Captain America and Agent Carter
Well, there’s ‘May to December,’ and then there’s ‘frozen-in-his-thirties to octogenarian.’ While they may have been on course for having a beautiful thing together, Captain America and Agent Peggy Carter were ultimately wrested apart by war, science, and a pesky little annoyance called fate. She guided him toward his destiny when he was just an embarrassingly below-average soldier, and he rose to the challenge by taking up the impenetrable shield. In so doing, he gradually chipped his way through her impenetrable shield, if you catch my drift.
But, there’s no time for dancing when World War II is underway and an evil, red-faced HYDRA guy is trying to achieve world domination at the expense of truth, justice and the American way. So, Captain America and Agent Carter selflessly placed their unspoken, unconsummated love on the back-burner, while Cap charged into danger to retrieve the Tesseract in 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger.
We knew it wouldn’t end well when Cap foolishly gazed at a picture of Peggy, just after it became clear that the plane he was in would soon plunge into the icy depths of the ocean. They spoke their last words to each other, and down he went.
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the successfully defrosted, but still frozen-in-age, Captain America visits with Peggy, who is now super-old. It’s tragic, with their deep fondness for each other speaking volumes in the awkward silences. They both know that, under these circumstances, it was never going to happen. We know, however, that – cinema tropes being what they are – if the roles were reversed, the octogenarian Cap would be wining and dining that Agent Carter all over town.