Agent Carter, Episode 7: Snafu

Recap: HOWARD STARK WHY WOULD YOU INVENT THAT

Previously: Peggy was arrested before Dottie could kill her.

Russia, 1943:  The Soviet Shrink is asked to come assist in surgery.  He is perplexed, as he is a shrink, not a surgeon, but they are asking him to use his hypnosis technique during a leg amputation; they’ve used up all of their anesthetic.  He agrees to give it a shot, and asks the kid to remember a day before the war (while playing with his ring), and the kid talks about a chess game he played with his mother before he left.  The kid is so deep into his memory, he doesn’t notice when they begin the amputation.

Back at the SSR, Sousa is interrogating Peggy (While DoucheBoss and Soviet Shrink are watching behind the mirror), and she is basically accused of killing all the dead bodies that have piled up, including Douche Number 2.  She’s insulted at that, “I mourned him with you!” “Yeah, I saw that performance,” Sousa replies.  Sousa wants to know about the orb, but she won’t say anything about it.  He’s wasting time, “There’s a trained killer out there and you need to do a thing about it.”

“She’s incredible,” Soviet Shrink says, “You present her with this wall of evidence and she scales it!  This woman is an excellent liar.”  JackOff comes in to tell DoucheBoss that Beta Agent has been killed, and JackOff is a little perplexed with Soviet Shrink being there at all. DoucheBoss firmly says that Soviet Shrink is there for a reason, and does JackOff have a problem with that? JackOff clearly does, but bites off a “no, sir.”  DoucheBoss then instructs them to turn up the heat on Peggy.

We get a marvelous scene where DoucheBoss, JackOff, and Sousa interrogate Peggy and there are quick cuts interweaving the three interrogations. JackOff clearly thinks something is off as this does not jive with the Peggy he saw in Russia. DoucheBoss wants to figure out what’s going on (as it fits within his preconceived framework).  Sousa is just angry.  They all accuse her of being snowed by Howard Stark. More specifically, his penis. JackOff tells her to make a deal; they want Stark. And they all want to know what’s with the orb.

DoucheBoss starts in with the Battle of Finnow, which Peggy’s like, “Fine, but I can’t tell you anything about it.”

“That worked out good for you, since everyone else involved is dead.”

And then Peggy starts laying down some truths of her own. “You think you know me.  But I’ve never been more than what each of you has created. To you, I’m the stray kitten left on your doorstep. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the pedestal transformed into some daft whore.”

Then she accuses them of engaging bad in police work on top of it, and they NEED to be looking for Dottie Underwood, who’s totally someone else by now.

Sure enough, Dottie is in a smashing pantsuit with an adorable hat, browsing in a baby supply store for a baby carriage. The sales woman also includes a pink blanket and Dottie smirks out of the store.  (Seriously her outfit is AMAZING.)

JackOff says the deal is off the table, which Peggy wasn’t going to take anyway, and then tells her that very soon, DoucheBoss is going to tell him to rough her up. “You’ve watched me on the other side of that glass. You know what I’m capable of.”

Peggy levels a stare at him. “And you know what I’m capable of.” The girl is a brawler and won’t hesitate to go to hair pulling and biting.

Jarvis then strides into the phone company front, where all of the girls there are very perplexed. Jarvis asks to speak to DoucheBoss. Rose, the one that Peggy chats with, is like “this is a phone company, bro.” Jarvis lays it out that he is Edmund Jarvis, he’s here to see DoucheBoss of the SSR, and has, in his briefcase, the signed confession of Howard Stark.

(that shrieking goat Sprint commercial needs to die in a FIRE.)

Jarvis hands over the confession, and tells them that Howard is in the air over Greenland, and should be landing at 9 pm. Howard’s attorneys have the signature page, and the SSR will get it as soon as Jarvis and Peggy are free to go. Peggy’s like wtf is going on. DoucheBoss says that he does find this arrangement tempting, but isn’t quite sure that Peggy and Jarvis are worth the trade. However, he will let Jarvis and Peggy go once Howard comes in. Peggy is free from prosecution, but is summarily fired.

Jarvis apologizes for this, but he panicked when Peggy didn’t meet him after she went to collect Steve’s blood. She’s like “Whatever, you panicked, you called for help, I can’t believe Howard is doing this,” and he gets a super Britishly guilty look on his face.  “About that confession…”  Jarvis wrote the confession. “OH FLIPPING HELL.”

“A PANIC WAS INVOLVED.”  Peggy lays it out: when Howard fails to land, they will both disappear until their trials, and then says, “Have you ever been hanged, Mr. Jarvis?  It is MOST UNPLEASANT.”

DB is on the phone to his wife, simultaneously groveling and I think proposing some sort of reconciliation?  Soviet Shrink is in the window again. Listening. Being creepy. The music is super sad.

Jarvis and Peggy ponder their existence, and Jarvis proposes trying to get the drop on them. “One hour in custody and suddenly you’re Jimmy Cagney.” Soviet Shrink is again tapping in the window to Dottie, and Peggy notices, and starts writing down the Morse code. Jarvis translates over her shoulder, “Prepare for evacuation, 90 minutes.”

“You know Morse code?”

“Your surprise wounds me!” (I do love these two, but Peggy + Dum Dum 5ever)

“What happens in 90 minutes?”

“Leviathan is coming.”

Peggy bursts out of the room, and demands to make a confession. “I have the one I want!” It’s a fake! Howard’s not coming. She sits down with the boys, including Jarvis, and lays out everything, including the stress it put her under and the guilt she feels about Douche Number 2’s death.

“Why are you telling us this NOW?”

“Because I need your trust if you’re going to believe me about Soviet Shrink.”

The boys are like fuck that.  She tells them that she saw him sending code, but DoucheBoss claims he’s a good man. “He’s been here for 48 hours.  We don’t know him.”

“Yeah, but we know you,” snipes Sousa, who’s still super pissy. “Why didn’t you come to us about this whole thing.”

Peggy lays down another truth bomb. “I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me, and I got away with it because no one looks at me. Because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I’m invisible.” DoucheBoss lives up to his fucking name by not even recognizing that she’s RIGHT and snipes that he doesn’t have anything to go on but her word. “There is one more thing.”

She opens the orb and tells them what it is. She tells them that the reason she stole it is because Howard lied to her about it, and she didn’t give it to Howard because she didn’t trust “our greatest capitalist” with such a prize. She also didn’t bring it to the SSR because she didn’t trust them either. “I guess I just wanted a second chance at keeping him safe.” She gives a broken half smile that breaks my cold dead heart.

“I believe her,” says Sousa in a side-bar conference. Between her confession and giving up Steve’s blood, she’s got nothing to bargain with anymore. JackOff accuses Sousa of being soft on her, and Sousa’s like, I’m the one that took her down, dipshit. DoucheBoss says he’ll follow Sousa’s gut and sends some boys (inc Sousa and JackOff) across the street to check out the building where Soviet Shrink could have had an accomplice. DoucheBoss will keep an eye on Soviet Shrink. (Sigh)

DoucheBoss asks Shrink to close the window, it’s a bit chilly. Shrink sees a pack of SSR guys going NOT AT ALL SUBTLY across the street. Shrink starts in on DoucheBoss’s family again, “I don’t want to talk about them right now.”

“Please, focus!”

DoucheBoss falls into the trap and talks about how the entire family gets together and cooks dinner. Wife, two kids, a chicken. “I want you to enjoy this moment, because after this, we have something very important to take care of.”

The boys spread out the search the building. JackOff tells Sousa that if he sees Dottie, “Do yourself a favor and start shooting.” Sousa feels like JackOff is being overprotective, but JackOff saw the kid in Russia, and “he’d hate to meet one that’s all grown up.” Sousa crutches out of the elevator, gun drawn.

DoucheBoss takes Peggy and Jarvis down to an interrogation room, and draws his gun on them, and then locks them both in, snapping the key off in the lock.

Dottie is about to leave the dentist’s office, but sees Sousa in the hallway.

DB and Shrink head down to the lab, and shuts the lab down. Even the lab guys are like “you’re acting weird but um, okay…” and once they’ve left, Shrink has DB look for Item 17. They look through all the items, and Shrink finds what looks like a bulletproof vest, and DB finds the crate that’s got Item 17. “Yes, this is what I want.”

Dottie leaves the dentists office with her briefcase, and see’s Sousa’s shadow in an alcove (shoddy police work indeed.  ALWAYS CHECK YOUR AMBUSH SPOTS PEOPLE). He jumps out behind her, and she carefully puts her case down, and they fight. He does his best, but she’s, well, she’s a black widow, baby. She heads down the stairs, and then parkours down the middle of the stairs. “She’s…. she’s coming down the stairs, and she’s coming fast!” She lands on the ground floor, and finds the hapless unnamed SSR redshirt down there and smirks at him. RIP, hapless redshirt.

At the elevator at the SSR, Shrink asks DoucheBoss for his package (the item from the crate). “I feel like I should keep this,” DoucheBoss mutters.

“Just focus.” Shrink trades the flak vest for the case, and tells DoucheBoss that he knows what to do. After all, his family is waiting. “You want what you deserve. Just focus.”

JackOff finds his redshirt, and Shrink walks out the door to find Dottie in a car. The item has been in storage, so they need to test it before the next phase. “But they know about us!”

“They’ll soon be far too busy to concentrate on us.”

In the interrogation room, Peggy and Jarvis have been handcuffed to a table. Jarvis is hollering for help, and Peggy’s like or…. we could smash the two way mirror. One, two, WAIT! “What if there are people who are behind that mirror watching us?”

“Then they’ll get hurt; there will be a spray of glass.”

“Ah.”  One, two, WAIT!

“What if these hypothetical people behind the glass have guns?”

“Then we’ll be the ones getting hurt. There will be  spray of bullets.”

“I see.”  They finally smash the mirror (which is not tempered glass, btw) and “No people!  Everybody wins!” Jarvis is adorable.

“I’ve just thought of something” Peggy says. “We’re still attached to a table?”

“We are still attached to a table.”

JackOff comes into the room and demands to know what the fuck is happening.  “Where is DoucheBoss?”

DoucheBoss comes home to find his son painting a birdhouse on the kitchen table, and his wife is a bit perplexed to see him home so early. He admits that he screwed up, and let a guy walk out of the building that shouldn’t have, and he feels like he should feel a thing, but just wanted to come home. The kid starts hammering nails, and DoucheBoss wakes up in his office, wearing the flak jacket (which is now lit up orange), and everyone is hammering on his door. Jarvis is horrified when he sees what DoucheBoss is wearing.

“It’s the prototype of a new system of armor.” It was designed to serve as a heat source, but the energy source was experimental and “deeply flawed.” Like explosively flawed.

Sousa wakes up and goes into the fly-filled dentist office, where he finds the eyeless dentist, and also he has Dottie’s briefcase. He finds her rifle, and her notes were she transcribed her messages from Shrink, including the one that says, “Kill Peggy Carter.”

DoucheBoss is burning up, and tells them that the Shrink got into his head, and you can’t let him talk or everything gets muddled. The scientists pose ideas on what to do, but messing with circuits would speed up the reaction, and cutting through it would mess with the circuits, and packing him with ice wouldn’t work because of reasons. Peggy speaks for us all when she says, “DAMN YOU HOWARD.”

No one knows what to do, but DoucheBoss grabs JackOff’s gun, and delivers his final instructions: tell his family he is sorry he missed dinner. And asks Peggy to promise that she’ll get the son of a bitch that did this. She promises. “Atta girl.” He turns, runs through the office, shoots out the window, and dives through it. The vest explodes just as gravity takes over.

At the SSR, people are getting bandaged, and Sousa comes in, having seen the explosion across the street. Peggy has a good wallow in guilt, and Jarvis is like nope, this is Howard’s fault. Peggy remembers that Leet Brannis was told to steal something, and thinks it was Steve’s blood. They head for the lab.

At a movie theater, Dottie comes in with the baby carriage, and some dude is pissed at the idea of bringing a baby to a movie (Note: he’s not wrong. He’s probably the jerk who would be checking his phone during a movie, and then I would yell at him).  Another woman tells Dottie not to worry about it; babies are adorable! (She’s not wrong, I have a nephew who, by the time you see this, will be two weeks old and he’s the cutest baby boy that is on the planet right now.)  (but don’t bring a baby to a movie)  (and turn off your fucking phone) Dottie covers her mouth with a handkerchief, turns on a gas canister in the carriage, and leaves it there while she leaves and blocks the door. “Do you think it will work?”

“I have great faith in Mr. Stark’s inventions.”

Peggy is relieved to find that Steve’s blood is safe, but they find that Item 17 is missing. Jarvis has no idea what it does.

In the movie theater, people start coughing, and then they get violent and savagely beat each other up. A couple is led into the theater by an usher, grumping about parking. The usher unbolts the door, and finds everyone in the theater dead, either by beating each other up, or due to the gas (it’s unclear how it broke down).

Review:

You just get me because Carrie is on vacation and has not watched the episode yet.

Howard, why did you invent that shit and then put it in a locked room, rather than DESTROY IT?!

WHY (the hearts of men are weak).

I really loved the way they interwove the three interrogators together, and I adored beyond measure Peggy calling out how she was able to get away with everything because no one takes her seriously. They put her in a box and nothing she did could change their preconceived notions.

Until you know, DoucheBoss is about 5 seconds from getting blown up, and THEN he’ll tell Peggy to go get Soviet Shrink and maybe she’s not actually fired.

(Spoilers for Kingsman: this gas seems like the magic SIM card that can turn people into violent rage monsters, which is a coincidence, but still synchronous.)  

I’m so sad next week is our last week.