Episode 5 - The Iron Ceiling
Peggy Carter has been going through a bit of a rough patch. The love of her life died, she’s working with men who have more respect for a good bourbon than for her, and in a final blow, the two men she thought weren’t like the rest of them turned out to be deceiving her. Peggy Carter was due for a win and during last night’s “The Iron Ceiling” she finally got one.
Competency is the most powerful, and rarest superpower. But Agent Carter has it spades. She’ll kick ass and take names, she’ll repurpose sexism to suit her needs, and she’ll translate Evil Typewriter™ code in no time flat, because she’s surrounded by idiots who already forgot the enemy is Russia. And what does she get for her trouble? Agent Thompson trying to hamstring her. Unfortunately for him Peggy plays her trump card, the 107th division. It buys her a ticket on the mission because Dooley is an ass, not an idiot. His mansplaining explanation of the Catch-22 of sending a woman to do "a man's job" will sound eerily familiar to any woman who has ever lived. But once Dugan, Sam, and the rest of the Howling Commandos got on the scene, I spent the remainder of the episode wishing Peggy would ditch the SSR in favor of working with a group of people who respect and trust her. The difference is night and day. Whereas Agent Carter’s co-workers fight her at every turn, the Commandos and Peggy are a well-oiled machine. She knows how they think, and they trust her to take point on entry to the facility. Dugan knows she’s more than capable of saving herself and Agent Thompson in the final firefight.
After four episodes of oppressive misogyny bubbling under (and over) the surface, it was a breath of fresh air AND slap in the face at exactly how poorly the SSR is utilizing an agent who has years of field experience. With all my focus being on how a good a character study “Agent Carter” is, there hasn’t been much discussion about the actual mystery tying this season together. With only three episodes left, the murky waters about Howard Stark and his missing inventions is getting more opaque, not less. What started as a 1946 “Italian Job” has spiraled into a conspiracy involving a WWII Russian massacre no one will take credit for, with Mr. Stark smack in the middle, throwing punches. Oh, and the Red Room Academy. For those of you not in the know, Dottie and Black Widow are graduates of the same elite boarding school. Well, “school” might be a loose term for taking orphaned Russian girls and molding them into obedient killing machines…apparently via bootleg disney movies and super serious recess games.
During Peggy & Co. field trip to Russia, they encounter one of the girls who is very, very good for her age. The little blonde uses advanced emotional manipulation to stab her way to freedom, and makes me question exactly how old Natasha Romanoff might be. After all, little blondes can grow up to be little brunettes who dye their hair red. Maybe Black Widow and Captain America have more in common than he realizes…wow!
Odds & Ends
• I will always love that Peggy keeps a picture of pre-Captain America Steve. She loved the man, not the superhero.
• Can’t decide if Dottie sleeps in handcuffs as a BDSM Security
blanket, or if the girls are a danger in their sleep.
• On the one hand, I appreciate any show that fleshes out the inner lives of “villains.” On the other hand, stop humanizing Agent Thompson! Just let me hate him.
• Jarvis tried to stop using his tell when he lied to Dooley…he can be taught!
• In the kerfluffle at the Academy, we don’t stop to question where the other girls are. Why is the facility abandoned
save the one child?
• I kind of hope Dugan’s nickname of Miss Union Jack sticks, if only because he’s a huge dork for thinking of it.
Episode 6 - A Sin To Err
With just two episodes out from the finale, it appears Agent Carter is looking to sprint to the finish, dropping another action-heavy episode that goes hard on plot-turns and revelations while paying off earlier setups.
In the previous installment, Peggy Carter had finally won the respect (or some of it) of her SSR colleagues for the ass-kicking she delivered to Soviet agents during a raid on Leviathan's "Black Widow" training camp. As "A Sin To Err" opens, we find that said respect has endured enough that Chief Dooley (Shea Wigham) is willing to let her chase down her new pet theory: That the killer moppets trained at the BW facility years ago may have grown up into the exact sort of seductress spies that could've manipulated their way into Howard Stark's good graces - and his vault. But by the end, all that respect has come crashing down as the SSR finally susses out her double-agent dealings. Oh, and that Russian psychiatrist liberated from the camp? He's a bad guy, and he wanted to get caught - turns out he's with Leviathan... and a master-hypnotist looking to ply his trade for access to that cache of reclaimed Stark weapons. More to say about him in a bit.
After some digressions into more straightforward spy genre skullduggery, this was a welcome return to (and deep-dive into) the series' main thematic focus on the "invisible world" of American women in the post-war/pre-feminist era. The early episodes focused on how Peggy was able to use the otherwise frustrating aspects of her world (male colleagues who barely acknowledged her, enemies who misjudged her, institutions like The Griffith Hotel that actively rendered women invisible in order to police their sexuality) to her advantage in spycraft; and now we get to see Dottie (or whatever Black Widow Mark-I's real name is) put her evil-doppleganger SPIN on the same routine, setting up a sniper's nest by overtaking the office of a sleazeball dentist who'd sent his staff home so that he can sexually-assault female job applicants. Even still, things wind up in a pretty dark and ironic place: "saved" from being killed by Dottie when the SSR finally manages to arrest her (I do wish we got to see more of the Keystone Cops antics of these hard-headed dopes charging around trying to solve things) thus placing her in the second worst possible scenario she could find herself: Stuck with colleagues who not only don't trust her, but are no longer going to let their guards down for any "Just a girl" trickery. Meanwhile, Dottie and the Evil Doctor are at large with a map to Stark's crates of superweaponry.
Naturally, this has to come to some level of a happy ending, we already know that Peggy Carter survives into the present and will in fact be helping to found S.H.I.E.L.D a few years from when this is all taking place. But Agent Carter has wrung a lot of tension from its scenario, and I can't wait to see how it wraps up.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Kicking myself for not even guessing at it earlier, but the Leviathan psychiatrist/hypnotist is pretty obviously either a pseudonym or a student of perennial Captain America nemesis Johann Fennhoff, aka "Doctor Faustus," whose stock in trade was indeed hypnotizing victims into committing crimes or giving up information before nudging them into suicide.
Searching for Black Widow handcuff scars was sort of a thin line on which to hang the montage of looking up Stark's recent ex-girlfriends, but it's a good scene all the same. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has minded both the elder and junior Stark's womanizing for comedy and cool-indicators for almost eight solid years since the original Iron Man, so it feels long overdue to finally point out how sleazy and unkind it looks from the other side.
Peggy getting set to be interrogated by both of her would-be suitors - Thompson (the sexist jerk who at least respected her enough to be honest about it) and Sousa (the nice guy who's maybe not as noble as he thinks he is) - is a little contrived, but it should be interesting as (presumably) a breather before the finale.
Still not sure how this is going to wrap up, but I'm still holding to my pet theory that Sousa is en-route to going bad, possibly relating to that precious vial of Captain America's blood.