Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Marvel's Agent Carter 1.06: "A Sin to Err"

“I knew she was hiding something but not this.”
- Sousa

We are closing in on the back end of our adventures with Peggy Carter and things are starting to heat up. Fresh off their mission to Russia, Peggy seizes on the idea that a female undercover operative charmed Howard and got into his vault. She’s especially keen on this idea as our rescued psychiatrist explains the birth of the Leviathan program in 1944. With a begrudging blessing from the Chief, Peggy heads off to figure out if her theory holds any merit. So of course she heads to the diner for a meeting with Jarvis. He arrives just after Peggy’s tried to give Angie a bit of a pep talk about not giving up on her acting dream. We’ll see if she follows Peggy’s advice. Peggy is still annoyed with Jarvis for using her the way he and Howard did but they have a common goal and so she wants to look at every woman Howard entertained in the prior six months. Jarvis warns it will be a long list. Apparently Howard gifts each woman with the same bracelet after the break up (tacky) and he uses Jarvis to deliver both the parting gift and the news. Poor man. He is just so abused by his boss. Peggy wants to track the women down and uses their disdain for Jarvis to see their wrists. She properly surmises that the Russian assassin will have scars from the handcuffs on her wrists.

Elsewhere, Dottie gets into the building opposite the SSR and we learn that our kindly psychiatrist is in fact working for (and may be the head of) Leviathan. Using Morse code and some other method of transmitting messages, he gives the order to kill Peggy. And then, he starts giving the Chief a therapy session on why his wife left him and how to fix it. I think he was using some kind of mind control thing to throw him off the scent but they get interrupted because having a Russian assassin on your tail isn’t enough. Sousa goes to jail and gets a positive ID on Peggy from the guy she beat up and handcuffed to a chair in the opening two episodes. Man, she is getting it from all sides! And Sousa insists on telling the Chief right then and there.

Peggy and Jarvis investigate the next woman on their list who has a sort of Russian sounding name. It’s the right person but Peggy comes up empty on the ID for the woman and Jarvis couldn’t find any information either. Of course it’s Dottie. That was obvious from the minute the name they were looking for was vaguely Russian. It might be her real name…or not. Unfortunately, their meeting at the diner goes awry because SSR agents from DC have showed up to try and contain her. She takes them out quite easily but gets caught by Thompson in the alley. He at least respects her skills after Russia but he still can’t let her go. He tells her to go into the office and talk to him but she can’t. She kicks his butt, too and then Sousa shows up, gun aimed at her chest. Of course he won’t shoot her but he’s crestfallen when she walks away because as he puts it if she walks away, he knows it is true that she’s been working with Stark. She leaves anyway to make a stop at her room to get Cap’s blood before rejoining Jarvis.

At the SSR offices, the Chief tasks all the remaining agents to get to every port, train station and airport to make sure Peggy doesn’t flee. And he leaves an agent in charge of the psychiatrist which is so going to turn out to be a bad thing for the agent. They get to talking and the psychiatrist points out that the agent is eager to please and often feels ignored in his professional life as with his personal one because he is a middle child. He offers to help the agent with his confidence level by telling him to focus on becoming the best agent possible. I’m pretty sure that means he’s going to turn the guy into a sleeper agent of some sort. He’s got this ring he keeps turning that makes a humming noise. He ends up getting the agent to draw him a map of the layout and he learns that the Chief is the only one who can now get into the lab where Stark’s weapons are. He’s probably looking for Cap’s blood. And when he’s done with the agent, he orders him to go out, have a drink and then get hit by a truck. So not exactly a sleeper agent but still a brainwashed one.

Out in the field, Thompson and Sousa head off to Peggy’s apartment building because Sousa overheard Peggy say she was stopping there before rendezvousing with Jarvis. He doesn’t know about the blood sample she’s there to collect. We see her pull the sphere out of the wall but she doesn’t have time to cover up the hole in her wall because Sousa, Thompson and some other agents are barging into the building and up to her floor. The agents bust in and start searching around for anything while Peggy hides outside on her window ledge three stories above the ground. I’m not sure how she’s going to get down without severely injuring herself. She ends up inching along the ledge to Angie’s room and after Angie gives a very convincing performance for the SSR guys and the land lady, she gets Peggy inside and even gets her brother to send a car to get Peggy out of town once she reaches the meeting spot with Jarvis. Too bad it doesn’t look like Peggy’s going to get there. She encounters Dottie who first gives her a hug and then kisses her to knock her out (paralyzing lip balm anyone? Is Captain Jack afoot somewhere and I missed him?). But before Peggy passes out she realizes that Dottie is the assassin she’s been looking for. She doesn’t get to do anything about it because Thompson and Sousa show up and slap cuffs on her before dragging her back to headquarters. Thompson cuffs her to the chair in the interrogation room and Sousa settles in for some tough questioning.

I am intrigued to see how the final two installments play out and whether we will get a complete storyline by the end of episode 8 or if we will be left with a big cliffhanger that may never get paid off. The ratings are horrendous but they aren’t amazing either. It’s a toss-up whether Peggy and the gang come back for another round.

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