Peggy did mention working at Bletchley Park and being a “codebreaker” in the Agent Carter episode The Iron Ceiling. Of course the only bit of pre-SSR canon Agent Carter gave us went against the teensy tiny bit of canon we already had from Marvel (which didn’t mention Bletchley). Additionally, personnel at Bletchley signed the Official Secrets Act, putting restrictions on what they could say about their work there, even after the end of the war. So Peggy being all “Hey, guys, that time I was a codebreaker at Bletchley during the war,” made me make this face:
But I suppose it’s canon now, and it’s a cool canon nonetheless. My concern is that it might preclude Peggy serving much time in France, like her comics counterpart. (To hell with Cartson vs. Peggysous vs. Cartinelli, let’s all debate whether or not MCU Peggy loaned her badassery to the French Resistance.)
haha, I had the exact same reaction to that line about Bletchley, because the actual Bletchley codebreakers didn’t even talk about it TO THEIR OWN SPOUSES until it was all declassified sometime in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I think. In other words, they spent most of their lives not admitting what they’d done during the war, even to the people closest to them. It was viewed as a sort of, if not sacred trust, then at least their patriotic duty not to talk about it. Certainly not something one would toss off in random conversation in 1946.
I suspect that line was thrown in there to play up her credentials on the assumption that the average viewer would have (vaguely) heard of Bletchley Park (sort of a “and then Historical Character was at Major Historical Event” kind of thing).
It’s something I’m sort of inclined to ignore, if possible, because of the blatant ahistoricality of it. However, there is a combination handwave I can think of that would work with both the character and with her apparent casualness in talking about it: she consulted at Bletchley Park on a rather limited basis as part of her wartime work for the SSR - either that, or worked briefly as a codebreaker at the very outset of the war before the SSR and/or British intelligence noticed her potential and recruited her straight out; and because everyone around her at the point where she says it in the show are also SSR agents, they know about the Bletchley project where most civilians wouldn’t.
…. hey, it’s a handwave, but that’s what we have to work with. And now that I think about it, I rather like the idea that she started out as a codebreaker in the very beginning and that’s how she came to the attention of the higher-ups.
We know she was in the U.S. and with the SSR by 1943, at least.
(Of course, there’s also the “history is completely different in the Marvel universe because superheroes” explanation, which is really the only way to reconcile actual WWII history with some of what’s in the first Captain America movie …)
(via yalumesse)