Agent Carter - 'Now is Not the End'

Sadly not yet.

Agent Carter was one of the best of the Marvel One-Shots which sadly no longer grace their BluRay releases, featuring Peggy Carter from Captain America kicking arse in retrosexist post-war America and then heading off to found SHIELD with Howard Stark. It had just enough Mad Men-esque period sexism to make you want to smack Bradley Whitford's smug SSR boss (seriously; outside of The West Wing has he ever played a character with any redeeming features?) and lashings of action; it was, in short, a joy.

Well, when it came to making a series to fill in the mid-season gap in Agents of SHIELD, they clearly didn't want to do SHIELD: The early years so much as they wanted more of what was in the One-Shot, and maybe getting Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper on a weekly basis was a touch costly, so Agent Carter the series, has a bit of a soft reset. Stark has been accused of selling weapons to the enemies of America and so SHIELD is presumably on hold, while Carter is back at the SSR being treated like a secretary, despite her obvious skills and the fierce independence represented by her red hat. She is rooming with a girl named Coleen whose work in the factories is similarly under threat from a returning male workforce who are preferred despite a lack of training or ability.

Because she goes against the flow, you see.

We open with Stark going on the run. Carter doesn't believe that he is a traitor, but when the SSR is tasked with bringing him in she knows she is the woman for the job. Her bosses, in particular action man Jack Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) and grumpy supervisor Roger Dooley (Shea Whigham) naturally disagree. She does have some support from crippled war hero Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokai), although Carter notes that if he stands up for her it makes her look like she needs him to. Stark is two steps ahead of the SSR, however, and not only eludes capture but also recruits Carter to secretly hunt down whoever stole and is now selling his 'bad babies', the inventions that turned out too deadly to ever be released. To help her, he leaves her with his butler, Jarvis (James d'Arcy), a very proper, very English man whose experience with espionage apparently extends to catching the petite cook stealing some spoons (although he and Stark may both be hiding things from Carter.)

Agent Nice-Guy, Senior Agent Douche, Chief Grumpy and
Agent Carter

The first baby is a horrifically explosive gas being sold via a nightclub owner and fence. Carter dons a blonde wig and sparkly dress and deploys knockout lipstick and a safe-cracking watch to acquire the formula before the SSR, only to find that the formula has already been weaponised. Adding a MacGuyver slant to her James Bond antics, she gathers several bottles of household chemicals to neutralise the explosive. In a nice touch, one of the bottles is bourbon, and that she reserves for after the delicate operation is complete.

Car, Stark, Carter and Jarvis.

That is the moment that she finds her flatmate murdered and is attacked by an unspeaking and apparently unstoppable man with a scarred throat, who walks away after she throws him out of a third storey window. After a pep talk from Jarvis, she consults with Stark Industries scientist Anton Vanko (c.f. Iron Man 2) and tracks the production of the explosives to a Roxxon Oil (because we don't have enough Easter Eggs yet) facility, where she clashes with another scar-throated man who speaks to her with a voice synthesiser, declaring that he and the man who attacked her are somehow at odds, before destroying the facility and escaping with a van full of the gas bombs.

'Now is Not the End' is a strong opener, showing a lot of the promise that Agents of SHIELD never delivered on. It's got conspiracy, triple identities and two factions of dudes without voice boxes, one of whom communicates with his bosses through a remote typewriter. It's like Alias (wigs and all) crossed with Fringe and a goodly dollop of old-fashioned pre-noir detective glitz. There is, in short, a lot to like, and I am at this stage (which is to say an entire series behind; thanks UK broadcasters) cautiously optimistic.