Agent Carter Did Spycraft Better Than Secret Invasion Ever Could
By Linda Codega
A few months ago I started the thankless task of recapping Secret Invasion, and now, a month after the series ended, I’m still deeply underwhelmed by the predictable blandness of the entire thing. Then, because I was hit by a fit of nostalgia and because I find Hayley Atwell absurdly attractive, I started a re-watch of the other grounded spy thriller from Marvel: Agent Carter.
After I finished the second season (the show was unceremoniously cancelled in 2016), I was left wondering… how did Secret Invasion manage to fuck up so badly that Agent Carter, a network television release with fewer stars, way less hype, and without Secret Invasion’s $200 million budget, was better written, better paced, and more enjoyable than Marvel’s most recent spy series?
For some background, Agent Carter was a short-lived Marvel television series that ran for two seasons on ABC from 2015 to 2016. The first season saw Hayley Atwell’s Agent Peggy Carter attempting to establish herself within the boy’s club of the postwar spy organization, the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR), hoping to clear Howard Stark’s name after an arms deal goes sideways. It is a science-fiction dramady couched in the Marvel universe, but with a main character who has no powers, Agent Carter kept both high heels firmly on the ground.
Secret Invasion was touted as “grounded,” and despite the fact that most of the plot was going to undoubtedly circle around the issue of what to do with the aliens that had clandestinely made Earth their home in the ‘90s, I believed the pitch. So much of spycraft is combining information and opportunity—in the right hands, the premise of a group of shapeshifting Skrulls helping Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury puppet the Avengers into compliance has potential. What we got, however, was a messy global political crises exacerbated by a single man’s hubris—the exact opposite of what Agent Carter was doing.
