Agent Peggy Carter

Peggy Carter is a British agent of the Strategic Scientific Reserve who supervises operations for the super-soldier division, commanding a yard full of recruits who underestimate her at their peril. She drops the loudest of them with a single punch on her first day, and she is among the few who see something in the frail Steve Rogers that the brass cannot. When the assassin who kills Erskine flees through Brooklyn, she gives chase herself, shooting at the fleeing car and standing her ground in the street.

Her faith in Steve outlasts the program that made him. Watching him wasted as a bond-selling mascot, she tells him he was meant for more than a lab rat or a dancing monkey, then risks her career to fly him behind enemy lines to save the 107th. She stands with him through the war on Hydra, storming Schmidt's Alpine base at his side. When the Valkyrie goes down, it is Peggy on the radio for his final call, keeping her voice steady as she promises him a dance at the Stork Club, a week next Saturday at eight, and listening as the line goes quiet.

Margaret "Peggy" Carter is a decorated veteran of the Strategic Scientific Reserve. The peace she fought for has rewarded her by chaining her to a desk. In the New York bullpen she connects the calls she never gets to make, while the men around her treat her wartime record as a punchline and her competence as an inconvenience. Then Howard Stark, freshly branded a traitor after his own inventions surface on the black market, slips back into her life with a proposition; He claims that someone tunneled clean through his vault and made off with his most dangerous work, the arsenal he affectionately calls his bad babies. He asks Peggy to clear his name from inside the very agency hunting him, which means turning traitor to prove that he is not one. She takes the opportunity..

Teamed with Stark's unflappable butler Edwin Jarvis, she gets to work. She slips into Spider Raymond's nightclub disguised as a platinum blonde and lifts the formula for Nitramene. A glowing implosion bomb nearly ends the night, but she renders it inert with improvised chemistry and a steadier nerve than the situation deserves. She escapes the Roxxon Refinery blast with seconds to spare. It costs her dearly. A scar-throated killer in a green suit, hunting the same formula, murders her roommate Colleen, a loss Peggy shoulders as her own fault. At the refinery she corners another marked man, the fence Leet Brannis, and pries a single chilling warning out of him before he slips away: Leviathan is coming. By dawn the SSR is scouring the city for a mysterious angry blonde, never once suspecting she is filing their surveillance reports two desks over. Their finest agent runs circles around them, and they are far too busy underestimating her to notice.

By day, Peggy Carter answers phones and files transport reports for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, tolerated as the office's token woman while the men around her keep missing what is sitting under their noses. By night she runs the actual case. Convinced Howard Stark has been framed, she partners with his butler Edwin Jarvis to recover the weapons stolen from Stark's vault, first among them the nitramene, a compound whose concussive blast collapses into a vacuum implosion. To trace the getaway milk truck she strolls into the Daisy Clover Dairy as Ruth Barton of the city Health Department, all clipboard and cold authority, and walks out with her lead. Back at the SSR she outthinks the entire investigation in front of the whole room, reasoning that residual Vita radiation would cling to a saboteur's clothing rather than his scrubbed skin, a hunch that flushes the mole, Van Ert, straight out of the building.

The trail runs to Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and to Leet Brannis, the thief who stole for Leviathan and then double-crossed them. Peggy offers him protection in exchange for answers, but a green-suited assassin runs the milk truck off a bridge before Brannis can give up much beyond a warning that Leviathan is coming and a strange heart traced in the dirt as he dies. She fights the gunman, the truckload of nitramene launches into the water, and the detonation swallows the evidence whole. Through all of it Jarvis keeps ignoring her orders and saving her life anyway, and his point lands: Steve Rogers leaned on her for courage and counsel, and shouldering a war entirely alone is no kind of plan. She hears him, mostly. She also takes a room at the Griffith Hotel under Miriam Fry's convent-strict code, ten o'clock curfew and no men above the first floor. She keeps the relentlessly friendly Angie Martinelli at arm's length, because in Peggy's arithmetic letting anyone close is just painting a target on them.

In a continued effort to clear Howard Stark's name after his stolen inventions surface on the black market, Peggy continues her covert campaign. Her lone ally is Stark's butler, Edwin Jarvis, and her only lead is a robbed vault. To spring Jarvis from a brutal SSR interrogation, she torpedoes her own credibility on purpose, swallowing Jack Thompson's contempt and a public dressing-down rather than blow her cover. It stings.. but it works. With Jarvis in the clear, they refocus their efforts on the vault. Carter cracks it herself. A thief could not have hauled hundreds of pounds of technology up through a manhole. She remembers the storm on the night of the break-in. The fact that New York still flushes its sewers to the river through tide gates.. all one would need is a raft and a weather forecast to float the whole haul straight out to sea.

That deduction leads her and Jarvis to a ship loaded with Stark's missing arsenal, a ship with the symbol given to her by Brannis in his dying breath. When an assassin nearly gets the best of both her and Jarvis, she puts a swift end to the fight by destroying his arm using "The Constrictor", one of Stark's 'Bad Babies'. Jarvis warns that going public would only pin Stark's guilt on her too, so she phones the tip in from the shadows and lets Daniel Sousa take the win. The triumph sours by morning. A professional killer silences the captured witness and Agent Ray Krzeminski both. Back at the Griffith, worn to the bone, Carter nearly shuts out her neighbor Angie Martinelli, then chooses to let one person in.

Peggy Carter is secretly working as Howard Stark's covert agent while continuing her official duties at the SSR. When Howard unexpectedly returns to New York, Peggy hides him at the Griffith Hotel. Howard asks Peggy to retrieve the Blitzkrieg Button, one of his confiscated inventions, from the SSR laboratory. Peggy agrees, but she immediately becomes suspicious that Howard and Jarvis are not telling her the whole truth.

Peggy successfully infiltrates the SSR laboratory and replaces the real device with Howard's dummy. Her suspicions prove correct when she activates the Button and discovers that it contains a vial rather than the weapon Howard described. Confronting Howard, he reveals that the vial contains the last of Steve Rogers' blood. Peggy becomes furious that Howard manipulated her connection to Steve and used her as a corporate spy. She ultimately keeps the blood rather than returning it to Howard and hides it inside the wall of her apartment. Meanwhile, the SSR investigation into Howard continues to close in around her.

Peggy Carter finally receives an opportunity to participate in an official SSR field operation when the agency intercepts a coded message apparently connected to Howard Stark and Leviathan. Her knowledge of Russian and her cryptography skills allow her to decipher the message and identify the coordinates of a Soviet military complex. Although Chief Dooley initially intends to exclude her from the mission, Peggy persuades him to let her participate by securing the 107th Regiment's tactical team, drawing on her wartime relationships with the Howling Commandos.

In Russia, Peggy serves as an experienced field operative alongside Jack Thompson and the Howling Commandos. She recognizes almost immediately that the apparent Stark weapons exchange may be a trap and ultimately helps uncover the Leviathan facility and rescue Nikola and Dr. Ivchenko. Her relationship with Thompson shifts as he begins recognizing her competence, while her friendship with Dum Dum Dugan provides a direct connection to her wartime past and Steve Rogers. Back in New York, Peggy continues investigating the possibility that a woman working for Leviathan manipulated Stark and murdered Krzeminski. She also unknowingly becomes the focus of Dottie's surveillance, allowing the episode to establish the danger posed by Dottie's proximity to her

Peggy presses the SSR’s new source, Dr. Ivchenko, about the Russian program that trained girls as covert weapons. She connects the small Korovin pistol used in Ray Krzeminski’s murder, the marks found in the Russian facility, and Howard Stark’s weakness for women. Convinced that a trained female operative manipulated Stark into opening his vault, Peggy obtains permission from Chief Dooley to follow that lead.

Working with Jarvis, Peggy investigates Stark’s former partners for the wrist scars left by restraints. The trail leads to a dancer named Ida Emke and evidence that supports Peggy’s theory. Unfortunately, as timing would have it, Sousa identifies Peggy as the woman tied to Brannis and the stolen nitramene. Peggy fights free from the Diner trap, retrieves Steve’ blood from the Griffith, and is saved from immediate capture by Angie. Afte the agents clear, Peggy makes a break for it only to be met by Dottie. Dottie incapacitates her with stolen knockout lipstick. Peggy, as she looses consciousness, sees Dottie’s scarred wrists, finally identifying the operative she has been hunting. Before Dottie is able to do any more, the SSR Agents round the corner and take Carter into custody.

Peggy is being interrogated by Chief Roger Dooley, and Agents Jack Thompson and Daniel Sousa after her unauthorized investigation into Howard Stark's stolen inventions. She refuses to cooperate in the interrogation. Edwin Jarvis arrives with a forged confession supposedly signed by Howard Stark, offering Stark's surrender in exchange for Peggy's release. Dooley doesn't respond quite the way Jarvis had anticipated and he ends up in a chair right next to Carter.

After seeing Dr. Ivchenko send a message in morse code to someone across the street Peggy lays it all on the line and tells Dooley, Thompson, and Sousa the full truth about her investigation, including her discovery that the Leviathan operative responsible for Krzeminski's death is still at large and that the 'weapon' recovered from her contains Steve Rogers' blood. Her desperate ploy works to an extent. Agents Thompson and Sousa are sent to investigate the building across the street. Meanwhile, Chief Dooley believes he can control Dr. Ivchenko. Later, when that turns out to not be true, Peggy is there for the final moments of Dooley's life and assures him that they'll 'get the bastard'.

Peggy investigates the aftermath of the cinema attack and learns that the gas used there, Midnight Oil, was originally developed by Howard Stark for military purposes. She and the SSR determine that Dr. Ivchenko is actually Johann Fennhoff, a psychiatrist specializing in hypnosis. Howard returns to New York and is arrested by the SSR, but Peggy listens to his explanation of how General McGinnis obtained Midnight Oil and used it during the battle of Finow. Howard tells Peggy that he wants to help stop Fennhoff because his creation caused the deaths at Finow.

Peggy agrees to use Howard as bait during a public appearance designed to draw Fennhoff into the open. When Fennhoff and Dottie attack, Peggy investigates and discovers that the shooting was a diversion intended to allow Howard's kidnapping. She determines that Fennhoff is targeting Times Square and follows the operation to Howard's private aircraft hangar. Peggy confronts Dottie and defeats her in a fight, while Fennhoff escapes to the radio room and Howard is placed under hypnosis. Peggy reaches Howard by radio and convinces him that the illusion of Steve Rogers having survived is not real. Howard abandons the plan to release Midnight Oil over Manhattan, and Peggy later receives Steve's blood from Jarvis and disposes of it in the East River.