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Agent Carter · Season 1 · Episode 1

Now Is Not the End

Carter Profile
Case File
Podcast Release
Sep 24, 2026
Media Release
January 6, 2015
In-Universe
April 14, 1946
Reality
Era
Captain America Nexus
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Synopsis

New York, 1946. Peggy Carter works a desk job at the SSR. She is still grieving Steve Rogers, a year after his plane went down into the ice. Congress holds Howard Stark in contempt for selling weapons-grade technology to America's enemies. Stark disappears rather than answer for it. Dooley assigns Jack Thompson to hunt him down. Dooly and the rest of the office treat Peggy like a secretary instead of a fellow agent. Stark reaches out to Peggy in secret. He asks her to clear his name from the inside, claiming that thieves had emptied his private vault and started selling his most dangerous inventions on the black market. One formula, molecular nitramine, could level city blocks if it were ever built. Stark introduces Peggy to his butler, Edwin Jarvis. Then he leaves the country to chase down weapons already sold overseas.

Peggy infiltrates Spider Raymond's club to buy the nitramine formula before its buyer can close the deal. Thompson's own raid hits the same room minutes later. Peggy gets out with the formula prior to her team even being aware of her. That night, her roommate Colleen O'Brien is shot dead by an intruder hunting the same weapon. Peggy narrowly avoids the same fate. Jarvis walks her through neutralizing the glowing sample over the phone, reading from Stark's handwritten notes. Stark Industries scientist Anton Vanko traces its chemical signature to a Roxxon refinery. Peggy and Jarvis follow the trail to a mothballed weapons facility outside the city. An arms dealer holds Peggy at gunpoint there. He won't name the associate he only calls "green suit." He warns her that someone called Leviathan is coming, moments before the facility goes up (or 'in') around them. Peggy makes it home in time to run off a man harassing Angie Martinelli at the automat. Jarvis quietly reports back to Stark that Peggy was exactly the right choice.

Reality Designation

This story takes place in the main continuity: 199999

Did You Know?

Reality numbers are Marvel's official designations.

Where a universe has no official number we follow the Marvel Database and use its Temporary Reality Number (TRN-1092). Where there is neither — official or temporary — at the time we watch it, we assign a Snark Industries number of our own (SI-001).

Characters in the Episode

Agent Peggy Carter

Milestone: Meets Edwin Jarvis and takes her first 'off the books' mission from Howard Stark

SSR agent sidelined by the boys' club; goes undercover for Stark to recover his stolen tech.

Edwin Jarvis

Milestone: First partnership with Peggy Carter, becoming her off-book field ally.

Stark's butler and Peggy's after-hours field support; talks her through disarming the bomb.

Howard Stark
Howard Stark Played by: Dominic Cooper

Milestone: Framed as a traitor and declared a fugitive from Congress after his lead-lined vault of "bad babies" is robbed through the sewer.

Fugitive inventor branded a traitor; recruits Peggy to find the real thief.

Colleen O'Brien

Milestone: Killed by Sasha Demidov off-screen

Peggy's factory-worker roommate; murdered by the assassin hunting Peggy.

Spider Raymond

Milestone: Killed by Sasha Demidov

Nightclub owner and fence holding the Nitramene formula; killed for it.

Leet Brannis

Scarred smuggler running Stark's tech for Leviathan; names the threat before he dies.

Anton Vanko
Anton Vanko Mantle: Crimson Dynamo Played by: Costa Ronin

Scientist who analyzes the alloy and flags its Vita radiation.

In-Universe Dates

June 22, 1943 Confidence: Certain

Flashback of Agent Carter attempting to stop Heinz Kruger on the day that Steve gets his Serum.

Defense

Flashback to Captain America: The First Avenger

November 1943 Confidence: Confident

2 Flashbacks:

- Howard flying the plane that delivers Cap to the the 107th, rescuing Bucky and the rest of the Commandos.

- Steve being shot at BY Agent Carter to 'test' his new shield.

Defense

Flashback to Captain America: The First Avenger

March 1945 Confidence: Reasoned

Multiple flashbacks to the Assault on The Red Skull's base, the Valkyrie going down, and the end of the conflict from Captain America: The First Avenger

Defense

Flashback to Captain America: The First Avenger

April 14, 1946 – April 17, 1946 Anchor Confidence: Reasoned
Defense

The season is consistently placed in 1946 across recap and reference sources, roughly a year after Steve Rogers' apparent death at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger. No on-screen date

This date was worked backward from the date being spoken onscreen in S1 E5&E8 and takes place over roughly 4 days.

Comic Roots

Where the episode's people and places come from on the page.

Peggy Carter's beginnigs

Peggy Carter began life on the page as a memory. She debuted unnamed in Tales of Suspense #75 (March 1966) and got her name and backstory in #77 (May 1966), both by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, cast as Steve Rogers' wartime sweetheart glimpsed only in flashback. The character who spends this outing running rings around a room full of men started out as a face Cap remembered fondly and little more. Everything the show hands her, the field craft, the sidearm, the standing, is adaptation building a lead out of a footnote.

Edwin Jarvis

Edwin Jarvis arrived in Tales of Suspense #59 (November 1964), also by Lee and Kirby, but as the Avengers' unflappable butler, not Howard Stark's. Planting him in 1946 as Stark's man is a neat bit of reassignment, seeding the loyal valet decades before the team he would actually serve ever assembled. Howard Stark himself is a retroactive figure in the comics, introduced in Iron Man #28 (1970) by Archie Goodwin, Don Heck, and Johnny Craig, the reveal that recast Tony from self-made genius to heir. The show borrows the name and the wealth and invents most of the rogue.

Cold War Marvel

The villainy is stitched together from across Cold War Marvel. Leviathan, the shadow Brannis names with his last breath, first appeared in Dark Reign: The List, Secret Warriors (2009) by Jonathan Hickman and Stefano Caselli, conceived as a Soviet-bloc counterpart to Hydra. Anton Vanko, here a mild scientist reading Vita levels off an alloy, is on the page the original Crimson Dynamo from Tales of Suspense #46 (October 1963) by Stan Lee and Don Heck, a Soviet armored heavy rather than a lab technician. And Roxxon, whose refinery becomes a crater tonight, was first named in Captain America #180 (1974), a title writer Steve Englehart coined as a thinly veiled Exxon. Three eras of comics, folded quietly into one 1946 night.

The Snark File

Easter eggs, callbacks and technical tidbits.

Project Rebirth

Peggy raids a box marked "Project Rebirth" and lifts a Vita-Ray detector that belonged to Dr. Erskine, wiring the night's chemistry straight back to the serum that made Cap. Anton Vanko then reads that same Vita radiation off the alloy, so Erskine's science is doing double duty.

Saturday at the Stork Club

The closing beat sets a dance "a week next Saturday at the Stork Club, eight o'clock," with a "don't you dare be late, just be there" exchange. That is the rain-check Steve promised Peggy at the very end of The First Avenger, the date neither of them ever got to keep.

Behind the Camera

Louis D'Esposito, co-president of Marvel Studios, directed, and the script is by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the writers of The First Avenger.