The Avengers are a tragic bunch. Thor’s father is cold and emotionally withholding and his stepbrother has tried repeatedly to kill him. Bruce Banner has an unstoppable green rage monster trapped within him that keeps him from his soul mate. Tony Stark has more complexes than lower Manhattan. None, however, are quite as lost as Steve Rogers: cast adrift in time by more than sixty years, he is the only one among them who can never, truly never go home again.
However, it seems that Steve Rogers’ past may not be entirely out of sight. Marvel Studios Co-President Louis D’Esposito announced at the Iron Man 3 premiere that he had recently finished directing a new Marvel One-Shot featuring a strong female character just days after Hayley Atwell, who played military officer Peggy Carter in Captain America: The First Avenger, commented in an interview that:
There’s been an online campaign for Peggy to be featured [in Captain America: The Winter Soldier]. People really liked her. So Marvel have made sure that as part of Comic-Con there will be a little kind of snapshot as to what Peggy’s actually really capable of, which was finished here and which was great fun. Hopefully, it will lead to other things
Given that Esposito claimed that his new One-Shot would be premiering at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, it seems fairly certain that the strong female character is none other than Peggy Carter, the love interest to whom Steve Rogers bid a teary goodbye before crashing the Red Skull’s plane into the Arctic to prevent its lethal payload from detonating. Though her appearance is as-yet unconfirmed for the sequel, Steve Rogers may well get to have that dance, albeit half a century late.
Emily VanCamp is set to play Agent 13, Peggy’s niece, in Winter Soldier, which could make for an intriguing love triangle, especially given that Peggy, who did not have the benefit of suspended animation, must be nearing her centenary. Might the One-Shot give as a tantalising glance at those intervening years?
More on this when we have it.