Worth The Ticket

This week marked the end of Agent Carter, the limited series run that was tiding us over until Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. returns next week, and while this episode was a great hour of television, it definitely left me wanting more. If anyone from ABC happens to be reading this, please renew this series. This can’t be the end of it. Now, onto the actual recap.

The episode starts off with Peggy, Thompson, and Sousa checking out the aftermath of last week’s movie theatre bloodbath, and I couldn’t help but break into a wide grin watching Peggy amble up with the guys as if this was the norm. If it wasn’t official before, it is now. Peggy is finally considered an equal. After Sousa is accidentally doused with the rage inducing gas, the team is able to determine that it contains a dangerous hallucinogenic that makes those who ingest it immediately turn into killing machines. At this point, Howard Stark himself arrives on the scene, and as always, James D’Arcy’s comic timing is masterful, as Jarvis’ reaction to the SSR agents’ demand of, “Hands up!” is priceless.

Stark explains that the gas was intended to be a way for soldiers to stay awake for days at a time during the war, but when its dangerous side effects became known, the gas was stolen under the orders of one General McGinnis and dropped on the Russians before the Battle of Finow. Now we know why the Russians were all dead before the battle even started, as well as why Stark was there in the immediate aftermath. He deduces that Dr. Ivchenko, now known to be Johann Fennhoff (aka. Doctor Faustus in the comics), wants revenge for the destruction of his comrades and family that Stark’s invention inflicted, and so Stark offers himself up as live bait in the form of a public press conference on the steps of city hall to draw out Fennhoff and his associate, Dottie.

Naturally, Peggy thinks this plan is too risky, but Stark insists, claiming that his conscious needs him to fix the mess his invention created. Of course, Peggy’s worries are proven correct when the press conference is interrupted by gunfire and Stark is kidnapped and taken to his private airplane hanger where Fennhoff is waiting to complete his plan of vengeance. Using his powers of hypnosis, Fennhoff convinces Stark to pilot a plane over Manhattan and drop the gas over Times Square, where hundreds of thousands of people have gathered to celebrate V-E Day. Peggy and company arrive just in time to see Stark take off, and a plan is quickly hatched to stop him. Peggy will try and break Stark’s hypnosis over the radio, while Jarvis will act as the back up plan; going after Stark by plane under orders to shoot Stark down if Peggy doesn’t succeed.

I don’t think very many people were ever in doubt that Peggy would succeed in getting through to Stark, but that doesn’t make the scene any less poignant, as Peggy finds herself once again talking to a man she cares deeply about over the radio as he’s threatened with death. It’s a beautiful scene that perfectly illustrates the bond between these two characters, and how they are both still trying to get over the loss of Captain America. Steve Rogers may have been the love of Peggy’s life, but he was also the first time one of Stark’s inventions brought something good into the world, and their shared grief in this scene is palpable.

Of course, Peggy finally does get through to Stark, and upon his return, everything appears to get wrapped up nicely. Fennhoff is arrested, Peggy is finally able to say good bye to Steve by pouring the last of his blood into the Hudson, the other agents at the SSR give Peggy a well deserved round of applause for her work on the case, Angie (remember her?) and Peggy become roommates at one of Stark’s more luxurious residences, and Sousa finally takes a chance and asks Peggy out on a date. It’s everything you’d expect in the final episode of a season, however, like most season finales, it also lays the groundwork for future story lines. Jarvis hints to Peggy that he would like to continue his work with her, Thompson proves that old habits die hard when he takes most of the credit for solving the Stark case, and Dottie is revealed to have escaped. But all of this pales in comparison to the final scene, when it’s revealed that Fennhoff’s new cellmate is none other than Arnim Zola, the once and future henchman of Hydra. He tells Fennhoff that they are in America, the land of opportunity, and as such, they have much to offer each other. Cue end credits and me praying to the TV gods that Agent Carter will be back next year. Seriously, are you listening ABC?

All in all, Agent Carter made the most of its eight episodes, and produced many solid hours of television. However, beyond that, it really succeeded in adding to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, and in particular, it managed to create more depth to the characters and the relationships between them. I know that after tonight, every time I hear Tony Stark spit out the line, “That’s the guy my father wouldn’t shut up about?” in The Avengers, I’ll think about Howard Stark piloting a weapon of mass destruction towards Manhattan under the illusion that he is finally going to find his long lost friend; an illusion made possible because it exploited his greatest shame and vulnerability. It certainly puts an extra level of shading to the relationship between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, one that will likely pay off for years to come, so once again, ABC? Please keep this show going. That’s all I ask. Oh, and if you could renew Galavant, I’d greatly appreciate it, but I don’t want to get too greedy. I’m fine with just Agent Carter.

That’s it for these recaps, but new shows are debuting every week, so stay tuned for more TV Watch to come.

Line of the week: “Howard, you are the one person on this earth who believes in me. I can not lose you.” -Peggy

After last week’s cliffhanger ending, I couldn’t wait to see how everything would play out, and this week’s episode of Agent Carter did not disappoint. After a brief flashback to Russia and the origin of Dr. Ivchenko’s crazy hypnosis ring, we’re promptly back in the interrogation room, where unsurprisingly, Peggy is handling the situation quite well. She doesn’t reveal anything too damaging, she staunchly maintains her innocence, and when her competence is questioned, she simply calls out Dooley, Thompson, and Sousa individually for how their attitudes towards her have enabled all that she has accomplished. It’s a wonderful scene that shows just how far her three fellow agents have come as characters over the course of the series. Sousa, who previously bonded with Peggy over their shared experiences of discrimination, feels genuinely betrayed by her perceived treachery, while both Thompson and Dooley seem at least willing to hear Peggy’s side of the story.

It isn’t long before the interrogation is interrupted by Jarvis, who shows up at the SSR demanding to see Dooley and waving around a written confession from Howard Stark as his entry ticket. After a short and rather one-sided negotiating session with the Chief, it’s decided that upon arrival of Stark at the SSR with a signed copy of his confession, Peggy and Jarvis will go free, and not a moment earlier. Peggy isn’t exactly thrilled with this deal, but she becomes downright enraged when she finds out that the confession is a fake; one concocted by Jarvis in a panic when Peggy didn’t arrive at their rendezvous after last week’s events. Stark’s loyal aide is still convinced that they can prove his boss’ innocence, but Peggy is far less optimistic. That is, until she witnesses Ivchenko tapping out morse code on the windowsill of Dooley’s office to Dottie across the street. She quickly interprets the message, and realizes that not only is the good doctor working for Leviathan, but her former neighbour is just across the street plotting something big with him.

Peggy immediately marches up to Dooley and declares that she’s ready to talk, and talk she does. She tells Dooley, Thompson, and Sousa everything that has happened from the moment she first met Stark in that alley, and she does this in the hopes of gaining their trust so that they will believe her about Ivchenko. Sousa is the first to believe her, with Thompson not far behind, and before long, Dooley is sending a task force across the street to look for Dottie. Unfortunately, this action is witnessed by Ivchenko, who quickly springs into action once he realizes that he’s been compromised.

While Dottie is taking out the team across the street, Ivchenko uses his ring to hypnotize Dooley, and uses this power to have the Chief take him down to the SSR’s lab to retrieve an item of great importance. We’re led to believe that it’s Steve Rogers’ blood, but Ivchenko bypasses the vial in favour of another seemingly innocuous box and heads for the door. Throughout this entire sequence, it’s unclear as to whether or not Dooley really is under the doctor’s spell, or whether he’s just faking it in order to prove Ivchenko’s guilt. I will admit that when Dooley finally does let the doctor walk out of the SSR and into Dottie’s waiting car with the mysterious box in hand, I was more than a little disappointed that Dooley wasn’t stronger in overcoming Ivchenko’s mind games. I guess I had underestimated how much I had grown to like Dooley as a character, and it was sad to see him fail his team in such a big way.

Even more sad was the state his team later finds in him, when he is discovered in his office wearing one of Stark’s more volatile inventions: a jacket that is set to overheat and explode at any moment. While the team tries desperately to figure out a way to get Dooley out of it, the Chief knows that his time is up, and in a heroic last stand, he runs himself out of a window to save them all from being consumed in the explosion with him. It’s a shocking end for a character I never once thought to be expendable, and it succeeds in dramatically upping the stakes for next week’s season finale. It also provided the show with one of its best moments so far, when seconds before his leap out the window, Dooley asks Peggy to promise him that they will get the people responsible. He singles her out specifically, and in doing so, he places his trust and faith in Peggy to get the job done. It’s the validation that Peggy has craved throughout the entire series, but it came at too high of a cost for all of them.

The only good thing to come out of all of this is that Peggy’s name has now been fully cleared, and judging by the way her co-workers are seemingly following Dooley’s lead in their attitudes towards her, Peggy is free to get on with the task at hand. And this will be no easy task, as it’s revealed in the closing moments that the item Ivchenko stole from the SSR is a gas capable of turning anyone who comes in contact with it into a frenzied mob of violence and destruction. Not exactly a good thing to have on the loose in the streets of New York City. Next week’s episode promises to be action packed, so please check back to find out how this all wraps up.

Line of the week:

Dooley: (to Peggy) “And you, promise me you’ll get the son of a bitch who did this. Say it!”

Once again, Agent Carter proved that it’s one of the smartest shows on television when it delivered yet another terrific episode last week. It had character revelations, crazy plot developments, and some pretty great action sequences, so let’s get started.

First off, remember in the last recap when I said it wasn’t clear which side Dottie was on? Well, after “The Iron Ceiling”, I think we can safely say that whatever she is up to, it’s nothing good. This episode opens with a flashback to a Russian boarding school from hell, where little girls are handcuffed to their beds at night, force fed English lessons through Disney cartoons, and forced to fight each other until the winner snaps the loser’s neck. Later, it’s hinted that this is where Dottie comes from, but even after she steals Peggy’s apartment keys and breaks in to search the place, we still don’t know exactly what it is she’s after. She steals a photograph of one of Stark’s weapon boxes and stares into a mirror pretending to be Peggy, and while it’s all creepy and mysterious, it gives little in the way of explanations. Am I the only one who wants to know her entire backstory ASAP?

The reason Dottie is able to sneak into Peggy’s apartment undetected is because Peggy is off on a mission with the SSR. The message from the typewriter that came through last episode was unsurprisingly written in code, and when Peggy is the only one who can decipher it, she decides it’s time she stopped taking lunch orders and actually saw some action on the front lines of a mission. Naturally, Thompson and Dooley are reluctant, but after Peggy arranges for the Howling Commandos to join them on their mission, she is told to pack her bags and ship out to Belarus. The typewriter’s message outlined a plan to pay off Howard Stark at that location for providing weapons to the Russians, and Thompson and Dooley, convinced they’ve finally got their man, want to catch Stark in action.

Of course, things aren’t quite that simple, and once in Belarus, Peggy and her team not only discover that the message was sent as a trap to get them there, but they also uncover evidence that proves Stark’s innocence and the overall plan to set him up. Thompson also gets to witness Peggy in action with the Howling Commandos, and see just exactly what she’s capable of when she gets to work with colleagues who actually respect her. But even better than all of this is Neal McDonough’s guest starring role, who along with his always awesome bowler hat, is back as one of the Howling Commandos, and therefore a lot of good natured banter and ribbing ensues among the agents that is a welcome respite from the overall seriousness of the episode.

While Peggy and Thompson are off on their mission, Dooley is doing some digging of him own, and after a chat with a journalist friend of his, he comes to the conclusion that the conspiracy might be much bigger than he first realized. He also decides that Stark may not be the clear cut villain he has been made out to be, and Dooley extends an olive branch to the elusive billionaire through Jarvis. The Chief claims to just want the truth of the matter, but I’m not entirely convinced of his change of heart. From the looks of it, neither is Jarvis, who takes Dooley’s card somewhat reluctantly.

Back on the plane from Belarus, Peggy is trying to cheer up Thompson, who is clearly not happy about how he froze during the firefight that preceded their escape. She tries to reassure him that it happens to everyone, and that the important thing is that he recovered, but to her surprise, Thompson opens up about the true story behind his navel cross award. He reveals that when he fought in the Pacific, he fell asleep on guard duty one night, only to come to when six of the enemy soldiers entered his camp. Before his comrades could wake up, he had shot all six of them dead, only to realize too late that they were carrying flags of surrender. This secret has haunted him ever since, as he feels that the navel cross has forced him to pretend to be someone that he’s not, and in confiding in Peggy, they finally share a bond that brings them onto equal footing. By the time they’re back in New York, Thompson is including her in the guys’ night out of drinking, and it looks like Peggy will finally get the respect she deserves from her co-workers. The only glitch in this plan is Sousa, who has finally figured out that Peggy is the mysterious woman who has been working against the SSR to bring in Howard Stark. He hasn’t said anything yet, but something tells me he won’t stay silent for long. Check back tomorrow to see what the ramifications are, because I’m sure they’ll be big.

Line of the week:

Jarvis: “[You are a Federal Agent] finely trained and skilled in the art of fetching coffee. These men you call your colleagues, they don’t respect you. They don’t even see you. Do you honestly expect they’ll change their minds?”

Peggy: “I expect I’ll make them.”

Now that Galavant has wrapped up, it’s time to catch up on Marvel’s latest foray into television: Agent Carter. Last time we checked in, the SSR had declared war on Howard Stark over the loss of Krzeminsky, and Peggy was racked with guilt over her role in her colleague’s death. I know it’s been awhile since the last Agent Carter recap, so let’s get started. We still have another episode to go before tomorrow’s new installment.

The episode begins with Jarvis trying to engineer a smuggling job, and of course, he is doing a spectacularly bad job of it. Not only does he have an enormously obvious tell for when he is lying, but when the two goons on the other side of the deal unsurprisingly up their delivery fee, Jarvis responds in an ever flustered manner. Nerves of steel that one. Thankfully, Peggy is there to back him up, knocking out the goons’ security guards and saving Jarvis from yet another disastrous attempt to be disreputable. With the deal finally secure, they make their way to the cargo hold and discover that the smuggled goods are none other than Howard Stark himself.

Yes, turns out Dominic Cooper’s five minute cameo in the season premiere was more than just a way of further emphasizing the show’s cinematic roots, as his character is back in a big way this week when he returns to retrieve one of his inventions that has already been picked up by the SSR. The problem is, his usual hide outs are found to be compromised, and so Peggy hides him at her apartment, giving Howard plenty of time to reveal that the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree in terms of the Stark men’s appetites for women.

In the meantime, Sousa is still following up on Jarvis’ anonymous phone call, one which ultimately led to Krzeminsky’s death. Sousa’s search leads him to a homeless man with a great distaste for police, who may or may not have been a witness to who placed the call. While Sousa attempts to bond over their shared experiences of coming home from the war as unwanted GIs, it’s Thompson who finally succeeds in getting the man to talk. The homeless man reveals only that he saw a dark haired woman and a well dressed man enter the boat before the SSR’s arrival, which both Sousa and Thompson admit isn’t much to go on. Unfortunately, Thompson gets this information at the expense of humiliating Sousa, and it’s at this moment that Thompson would have tipped fully into the chauvinist caricature he was headed for if it weren’t for a brief scene later on with Peggy, during which he questions her loyalty to an institution that will never acknowledge her value. It was a very interesting and much needed shading to a character who up until now had been very one note.

Unknown to him, Peggy has been very much proving her value when she retrieves the so called Blitzkrieg Button for Howard, only to discover that instead of being a device that can wipe out the electrical systems of an entire city as he claimed, it contains a vial of blood. Steve Rogers’ blood, to be specific, and when an enraged Peggy confronts Howard, he claims his intentions are honourable and that he means to use the blood to create vaccines and cure diseases. Peggy is less than convinced, believing him to only be in it for the profit, and she angrily demands that he vacate her apartment by the time she returns. She then leaves, just in time as it turns out, because the ripped off beneficiary of the deal Peggy and Jarvis reneged on at the beginning of the episode has arrived to collect his debt. However, before he can enter Peggy’s apartment, her neighbour Dottie, who moved in last episode, takes him out with some rather impressive neck breaking skills. It’s hard to tell from this scene whose side she’s on, but something tells me that Dottie has a much bigger role to play in the episodes to come.

Finally, while all of this has been going on, Dooley travels to Germany to speak with an ex-Nazi before his execution. Since the Leviathan assassins were supposed to have died in the battle of Finow, he wants some answers as to how they were still alive and kicking in New York City until just recently, but what he gets is only more questions. He learns from the Nazi that there was no battle of Finow, and that the Russian forces were all murdered well before the Germans showed up. Furthermore, the first Allied plane to reach the site of the massacre contained none other than Howard Stark himself, thereby convincing the SSR Chief that there’s a true conspiracy afoot. Just as he’s coming to this conclusion, the mysterious typewriter from the first episodes begins to type in the background. I’m guessing that whatever message it contains will only spell more complications for Peggy, Jarvis, and Howard.

Agent Carter has quickly gained the reputation of being one of the best comic book series on television right now, and it’s easy to see why. This was a solid episode full of much needed and expertly executed character and plot development. For once, I’m happy that work and travel forced me to fall behind on these recaps, because now I can immediately dive into the next episode, instead of waiting a week to find out what happens. Next recap will be up shortly, and then check back tomorrow for a recap of the latest episode.

Line of the week: “Could I borrow the sports section?” – Stan Lee, proving that his Marvel cameos are extending into network television.