Kyle’s Thoughts

Hollywood has provided a new space for Agent Carter to explore, Howard Stark gives the show levity, and there are more nods to history—both Marvel and actual—than Meryl Strep has Oscar noms, but I’m worried the show doesn’t know where it’s going. Agent Carter’s second season will only last ten episodes, so we’re a third of the way through the season already, and it aims to link into Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s third season, which returns in early March, and the upcoming Doctor Strange film.

Agent Carter’s trying to do too much in a small time period, and I wonder when we’ll reach comic book film/TV show critical mass. I love that so many comic book TV shows and movies exist, but the cast of characters gets bigger and bigger and that causes the storylines to become unruly. Agent Carter may be the victim of such an unruly storyline. And that’s a shame because Agent Carter is improving in other areas. Not the least of which is the historical references.

Kid Colt, a Marvel Comics Western series that ran for over 30 years, made an appearance, and that was fun. Plenty of the physical comics made their way on the screen but when we first meet Howard Stark, he’s directing a Kid Colt movie. This, in turn, led to a not so subtle dialogue exchange between Howard and Peggy, opining that America isn’t ready for a female cowboy. Does that sound like modern critical responses to Marvel’s lack of leading ladies? Yeah. Agent Carter lacks subtly, but when it doesn’t preach to us about equal rights, it can be fun.

This week’s ubiquitous female rights announcement came in the form of Howard crashing a gentleman’s club with a throng of women in tow (Peggy slips behind the scenes to conduct a little sleuthing) and when the club’s president calls for security, he orders a Code Pink. Again, this isn’t subtle but it’s fun and in keeping with the characters. Where I get tripped up in this instance is in calling the situation a “Code Pink.” The year is 1947, just after World War II, and that’s when the shift from pink as a boy’s color to pink as a girl’s color started. It takes a little suspension of disbelief to think that this color shift had taken hold of the country.

(Note: no one knows for sure how or why the gender color shift occurred but one of the most popular reasons is that Rosie the Riveter wore blue overalls and when the men returned from war, the women were told to take off their blue overalls and put on pink dresses; the feminist movement embraced pink as their protest color after that. This places the “pink is a girl’s color” movement in the timeframe of 1947-50, so Agent Carter is stretching believability.)

Howard Stark is the fictional counterpart to Howard Hughes—I wonder how long it will be before Howard Stark becomes Tony’s grandfather instead of father—and now Agent Carter gave us a fictional version of Hedy Lamarr, the actress who invented a radio guidance system that also paved the way for modern wireless technology. Both Stark and Frost, Lamarr’s fictional doppelganger, flip their real-world equivalent’s careers. Hughes was a director turned inventor, while Stark was an inventor turned director here. Lamarr started as an actress and turned inventor, and Whitney Frost started out as an inventor and turned into an actress. I liked how Agent Carter incorporated history into this season.

The story’s a word jumble at this point. The gentlemen’s club Howard, Peggy, and company infiltrate rigs elections and pulls other strings (could be Hydra-influenced), zero matter has to be a callback to the monolith in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Dr. Wilkes’s transformation to the ethereal doesn’t harken social commentary about race, unless Agent Carter is deploying a softer approach. I doubt that. Agent Carter’s fun but I don’t know if they’ll pull out a full story in seven episodes or less, especially if they intend to tie the show into every other Marvel property that sees a release this year.

Kyle’s Thoughts

Agent Carter found a way to connect to the greater Marvel cinematic/TV universe with “A View in the Dark.” I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing but the monolith makes its first chronological appearance in this episode—actually it made a cameo in the previous episode of Agent Carter “The Lady in the Lake, but who’s counting?—and we could either get background info on Hydra’s exploits to grab the monolith and get a Star Wars prequel approach to Agent Carter or we could get a new story entirely. Fortunately, it looks like the latter.

I’ve been on record saying that I didn’t want this series to function as grout between the ending of Captain America: the First Avenger and the modern Marvel cinematic universe. We need something a little more and it looks—for the time being—like Agent Carter could be giving us something more. I’m withholding judgment.

The thing I noticed in “A View in the Dark” is that Agent Carter has committed to a location shift from the east coast to the west coast. I guess this was inevitable since Tony Stark starts in Los Angeles and then relocates to New York City but I’m wondering if this is more a function of the ridiculous taxes and fees associated with filming in NYC. Perhaps it’s a little of column A and B. The new locale works for Agent Carter. The color palette shifted to a warmer and inviting one and it feels like a different creature but I think the show would benefit from globetrotting and if it does, it should continue to make each location its own entity. Agent Carter also branched out from its theme of sexism to issues of race but it didn’t harp on the issue as much as did sexism last season. We got one full scene to drive the point home and that’s good.

I would say more about the main arc but I’m afraid we’d get into spoiler territory. For now let’s say that it holds my interest and it works with what Marvel has planned for the rest of its universe. In short, Agent Carter continues to deliver a fun, watchable product that features one of Marvel’s few leading ladies.

Kyle’s Thoughts

Agent Carter’s “The Lady in the Lake” did a nice job of hinting at Peggy’s disadvantage in the workplace (the first season slathered “this is a man’s world” like Orville Redenbacher’s layers on the butter in their triple the movie butter popcorn) and showcasing her as a founding member of S.H.I.E.L.D..

It might not make sense up-front but I’m making a Star Wars reference; bear with me. I thought Star Wars miss-stepped with its prequels because it told us Darth Vader’s story, a story we already knew, while Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic went far enough back in time to make the series exciting. Agent Carter splits the difference between these two approaches. It doesn’t go back as far as Knights of the Old Republic, but we don’t know as much about Peggy’s past as we did Darth Vader’s. “The Lady in the Lake” gave a nice tip of the hat to the Marvel cinematic universe’s past, while giving us something fresh.

It didn’t take long for us to catch up with Dottie Underwood, the late 1940s version of the Black Widow. In fact, it took less time for me to pick up where Agent Carter left off last year than it did for me to figure out what was going on with the DC Comics shows this week and Agent Carter had a much longer hiatus than either Arrow or Flash. That speaks to better writing.

Agent Carter captures the fun (humor and action) of a Marvel movie and puts it on the smaller screen and yet it connects with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. I won’t say how but Agent Carter could be a missing link a thread or two for Marvel’s other TV series or it could add to a growing tapestry of story threads. We’ll have to wait and see but I can definitely say Marvel TV shows tend to fall flat their first season only to find their footing in their second. Okay, it’s too soon to tell, but “The Lady in the Lake” is a good start to Agent Carter’s sophomore effort.