Here’s the Marvel TV cameo in Avengers: Endgame you probably missed

Avengers: Endgame certainly has cameos, but there’s one that stood out to Marvel TV show-watchers. It’s certainly a blink-and-you’ll miss it cameo.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.

Avengers: Endgame is the perfect movie to round out the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’ve lived and breathed these movies, you will love every second of it.

Of course, being a Marvel film, there are plenty of cameos and callbacks to some of the prior 21 films. But there was one cameo that was completely unexpected, a “blink and you’ll miss it” moment.

Avengers: Endgame accomplishes plenty in the three hours it has. One of the most entertaining parts? The Time Heist!

Our remaining Avengers split into three teams to hit different points in the past to gather the Infinity Stones. We get to revisit old movies from different vantage points, and it’s incredible and hilarious.

The cameos are nonstop — Frigga! Jane Foster! Loki! Agent Sitwell! Rumlow! Alexander Pierce! But the most surprising cameo comes when Tony and Steve travel back to 1970 to find the Tesseract.

We see Edwin Jarvis (James D’Arcy), Howard Stark’s butler from Agent Carter, open the car door for Howard Stark and cart him off on his way. It was a moment that made a fair few in my theater gasp happily, myself included, especially when he even had a line of dialogue, and made me long for Agent Carter again.

James D’Arcy and Dominic Cooper in Agent Carter (2015). Eric McCandless/ABC

It took 22 films for us to finally get our TV crossover cameo in a Marvel film. And it was perfect—and easy! It wasn’t anything that mattered to the plot. If you watched Agent Carter, you got a thrill for seeing a familiar face from the small screen. If you didn’t, you just see the Stark’s butler Jarvis, who is the inspiration for Tony’s J.A.R.V.I.S.

It makes this cameo just as disappointing as it is exciting.

Us Marvel TV-watchers always had high hopes for a crossover to the films. But we never needed anything flashy. We never needed to see the Defenders fighting alongside Cap and Black Widow (even if it would have been awesome). We didn’t need to see the Avengers confused as to why Coulson’s still alive or what Daisy’s doing quaking everything around them. We just wanted to see a familiar face, an inside joke only a few would understand.

This could have been done back in Ant-Man. When Darren Cross brings in the representatives from Hydra, one of them could have easily been Grant Ward from Agents of SHIELD. None of them talk; they all just stand in the background. It wouldn’t have changed anything for those who don’t watch SHIELD. He would have just been a fun easter egg for everyone who stuck with the show.

And that’s exactly what they did with Jarvis. Inconsequential and fun.

It’s also a treat for fans of Agent Carter to see that Howard’s trust in Jarvis lasts at least through the 1970s. After all, Jarvis was one of the best parts of the show, a loyal friend to the end for both Howard and Peggy.

In the end, maybe we should just be happy that Marvel finally managed to sneak a television character into one of their feature films. Even if it took a decade.