From the strange side effects of long-distance relationships that wind up going fully multiversal
to the challenges of a super-soldier serum glow-up, here are some pretty weird things
about Captain America and Peggy Carter's relationship.
We might as well start by acknowledging that even in its most basic form, Steve Rogers
and Peggy Carter's relationship is definitely weird when you compare it to traditional love
stories.
From Peggy's point of view, it involves a man who dies and then comes back 70 years
later looking exactly as handsome as he did in 1941.
The decades in the middle were occupied by a long and successful career as a spy, not
to mention a marriage to someone else and two kids that we never even learn about.
From Steve's point of view, it's even weirder.
As far as he's concerned, he goes to what he thinks is his death, only to wake up a
few seconds later to find that everything, including Peggy, has moved on into the next
century without him.
He goes immediately from promising to take her dancing to hanging out with her as she's
dying of old age after a long life that he wasn't really a part of.
Then, he goes back in time to put a ring on it after seeing her on her literal deathbed.
He was at her funeral before he was at their wedding.
That's not usually the right order for those, unless something has gone terribly wrong.
And then we get into the really weird stuff.
If we're going to get the weirdest and most obvious sticking point about Steve and Peggy's
relationship out of the way right up front, we're going to have to to talk about Sharon
Carter.
It's pretty clear from the way that the movies unfold that the relationship between Steve
and Peggy wasn't originally intended to be the endgame, so to speak.
Captain America has famously been characterized since his return to the comics in the 1960s
as a man out of time.
He's the iconic hero from the country's past who returns like King Arthur at our moment
of greatest need.
"I understood that reference."
The thing is, nobody actually wants a superhero who needs Peter Parker to explain how to use
his iPhone, so Cap is also a guy who acclimates very quickly to new situations, whether he's
fighting bad guys or catching up on 70 years of missed pop culture.
Losing the years he would've spent with Peggy is a necessary ingredient for giving his time
on ice some emotional weight.
Waking up in the 21st century isn't that much of a tragedy, he even talks about how much
he prefers present-day food to whatever he was snacking on back in the '40s, so the only
thing that he really loses is Peggy.
Even that turns out to only be a tragedy for Steve.
In Winter Soldier, we see him as he watches Peggy explain that after the war, she got
married to an unnamed soldier and had a very happy and fulfilling life working for S.H.I.E.L.D.
As Steve's story continues, the loss of his relationship with Peggy. and eventually the
loss of Peggy herself, becomes the one big tragedy of Captain America's history, especially
once the other close companion he lost makes his own miraculous return from the dead.
That also means it's something he can move past, which, of course, he does...right into
the waiting arms of Sharon Carter.
And that is a problem.
As much as we all might love Steve and Peggy together, there's a pretty good reason why
Sharon shows up in The Winter Soldier to add another side to this cross-time love triangle.
In the Captain America comics, Sharon is Cap's longest tenured love interest.
She even predates any of Steve's other love interests, including Peggy.
In fact, until she popped up on the big screen in 2011, Peggy was actually a pretty minor
character who mostly appeared in flashbacks.
Sharon, on the other hand, was the long-time on-again, off-again romance that always seemed
like the default setting for Captain America's love life.
After all, if you're going to have Steve Rogers continue his adventures in the present day
after spending 70 years trapped in an iceberg, he should probably have a present-day love
interest.
The First Avenger was framed as a flashback, so Sharon was held back from the Marvel Cinematic
Universe until the second film.
Since there was already a character in the comics who could provide a connection to Cap,
Peggy got the role of the bittersweet, tragic romance in the first movie.
Unfortunately for Sharon, it turned out to be a little too bitter for everyone who wanted
a happy ending, so Cap never really got over Peggy...which created a whole other problem.
This all brings us to the really weird thing about the Cap-Peggy-Sharon triangle.
Even if they're both age-appropriate due to some suspended animation hijinx, it's usually
frowned upon to date your ex-girlfriend's niece, especially if she's about 50 years
younger.
And then there's the problem that we get into with all the time travel that comes at the
end of Endgame.
It's all well and good that Cap's reward for saving the universe is that he gets to go
back and be reunited with his one true love, but Sharon is Peggy's niece.
Steve and Peggy get married, and if you look closely you can spot a wedding ring, then
Sharon is also Steve's niece.
Which means Captain America straight-up made out with his own niece like two days after
his wife's funeral.
Sure, Sharon wasn't his niece yet, and Peggy wasn't his wife before she died, which is
a pretty concise explanation of the headaches that result from time travel, but still.
You can use all the Ancient One's magic timeline graphs you want to explain why it's actually
okay for all of this to happen, but even the most die-hard fan of the Steve and Peggy romance
has to admit that it's weird that Captain America's dating pool never really extends
beyond his own family.
One of the really sweet things about Cap and Peggy's relationship is that the two characters
always carry pictures of each other, even when they're separated by the gulfs of time.
Cap has his picture of Peggy that he clipped out of the newspaper.
When we get a glimpse of her desk in the '70s during Endgame, we see that Peggy keeps a
framed photo of Steve, even 30 years after his presumed death in the Arctic.
What makes it even sweeter?
It's a photo of Steve before his transformation from the Super Soldier Serum, showing us that
she loves him for who he is on the inside, and not just because mad science turned him
into the Marvel Universe's hunkiest possible Chris.
At the same time, that's a little unusual on its own right, isn't it?
Steve had to have been Captain America for at least a few years, right?
The First Avenger opens with the Red Skull discovering the Tesseract in 1941, and it's
implied that the end of the movie happens close to, or even immediately before, V-E
Day on May 8th, 1945.
Even if you give him plenty of time to catch up on the news, volunteer, and go through
training, that's still two or three years where he's the hunk that we all know and love.
Judging by the increasing tightness of his shirts over the course of the MCU, it seems
clear that Steve himself is pretty comfortable with his ridiculously shredded new body.
"That is America's ass."
There isn't a big question of who Steve's "true self" is like you might see with Superman
and Clark Kent.
If that's the case, then maybe Peggy's photo isn't really for Steve at all.
Maybe it's just a tribute to how much she loves symbolism.
Even at the best of times, relatively speaking, Captain America and Peggy Carter's relationship
wasn't easy.
Of course, it had to be at least a little rocky.
That's where the drama comes in, and while it might just be nice to watch two people
have a perfectly content relationship while also destroying sci-fi pseudo-Nazis, even
romantic stories are driven by conflict.
Still, most traditional romances don't involve one party shooting at the other with a handgun
four times.
When she catches Cap in a superheroic makeout session with a fellow intelligence officer
played by Natalie Dormer, Peggy is incensed, even though she and Steve are definitely not
a couple yet.
Steve's not blameless here, either.
He immediately gets defensive and goes way too far in response, implying that she's getting
some action from Howard Stark.
It's a bad scene all over.
It all comes to a head once Stark himself shows up and, oblivious to this little tiff,
gives Cap a prototype of his famous shield, and Peggy unloads four rounds at him, which
is the kind of situation where it's okay to be defensive, especially if you're holding
a bulletproof shield.
That brings the fight to an end, but is it really a healthy foundation on which to build
a life together as romantic partners?
Is every argument that these two have in their relationship going to end up involving firearms
and vibranium?
"I could do this all day."
The question of how the alternate timelines shake out if Captain America goes back to
live a happy life with Peggy Carter is going to prompt a whole lot of headaches, especially
if you try to make it line up with what we see in Agent Carter.
Steve's plane goes down somewhere before May of 1945.
Agent Carter's two seasons take place in 1946 and 1947.
That gives us a couple of options as to what might happen when Steve travels back in time.
Let's say he goes back to shortly after he vanished and gets that dance, which means
that the events of Agent Carter don't happen as we saw them.
That could mean that Steve tags along as Peggy's super-soldier sidekick, which would actually
be pretty charming.
Or maybe they wind up doing something else, and there's no one around to stop Dottie Underwood
from murdering Howard Stark in the '40s.
That means Tony Stark is never born, which means that this particular timeline probably
ends with Thanos destroying the Earth because Hawkeye tried to fight him all by himself.
Want to get really weird with it?
Let's assume that after he departs for the 1940s, Steve settles in for a happy married
life and spends the next 70 years with Peggy before arriving back on that park bench as
the world's most handsome hundred year old.
He might be back where he would've been without being frozen in the ice, but he's still a
man out of time, just in the opposite direction.
He's been to the future.
And Peggy's a spy.
There is no possible way that Peggy Carter doesn't use Steve as a resource for information
on what's going to happen so that she can more effectively do her job for S.H.I.E.L.D.
Even if Steve never got around to getting the specifics, we know that he's at least
aware of a few pretty important things that happened between 1945 and 2011, because we
see him writing them down in his little notebook.
He knows that the moon landing happens in 1969, which is a pretty big deal!
He knows about the Berlin Wall!
He even knows that Apple Computers is a pretty good investment when it goes public in 1980,
and all of that is just what we know from seeing that single page in his notebook.
But sure, maybe Captain America decides that preserving as much of the timeline as possible
is worth not telling his wife things that would help her prevent countless tragedies.
He still knows that S.H.I.E.L.D.
itself has been infiltrated by Hydra, and that his best friend is alive in Russia, being
brainwashed into becoming a cyborg assassin who kills Peggy's pal, Howard Stark.
There's no way that Captain America and Agent Carter don't at least try to deal with those
things, meaning that they're running the risk of creating a very different timeline.
On the other hand, Peggy would probably get to try Thai food way earlier than she would've
otherwise, so that's nice.
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