Episode 7 - SNAFU
Instead, we’ll turn our attention to this week’s new episode, “Snafu.” That word could really apply to multiple things in Peggy Carter’s life, as she’s pretty quickly gone from having almost everything under control to nearly all aspects of her life going wrong at once. She’s been found out by the SSR, lost her home and discovered the existence of a deadly foe who used to be her next door neighbor. Yup that just happened.... Peggy is cornered and more vulnerable than ever as Leviathan makes their move against her. As the SSR zeroes in on Howard Stark, they may pay the ultimate price as they find their true enemy is closer than they realized.
Well, shoot. The ultimate price usually means … well, death. But we know Peggy doesn’t die, because she’s still alive in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. And Howard needs to live long enough to have a son, so he should be fine too. We trust the writers to still give us something tense. I know I’m looking forward to the ultimate Peggy vs. Dottie showdown (I’m going to keep calling her that even though I’m sure her real name is something a little more Russian), though that may not take place until the finale.
Flashback to Russia, 1943 with the Doc attempting to hypnotize a man who needs to get his leg amputated, basically showing us how his powers work. Meanwhile, in the present, Agent Carter is still in SSR custody with Sousa interrogating her. They are trying to pin the blame on her for everything, including Krzeminski’s death. Carter complains that the evidence is circumstantial, that they’re only seeing what they want to see, and there’s a bigger threat that needs their focus. For some reason, the Doc is on the other side of the glass with Chief Dooley (playing the long-con to hypnotize him) and not even caring that Agent Yauch is nowhere to be found–until Thompson bursts in to say Yauch has been hit by a bus. Getting nowhere on Agent Carter, Thompson, Dooley, and Sousa all play different angles. Thompson tries the personal card; Sousa attacks, feeling betrayed; Dooley tries backhanded flattery. But all Carter gives them is that Stark isn’t the man they want and for some reason, they don’t understand that. Dooley also wants to know about the Battle of Finow, but again, Carter has none of it and says the person they want is Dottie Underwood, who will have obviously gone underground by then.
It’s at this point that Jarvis shows up with a “signed confession of Howard Stark,” but they only get it if he can see Agent Carter. Unfortunately, Jarvis’s panicky plan (because he forged the confession and the signature, unable to get a hold of Stark) does not fly with Dooley. Until Howard Stark walks through the SSR doors, Jarvis and Carter remain under lock and key. Jarvis merely wanted to buy them time to come up with a better plan. With that time, Peggy notices Doc doing Morse code to someone across the street, and she writes down what he’s sending: In 90 minutes, Leviathan is coming.
This is when Agent Carter fesses up to the SSR. She tells them everything that’s happened in the first six episodes so that they will believe her when she tells them about the Doctor. And yet, none of them can understand how she got away with conducting her own investigation right under their noses. I’m going to mash together a handful of the lines that sum it up so well:
" I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me. Because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I am invisible… To you, I’m a stray kitten left on your doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore.”
She gives them Steve Rogers’ blood and breathes the line that broke my heart: “I suppose I just wanted a second chance at keeping him safe.” While Sousa believes her, Dooley is uncertain, but sends Sousa and Thompson across the street to investigate whether anyone is there still. Dooley heads off to babysit the Doc, albeit unsuccessfully. He’s under hypnosis in a matter of minutes, leading Doc straight to Stark’s stuff to find Item 17. Across the street, Thompson warns Sousa that if a woman comes after him, shoot to kill. If she’s like the little girl in Russia, it will not go well. And of course it’s Sousa who runs into Dottie. With a bit of a flair for acrobatics, she escapes, picking up the Doc across the street, and blends in with traffic.
Dooley, under hypnosis, locked Peggy and Jarvis in the interrogation room. For their brilliant escape, they use the table as a battering ram against the mirror, only to remember they’re still handcuffed to the table. Thompson walks in, asks where Dooley is, only to find him in his office. In his mind, he’s on a sentimental journey, but in reality, he has Stark technology wrapped around him, ready to blow. Jarvis explains it’s a prototype for a new system of armor to keep men warm during the winter months. However, locking the armor ignites a self-sustaining battery that heats and heats and heats until it explodes with the wearer still strapped in.
Dooley realizes he has to make the sacrificial play. He turns to Agent Carter and makes her promise to get the man, the people, who did this to him. He shoots a window, jumps out, and explodes ten stories above the boulevard. Even Sousa sees it across the street (where he found Dottie’s handwritten notes and the dead dentist), but he doesn’t know what happened until he returns to the SSR.
In the aftermath, Peggy, Jarvis, and company discover that Leviathan did not take Steve’s blood as they initially thought, but Item 17, and even Jarvis doesn’t know what it does. It’s a container of biochemical gas that turns everyone into angry, fighting monsters until they die. Battle of Finow, anyone?
Good Moments:
-Dottie going down ten flights of stairs in a matter of seconds.
Line Of The Week:
- All I have written for this is the phrase “Mustachioed Casanova” uttered by Peggy about Howard Stark. I think it fits. I think I need to fit this into my daily lexicon from now on.
I was laughing in the first five minutes of this episode with that flashback to Russia. Why? Because the man getting his leg sawed off was Private Ovechkin. I’m only led to believe that this is somehow Alexander Ovechkin from the Washington Capitals and he’s a time-traveling Russian spy who now plays hockey in the NHL.
Part of me thought Sousa was done for with all that pre-warning by Thompson. I had a feeling that someone was going to die, but I didn’t anticipate it being Dooley.
Speaking of Dooley, when he asks Peggy about the Battle of Finow and she replies, “I never saw a battle in Finow,” was that her saying she wasn’t there? Or that there wasn’t a battle like his journalist buddy said? Which way did you guys read it? I’m torn. She did work alongside Howard quite a bit, but her name didn’t pop up on the flight manifest when Stark’s did. I know I’ve gushed before about the Peggy/Jarvis duo, but it was at the top of its game this episode. He’s a bad liar, which makes it hilarious because Peggy can barely handle it. Their relationship, that back-and-forth annoyed banter, shows flashes of Hollywood screen couples from that era. It’s a shadow of something like Audrey Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and it works so well on this show. If anyone has seen Kingsman: The Secret Service, did anyone else see parallels with this episode’s final scene and that scene with the church? I had a strange sense of déjà vu. (Or as I whispered to the fiancee in the movie theater, “Why does Samuel L. Jackson’s character always have an underground warehouse full of evil inventions?”)
Episode 8 - Valediction
-Thompson, Sousa, and Carter head to the movie theater to investigate what happened. Peggy deduces they killed each other upon seeing a body with a large clump of women’s hair in its clenched fist. Sousa finds Item 17 inside, gets a spray in the face of the stuff, and immediately starts punching everything and everyone. When he’s calmed down and woken back up, he tells Agent Carter he remembers nothing after the gas hit, only that he wanted to kill everyone. He also apologizes for hitting her (but not Thompson). The SSR comes to find out that the Doc has ten canisters to terrorize the city, but what is he trying to do? Enter Howard Stark, swaggering in like he’s a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, to tell everyone that Doc is targeting him. Of course, Thompson and Sousa hear no word of it because they’re still fixated on Stark being guilty. The scene of them badgering him with angered questions and him just rolling his eyes made me chuckle. The gas is called Midnight Oil. The US Army wanted Stark to create something to keep soldiers awake for days at a time. However, his prototypes did nothing of the sort, instead causing psychosis, delirium, and in extreme cases, asphyxiation (hence the Leviathan agents with no voice boxes). The Army took Howard’s test samples and deployed it without his knowledge: hence, the Battle of Finow. Doc wants revenge on him for the bloodbath his invention created, so Howard offers to be bait. Agent Carter, meanwhile, tries to suit up Howard to be able to take a bullet while he gives a public press conference, but he wants his own tech to protect him. She leads him to their labs where he immediately freaks out with how they’re treating his stuff. The bickering between Howard and Peggy fits their relationship, but it’s only when Howard confesses that he cares what Peggy thinks of him does it really hit home. He knows everything is his fault and he needs to fix it. And then he steals Steve Rogers’ blood on the way out.
The press conference is in full swing with SSR agents everywhere and Howard making Thompson squirm with what Thompson has to say about Stark. Shots are fired from a hotel window, and when Peggy goes to investigate, they find it was rigged to go off on its own and create a diversion. In an attempt to get Howard to safety, Jarvis shoves him into a police car driven by Leviathan agents. In the aftermath, Agent Carter and Thompson brainstorm what Doc and Dottie would want to do. They realize it’s VE Day and Leviathan is most likely targeting Times Square, already full of over 100,000 people. Jarvis knows where they’re taking Howard: His other vault. The one with airplanes. Flash over to Stark at Dottie’s mercy, tied to a chair, while he tries to remember what her name was when they spent an evening together. There’s a flashback to that particular evening, and it’s patented Stark schmoozing on a pretty woman. And the fact that Howard can’t remember her name until five minutes to go in the episode cracked me up.
Doc (Ivchenko/Fenhoff/Faustus, whichever you prefer!) explains to Howard that he saw Midnight Oil in action and only survived because of the gas mask he wore. He watched his brother descend into madness and get decimated. Howard attempts to apologize–he sounds pretty sincere, too, but Doc will have none of it. He wants to make Howard suffer and takes his mind to the moment he most regrets. He is mentally sent to a wintery tundra (which may or may not be Michigan right now, but I digress) and believes that they have found Steve Rogers and the crashed Hydra plane. In the actual world, Agent Carter and company show up just as Howard flies off the runway. With Jarvis the only one of them who knows how to fly a plane, he’s in charge of shooting down his boss if Peggy can’t talk him down once she fights her way to the radio. Agent Carter finds Doc and Dottie, and the ensuing Black Widow/Peggy Carter fight ensues. It goes…rather poorly for Peggy; she gets her butt handed to her (and rightly so because Dottie is literally a tool designed for combat), until she kicks Dottie out the window and onto a plane several stories below.
As Agent Carter tries to talk Howard down, Thompson and Sousa try to hunt down Doc. Thompson gets knocked out by him, and Sousa lets Doc talk despite Thompson’s warnings thirty seconds before. Even as I screamed at my television for Sousa to shoot and not make the same mistake twice, he clocks Doc with his gun and pulls out the earplugs he had in. Touché, Sousa… Agent Carter tries to talk Howard down, but he still sees himself somewhere over Greenland (or wherever Cap crash-landed, I don’t know if they ever say). It’s only when she focuses on Cap himself and how good a person he was even before Project Rebirth that Howard snaps out of it. As Howard returns to his vault, Peggy realizes Dottie isn’t dead and has taken off.
The next day when Peggy arrives at the SSR for her paycheck (since she was technically fired), her cowards greet her with a standing ovation. And then Agent Thompson takes credit for all her work, which ticks off Sousa to no end, but Peggy calms him by saying, “I don’t need a congressional honor. I don’t need Agent Thompson’s approval or the President’s. I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter.” That’s what Hayley Atwell brings to Peggy Carter: a brusque confidence that won’t let her get bogged down by the world that still has to catch up to her.
Howard Stark has offered Peggy and Angie one of his penthouses until they can find a better place to stay. When Angie runs off to see a telephone in every room, Jarvis tells Agent Carter that should she ever need backup for another mission, he will help her in a heartbeat. And then he gives her Steve’s blood, unbeknownst to Howard, because she’s the only one who knows what to do with it.
As “The Way You Look Tonight” plays, we watch Peggy uncork the vial of Steve’s blood and pour it into the river, giving her one last goodbye.
Marvel seems committed to making a second season with that final scene before the credits. We see Doc being put in jail with his jaw wired shut. We get to meet his cellmate, and I’m not going to lie, I started cackling because for once, I guessed something right! In last week's episode...well recap as well.... I mused about the “Marvel Easter Egg” that James D’Arcy teased, and Zola was my first guess! There’s a grandiose speech by Zola, which he ends by saying they are in an American prison, and America is the land of opportunity. And that’s the end of Agent Carter, season one!
Good Moments:
-Sousa having earplugs in when Doc is talking to him. I didn’t expect it at all–I just assumed he was going to fall for Doc’s hypnosis.
Best One-Liner:
-“And now do you feel now?” Agent Carter asks after Sousa explains the feeling of the gas.
“I still want to kill Thompson, but no more than usual,” Sousa answers.
Final Thoughts:
-Did anyone else love the throwback to the Captain America Adventure Program? I know I did. Please keep that around for the potential second season.
As soon as Agent Carter said she would radio Howard to talk him down, I knew there would be parallels between that scene and the final scene ofCaptain America: The First Avenger. Both scenes are heartbreaking, and this one hurts in an entirely different way when we hear Howard say that Project Rebirth was the one thing he’s done that brought good into this world, and he screwed that up, too. Howard and Peggy work well bouncing off each other, and I’d love to see them continue their relationship, especially whenever Howard settles down and marries Mrs. Stark, whenever that is.
Part of me was kind of let down by the last half of this episode with Howard under Doc’s control. Why? It came across as very anticlimactic because we know Howard can’t die. He hasn’t had Tony yet, and we have proof that Tony had his father until he was at least nine years old, so it’s not like they could just write Tony into it as the product of some one-night stand with a random woman. Confession: I cried at the end of Agent Carter.
Does Dottie terrify anyone else? How she can go from over-the-top friendly, clueless woman to blank-faced killer in a split second gives me goosebumps. If I ever manage to travel back in time to 1946, I wouldn’t want to run into her down some dark alley.
I’d love to see how the SSR runs under Thompson now that he has more respect for Agent Carter. Or even jump forward to the 1950s when Carter’s more into a position of power or about to jump off and form SHIELD. Just as long as Jarvis is still involved in some regard.
The possibilities are endless and the fact that Hayley Atwell is constantly popping up in other Marvel endeavors as Agent Carter has me hopeful that perhaps we will get the same format next year: Agent Carter when Agents of SHIELD takes its winter break. I’m all for it, are you?