Peggy Carter’s meant something different to all men in her life. To Jack Thompson, she’s been a simple secretary. To Daniel Sousa, she’s a war hero on a pedestal. To Roger Dooley, she’s a helpless kitten left on his doorstep. This week, she’s a woman cuffed to a desk – one who knows the truth about two Russian moles and might be too late in convincing her doubting peers. As this week’s Snafu would imply, Peggy’s in a doozy of just that and Marvel’s Agent Carter certainly knows just how to break a girl out of one at a terrible cost.
An episode away from our finale, it’s getting a bit hotter under the collar than Peggy would like. Cornered and with nowhere to run, our heroine finds herself the prisoner of the SSR with Dooley and Sousa questioning both her and Edwin Jarvis until they break all while the real villains slip right under their noses. Suspect in aiding and abetting Howard Stark, Peggy and Jarvis are finally left with little option but to confess to their off-hours investigation and recruit the SSR’s skeptics in outing the Leviathan plants among them. You know what? It works.
That Peggy’s smarter than all of our male colleagues has been a smart, subversive theme across the series thus far, but it’s immensely gratifying to see Peggy get to speak peer-to-peer with Thompson, Sousa, and Dooley than woman-to-men. Here, everyone seems to reach the mutual understanding the series has been building to, fleshing out even the worst male attitudes Peggy’s suffered through. That Thompson couldn’t reconcile the Peggy he confided in Russia with there as a traitor was a rather moving element as well. No one’s sinless in Agent Carter, it seems and for a change, everyone put off throwing the first stone.
Everyone had their secrets to share this week with the real snafu was the guilt behind them. Haley Atwell’s performance deserves special props this week once again in that regard, at least revealing her most precious memento to her coworkers – the literal lifeblood of America’s First Avenger. “I suppose I just wanted a second chance to keep him safe,” she tells us. By this point, I’m liable to believe it.
Peggy and Jarvis share in their usual bravado, but especially here. It would turn out that Jarvis has had his own snafus in this series and a telling confession note cleverly shows a chink in our doting butler perfect manner. Escaping their handcuffs produced a rather amusing banter between them to boot in the classy, deadpan manner the two of them know how to mine.
That’s not to say that Dooley and Agent Yauch didn’t get their due too thanks to the further hypnotic shenanigans of Dr. Ivchenko. This time, there were no more watches or cheesy code words; rather, a much more personal point-of-view from his victims. Like any ABC production, of course it’s family that should take up Ivchenko’s manufactured fantasies despite the giveaway of the telltale soft focus. A maternal picnic and a Normal Rockwell style dinner scene could all be a bit cheesy if not for the characterization it conveniently lends to Dooley, the SSR’s strong-armed boss with more guts than I gave him credit for.
Too little too late could describe the regret that weighs Snafu’s heavy heart, all culminating in an explosively dramatic suicide jump for one of our SSR men, though it seemed just a bit too obvious in play. Tragically, it’s also the result of another of Howard Stark’s unstable inventions (and easy Ironman callback) – something Jarvis may not easily overlook in the years to come with his boss. It’s Sousa’s poor shot that allows our darkly devoted Dottie to get the best of him, showing us only the coolest way to parkour your way down a flight of stairs. A gassed theater of dead families are the grim result of her and Ivchenko’s escape and a grimmer preview of what’s surely to come for Leviathan’s plans next week.
Amidst the intrigue Leviathan’s created in the series thus far, it’s sadly apparent that we may never see the entirety of its plans. Early on, the idea of a shadowy, globe-spanning organization was a thrillingly large one. Now that Agent Carter’s comfortable reducing it to just Dottie and Ivchenko’s plans as its American embodiment, it’s all disappointingly small of an arc to end with for such a huge story. Is massacring civilians for the heck of it their plan? Maybe we’ll learn more about the ambiguous World War II connections in more shows to come, but for now it’s fraying loose ends that need not be.
It’s all getting down to the wire for Marvel’s Agent Carter and this week’s events successfully raised the stakes. Snafu brilliantly realized the horrifying possibilities of the devious endgame the series seems to have in its sights. Peggy’s finally in sync with her SSR allies and setting up the kind of S.H.I.E.L.D we can expect to see in the Marvel universe to come. I’m almost sorry to see the series go, but I’ll gladly gobble up the finale now.
Marvel’s Agent Carter airs Tuesday nights at 9/8 Central on ABC. Catch all the latest episodes at ABC.com and all the latest reviews here at BagoGames.