She’s the English secret agent who had a special relationship with Captain America. She has no superpowers – unless you count a heightened fashion sense and being handy with a pump-action shotgun – but is capable of foiling diabolical plots. She’s a woman operating in a man’s world, but while her sexist colleagues in the Strategic Scientific Reserve have the suits, hats and tommy guns, she’s the one who seems untouchable.

There are lots of reasons to love Peggy Carter, not least because Hayley Atwell’s plucky performance is so appealing. But perhaps one of the most obvious is that, for someone who is part of the ballooning Marvel screen universe, Peggy doesn’t seem weighed down by too much baggage.



Watch a trailer for Agent Carter season two

In a rushing torrent of Marvel continuity, Agent Carter, who returned to our screens for season two last night, tries to paddle her own canoe. After being introduced in the 1940s-set Captain America: The First Avenger, the character was left behind by subsequent Marvel movies (although Atwell has still racked up some film credits – thanks to flashbacks and dream sequences, she cameoed in both Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man last year). Her superhero sweetheart Steve Rogers was frozen in ice for decades before waking up in the present day, a confusing place where more than a dozen Marvel movies are mapped out for the next five years. Peggy is still operating in the late-1940s, insulated from most of the machinations required to pave the way to 2018’s gigantic movie crossover Avengers: Infinity War, a two-part blowout that, according to one of its directors, will involve at least 67 notable Marvel heroes and villains. Sixty-seven! That’s not a cast list, that’s a Spandex LinkedIn network.

Marvel’s USP is interconnectedness, but the scale of its success and the velocity of its planning can make it seem like it is trying to monetise FOMO. The endless stacking of characters and storylines means that even casual fans might feel obliged to check out standalone movies such as Doctor Strange and Black Panther before the first part of Infinity War debuts. Diehard acolytes will also stick with TV offshoot Agents of SHIELD, currently midway through a fairly decent third season, just to keep tabs on mutated beings the Inhumans, who have their own movie scheduled for 2020.

Even Netflix’s discrete clutch of Marvel anti-heroes, nominally ringfenced from the wider universe because of darker, racier content, is blowing up faster than expected. When Netflix first announced its plan to make four standalone series showcasing street-level characters before teaming them up for a combined mini-series called The Defenders, it seemed wildly ambitious. Now, with second seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones already confirmed, and more spin-offs mooted, Netflix’s original blueprint seems almost conservative.

Against this backdrop of caffeinated worldbuilding and the frantic laying down of narrative track for future projects, Agent Carter feels like Marvel for the time-poor. The breezy first season was only eight episodes long, a third of the length of your average season of Agents of SHIELD. Season two is a trim 10 episodes, easily limboing under the time required to keep up with Jessica Jones.

Battling evil, and sexism: Agent Carter alongside her Strategic Scientific Reserve colleagues. Photograph: Marvel/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Instead of darkness and grit, Agent Carter has a lightness of touch, embodied by the fizzy repartee between Peggy and Edwin Jarvis, her platonic partner in crimefighting. In the grand overarching Marvel design, they are both technically supporting characters – an Avenger’s historic love interest, and the oft-exasperated, slightly prissy butler of Iron Man’s playboy dad. Yet, thanks to the appetite for Marvel content, here they are headlining their own series. Perhaps corporate synergy isn’t all bad.

In season two, Peggy relocates from New York to LA, investigating suspicious science phenomena against a backdrop of late-40s Hollywood. There are atomic conspiracies, femme fatales and a particularly obstinate flamingo. Peggy even seems ready to move past losing the love of her life.

For all her gumption, Agent Carter will never be able to operate entirely independently – one of the major MacGuffins in season two will apparently dovetail with Doctor Strange, the Benedict Cumberbatch-starring mystic blockbuster that is due in November – but hopefully any connecting threads to Marvel’s ongoing plans for world domination will create texture rather than bondage. Never mind how she fits into the universe – most of us are more invested in Peggy finding her own place in the world.

• Agent Carter airs on Thursdays at 9pm, on Fox