Agent Carter - Season 2
- Thread starter Gaith
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I think of it as kind of like how the '40s or '60s origin stories for Marvel superheroes got revisited later with more detail. The broad events are still canonical (Steve Rogers volunteers for a special treatment that turns him into a supersoldier/Reed Richards and his friends launch a rocket into space and are bombarded by cosmic rays/Peggy Carter faces sexism at the SSR but kicks ass and then gets pegged by Howard Stark to found SHIELD), but the specifics are reworked and retconned and added to later on.
Look at TITANIC. We all knew the ship was going to to hit an iceberg and sink. Didn't stop the movie from taking over the world.
As for costumed heroes back in the day, how about The 3-D Man? He'd be perfect. And maybe Baron Blood as a bad guy? That might boost ratings.
Not really, because the short shows that Peggy is still dismissed by her SSR superiors at the time when Stark recruits her, whereas the show's Peggy has earned the respect of her SSR peers by now.
Well, all of those peers were apparently gone. If Jack Thompson is dead and she comes back to the New York office, I could see her having the same difficulties. It obviously makes for bad television to recycle that, but for continuity purposes, I don't think it's implausible.
As I recall, in the second-season premiere, everyone in the New York office, not just Thompson, is fully aware of Carter's standing as a top agent. She's got a whole SSR team backing her up when she takes down Dottie in the bank, and there are several eager spectators for her interrogation of Dottie. So the scenario where everyone in the office dismisses her and she has to operate clandestinely is no longer feasible.
For sake of Pete, it's not as though the events depicted in the one-shot were in any way special to begin with! She beat up a few dudes (which the series has shown her doing several times) while conspicuously wearing her work heels for no good reason (which the series has, mercifully, not shown, or at least has not made a point of showing). Sure, it had Bradley Whitford, but it wasn't much fun for this Josh Lyman fan to see him being a dick.
Conclusion: it's no loss at all to pluck the short from the overall MCU continuity.
Conclusion: it's no loss at all to pluck the short from the overall MCU continuity.
Except the organization she's up against now has been almost entirely defanged in one fell swoop (by its own members, too, not even Carter) and its own secret meetings seemed to suggest it was far more amoral boys club/ultra capitalist supremacy group than world conquering fifth column.
I'm sure (if they do go forward with the SHIELD plot soon) that it will have at least some small part in that - probably its downfall being an opportunity for Hydra to take over some or all of its assets/remaining members - but it would've been a more interesting story if it hadn't spent so long beating around the bush.
They could show somebody watching the one-shot in black-and-white as part of a newsreel re-enactment. "Boy, that actress looks nothing like the real Peggy Carter." Of course, since SHIELD is supposed to be secret, they probably couldn't allow that. Maybe a scene of Stark screening it. "No, we can't allow them to run this. Call them. The usual terms."
That is both a good and bad example.
Ah, I loved 3D-Man back in the day, at least the nice little retro two-parter in Marvel Premiere. And they had the gall to include him in The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
I think the idea behind the Arena Club was that they already ruled the world. They represented the white male one-percenters who were in effective control of government, industry, commerce, war, entertainment, and everything else, and who manipulated events as they saw fit while creating cover stories to fool the masses (like the Koch Brothers and Rupert Murdoch today). They reportedly had President Harding assassinated and triggered the Great Depression, presumably because it let them make themselves still richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else.
And there's no need for any supporting character to be a secret Hydra mole, because we already know exactly how Hydra infiltrated SHIELD. Arnim Zola told Steve and Natasha the whole story in The Winter Soldier. Shortly after SHIELD was founded, Zola was recruited as an asset through Operation Paperclip, the real-world program that brought German scientists like Wernher von Braun into the employ of the US to keep the Soviets from getting them. So Zola was in position to suborn SHIELD from within, which he did gradually over the next few decades. We already got a guest appearance from Zola at the end of AC's first season, so that's been set up in the show as well.
Would he sparkle?
Was that mentioned in the show? I might've missed it. What I can recall seemed to suggest that they were quite well connected in governmental, military and media circles, and certainly in a position to seriously influence the US, but not necessarily control it (and the rest of the world didn't really seem to factor in at all).
The Harding assassination and the '29 market crash were specifically alluded to, yes.
The point is, they were a group of rich white men, and rich white men have had a monopoly on power for a very long time. The Arena Club's members may not have held formal power, but they controlled and manipulated the people who did. We saw them manufacturing a scandal to get Chadwick's rival to withdraw so that Chadwick would be elected to the Senate, and they had plans to continue manipulating the process until Chadwick, their own chosen puppet, got elected president. And we saw Vernon Masters trying to groom Thompson for a leading role in the US intelligence establishment while also recruiting him into the club. This is the point. You don't have to conquer a country with armies if you can buy and sell its nominal leaders.
True enough, but that kind of power is clearly at least a little bit vulnerable. Something we see in the fact that they have no control whatsoever over Carter (or Stark) and that they apparently needed to assassinate Harding, rather than control him.
Either way, though, they're certainly a way away from the Hydra mentality, which was my original point.
I don't see the difference. Hydra was content to quietly infiltrate SHIELD, the U.S. Congress, the World Council, and other organs of power over the course of 70 years, serving as a power behind the throne and secretly manipulating world events to serve their agendas. That's exactly the Arena Club's MO. If anything, maybe Zola learned from the Arena Club's example that quiet infiltration is more effective than armies of jackbooted thugs with superscience ray guns. Maybe the surviving members of the Arena Club ended up aligning themselves with Zola and became the new Hydra. I can certainly see Alexander Pierce as a spiritual successor to Vernon Masters.
We already know from Agents of SHIELD that Hydra existed long before the Red Skull (you know, with it actually originating with the worship of whatever creature now possessing Ward's corpse is and all), and has been pointed out several times, practically everything about the way the Arena Club operates screams "Hydra." It's not like Hydra always calls themselves Hydra, either.
I thought so too, but apparently the symbols aren't identical, just really, really similar:
1820s Hydra, inverted
Arena Club Council of Nine
Michelle Fazekas has said the Council is not connected to Hydra, though I find that hard to believe, given the striking similarity of the logos. Apparently it's supposed to be the MCU version of the Secret Empire, whatever that is. But maybe it's a splinter group from the ancient forerunner of Hydra.
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