The episode, which was billed as “What if Captain Carter fought the Hydra Stomper?” sets up an opportunity to revisit not just one of Marvel Comics’ most beloved storylines of all time, but one of the best MCU movies to date, “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Yes, as the title suggests, Captain Carter is at the very center of this episode, just as she was the first episode of the show’s first season, and her standalone episode gets a sequel. In this case, she gets to experience much of what Steve Rogers went through thinking his friend Bucky was dead, only to find out years later that he was alive and, more than that, an agent of the wrong.
Naturally, there are some familiar beats, but the nature of Peggy Carter having to reassess her relationship with Evil Steve years later changes things up a lot. This is by no means a beat-for-beat account of what fans already know. Quite honestly, it’s anything but. Only in the most basic ways does this story resemble “The Winter Soldier.” The folks at Marvel are really committed to making this a multiverse tale by flipping everything on its head and throwing everything at the wall. We see key moments recontextualized through Captain Carter as opposed to Captain America, yes, but it’s so much more than “the same but different.”
One of the most satisfying things in the entire MCU was Steve and Peggy’s relationship which culminated beautifully in “Avengers: Endgame.” This episode allows us to revisit that relationship in a truly unique and radically different way. The love is still there and the hearts beat the same, but the vessels carrying those hearts are markedly different. As such, even though it’s a multiversal take on a familiar tale, it hardly feels familiar at all.
