Relationship Spotlight: Peggy Carter & Edwin Jarvis (Agent Carter)

Another great Marvel friendship here – this one doesn’t even need superpowers to be awesome.  It’s too bad that Peggy and Steve didn’t get their dance, but if she’s going to be kicking ass and taking names somewhere without him, I’m glad she has Jarvis to back her up.

The unwanted sidekick who ultimately proves themselves invaluable is a tried-and-true archetype, and Jarvis (not to be confused with  J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s intelligent computer system) fits the bill.  When Peggy agrees to help Howard recover his stolen inventions, she’s in a fairly solitary place.  She’s still privately grieving Steve’s loss, and she’s silently seething at the way the SSR treats her like a secretary and wastes her skills as an agent.  She’s not in the mood for a tagalong, and she’s very insistent about handling things herself.  The last thing she wants is Howard’s butler, Jarvis, foisted upon her to help with her secret mission.

And at first glance, Jarvis doesn’t seem like he’d be much help even if Peggy did want it.  He doesn’t give off the air of being made for the field, and he’s used to a routine and neatness that belies the grime and unpredictability of spy work.  It’s understandable that Peggy would look at him and only see a stuffed shirt.  However, Jarvis isn’t just anyone’s butler – he’s Howard Stark’s butler, which inevitably means that he’s dealt with grime and unpredictability plenty of times.  And, as ill-suited as he seems for the task, he’s more than willing to do whatever will help Peggy in any way he can.  Not that he’s a spy extraordinaire, but he’s hard-working, fastidious, loyal, and extremely eager, all of which are good qualities to have in a pinch.

So, slowly, they start to become partners.  It’s still definitely a hero-sidekick type of situation – Jarvis never condescends to Peggy, which is a major point in his favor – but Peggy comes to value Jarvis’s support.  As she fights for her worth, she recognizes Jarvis’s as well, learning to appreciate a punctual get-away driver, a, extra pair of eyes applied to a problem, and someone who has her back when things get dicey.  She doesn’t always show that appreciation very well, partly because it’s hard for her to open up to someone again (albeit 100% platonically) and partly because, like most Marvel heroes, she doesn’t always listen to other people’s advice as well as she should.  Over the course of the (too-short) series, they come to mean a lot to each other.  They don’t always see eye-to-eye, and when they fight, it’s hard, because each knows how to get to the other, but when it really matters, they’re always there for each other.

One of my favorite scenes on the show comes early in season 1, when Peggy recovers Howard’s weapons cache and immediately begins planning her victory walk through the SSR offices, proving what she can do once and for all to those self-important misogynists.  Jarvis, though, realizes she can’t do this because they’ve been carrying out their investigation in secret, counter to the one the SSR is running.  When he tells her as much, she brushes him off, too caught up in relishing the chance to finally be recognized as the incredible agent she is, and so he starts in with the tough love.  Taking on the role of her superiors, he starts bombarding her with questions, and Peggy is forced to accept his point – that there’s no agency-sanctioned explanation for her actions or her discovery, and that, as much as it kills her to do it, she has to call in an anonymous tip and let another (male) agent take the credit for what she’s done.  Jarvis is tough but honest in getting her to see this, as well as empathetic in seeing what she has to sacrifice.  I enjoyed these two before that scene, but this is when I knew I loved them.

Favorite Characters: Agent Peggy Carter (The Avengers)

By The Avengers, I of course mean the general Avengers universe – while Peggy only has a cameo appearance (as a hallucination, no less!) in Age of Ultron, she’s an enormous part of Captain America and obviously anchors the fantastic Agent Carter, which recently finished its second season.  (By the way, I know I just did an MCU post on Kilgrave recently, but you can never go wrong with Peggy.  Besides, it’s International Women’s Day; she knows her value!)

We meet Peggy in Captain America, as Steve’s potential love interest and much more.  Though her contributions to the SSR in that film are mostly behind-the-lines – overseeing projects, liaising, helping with strategy – her place as a woman in a prominent position in a government-military organization during World War II is huge.  There’s just enough screentime for sexist douchebags to show how tough and determined she had to be to get where she is.  And she proves her value time and again:  facing off against enemy agents, bending the rules when it’s important, and helping Cap on his journey to being more than just a liberty bond poster boy.

Agent Carter picks up with Peggy after the war and the losses at the end of Captain America, and if anything, she’s even more fabulous there.  The ante is upped from every angle.  The show allows her to do more spy stuff, using gadgets and getting out of dangerous situations.  She does more infiltration, donning accents and disguises and being generally awesome.  She shows off her mad combat skills like a boss, she works out intricate plans, she takes on multiple cool female villains, and she does it all in the mid ‘40s, which were even more sexist than the war years.  By various necessities, much of her BAMFness has to be conducted without the knowledge of her superiors, and it kills her that those good-old-boy misogynists don’t know what she can really do.  There have been times when she’s flirted with the idea of revealing herself to them, but, begrudgingly acknowledging the reasons why that won’t work, puts her desire for recognition aside for the greater good.

She has flaws, too, by the way.  Like so many heroes, she has a tendency to rush into danger without backup, sometimes out of a stubbornness to prove she can do it (informed by the issues mentioned above,) sometimes because she’s so focused on the goal that she can’t think practically, and sometimes because she thinks she has to take on everything herself to keep her friends out of danger (which is admirable, but it’s still misguided.)  She’s gotten so used to shouting to make her voice heard that she doesn’t always listen to other people’s input, and that can make her miss important details.  She’s so good at pretending she doesn’t need people that she can sometimes push others away, sublimating all her need for companionship (platonic or otherwise) into her work.

But when she opens up, she can be an excellent, loyal, if still somewhat commanding, friend.  There aren’t a huge number of people who are close to her, but she would do anything to protect them; her friendship with Jarvis is a highlight of the series.  The show as gone light so far on romance, mostly teasing will-they won’t-they stuff, which feels right.  Steve was such an important figure in Peggy’s life that it can’t be easy to move on, but I’m glad the show seems to be heading in that direction.  I think there’s a lot of potential in a story about Peggy taking a risk on love again, and I’m excited to see where the show takes us with it.  Wherever that is, I just want it to be as great as her.

Relationship Spotlight: Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America & Peggy Carter (The Avengers)

Strictly speaking, this relationship generally stays in the specific context of the Captain America films and their satellites, but I figured I might as well follow my precedent of lumping all my Marvelverse write-ups, save the individual movie reviews, under the Avengers heading.  This relationship is my favorite romantic pairing in the franchise by a landslide, and it’s high time I geeked out about them a bit.  (Some Captain America spoilers.)

Maybe it’s a little odd to place Cap/Peggy so high, since they really only have one movie together and theirs is more of a will-they-won’t-they turned into a what-might-have-been.  By the end of the first Captain America film, they’ve been utterly separated by time, and they haven’t even had an official date.  (Their last scene in that movie is devastating, oh my goodness.)  So yeah, maybe they’re affecting or significant as a wistful would-be romance, but my favorite?  Really?

Really.  And honestly, a huge part of that is the simple fact that Cap and Peggy are both just so awesome as characters in their own right.  Cap is a runt who was transformed into a golden boy, and even though he packs a hefty punch, he remembers how it felt to be powerless.  As such, his strength is never used for cruelty, and he keeps an ever-present eye on his moral compass.  Peggy, meanwhile, is a cool-as-a-cucumber badass who rises to an important position in an age when her field is considered a definite men’s realm.  She shuts down all the haters in the best way possible:  by proving herself, time and again, to be tough, intelligent, and capable.  Both are strong, both are sensitive, and both strive endlessly to do what’s right.  I mean, come on!

It goes without saying that, when put together, they’re pretty sensational.  From their first conversation, although Steve is sweetly awkward around Peggy (chalked up equally to her hardcore amazingness, his attraction to her, and his inexperience with women,) he in no way treats her as being any less competent due to her gender.  Throughout their time together, if he ever pulls the old, “No, you stay here – I’ll handle this,” it’s not because he doubts her abilities or thinks the fight is no place for a woman.  Rather, it’s just Cap being Cap, wanting to take all the risk on himself because a) he knows the serum gives him an added advantage, and b) his V-for-Victory eagerness do his part sometimes forgets that others wish to do the same.  More often than not, all Peggy has to do is make it clear that she wants to contribute, and then they can go forward as a team.  It’s more than a little heartbreaking to see all the sexism and dismissiveness Peggy has to put up with on Agent Carter, especially since, in Steve, she had someone who always valued her as a person.  In turn, Peggy treats Cap as more than a walking lab experiment.  She respects his integrity and his tactical instincts, and she recognizes that, super-soldier or not, he’s also human and sometimes needs help, comfort, or to be cut a little slack. 

I think both of them see themselves in the other.  Both are well-acquainted with being denied the opportunity to show what they’re capable of, and when they meet, it’s no surprise that each empathizes so easily with the other.  Such compatible, complementary pairings don’t come along nearly often enough.  Let’s take a moment of silence for all that this one could have been; these two would’ve been unstoppable together.