Trailer Tuesdays: Agent Carter

So we’ve been pretty excited about ABC’s new miniseries, Agent Carter, for a while. Even though there wasn’t much information on it, we kept seeing delightful tweets about what Hayley Atwell was getting up to on set. Soon it could reasonably be inferred that basically, Peggy Carter was going to have a lot of scenes where she kicked someone’s ass. And now, we’ve finally gotten our first look at the trailer for Agent Carter.

In the trailer, Howard Stark asks Peggy to find out who has one of his chemical equations before whoever has it manages to sell it or replicate it. “It could level a city block, and not one of the short ones,” he tells her, before zooming off in his boat. Oh, Starks. Peggy’s left with Howard’s butler, the original Jarvis, and the rest of the clip fades into a montage of the previously mentioned asskicking scenes.

Now, we already know that Howard Stark will definitely be in the series, but we don’t yet know if the Howling Commandos will be involved at all. Judging from their brief appearances on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., they would be a welcome addition to any cast. We do know a few things about the cast—Bridget Regan has been announced to be Peggy’s neighbor, and Lyndsy Fonseca, best known to me as Ted’s daughter from How I Met Your Mother, will be her best friend. This leads into the treatment of women in post-WWII America—Peggy’s clearly taken up residence in the U.S., and for women’s rights, that was an interesting time. During the war, women were encouraged to take mens’ jobs, but afterwards, women were expected to go back to their previous jobs and let the men take care of everything. In this sort of environment, it would be fascinating to see how Peggy and other women might thrive. Yet, thus far, we don’t have any hints of women attempting to apply for Peggy’s S.H.I.E.L.D.—we don’t even have a clue how Peggy was able to finagle her way into S.H.I.E.L.D., although Peggy being Peggy, I have a couple of ideas.

It’d be a shame not to see these guys around as Peggy’s elite backup team.

Furthermore, we don’t have much of anything about race. This is another reason I’d love for the Howling Commandos to be in this series—now there are some characters of racial diversity that the audience is already primed to care about! Surely the writers and producers haven’t forgotten about Jim Morita? During the war, many Japanese-American soldiers were sent to internment camps with their families, and others were recruited for a special segregated unit. All returned to extreme discrimination within the U.S. What about Gabriel Jones? Many Black and African-American soldiers served with distinction in the war, and again, they returned to find that sometimes they couldn’t even get services readily available to other veterans in the country they had fought so hard to protect. They could even do another tie-in here—Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s Antoine Triplett has said his grandfather was a Howling Commando, and that’s the sort of continuity tie-in that Marvel would usually be very excited for. Will Marvel give us a nuanced B-plot about these characters and these issues in Agent Carter, eight-part series though it is, or will they follow every other Hollywood movie’s lead and again whitewash history?

Agent Carter will premiere Jan 6th on ABC, while Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is on a mini-hiatus. Do you plan on watching it? If so, what would you like to see? Let us know in the comments below.

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