“Now is Not the End” is episode one of season one of Marvel’s Agent Carter.
This, the first episode, begins with a clip from Captain America: The First Avenger, as Steve Rogers is about to force the HYDRA plane that is heading for New York into the water, speaking to Peggy Carter as he does so.
Next, Peggy is in an apartment in New York City in 1946. There is an article in the newspaper suggesting that Howard Stark may have sold weapons to the enemy. Clips of Peggy doing regular domestic things are interspersed with clips of her doing rather more active things from the film. Peggy’s roommate, Colleen, arrives as she is putting the bed away. Colleen thinks that Peggy works for the phone company; given that Peggy also has a gun, this is probably not entirely true.
Peggy does head to the offices of the New York Bell Co., but one of the operators opens a secret door and Peggy enters a hidden lift which leads to the Strategic Scientific Reserve. Which is where she really works.
Peggy’s boss wants her to cover the phones, which she does by getting all calls forwarded to the conference room. There, a clip is shown of Howard Stark, who has been accused of treason by selling weapons to the enemy. He has been giving evidence on Capitol Hill regarding this; Stark states that he hasn’t knowingly sold weapons to the enemy – and, by the very definition, he couldn’t have done it unknowingly.
Six pieces of Stark’s technology have turned up on either the black market or in the possession of enemy states. Stark has been treating it as a joke, but now he has disappeared, and the SSR wants to find him. Not only is Stark in contempt of Congress, he’s a fugitive from justice. Carter objects to this, as the Stark she knew during the war was not a traitor. Carter is not getting a lot of respect from either her boss or her fellow agents; only one, Sousa, stands up for her. Although she tells him she can handle anything the others throw at her.
Peggy misses the purpose and responsibility she had during the war. Despite being an agent, she is being treated as nothing more than a secretary by all the other agents (except Sousa) – who are all men. Whilst at a diner, she leaves her table and comes back to find a message asking her to meet someone in the alley in five minutes. When she exits, a man approaches and says that she’s coming with him. So Carter knocks him down. When a car that was waiting approaches, she shoots out a tyre – only for a door to open and Howard Stark greet her.
Stark says that he’s being set up. He had a very secure vault, one in which he kept all of his ‘bad boys’ – inventions too dangerous for anyone to have. Someone broke into this vault and cleaned it out whilst he was away.
Stark wants Carter to work inside SSR to clear his name, as she’s the only one he can trust. He says the SSR isn’t using Carter correctly. There’s an auction coming up soon of a chemical formula Stark invented. It hasn’t been tested but Stark says that it works – after all, he invented it. The formula is for a very powerful explosive, and it’s happening in New York. The man that Carter hit earlier is Jarvis, Stark’s butler, and he will help her; Stark himself is leaving the country to check on other inventions of his that are being sold.
So Peggy Carter is working as, technically, a traitor, helping another person believed to be a traitor. There is far more going on than meets the eye, and a hint of something big. Literally, going by the word.