Agent Carter, Episode 3: Time and Tide

Peggy gives us a moment to catch up on everything that’s happening- she loved and lost Steve, works for the SSR, Howard Stark asks her to find his stuff and clear his name, leaves her a butler (HEY JAMES D’ARCY HEY) and time is running out.

At Peggy’s New Apartment Building of Well Defended Virginhood, a guy watched ominously from the shadows while Peggy starts researching the symbol James Frain left her.  This is pre-Google, so it could take a while.  Guy starts climbing up the drain pipe, and gets to Peggy’s window to find her pointing her gun at him.  “Is this not apartment 3F?”  It’s his girlfriend’s apartment he’s looking for, but he missed by one.  He pathetically begs for Peggy to let him walk though her apartment, but she’s not having it and shuts her window in his face.  “Have a nice night!”  At least he’s polite.

The Old Boys Club goes to Ominous Skinny Dude’s seedy-ass hotel room, where the hallways is crawling with hookers, one of which knows Douche Number Two’s name.  The Old Boys search the room and find a stash of cash and passports hidden in a seat cushion (They complain it’s amateur hour, and I have to agree.)  They also find the typewriter-razor transmitting device thingie (we need a better name for this) which is STILL SET UP, SPEAKING OF AMATEUR HOUR WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING A SUPER SEEKRIT RADIO THAT CAN BE DISGUISED AS A COLLECTION OF BORING THINGS IF YOU LEAVE IT ARRANGED SO IT IS OBVIOUSLY NOT BORING THINGS?  I’m so disappointed, OSD.

At breakfast in the Apartment Building of Well Defended Virginhood, the woman who got visited by her boyfriend is summarily evicted for having a dude above the first floor.  I’m not sure about tenancy laws in 1946 New York, but that shit would not fly now, because you have to give notice at least.  The Dowager Guardian of Virginhood declares the building to be impenetrable, but Peggy disbelieves- nothing is impenetrable.

The Old Boys get an ID on James Frain, only the filling in his teeth is Russian and the real Leet Brannis died in 1944, so really they don’t have an ID.  OSD is harder to ID, but they’ve figured out that the typewriter thingie is a long range transmitter- like maybe Moscow long? And Chad Michael Murray is gonna check with a friend of his in Moscow about it.  Douche Number 2 is put out, but he doesn’t have any friends in Moscow.  Sousa announces that they got an id on the license plate they get on the refinery wreckage- it belong to Stark, there’s no other bits of car, and Stark is on the lam, so why would he blow up a refinery?  It is weird.  So the Old Boys look at each other meaningfully and douche off.

Jarvis is at home, stacking the dishes, when an accented voice yells out “Leave the dishes!  I can take care of it!” and Jarvis takes her up on that as he sees Peggy lurking out in his garden.  Peggy wants to see the vault and see where the trail leads away from.  Jarvis eyes her snappy suit and says she isn’t really dressed for it, and that there was a huge storm the night of the break in, and rain and candlelight makes him sleepy.  Just as Peggy Britishly snipes at him that he’s “QUITE the guard dog” CMM and Sousa knock on the front door.

Peggy has left her purse on the front hall table in full view of the door while she hides in the corner, and my roommate and I both say, in identical tones of hushed disappoint, “PEGGY YOUR PURSE.”  They ask if he’s misplaced a car, and Jarvis says that he reported it stolen DAYS ago.  They take him downtown to discuss this missing car more.

After commercials (I’m pissed about the Oscar nominations, but you go JK Simmons!  Sell that insurance and I’m on your team for Supporting Actor), Douche Number 2 complains that he has the night shift, but he has tickets to this show he wants to take his girl to, and no one will trade with him kri kri kri.  He yells at Peggy for being late, she parries with who is he taking to the show? Wife or girlfriend?”  The other boys go “oooooooo.”

Peggy, DoucheBoss, and Sousa watch CMM interrogate Jarvis.  Peggy says she only knows of him by the file, and Jarvis points out that the “death ray” has been found.  Peggy asks about the stolen car report, which DoucheBoss holds up and says, “It’s been ‘lost’ in the system.”  CMM and Jarvis spar a bit, with Jarvis protesting Stark’s innocence, until CMM drops that Jarvis has been charged with treason.  Jarvis’ stomach drops into his shoes, and CMM threatens to let everyone know about this information- immigration, friends, family, Jarvis’ wife…  Peggy looks sick.  DoucheBoss is practically hard over getting the inevitable confession.  Peggy leaves, saying she needs to get back to her station.

Douche Number 2 sees her going back to her desk and says “Okay, I’ll let you take my shift!”  Peggy doesn’t even acknowledge that she heard him, grabs a stack of files and stalks off.  Peggy goes back to DoucheBoss and asks for his signature on something, and picks up the “lost” police report while she’s at it.  DoucheBoss and CMM (I need to come up with a better name for him) (oh, JackOff! His name is now JackOff) meet in the hallway, with Peggy overhearing, that Jarvis is about to fold, and then everyone goes into the interrogation room with Jarvis, about to hammer him, and Peggy walks over saying “Oh, I found the lost police report!”  They have no choice but to let Jarvis go.  DouceBoss and JackOff yell at Peggy for fucking everything up, and from their point of view, yeah, she kind of did.

At the Apartment Building of Well Defended Virginhood, Peggy is getting ready for a little night work when Angie shows up ready to dish. “I got a bottle of Schnapps and half a rhubarb pie.  Let’s see which one makes us sick first!”  Peggy tries to gently shoo her away, and Angie takes it REALLY badly.  Just then, the Dowager Protector of Virgins brings in a new girl, and there’s so much being unsaid but we get 4 women on screen at the same time who do not talk about dudes at all!  Dotty is from Iowa, pursuing a ballet career.  She is also played by Bridget Kelly, from Legend of the Seeker, so she’s probably up to something.

Peggy heads back to Stately Stark Manor, and there’s a HUGE hole in the floor of the vault room.  Jarvis and Peggy harness up to do a little spelunking, and Peggy assure Jarvis that he can TOTALLY keep his privacy.  She doesn’t NEED to know the details of his treason.  He does not take the bait.  The hole leads to the storm sewers, which, since it was raining a shitton the night of the break-in, would have filled up the storm drains. Peggy points out that the thief could have just floated a skiff down to the sea.

JackOff leaves the office for the evening, leaving Douche Number 2 and Sousa for the night, and Sousa asks Douche Number 2 if he was going to ask Carter to cover the shift.  “I was.  I DID.” “I’m sure you were polite and respectful as always.”  Douche Number 2 says Sousa shouldn’t get sweet on Peggy- no woman would go from a red white and blue shield for an aluminum crutch.  This moment lands on Sousa face and Enver is brilliant in letting it sit there for a second.

Peggy makes it about five seconds before she tells Jarvis that she needs to know what’s up with this treason thing.  Jarvis tries to demur, but she won’t let him.  He finally tells her that before the war, he was with a general, and he met Anna in Budapest.  Once the war started, things got difficult, and Anna was Jewish,  so Jarvis forged the general’s name on some papers to get her out, and he was arrested almost immediately.  Stark got the charges dropped and Anna out of Hungary, cuz he isn’t a total asshole.  Anna knows that Stark got her out, and Jarvis out of trouble, but apparently doesn’t know exactly what Jarvis does for Stark now.

The end of story and the end of the sewer end at the same time, and there’s a boat with the heart and line symbol on it- the Heartbreaker.  Our heroes go back to get a car, and Peggy loads her gun (why does she not have the clip in normally?  That’s silly, Peggy).  Jarvis asks if she has another one, and she snarks that “someone is getting rather confident.”  I love these two.

On the boat, they find a stack of Stark Tech crates.  Peggy opens one (Jarvis: “Be careful.  Some of them can be skittish.”) and pulls out what was supposed to be a back massager that causes severe muscle contractions and breaks bones, so that’ll definitely never be seen again and certainly not in the next ten minutes.  “Awesome!” Peggy says.  “Let’s call it in.”  Jarvis points out that she can’t answer the questions the SSR will ask her, and does the role play with her perfectly.  “If you want to clear Mr. Stark’s name, you must work from the shadows.”

So Jarvis is sent out to make an anon tip to the SSR’s direct line in a hilariously bad American accent.  Sousa and Douche Number Two head out, just as a thug comes up behind Peggy and charges at her with the finesse of a stampeding hippo on land.

“I’m not afraid to kill a woman.”  “Would it help if I say I won’t make it easy?”  They brawl and Peggy holds her own, but this guy is huge, and he nearly has her when Jarvis beans him with a hanging light.  The thug goes after Jarvis and Peggy nails him with Chekhov’s Back Massager.  Peggy and Jarvis cheese it while the SSR is on the way.  Douche Number 2 and Sousa find the boat, find the stuff, and find unconscious thug, and Douche Number 2 is delighted!  “We’re getting promotions out of this!”  Sousa is less sure: “This got handed to us.”

All the Old Boys show up, and the Stark stuff is loaded into a truck, and Thug is loaded into a car.  JackOff is excited at the idea of interrogating the thug, and Douche Number 2 drives Thug to the office.  Thug asks if “That dame is working for you, you know, English broad, solid right hook”  Just as Douche Number 2 about to question him more, the car gets rear-ended at a train crossing, and Douche Number 2, being Douche Number 2, douches out to demand what the fuck.  He gets shot several times. I am a little surprised he only made it three episodes, but also pleased I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to come up with a nickname for him, and then Thug gets executed too.  (I was expecting that the car would get shoved into the train track to get run over, for a messier and less conventional execution, but hey.)

Peggy comes into work the next day to find that all the phone operators are crying and upset – I 100% believe that no one would have called her to let her know.  The office is incredibly sad, and there are flowers on Douche Number 2’s desk.  Sousa says he knew something was fishy about the anonymous tip, that they were targeted.  DoucheBoss wants everyone to remember that Douche Number 2 would be still there if it wasn’t for Howard Stark, and he doesn’t want to lose any more of the team.  And now he has to call the wife.  (They really haven’t called her yet?  assholes.)

Peggy goes to the Automat to talk to Angie.  “I thought I might tell you about my day, if that’s convenient.”  She tells Angie that one of her co-workers died- Angie says that she totally knows how Peggy feels- she had a cousin who got blindsided by a bus “granted he did just knock off a newsstand.”  Peggy says that Douche Number 2 was, well, a douche, but she’s still upset and can’t quite process, so is the Schnapps offer still open?  We end with women supporting each other, and a glorious end shot of Peggy through the Automat window.

RHG:

Before I get going, here’s an article on The Mary Sue about the lives of women after WWII and how Agent Carter is reflecting that.

I love how Peggy is doing her best without much of a support system. Jarvis is great, but she just doesn’t have the institutional support that the Old Boys Club has, so there’s improvisation and cobbling together plans, and maybe they’re not the best thought out, but she’s fearless.  And awesome.

I don’t want Angie to be evil.  I want someone to be on Peggy’s side and be her gateway into the normal world.  I love Angie, even as she does tend to turn conversations to talking about her self and working on navigating the adult world.  And she’s adorable.  And friendship!  GIVE ME FRIENDSHIP OR GIVE ME DEATH.

I ship Jarvis and Peggy like whoa, and I think the fact that we haven’t seen Anna on screen at all is significant- my current number one theory is that she’s disabled in some way, perhaps in a wheelchair.  Jarvis seems to be doing a lot- most- of the domestic chores, and the house he has at Stately Stark Manor is one level.  I have a crack theory that pretending to be Anna is how Howard Stark is hiding, but even for Stark that seems….  unlikely.  Still, there’s real affection in Jarvis’ voice, so either Anna is real and my shipping will be forever unrealized, OR Jarvis is a hell of an actor.

Look at these dorks.

I love this show.

Sarah:

“She was Jewish.”

“She still is, I’m happy to say.”

Awww.

The costuming is subtle and powerful in this show. For example, when she’s walking into the room after Douche2 dies, she’s wearing a red jacket. Everyone else wearing white or grey, and she’s wearing red. They blend into the background all pale and washed out, and she’s BAM, red. And the red could have all kinds of meanings, too.

I think many a thesis could be written on the use of color in the costuming and the backdrops of this show, from the signature colors of the different characters to the use of yellow and gold locations like the diner for “home” or “welcome.” Not to mention Peggy and red – there’s a lot to look at there. Which I love.

Also: there was time to get flowers for his desk but not call his wife? Or girlfriend? Nice.

Carrie:

I second the Awwwww regarding the line about Anna.  I love the cinematography on this show – the diner shot, Peggy walking through the office in red, the contrast of the bright yellows of the boarding house – gorgeous stuff.  The music is excellent as well – if ever anything conveys  loneliness and grief, it’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” playing as Peggy sits alone, with no one to fully trust.  The boarding house matron is evil but I love her a little for the Houdini joke (and I love Angie’s facial expression when she says, “Oh, Houdini – that’s never good).  Love the friendship between women.  Am torn between hoping Angie does not turn out to be evil (because I love seeing positive depictions of female friendship), and hoping she will (because I bet that actress can really rock an evil attitude).

One of the things I’ve noticed is that Outlander, Miss Fischer’s Mysteries, and Agent Carter are all at least in part about the aftermath of war, at least they are at this point in their respective seasons.  It gives the characters a weight of experience and a sense of stakes that an ingenue simply could not pull off, and it means that even the lightest plot line has a little hidden pathos.  At one point Angie says, “The war’s over, right?”  But for Peggy and her fellow agents, the war isn’t over – it’s just secret, which makes it worse.  There’s no Home Front – especially for Peggy, who is almost completely isolated in her office.

There is no new episode this week, so we’ll be back with Peggy in two weeks. Are you still watching? How are you liking it? What have you noticed?