The principle S.H.I.E.L.D. was founded upon was pure…Protection. One word. Sometimes to protect one man against himself, other times to protect the planet against an alien invasion from another universe…but the belief that drives us all is the same, whether it’s one man, or all mankind…
– Nick Fury, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘The Beginning of the End’ (1.22)
I.
After the financial and critical success of the Phase One Marvel Cinematic Universe films and the purchase of Marvel Entertainment by the Walt Disney Company in 2009, Marvel Studios began exploring the possibility of expanding the MCU onto the small screen. With such a diverse cast of characters and a decade’s worth of plots to explore already told in the comics, the possibilities seemed to be almost endless. The densely populated Marvel canon would allow a television show to draw from, complement and expand the mythology of the film series which had reached seven releases by the time of the broadcast of the first episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on 24 September 2013. What Marvel and ABC attempted was something that had never been done on such a scale in television history: the creation of a weekly programme which both existed in its own right, but at the same time was closely interwoven with a film franchise, with both properties running concurrently. As Jeph Loeb, then Head of Television for Marvel Studios, suggested, ‘We love to tie into the films, and we’re creating a sort of living jigsaw puzzle that we can add pieces to as we go’ (qtd. in Benjamin 2015: 209).
This ‘living jigsaw puzzle’ that Loeb described has taken many forms since 2013. Almost every episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. features references to the events and characters within the film franchise, as in when agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) is said to have scored the ‘highest marks since Romanov’ on a S.H.I.E.L.D. weapon range in ‘Pilot’ (1.01), or when the psychologist Andrew Garner (Blair Underwood) is shown to be working at Culver University where Bruce Banner once conducted research and was confronted by General Ross during The Incredible Hulk in ‘One of Us’ (2.13); or Mike Peterson (aka Deathlok) asks ‘Did I beat Captain America’s time?’ in one S.H.I.E.L.D. training challenge in ‘The Bridge’ (1.10). One of the central narrative elements of the first season, the centipede serum, which is said to be a ‘cocktail of the Erskine formula and gamma rays’ in ‘Pilot’ (1.01) but also to contain the Extremis virus from Iron Man 3. At other times characters from the films themselves are featured, like Nick Fury in ‘0–8–4’ (1.02) and the Season One finale ‘Beginning of the End’ (1.22), and Maria Hill, Lady Sif and President Matthew Ellis, who have each appeared multiple times throughout the television series. In one memorable episode at the start of Season Three, ‘Laws of Nature’ (3.01), President Ellis manages to refer to the dramatic events of The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier all in one televised address, as he informs the world, ‘I don’t need to remind people of the recent catastrophes in New York, London and most recently Sokovia, tragedies that seem to be growing in number and scale and the organisations we had in place to protect us, S.H.I.E.L.D., brought airships raining down in our nation’s capital…’. Events in the films are not only referenced but integrated into episodes like ‘The Well’ (1.08), which was broadcast the week after the cinematic release of Thor: The Dark World and dealt with the aftermath of Thor and Malekith’s battle in Greenwich. The later episodes of the Season Two were shown to build up to the events of Age of Ultron with mentions of Strucker’s experiments on humans in ‘The Frenemy of My Enemy’ (2.18) and Coulson’s retrieval of a memory stick in ‘The Dirty Half Dozen’ (2.19) being key to finding Loki’s sceptre which opens Age of Ultron.
Yet, as previously mentioned, there is a hierarchy across the MCU with the cinematic branch firmly established as the most important texts and events which happen within them flowing down towards the television shows, web series, video games and graphic novels, but very rarely the other way around.1 The most obvious example of this is the fact that none of the film’s major characters, the Avengers themselves, appear in anything other than news footage, images from the films or photographs outside of the cinematic releases. Several high-profile creative figures in the MCU have praised the television show, but at the same time been slightly dismissive of it, including Joss Whedon himself, who directed the pilot episode, but suggested that it was sometimes stuck with ‘left-overs’ (qtd. in Fitzpatrick 2016).2 It is true that the show focuses primarily on ‘the peripheral people…the people on the edges of the grand adventures’ (Whedon qtd. in Wigler 2013), but Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s Agent Carter and the Netflix television shows Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist (explored in chapter ten) are able to forge a distinct identity of their own, at the same time as contributing to what we might refer to as the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe experience’ in a range of palpable and compelling ways: whether in their ability to expand the mythology of the MCU with their extended and expansive long form storylines, or in the case of the Netflix versions, exploring more adult-oriented themes. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., with its twenty-two episodes per season, is able to delve further into the world of the Marvel universe, linking the film series together in a way it would never be able to achieve given the inherent time constraints on the cinematic medium compared to its television counterpart. It is able to move around the globe on a weekly basis and even venture to other planets, dimensions and realities, it can go backwards and forwards in time in episodes like ‘Purpose in the Machine’ (3.02), which dramatises early meetings of the HYDRA society in the nineteenth century, or return to World War II in episodes like ‘Shadows’ (2.01) which brings back characters like Peggy Carter, ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan and Jim Morita.3
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also adopts many of the narrative devices of the film series, with its own televisual version of the stingers or post-credits teasers which come after the final act break and before the end credits of the show, the most striking of which is perhaps the surprise Nick Fury cameo in ‘Beginning of the End’ (1.22), or the reveal of Skye’s (also known by then as Quake) vigilante status in ‘Ascension’ (3.22), or the final episode of Season Four, ‘World’s End’ (4.22), which shows Coulson waking up on a giant space station. With its glossy televisual aesthetic, extensive action scenes and comparatively large budget, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is certainly an example of what many have now come to refer to as ‘Cinematic TV’ (see Nelson 2007: 11). The superhero renaissance, as the two following chapters explore, was not just a cinematic one, but a televisual one too. While during the 1990s superhero-themed TV shows were extremely rare – Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (ABC, 1993– 97), being one of the very few to achieve success – the first decades of the new millennium saw a proliferation of them from Heroes (NBC, 2006–10), Smallville (Various, 2001–11), and Arrow (The CW, 2012–), to The Flash (The CW, 2014–), Supergirl (CBS, 2015–), Gotham (Fox, 2014–) and many others. Unlike their DC counterparts, which were disconnected from the film versions and not part of the DCEU, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s Agent Carter and the likes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist are an integral part of the expansive MCU project.
II.
As the title of the show suggests, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is set around the fictional organisation of S.H.I.E.L.D. which initially stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division when the agency first appeared in Strange Tales #135 in August 1965. This original comic book incarnation drew inspiration from the popularity of fictional spy films and television shows in the 1960s, in particular organisations like U.N.C.L.E. in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 1964–68) with its antagonists T.H.R.US.H.4 In the 1990s, the acronym remained but instead stood for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate, before becoming the much more post-9/11-sounding Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, which is used throughout the MCU. Even though it is a fictional organisation it is clearly inspired by real-word agencies like the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the National Security Council, for both its construction and its worldview. In the diegetic world of the MCU, S.H.I.E.L.D. emerged from the SSR (Strategic Scientific Reserve) which was formed in 1940s to battle the Nazis and HYDRA, just as the CIA has its roots in the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), which was the US wartime intelligence agency created in 1942.
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is produced and very obviously set in the tumultuous new millennial decades, and the series portrays a variety of threats to both American and global safety which come in many forms: from terrorism, organised violence and vigilantism, to supernatural enemies, enhanced beings and even those from other planets. Despite the often intergalactic nature of these fears, many of them are decidedly of our modern era, an age in which, as Coulson observes in ‘Eye Spy’ (1.04), ‘between Facebook, Instagram and Flickr, people are surveiling themselves’. We are frequently informed that S.H.I.E.L.D. is a security agency with a global purview, but it is portrayed as a particularly American organisation in terms of the way it exercises its significant power and even the use of the word ‘Homeland’ in its title is suggestive of its American status. Just as the Avengers are American (or at the very least Americanised), so are the vast majority of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents: America is where its main bases seem to be located and while it is said to answer to the United Nations, it is President Ellis who is ultimately shown to be the figure the agency turns to most frequently for authorisation. Most importantly, the fears and anxieties which it dramatises mirror, through the prism of the superhero genre, those of the United States in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Thus, the subtitle of this chapter, ‘What does S.H.I.E.L.D. stand for?’, is a multi-layered one, referring both to the derivation of its acronym and also how the parastatal organisation functions both within and beyond the diegetic frames of the television show’s narrative. It is a question which has been explicitly answered by various characters through-out the show’s run: in the pilot episode Grant Ward suggested, ‘It means we’re the line between the world and the much weirder world. We protect people from news they aren’t ready to hear. And when we can’t do that we keep them safe’ (1.01), but for Phil Coulson, who is at the centre of the show and an individual who had progressed from minor player in Iron Man to one of the central characters of The Avengers, the purpose of S.H.I.E.L.D. is ‘to serve when everything else fails, to be humanity’s last line of defence, to be the shield…’ in ‘Providence’ (1.18).
Coulson, who according to Clark Gregg did not even have a name in the script for Iron Man he originally read (see Leane 2016), resonated to such an extent with fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that his death in The Avengers inspired a widespread demand that he be brought back into the MCU somehow, a movement which went by the name of ‘Coulson lives/Fury lies’ (see Asher-Perrin 2013). The first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. uses Coulson’s ‘death’ as its central narrative mystery and does not reveal how he was able to survive his own ‘murder’ at the hands of Loki until the final episode, ‘Beginning of the End’ (1.22), when audiences learn that he was revived using the dangerous drug GH25 made from alien DNA as a part of Project T.A.H.I.T.I. Coulson is understandably greatly traumatised by the process and criticises Fury’s use of the unstable drug which ‘was created to revive an Avenger in the event of being killed in battle’ (Benjamin 2014: 3), to which Fury replies ‘Exactly!’, indicating the shift that Coulson has made from a small role in the MCU to being considered as an Avenger in his own right. On his return to active service Coulson is charged with putting together a new team of agents to respond to crises all over the globe in the aftermath of The Avengers and the wake of the realisation that enhanced individuals and supernatural beings are real. Prior to his appearances in the television show Coulson had received little screen time to explore his character, the sum of which was his love of vintage Captain America cards and the aside in The Avengers that revealed he had a girlfriend, the cellist in Portland. In the series, given his central role, Coulson’s characterisation is expanded: we learn that he comes from a modest background, was recruited by S.H.I.E.L.D. after college and that he is an only child from Manitowac, Wisconsin, and once worked on classic cars with his father (just like Tony Stark did with his father Howard) who died when he was nine. Instead of the Stark family’s red and gold 1932 Ford Flathead Roadster, the Coulsons worked on a cherry-red 1962 Corvette by the name of Lola, which Coulson uses the latest experimental technology on to enable it to fly.
The team that Coulson puts together become the co-protagonists of the show: the British scientists Leo Fitz (Ian De Caestecker) and Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), the hypermasculine field agent Grant Ward and the pilot/deputy commander, Melinda May, aka ‘the Cavalry’ (Ming-Na Wen). Coulson frequently functioned as the audience surrogate in the films, but given his leadership role and the secrets he has access to in the television series this position is instead given to the final member of the initial team line up, the only one to begin the narrative not as part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and our way into the world, Skye (Chloe Bennett), who has been described as ‘the audience’s point-of-view character’ (Benjamin 2014: 25). Skye ‘geeks out’ around superheroes just as Coulson did and even admits to once being one of those ‘sweaty cosplay girls crowding around Stark Tower’ (1.01) in ‘Pilot’. Skye begins the show as a civilian computer expert and member of the hacktivist group, the Rising Tide, who distrusts S.H.I.E.L.D., but before long comes to realise that they are actually a force for good in the world and becomes an agent herself. David Higgins classifies her as a character who ‘quickly sacrifices her commitment to radical social and economic justice as she learns that S.H.I.E.L.D.’s totalitarian interventions are well-meaning and necessary in the face of the omnicrisis posed by alien and superhuman threats’ (2015: 55), thereby mirroring the arcs of characters like Black Widow, Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver. If we as an audience are not convinced by the empathetic Skye’s transition, the Rising Tide are thoroughly discredited in Season One before being erased from the show entirely after revealing that one of their best hackers, Skye’s former boyfriend Miles Lydon, is both untrustworthy and unprincipled. He tells Skye, ‘We can’t let them get away with it. Manning, Snowden, Aaron Swartz. These are modern-day revolutionaries!’ in ‘The Girl in the Flower Dress’ (1.05). But it is shown that he accepted money for information obtained from his hacking skills which leads to the death of the enhanced individual involved. Miles’ perfidy is effectively contrasted with the honesty and integrity of people like Coulson, Fitz and Simmons who risk their lives on a daily basis to save innocents all over the world. By ‘Providence’ (1.18) Skye is able to tell Coulson, ‘You were right all along. Having all this [secret information] out there in the world makes it too dangerous…’. Later, in Season Two, Skye is revealed to be an Inhuman herself and rejects her given name, adopting her birth name Daisy, but is often referred to by her superhero name, Quake, and is described as a ‘walking weapon of mass destruction’ by the duplicitous Senator Ellen Nadeer in ‘Lockup’ (4.05). Like the majority of women in the MCU, Skye is impossibly beautiful, as are all the other female co-protagonists in the television show, yet they are given much more time for character development and as a result often emerge as far more interesting characters than their female cinematic counterparts.
III.
The pilot episode of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. quickly establishes that the series is set in a post-The Avengers world, where the public is now, after the devastation of the Battle of New York, very aware of the existence of superheroes, enhanced individuals, aliens and even gods. It is Skye’s voice-over which opens the show and she informs the audience, ‘The secret is out. For decades your organisation [S.H.I.E.L.D.] stayed in the shadows, hiding the truth. Now we know they are among us: heroes and monsters. The world is full of wonders.’ Agent Maria Hill later confirms this view of the new world: ‘Everything’s changing. A little while ago people went to bed thinking the craziest thing in the world was a billionaire in a flying metal suit, then aliens invaded New York and were beaten back by, among others, a giant green monster, a costumed hero from the 1940s and a God’ (1.01). Just as the Battle of New York was the central event of the cinematic MCU throughout Phase Two, it is pivotal for its televisual branch too and many of the episodes of the first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are linked to it: from the black-market sale of a Chitauri Neural Link found during the battle in ‘Pilot’ (1.01), to the mysterious powers given to a group of traumatised fire-fighters who were first responders in New York in ‘FZZT’ (1.06). This early episode is one of many which seek to distinguish Coulson’s much more humanistic leadership style from the other authority figures in the MCU, notably the secretive Nick Fury, but later the authoritarian Agent Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) and Robert Gonzalez (Edward James Olmos). Coulson refuses to leave one of the fire-fighters alone even though the man is moments away from exploding, telling him, ‘We [S.H.I.E.L.D.] were on the ground with you in New York’. It is in this episode that, for the first time, Coulson is able to admit to himself that he too had died during The Avengers, something he had until then been unable to process.
The first season came under criticism for its slow pace and failure to deliver on the promise of the initial Whedon-directed pilot. Willa Paskin at Slate called it ‘too self-serious to be really goofy, and yet too fan-boyish to rescue even one hour of television from mediocrity’ (2013) and Eric Goldman at IGN declared it ‘a fun, light-hearted, but fairly disposable piece of entertainment’ (2014). The episode ‘End of the Beginning’ (1.16), aired in the same week as the cinematic release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and saw the reveal of HYDRA’s infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. spill over into Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in an event which Colin Harvey described as having ‘mammoth diegetic consequences’ throughout the MCU (2015: 87). In the next episode, ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ (1.17) Agent Grant Ward, who had been established as one of the focal points of the series and its handsome, rugged hero, is revealed to be a HYDRA agent having been recruited in his teens by the charismatic Garrett (Bill Paxton). As in the films, these events cause many to question S.H.I.E.L.D.’s global role and in the second and third seasons those agents that remain become fugitives, hunted by those who see little distinction between Coulson’s S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA. But, as Gail D. Rosen pointed out, we are never asked to question the commitment of the core group of agents and even though they might ‘turn from loyal soldiers into outlaws, but they remain intact as a family devoted to protecting the world, even in secret’ (2015: 216). Like their superhero counterparts the Avengers, the actions of Coulson’s team and ‘his’ S.H.I.E.L.D. are unequivocally endorsed throughout the series and the show rarely pauses to reflect on the nature of such a powerful and clandestine organisation. In doing so it reifies the role of powerful and secretive government agencies in the real world that we are asked to trust unequivocally, secure in the knowledge that they are acting in our own interests. This is emphasised, as the films have been, by the frequent connections drawn between S.H.I.E.L.D.’s current role and World War II. These become literalised in the emergence of their enemy Daniel Whitehall, aka Werner Reinhardt, formerly a high-ranking Nazi official and HYDRA agent who uses Inhuman DNA to de-age himself, or when we are informed that modern agents had relations who fought in World War II. These include Antoine ‘Trip’ Triplett whose grandfather was one of the original Howling Commandoes, and Robert Gonzalez, the leader of the ‘real S.H.I.E.L.D.’, who is shown wielding his father’s World War II-issue Colt M1911A1 and using it to kill members of HYDRA as his father had done decades before him.
The fact that S.H.I.E.L.D., despite the pretence of being a global agency, is unambiguously American in its formation, membership and construction is rarely commented on and neither are its frequent global interventions abroad, which are, for the most part, portrayed unproblematically. These journeys show them doing good in their role as international police officer in locations as diverse as Belarus (1.04), Hong Kong (1.05), South Ossetia (1.07), Cuba (1.18), Morocco (2.03), Puerto Rico (2.09), Bahrain (2.17), Colombia (3.11) and Russia (3.13), among others. When they are criticised for their actions, the audience knows that what they have done has always been for the greater good and, as in the film versions, those who tend to criticise them are shown to be compromised themselves. It is portrayed as entirely natural and logical that America would play this role and when, in episode ‘0–8–4’ (1.02), Coulson’s team visit Peru to retrieve a mysterious artefact they meet resistance from Camilla Reyes (Leonor Varela), a former associate of Coulson’s, who tells him ‘You stay in your borders, I’ll stay in mine!’ it is her who seems unreasonable. Reyes’ perhaps understandable reluctance to cooperate with the categorically American S.H.I.E.L.D. is portrayed initially as intransigence and then duplicity, as it is revealed that her government wants to use the deadly alien weapon found on their soil against the rebels who oppose them. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. informs us that it is better to leave these things to an altruistic and beneficent America and Coulson’s assertion that ‘An 0–8–4 supersedes all national claims’ is meant to show that his agency is beyond these petty bureaucratic and nationalistic concerns. He suggests to her that ‘borders are disappearing, aliens descended on New York remember?’, revealing that the events in New York gave his agency the power to transgress international law in ways which offer parallels to the shifting ideological coordinates of America’s global role after 9/11. As it was in the real world, the MCU’s own 9/11 becomes ‘the basis of a universal moral, ethical, and total-war response; all states must recognise, empathize, and interpret 9/11 as the United States posits’ (Astrada 2010: 23). This global reach is emphasised in a number of ways and almost always disavowed or ignored as it is in ‘T.R.A.C.K.S.’ (1.13) when the Italian law enforcement officer Carlo Rota is shown as displeased with S.H..I.E.L.D.’s interference and tells Coulson, ‘You’re not asking me at all, Agent Coulson. You’re telling me and my team to step aside!’, but it is later revealed that he is working for the HYDRA-affiliated Cybertek.
Figs 25–28: The global exculpatory tour of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. might be regarded as an example of ‘virtual terror tourism’, featuring American superheroes thanklessly saving the world in places as diverse as Peru (1.02), Cuba (1.18) and Bahrain (2.17). The bottom image reads ‘Caucasus Mountains’ but the episode is primarily set in the disputed territory of South Ossetia (1.07)
This continues in the very next episode, ‘The Asset’ (1.03), where one of the antagonists of the first season is introduced, the billionaire inventor and industrialist Ian Quinn (David Conrad). He is shown to have become a naturalised citizen and resident of Malta to escape the clutches of the United States. It is a country, which he adds later, ‘Where we are allowed to pursue progress and profit without the strangulation of regulations that are now choking our world’. Quinn is a ‘bad’ scientist, one of those who pursue technological advances for selfish reasons, the likes of which populate the MCU and are distinguished from the ‘good’ scientists like Banner and Stark, Fitz and Simmons. When S.H.I.E.L.D. are not allowed to mount an operation in Malta because of international law, or what Skye refers to as ‘stupid rules’, they do so anyway. Quinn questions Skye’s motivations for joining S.H.I.E.L.D. given her hacktivist background: ‘Don’t you get it? SHIELD’s against everything you stand for. They’re Big Brother!’ To which she answers, with a familiar image of how America sees itself: ‘Maybe, but they’re the nice big brother who stands up for his helpless little brother when he’s getting beat up.’ While Skye makes the transition to trusting S.H.I.E.L.D., Coulson’s arc takes him, to a certain extent, the other way, from explicit faith in everything that the organisation represents to (selectively) questioning it. In ‘The Hub’ (1.07) he tells Skye how important it is to ‘trust the system’ but by the time of ‘The Magical Place’ (1.11) he acknowledges that, ‘We need to root out all the secrets’ and by ‘Yes Men’ (1.15) is able to suggest, ‘To hell with any protocols or any code I used to be bound by!’ It is important to acknowledge that Coulson always goes against protocol whenever he needs to and is always shown as being correct to do so, because of the positive results he is able to achieve, as in when he defies S.H.I.E.L.D. bosses in ‘FZZT’ (1.06) to save Gemma’s life by putting the rest of the team in great danger, or in ‘The Hub’ (1.07) when he rescues Ward and Fitz from a suicide mission. He was not able to do this in the films as this maverick role was occupied by Tony Stark, but in the television series when he is the heroic lead, it is vital that he question authority as this is simply what American heroes do. The most interesting and ethically suspect example of this is in ‘T.A.H.I.T.I.’ (1.14) after Skye has been shot and left for dead by Quinn. Seemingly, the only way to save her is to get the same GH25 drug which revived him from a secret facility where it may or may not be kept and which may or may not work on her. The facility is protected by two S.H.I.E.L.D. guards who refuse to provide Coulson and his team with access, suspecting subterfuge. When they are unable to inform the guards of the correct password, Coulson and his team break in and kill both in order to perhaps find the material to save Skye. It is an action which is never questioned or mentioned again, and one which is endorsed when Skye is indeed cured by the drug. This pattern of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s extrajudicial intervention around the globe carries on through all of the seasons and has been persuasively connected to the post-9/11 environment by Samira Nadkarni who argues: ‘The viewer is assured that eventually these [the weapons S.H.I.E.L.D. uses after New York] will no longer be required, and this echoes the rhetoric of American foreign policy with regard to wars waged after 9/11 regarding the withdrawal of troops after the purported end of terrorism’ (2015: 2). This is how the MCU views the world: with the United States as a reluctant operator in global events, but one that is necessary and entirely moral in its actions, which I have elsewhere characterised as the ‘necessary intervention’ narrative paradigm (see McSweeney 2014: 87–97), in which films and television shows present a firmly Western-centric approach to complex geopolitical affairs. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s role and what it is representative of evoke what Andrew Bacevich suggests is the ultimate American objective for the twenty-first century: ‘the creation of an open and integrated international order based on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms’ (2002: 3).5
IV.
This very American view of the world is portrayed just as emphatically in Marvel’s Agent Carter, the short-lived ABC series revolving around the character played by Hayley Atwell originally in Captain America: The First Avenger, who had, by the end of Phase Two featured in four films and episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Even though it only ran for eighteen episodes, Marvel’s Agent Carter remains an important addition to the MCU, being the first MCU project to have a female lead with her name in the title. Shortly after the release of the ‘One Shot’ called Agent Carter (2013) a full series was ordered by ABC which was first broadcast in the mid-season break in Season Two of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Peggy Carter’s entrance to the MCU had been a memorable one back in The First Avenger when she punched the sexist recruit Gilmore Hodge in the face, knocking him to the floor. Hodge had asked her, ‘Are we dancing? Cause I got a few moves I know you’d like’, and later Peggy had informed Steve Rogers, ‘I know what that’s like, to have every door shut in your face’. The television series takes these two moments as the starting point for its narrative which explores Peggy’s life in the male-dominated post-war world, where things are shown to have changed quite considerably for her and many millions of American women. Despite having proved herself as a formidable and resourceful operational agent during World War II she finds herself relegated to menial tasks like answering the phones and preparing lunch orders for her far less able male colleagues. While few women experienced the war like the fictional Peggy Carter, many did experience a similar change in status and opportunities afforded to them in the workplace. Peggy’s flatmate, Colleen, talks of ten girls getting the sack in her factory and being replaced by returning G.I.s. World War II resulted in more than two million women in the workplace and 400,000 in the services which ‘prompted popular consideration of gender equality, compelled unionists and employers to confront their commitments to gender hierarchy, and offered at least some working women the novel experience of equality’ (Gabin 1995: 108). Not only is Peggy relegated to the duties of a secretary, but the men belittle her war-time achievements. Her well-meaning but chauvinist boss Chief Dooley says, ‘Being Captain America’s liaison brought you into contact with all sorts of people, but the war’s over’, and another male colleague suggests, ‘I bet Carter knew a lot of guys during the war’. Peggy is understandably frustrated and explains: ‘During the war I had a sense of purpose, responsibility, but now I connect the calls and never get a chance to make them.’ Her colleague, Jack Thompson, explains that it is ‘the natural order of the universe. You’re a woman. No man will ever consider you an equal. It’s sad but that doesn’t make it any less true.’ It takes Peggy the whole of the first season to convince those around her of her abilities in a way that few real women of the era had the opportunity to do.
Like many characters within the MCU, those in Marvel’s Agent Carter are shown to be traumatised by their past experiences, in this case through World War II: Peggy is suffering from grief over the loss of Steve Rogers, Daniel DeSousa lost his leg and struggles to be recognised beyond his disability, Chief Dooley returned from service only to find that his wife had an affair and his commitment to his job has led to them becoming estranged, and Jack Thompson is feted as a war hero after having won the Navy Cross for bravery at Okinawa, but we later learn it is an honour he did not deserve. When Peggy saves Jack’s life, she learns of his secret, but she does not judge him, even when at the end of the season he takes credit for the hard work she did in solving their most difficult case. It is these elements which make Peggy Carter one of the most human of ‘superheroes’ throughout the MCU, not just because she does not possess any powers, but because of the way her empathy and vulnerability is often shown to be her greatest strength, a fact that makes her a vivid protagonist. One of the writers of the series, Tara Butters, suggested that ‘her superpower is the fact that other people underestimate her. And she often uses that to her advantage, because she doesn’t have superstrength’ (qtd. in Abrams 2015). Agent Carter is a rare entrant into the MCU which raises and addresses this issue explicitly within the context of its narrative, although its extended criticisms of post-war patriarchy are framed from the comforting perspective of being set in the distant past, allowing the writers to feel secure in their understanding of how very different things supposedly are now, refusing to acknowledge the precarious nature of the representations of women in the twenty-first-century MCU. So when Carter says to her chauvinist male colleagues, ‘You think you know me. But I’ve never been more than what each of you has created. To you, I’m a stray kitten, left on your doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore’ in ‘Snafu’ (1.07), the sentiments she articulates could very well be applied to all the MCU women, whether they have powers (Scarlett Witch) or do not (Pepper Potts, Jane Foster and Betty Ross).
Fig. 29: Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) from Marvel’s Agent Carter dramatises her attempt to come to terms with life after World War II in late 1940s New York and Los Angeles
The series draws almost as heavily on the MCU films as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and it is the figure of Captain America, as one might expect, who is a looming presence over Peggy’s experiences. The pilot episode even begins with shots taken directly from the end of Captain America: The First Avenger and he is mentioned frequently not just by Peggy but other characters, with a radio show called ‘The Captain America Adventure Programme’ playing an exaggerated version of some of his adventures. Peggy shows her disdain for the serial, which features whimpering damsels in distress for Cap to save and in one artful scene she beats up a henchman while listening to one such damsel being saved on the radio show. Peggy reunites the Howling Commandoes in a mission in Russia which allows the show to explore the Red Room orphanage in more detail than it ever was in the film series and even gives the show a Soviet assassin called Dottie whose abilities parallel Peggy’s own. Christopher Markus attempted to suggest that there was some sort of parity between Dottie and Peggy, stating that ‘Peggy should consider that it wouldn’t take her all the make to make her Dottie’ (qtd. in Rodriguez 2015: 60). But the show, as its cinematic equivalent has always done, could never recognise these connections in anything other than a superficial fashion. It also gives a central role to a young Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) and his butler Edwin Jarvis (who will inspire Tony Stark to create the AI which will be known as J.A.R.V.I.S.) and the overarching plot of the first season concerns itself with accusations directed at Howard Stark that he sold weapons technology to enemies of the United States, i.e. the Soviet Union. In scenes reminiscent of Iron Man 2 where Tony Stark is brought before a similar committee, Howard is asked: ‘Did you knowingly sell military grade technology to enemies of the United States?’ When it looks like he will be found guilty, even though he is not, he goes on the run and only Peggy is able to help him clear his name. Stark is shown to have his flaws (like his son), but he is firmly identified as a patriotic capitalist and entrepreneur the likes of which have been said to have ‘built America’.
Despite being well reviewed, the show was cancelled due to dwindling audience figures at the end of its second season: after having premiered with 6.91 million viewers for the pilot episode ‘Now is Not the End’ (1.01) on 6 January 2015, the ironically titled second season finale ‘Hollywood Ending’ (2.10) had a series low of 2.35 million, which was felt too small by ABC to justify the commission of a third season. Season Two had relocated to Los Angeles in 1947, but failed to develop the characters as well as it might have done. Having seemingly solved Peggy’s second-class status by the end of the first season, the second flirts with McCarthyism, the Blacklist and racism, but only ever in a very superficial form. Peggy has a chaste relationship with Jason Wilkes, an African-American scientist, but the show does little by way of exploring post-war racism than have him called ‘boy’ in a store in the episode ‘Better Angels’ (2.03) and have Stark observe that he was ‘already a target because of the colour of his skin’. Like how it treated sexism, Agent Carter is able to frame post-war racism through the comforting prism of its present to audiences who are apparently secure in the knowledge that no such disparity exists in the modern world – conveniently ignoring the fact that in Phases One and Two black superheroes and even black characters were few and far between.
Notes
1 A rare example of this is the explanation of the mysterious appearance of a helicarrier at the climax of Age of Ultron which, for those who have not seen the television show, is just a fortuitous deus ex machina. But for those who have, it is explained how and why Fury came to have a helicarrier when they all seemed to have been destroyed at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
2 This was satirised in the webseries produced by Screen Junkies called Interns of F.I.E.L.D (2016–) which followed the interns of a secret agency which stood for Field; Intervention; Espionage; and Logistics Department. In ‘Villians’ (1.01) after the superhero named Staff Sergeant America has defeated his nemesis the Black Skull the interns are told, ‘The cool part is over with. So, clean up all this crap…’ in a series which very obviously makes fun of the often peripheral nature of the characters of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
3 It also has the webseries Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Slingshot (2016) which featured S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Elena ‘Yo Yo’ Rodriguez (Natalia Cordova-Buckley) set between Season Three and Season Four in six episodes of between three and six minutes long and all made available online on 13 December 2016. A slightly stranger title was Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Double Agent (2015) which featured someone employed in the ‘real world’ to retrieve secrets about upcoming episodes of the show with the cast playing versions of their real selves.
4 Stan Lee confirmed this in interviews (see Goldman 2014). These acronyms stand for, in order, United Network Command for Law and Enforcement; Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.
5 One of the best examples of this is S.H.I.E.L.D.’s incursion to Bahrain portrayed in ‘Melinda’ (2.17) where we learn how Melinda May was given the nickname ‘The Cavalry’. Coulson initially refuses to allow May to enter a building where many agents have been kidnapped and taken hostage by the Inhuman Eva Belyakov, telling her ‘S.H.I.E.L.D. is not authorised for any action’. However, when it is clear that there is no hope for those inside he tells her ‘Go!’ and May rescues the men, but is forced to kill Eva and her daughter Katya. Such is the importance of this moment for the series that the show returns to it as the basis of the alternate reality narrative in Season Four. In this alternate reality May does not kill Katya and this leads directly to the Cambridge Incident where she is said to have murdered two hundred and seventy-nine innocents, a tragedy which sparks the resurgence of HYDRA in that reality.