See, that’s the thing about Action Chicks. Even when they get headline status, they’re occupying a genre assumed to be By The Guys, For The Guys and that means that as a rule, Action Chicks — especially high-budget Action Chicks — prove their value by internalizing misogyny. I’m used to Action Chicks who make a point — overt or coded — of rejecting the feminine sphere and everything it represents, by being the only girl; or the girl who’s not like the other girls and will do anything to prove it, while still staying sexy enough for the male gaze. The femininity they cling to — the vanities, the romances — almost always end up liabilities.

So: I’m watching Agent Carter, and I assume I’m in for more of the same, which isn’t surprising, really. I figure, I’ll turn off the critic filter and enjoy the fights and the fashion, and maybe I’ll watch episode two, but probably not.

But the thing is, Agent Carter has my number, because the first thing that happens after that montage is that Peggy’s roommate walks in the door. And even though they don’t know each other very well, despite the inconvenience of an opposite-shift roommate and the secrets she’s keeping, Peggy clearly likes Colleen. There’s genuine affection and camaraderie — and again, when she greets the woman at the fake switchboard that serves as a front for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, and the waitress at the automat.

And all of a sudden, I’m paying attention. Because I know the Action Chick rules, and Action Chicks aren’t allowed to like other women. Other women can be rivals, or foils, symbols of what they’ve given up or failures for the Action Chick to transcend; but never friends.

Don’t get me wrong: She kicks ass. In the first episode, I watch her fell a towering thug with a teakettle and stove burner; and another with knock-out lipstick; and a third with a stapler. I watched her get classified information from a meeting over her clearance level by bringing coffee to her male colleagues. I watched her defuse a bomb with chemicals scavenged from her kitchen and vanity and mixed in a perfume atomizer. Do you know what all those things have in common?

They’re coded heavily as feminine. Even the stapler: remember Peggy spends most of her time in S.S.R. relegated to secretarial work.

Now, there is a subset of Action Chicks who use feminine accessories as weapons. They’re femmes fatale, grifters; morally grey and usually doomed as hell; and those feminine weapons are coded as sinister and deceitful. There is a femme fatale in Agent Carter, and she is subversive and wonderful and terrifying and very, very sad: not because she is relegated to the feminine, but because of how violently she has been stripped of her agency and identity.

But Peggy knows who she is. She’s not a femme fatale or a grifter. She’s a secret agent, and she’s more than a little bit prim, and she makes her own calls and messes up — sometimes catastrophically — on her own terms. Peggy Carter’s femininity isn’t a trick or a trap, nor is a mask she wears for the benefit of the men around her: when we finally see her stripped of those cultural expectations, fighting and drinking alongside comrades who know her value, she has shockingly little pretense to shake off.