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Marvel One-Shot

Agent Carter

Carter Enters the Room
Case File
Podcast Release
Sep 15, 2026
In-Universe
July 1946 Confident
Reality
Era
Captain America Nexus
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Synopsis

New York, 1946. A year has passed since Captain America took his plane down, and Peggy Carter still hears that radio call. Her work at the SSR is code breaking and data analysis. Agent Flynn calls her pet names like 'sweetie' and tells her the war is over. That the boys will handle the rough stuff. Three months into the posting she has not been sent on a single assignment. When the hotline reports Zodiac crossing the Whitestone Bridge in a green sedan, Flynn sends Miller, Johnson, and Wilkes. They come back with a shot-up car and nothing else. That night Flynn takes the boys out for a drink. Peggy is left to polish his field reports and lock up.

The hotline rings again while she is alone in the office. The caller gives her Zodiac's location and recommends three to five agents. Peggy goes by herself. She approaches the warehouse and acts the innocent until puts one through a window and the other is dropped like a sack of potatoes. The one gets handcuffed and ordered to scream for help to draw out the others. After taking out another 4 men, she approaches the room and throws a smoke grenade into the the newly shot hole in the door. When she believes her job done, enters the room and opens the case. In that moment, she is attacked by a large man. After a desperate struggle, she manages to stick the giant man with a hidden knife from her briefcase. What she carries out is a single vial with the Zodiac symbol etched into its surface. Flynn rails on her the next morning for skipping authorization and reminds her that no one is above protocol, not even Captain America's old flame. In perfect timing, the telephone interrupts him. Howard Stark is on the line and wants Peggy in Washington to run S.H.I.E.L.D.. Flynn is ordered to deliver the news himself and to profess that he is honored to do it. He offers to carry her things down to her car. She tells him she does not require his help, as usual. Later, poolside, Stark reads Top Secret files while Dum Dum Dugan watches two women in bikinis, something Dugan has never seen before. He asks whether Stark invented it. Stark credits the French.

Reality Designation

This story takes place outside the main Marvel continuity: SI-007

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

Peggy Carter

Milestone: Invited to run S.H.I.E.L.D. alongside Howard Stark

SSR analyst kept off field duty; recovers the Zodiac vial alone and is named to run S.H.I.E.L.D.

Howard Stark
Howard Stark Played by: Dominic Cooper

Calls the SSR office to install Peggy at the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. alongside him

Agent John Flynn
Agent John Flynn Played by: Bradley Whitford

Peggy's SSR superior; blocks her from assignments, then is ordered to hand her the promotion

Timothy "Dum Dum" Dugan
Timothy "Dum Dum" Dugan Played by: Neal McDonough

Milestone: Sees a bikini for the first time

Poolside with Stark in the post-credits scene

Comic Roots

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

Zodiac

On the page, Zodiac is not a substance. It is a criminal cartel, first appearing in Avengers #72 (January 1970), created by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema. Twelve members, one per sign of the western zodiac, each running a different American city, all of them handpicked and financed by multimillionaire Cornelius van Lunt operating as Taurus. The stated goal is world economic and political domination. One member predates the group: Scorpio, created by Jim Steranko, who first appears under that name in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #1 (June 1968) alongside the ankh-shaped Zodiac Key. Worth noting given where this story ends. In the comics, the man who infiltrates the Zodiac cartel is Nick Fury, wearing Scorpio's identity, working for S.H.I.E.L.D.

S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Founding

The agency debuts in Strange Tales #135 (August 1965), created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with the acronym then standing for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law-Enforcement Division. It was rebranded in 1991 as Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate. Lee has said the inspiration was the contemporary vogue for acronym spy outfits, naming television's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as the model. On the page the organization arrives fully formed and modern, with Colonel Nick Fury pulled out of his wartime series, given an eyepatch, and installed at the top. There is no Peggy Carter in that story and no Howard Stark running the place, though Tony Stark does appear in the issue. Handing the agency's origin to Carter and the elder Stark is a screen invention, not an adaptation.

Peggy Carter's Chance to Shine

Peggy Carter debuts in Tales of Suspense #75 and is not named until #77, both 1966, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. For decades she was a wartime memory rather than a lead, and the comics never gave her a S.H.I.E.L.D. founding of her own. Marvel published the five-issue Operation S.I.N. in 2015 explicitly to capitalize on the ABC series premiere, sending Kathryn Immonen and Rich Ellis back to put Peggy and Howard Stark in early-1950s Russia after an alien energy source, with a newly risen Hydra hunting the same prize. The same team then wrote Agent Carter: S.H.I.E.L.D. 50th Anniversary #1 later that year, in which Dum Dum Dugan tries to recruit Peggy into S.H.I.E.L.D. and the two of them run into Lady Sif. The comics put Dugan's recruitment pitch in 1966. The screen has Howard Stark hand Peggy the whole agency in 1946.

The Snark File

Easter eggs, callbacks and technical tidbits.

The Bikini

The bikini gag is a hard historical marker, not just a joke. Louis Réard unveiled the two-piece at the Piscine Molitor in Paris on July 5, 1946, modeled by eighteen-year-old Casino de Paris dancer Micheline Bernardini after every professional model he approached refused. He named it after the Bikini Atoll, where the United States had detonated a nuclear weapon four days earlier, hoping the suit would generate comparable headlines. Bernardini reportedly received around fifty thousand letters. Dugan's blank stare is period-accurate: in the United States the bikini would not catch on for years.

Shane Black

The voice on the phone that speaks to Agent Carter belongs to Shane Black, director of Iron Man 3, the film this short shipped with on Blu-ray. He is credited as Disembodied Voice.

The Whitestone Bridge

The Whitestone Bridge is a real and period-correct crossing. The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge opened to traffic on April 29, 1939, one day before the New York World's Fair, and spans the East River between Throggs Neck in the Bronx and the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens.

Gabriel Beristain

Gabriel Beristain shot this short and went on to serve as cinematographer on episodes of the Agent Carter series, including "Now Is Not the End" and "Snafu."

McGuffin

Marvel screened the short at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2013 ahead of the home release. Asked from the floor whether the nature of the Zodiac would ever be explained, D'Esposito answered that it was the McGuffin.