The first season of Agent Carter featured some very cool nods to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the upcoming second batch of episodes looks set to take that to another level. That’s because Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter makes the move from New York City to Los Angeles in order to investigate Isodyne Enery, a company tied to classic Iron Man villain Madame Masque.
Now, it’s also been confirmed that the season will also address the extra-dimensional energy known as the Darkforce a little later on, and as comic book fans should know, that’s something Phase 3 superhero Doctor Strange is very familiar with.
So, how exactly will Agent Carter link to that movie? Showrunners Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters explain:
“Basically, Isodyne is a company that we invented based in part on real life companies like Radiodyne or General Atomic or the beginnings of the Jet Propulsion Lab — all of which were in L.A. in the ’40s, and were developing the space program and were developing nukes. That’s what Isodyne is, and what you’ll learn is they were involved in the nuclear testing out in the desert when they were testing the, at the time they were calling it the atom bomb — and one of these tests didn’t go as expected. You’ll learn more about that in Season 2, but they stumble upon what people in the Marvel Universe will know as Darkforce, but because they’ve never seen it before they just name it Zero Matter. That’s our tie-in to the ‘Doctor Strange’ universe, and also to ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ because you’ve seen it in ‘S.H.I.E.L.D.’ as well.”
“The cool thing about what we learned as we researched Darkforce over the course of Marvel comic book history is, it affects people in different ways. It’s created a bunch of superheroes, it’s created a bunch of villains, and it has all these different properties. It could be a liquid, it could be a gas, it could be a solid, it could give you powers, it could kill you. It has a lot of different applications, which was cool for us. We were able to select what we liked and sort of make our own rules as to what it does, how it operates, and who it affects in our world.”
How significant the ties between Agent Carter and Doctor Strange will be remains to be seen of course, but this is definitely an interesting and unexpected crossover. With Agent Carter set to return with a two-part premiere next week, we’ll learn more then, but season two of the Captain America: The First Avenger spinoff just keeps on sounding better and better, don’t you think?
