Thursday, February 19, 2015

Marvel's Agent Carter 1.07: "Snafu"

“You think you know me, but I’ve never been more than what each of you has created. To you I’m a stray kitten left on your doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress, the girl on a pedestal transformed into some daft whore. You’re behaving like children and what’s worse, what’s far worse is this is shoddy police work. You were inches away from the woman that you want when you loaded me into your car.”
- Peggy

Things are getting dire for our heroine. Before she’s tag-teamed by the Chief, Thompson and Sousa, we see the Russian doctor on the front lines in 1943 where his talents for making people get lost in their minds and not feel pain is put to work during a double amputation on a young soldier. I guess we know where his skills came from and why Leviathan wanted him. Back at the SSR, the guys are trying everything short of violence to get Peggy to talk. They say how confused and frustrated they are. Souse accuses Peggy of sleeping with Howard (yeah right, she’s smarter than that). The Chief wants to know about the sphere with Cap’s blood in it (he doesn’t know about the blood) and she tries to point them in the right direction (Dottie’s direction). Speaking of the Russian assassin, we see her purchasing a baby carriage. I can’t even begin to imagine what she’s going to do with it. And the confound matters back at headquarters, Jarvis shows up and announces he has a signed confession from Howard Stark.

Jarvis says Stark has confessed to everything and he’s on a plane due to land in a few hours. He will sign the signature page of the confession and report to SSR headquarters. The deal is that Jarvis and Peggy go free. The Chief isn’t too happy about that and keeps them in custody until Stark arrives. Of course, he’s not actually going to show up. It was all a rouse concocted by Jarvis in a panic to try and get them more time to close in on Dottie. Good one, Edwin. Really good plan there. But it does afford Peggy a few into the Chief’s office and she spots the doctor tapping away on the window sill in Morse code. There’s going to be an extraction in a short time and this prompts Peggy to come clean to the guys. They are skeptical at first (understandable really) when she explains that she did her own investigation and she feels guilty for the agent’s death. When they can’t understand why she wouldn’t go to them for help, she bluntly reminds them that she’s invisible unless she’s playing secretary or coffee maid. They don’t say anything exactly but it is obvious they realize they were being assholes. And Peggy also gives them one more thing to show she’s telling the truth; she reveals Cap’s blood. This is enough for the guys to believe her.

Sousa and Thompson take a couple guys across the street to check out the building and see if they can find who the doctor was communicating with while the Chief babysits the doctor. That goes about as well as can be expected. The doctor gets in the Chief’s head and convinces him to lock up Jarvis and Peggy and continue the rouse that Peggy is a traitor. He gets into the lab with the doctor and ends up finding what looks like a light-weight bullet proof vest of sorts. But what the doctor is really after is in a crate. It’s pretty old and hasn’t been used in a while apparently. Now it has me wondering if some of it might be Hydra related. It probably isn’t since this show is separate from Agents of SHIELD but they are connected enough that it could be an 0-8-4 or something.

Across the way at the other building the agents split up which really is never a good idea. I know they have like 4 agents and lots of floors to cover but you’re facing a highly trained and skilled assassin. As Thompson points out, a pint-sized assassin-in-training kicked their butts in Russia. So of course Sousa has to find Dottie and get into a fight. He sort of holds his own a little bit until she starts spider-jumping down the stairs and kills an agent. Seriously, Romanov never did stuff like that that I remember. Maybe the program changed between the 1940s and the 2000s.

Peggy and Jarvis eventually get free after a bit of physical comedy with a table used as a battering ram. But things are getting even more dangerous. The vest the Chief is wearing is a heat vest that likes to go boom when it overheats and thanks to it being a Stark invention it always overheats. There aren’t a lot of options to stop it. In fact there aren’t any that will let the Chief live. So he ends up jumping out a window just as the vest explodes. He wasn’t an overly bad guy and I feel bad that he died. At least he gave Peggy an order worthy of her skill before he died. He wants her specifically to take down Leviathan. Sousa also found some sketchy information in the room Dottie was using. There’ still some things that need to be figured out, like what exactly was taken from the lab. Peggy worries they nabbed Steve’s blood but she’s relieved to find it’s still there. But whatever was in the crate is gone and no one seems to know what it is. However, I think I know. Dottie takes the baby carriage to a movie theater and leaves it there and then all the theater goers start coughing and beating the crap out of each other. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened at the battle with all the dead Russians and why Stark was there in the aftermath of everything.

Next week’s finale is going to be a very exciting affair. I have to say I’m kind of glad the season was so short. It really keeps the storytelling tight and it does seem like we’ll be getting a definitive ending to this particular storyline in the event the show doesn’t come back. I won’t speculate on its chances because with ABC and Marvel you really don’t know what is going to happen.

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