Agent Carter Creators Talk Peggy's Future, Hydra and Superpowers
Agent Carter's creators on Peggy's future, Hydra, superpowers and more, including why they like doing a shorter season.
27 JAN 2015 BY ERIC GOLDMAN
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have become a big part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe team, having worked on the screenplays Thor: The Dark World, Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and with the duo once more collaborating for the upcoming Captain America: Civil War – a notably large project that will also feature Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man and the introduction of Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther.
In the midst of this, Markus and McFeely are the creators of Marvel’s Agent Carter, the new eight-episode TV series featuring Hayley Atwell reprising her role as Peggy Carter from the Captain America films. I was recently among a group of press who spoke to Marcus and McFeely about how much they’ve been able to be involved in Agent Carter week-to-week (after they wrote the first episode), why they like having a shorter run of episodes, the role Hydra could play in the series should it continue and more.
Question: Given how much Marvel stuff you’ve got going on, how much have you been able to be involved with Carter beyond the pilot and charting out the rest of the season?
Christopher Markus: As much as we can be. They’re very good about placing them, geographically, very close to each other so we can run across the alley way. Steve, perhaps more than I have, has been in the room as much as he can. Because they put it all in the same spot, we can just walk across the alley and take Cap 3 meetings and then sit in the [Agent Carter] writers’ room and try to break each episode, so it’s been really gratifying in that way.
Question: Can you talk about playing with the greater architecture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and being able to know what’s happening in Avengers, know what you guys have planned for Cap 3 and some of the other movies, and then weave that into what you’re doing here?
Markus: It’s fun.
McFeely: A light touch, but we do try to do it.
Markus: Yeah, but you really only need to drop the tiniest bit of hint and its connected. You don’t have to go, “Howard Stark’s wearing the same pants that Tony wears!” It is a crazy kind of… Everything is enhanced just by the knowledge that its all connected. What will be a completely undisclosed scene in Cap 3, and a perfectly good scene, suddenly, with what I know about this and this… It’s like this will be a
great scene now and we didn’t have to write it any better. It’s just because of all the connections.
Question: Howard Stark, we can see the echoes with Tony. But as he comes back into the show and we get to know him a bit more, might we see some ways he’s different from Tony?
Markus: He’s burdened in a different way. I think Tony’s burdened with
Howard, in a way. Howard raised Tony and that had all its own effects on him. I think Tony is much more flippant than Howard. Howard is a playboy but he’s quite serious about what he’s doing. Tony is…
McFeely: Partly, that’s a function of the Iron Man movies, where Pepper becomes important and he’s not a cad. We’ve not met Maria Stark so Howard can be as caddish as we’d like him to be. They’re different in that way too.
Question: Can you guys talk about working with only eight episodes. That can cause really accelerated, great storytelling. Have you enjoyed that and if you move forward to a Season 2, are you hoping to keep the same?
Markus: I would love to keep it small because, god bless them, the people who make 22 episodes… I don’t know how the hell they do it. That’s like the Bataan Death March. I don’t know how you’re alive at the end of that. But also, there’s no way… You have to become episodic at that point.
Markus: One thing we definitely didn’t want is for her to finish a mission this week and wipe her brow and the next week another goon comes up. Everything gets slightly generic when you’re hitting a new story every week. So this, we could tell, in the
least possible success, if it never came back, we’d have a tight little story that we could say, “This was an eight-hour Marvel movie” instead of a failed TV show. [Laughs]
Question: Having shown her much older in The Winter Soldier, how much of Peggy’s life, in broad strokes, have you mapped out in your mind?
Markus: Very broad strokes.
McFeely: I can’t hand you twelve scripts tomorrow.
Question: The Jarvis connection to present day, did you guys have that mapped out in your heads, that character?
McFeely: In terms of Tony’s JARVIS, the A.I.?
Markus: I mean, that was in the first Iron Man movie and it sort of got extrapolated backwards from that.
Question: Do you guys know the through-line yourselves or are you still finding your way?
McFeely: We are not allowed to specifically talk about the complete through-line.
Markus: But I do think Jarvis is huge in Tony’s life. I don’t exactly know the math of when Tony was born….
McFeely: It depends on how old Robert thinks he is.
Question: You mentioned the [Agent Carter] short was the framework and inspiration for this series. Are you using that as canon? Is that going to be where it ends or is that sort of scrapped?
Markus: At the moment, we’re saying that’s where it ends but we all agree and understand that it’s going to get tougher if we continue.
Question: She’s not treated very well by the men in her life in the short and I hope at least, as a viewer, that she moves past some of that?
McFeely: It’s also my hope. But that doesn’t mean that things couldn’t reverse. She could have a bad Wednesday. I don’t know what the official policy is, but clearly the short was an inspiration. We all said, wow, we could have a whole series of this. Are we bound to exactly that? I think the jury’s out. I’ll say that.
Question: There are these larger questions of Peggy building a family at some point in between where she is now and The Winter Soldier. Is that something, if Carter gets future seasons, you plan to answer in the show?
McFeely: We like to raise the question… Well, I find it funny – this is a bit of a tangent -- because I read a bunch of reviews over the first two weeks but it was all, “What a great, empowering show,” right? And the whole feminist conversation, I really like that. And then the next week was, “Who is she going to marry?” And I was like, “Is that the same publication?” We always knew that if people really caught it in Winter Soldier, and we introduce enough candidates in Agent Carter it would come up. I’m perfectly happy for it to come up now. But if you told me we had three more seasons, we’d probably get closer.
Question: You also, with Winter Soldier, put in this history of Hydra, that is going to make people have a lot of questions about everything going on in Agent Carter. Obviously, that’s going to be in your mind as well. Is that something where you toss around a lot of ideas about, “Well, this could happen”?
McFeely: Absolutely. Hydra is a blessing and a curse, because as soon as we say, “There they are!” and we show them to the audience, we either have to have Peggy deal with it and then get knocked on the head -- because clearly she didn’t know about it -- or we have to hide it from Peggy. It’s a storytelling question that we are playing with and considering.
Question: Is this a show that is open to super powers or do you want to keep it closed in the espionage corner of the Marvel universe?
McFeely: Good question. I guess the question’s open. We live in the Marvel universe. We’re also on television, so what can we do well? Is the Whizzer stopping by any time? I’m not positive. For now, what you’re seeing in the show is certainly the flavor of the show for this season, but who knows.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/01...tors-talk-peggys-future-hydra-and-superpowers
I'm listening to one of the podcasts I regularly listen to & they saying they rewatched the scene several times where the cop gets shot & they saying it was definitely a female that shot him.
It gotta be Lyndsy Fonseca's character. NO WAY they just casted her to be a civilian on this show after coming off the major role she played on "Nikita".
I figured it was just a random goon 
