selenak | Agent Carter 1.08

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Agent Carter 1.08

...and it better be 1.08 to be followed by 2.01, though if this the last we see of Peggy Carter, it was a wonderful miniseries. Not perfect, but wonderful, and I adore it.

Since I did guess right about how things went down in Finnau, including Howard originally designing the gas as something else, realising it was unusable and dangerous in time but the military going ahead with it anyway, let me acknowledge what I got massively wrong: no one at SSR was a mole, Angie wasn't, either, and neither was Anna. (BTW, new guess as to why we never saw Anna: because they didn't want to cast an actress for a two line cameo in order to be free to cast someone if/when they get a season 2 without needing to get Original Actress back.)

It's been said before: this show's narrative basically retcons/makes the first Captain America movie as Peggy Carter's superhero backstory pain and Steve's "death" into her origin trauma. Peggy, through the show, had two main arcs - leaving aside the tracking down of bad guys and finding MacGuffins stuff -: finding a way to exist that allows her to do what she's best at and be valued for it, and to work through her grief and let go. Fittingly, the finale gives her the open acknowledgment (the cheers from the other agents) but also also has her state her realisation a moment later, when Thompson gets the credit for her work from the Senator (because that's how the system works, and Thompson may be not a one dimensional jerk anymore but he's still an active part of the system so of course will take the credit), to an indignant Sousa that she doesn't need Thompson, the President or anyone else acknowledge her worth; she knows it, and that's all she needs. (BTW of course Peggy had self respect at the start, too, but back then she DID want open acknowledgment from the sexist guys around her.) And fittingly, the finale puts her through her original trauma again with Howard in the plane, this time changing the outcome, and gives her the chance to bring the last part of Steve (as far as she knows) home (the Brooklyn Bridge!) and let him go. One of the many things about Captain America: The Winter Soldier that I loved was that the movie in the scene with old Peggy and Steve showed us that while she never forgot him, she didn't spend the rest of her life pining away, she moved on. Old Peggy tells Steve that she's lived her life, and it was a good one; that her only regret was that he didn't get to live his. (Note: his, not theirs. This wasn't Peggy wishing she's spend the last 70 years with Steve instead of the way she did, with the other people she loved whose photos we see on old Peggy's shelves, it's Peggy wishing Steve hadn't been frozen and now stranded in another time instead of living through the decades like everyone else.) And the moment when we see Peggy pouring that blood into the Hudson, saying "goodybe, my darling" is when she completes that letting go that will help her move forward. Both pro and fanfiction so often define true love as loving only once and never ever letting go, so I treasure this part of Peggy's emotional arc all the more.

Speaking of people who pine, though: I guess one sided Howard/Steve is canon now. :) (Which totally fits with Tony's line from Avengers re: Steve: "This is the guy my father wouldn't shut up about?!?") Mind you, I did have a bit of a problem with the writing because basically a minute after we had Howard express his guilt re: Finnau the show tells us his greatest shame/regret is not having been able to save Steve. It's not that I don't get why: if Howard had been hypnotized into a preventing Finnau fantasy instead of a saving Steve fantasy, it would not have the same emotional resonance with Peggy, and the show needed for Peggy to relive her trauma (guy in air plane carrying stuff which could kill thousands of people unless guy and air plane go down before reaching this point, her on the other and of the communication) and for her and Howard to feel similar emotions so she can let go. (You can even make the meta point here that Howard, who according to Nick Fury never stops looking in the ice for Steve and never found him - but found other dangerous things like the Tesseract - and who couldn't really communicate with the son who resembles him so much, is an illustration of what would have happened to Peggy if she hadn't been able to do that, of the danger of staying trapped in the emotional past.) But still: priorities, Howard. A massacre should trump Steve's death.

(Though I'm also a sucker for Peggy's mixture of exasparation and fondness for Howard - that eyeroll she and Jarvis shared when he finally remembered Dottie's alias was perfect - and his basically making his grand atonment gesture because he cares what she thinks of him and snapping out of his perfect moment fantasy her her. Also that he doesn't try his Casanova act with her; she's "Peg" and "pal", and utterly uninterested in him sexually.)

Jarvis was perfect throughout, and definitely the standout new character the series added to the MCU for me. (Peggy being an already established one.) (Yes, okay, we speculatively knew Jarvis probably existed in the MCU since Tony named and modelled his AI after him, but you can still count on screen Edwin Jarvis as a new character.) His sidekick to hero chemistry with Peggy was amazing, his respect for her never wavered, he always had his own mind (the one time he followed orders over his own judgment was not telling Peggy the truth re: Steve's blood, which is why the last Peggy and Jarvis scene with him giving the blood to her while letting Howard think it was destroyed was so appropriate), the banter between him and Peggy was golden yet never romcom, and I'm so glad said last scene also made it clear he's ready to assist her in her future heroic endeaovours whenever she wants. (Someone write me a "Mr. Jarvis, we are needed" ficlet.)

Angie did get one scene in the finale, and while it didn't have her helping to save the day, it showed Peggy and her moving in together (in one of Howard's houses), which should please Peggy/Angie shippers, especially since Angie's room at the Griffith was just fine, she could have stayed there. Peggy inviting her (after Angie had invited her at the start of the show) to share her new place of residence is really just about mutual fondness and wanting to live together.

Daniel Sousa clearly has read the Odyseey and uses that knowledge wisely; the earplugs to foil Ivchenko/Faustus were great, and of course he lets Thompson sweat a little first. Sousa/Peggy shippers also get thrown a bone; while not saying yes when he asks her out for a drink, she does smile fondly when he can't see it, so maybe she means "someday".

Now yours truly doesn't ship Peggy with any of the cast in the romantic sense; if anything, I appreciate the series didn't make Peggy moving on from her lost love happen via a Mr. (or Mrs.) Right showing up. "Whom will Peggy date?" was never a question during these eight episodes, and sadly that's still unusual with a female main character. Go show! This said, of course in terms of fanfiction there is fodder for plenty new and old relationships. Not to mention it thoughtfully provided Peggy with a female arch nemesis who already kissed her. Of course Dottie survives. (BTW: "I can be anyone" - I was reminded of the Natasha and Steve conversation in the car in The Winter Soldier.)

...and of course there is a Marvel tag scene: never has the sentence "America is the land of opportunity" sound so sinister as when Dr. Zola murmurs it to Dr. Faustus. This was the tie-in to The Winter Soldier we've been waiting for, which is why I'll handwave the logistics of Ivchenko/Fenhoff/Faustus being put in the same cell with Zola. Speaking of Ivchenko/Faustus, I continue to find the show's version more interesting than his comics counterpart because the Finnau massacre (and having to live through it, seeing his brother die that way) certainly gave him an understandable reason to hate Howard Stark and want revenge, while not excusing his own post-Finnau utter disregard for life. Dottie and Ivchenko as the two main villains of the season managed to be both their own people and a Marvel continuity treat (Black Widow and Dr. Faustus). Well done, show. So very well done.

There's definitely room for improvement: characters of colours with actual roles and personalities, for starters. But these eight episodes were still a treat for me, and I'm over the moon they were made.

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priorities, Howard. A massacre should trump Steve's death.

*Should*, but it's very Howard that it doesn't! After all, unlike Ivchenko and his dead brother at Finnau, Howard personally knew and loved Steve, and I think that trumps soldiers dying in war for him. I like that he's destroying his wartime inventions, too - it's not like he is going to stop inventing weapons, but he no longer has the urgency of wartime.

I loved so much that the show didn't wrap up Peggy's story with her being with someone (or leaning in that direction) but ended her past story with Steve and set up up to move on into the future. And I am thrilled that Dottie survived - having failed in her mission, would she go back to her handlers or make a break for it and "be anyone" like she said?

I vote for Rogue!Dottie, it would make that much more unpredictable. Though I'll also take loyal Russian agent Dottie, as long as we get more.

Point taken about the personal emotion with Howard, and also the destruction of his wartime inventions.

I agree with that from what I've seen of Howard, regretting losing Steve more than Finnau makes a lot of sense from his character. Especially since Steve apparently was one of the few people he actually managed to love, so it's sappy, but has a lot of identification potential for the viewers.

I really liked how they resolved all of this: Peggy making peace with Steve's death, not being in a new relationship, but at least acknowledging the possibility of getting a drink with someone(she's so about five numbers too big for poor Souza, though), Jarvis being on board for more "Avengers" style adventures, Angie moving in, Dottie surviving and probably on her way to being her own agent, Ichenko getting a fun new roommate, and Thompson still being a dick. I so hope we'll be able to see more of them. And yes, with more POC characters, please. The running gag of the black guy dying after two minutes of screentime already wasn't funny anymore when they made it the first time.

Question for the expert: who and what is Dr. Zola?

Dr. Zola (the guy played by Toby Jones in the last scene) was the Hydra (chief scientist and sidekick to the main Big Bad of the first Captain America film. As opposed to his boss, he was more survival oriented and hence ended up captured by Steve and not dead. In the second Captain America movie, we find out that in a comicverse equivalent of Operation Paperclip, he started working for the US, then SHIELD at some point post war (they didn't say the year). (Note: the second Captain America movie is all about the shadiness and deliberately goes for a 70s thriller type of movie, where Steve is shaken by revelation after revelation.) He then used the opportunity to rebuild Hydra from within SHIELD because he'd figured out that this was idea. Telling everyone you want to take their freedom away, as his boss did, gets you nowhere. Organising both the "threat" and the "defense" and telling everyone you're PROTECTING them from the "threats to freedom" gets you everywhere and gets people to give up their own freedom. (Why yes, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is very consciously a post 9/11 movie). Finally, when Zola felt himself dying of cancer in the 1960s, he managed to program a computer with a copy of his personality and knowledge so said computer could be found by Steve and Natasha and gloat and deliver exposition in the present.)

...oh, and while he was at it, he also brainwashed and operated Steve's old friend Bucky into becoming a lethal assassin. Which is why Faustus ending up in the same room with him is significant, because that explains a lot of how Zola got brainwashing expertise (not his field in the first CA movie).

As you can imagine, Toby Jones has fun with the role. But my favourite Zola line is from computer!Zola when Natasha asks who Dr. Zola was and Steve says he was a German scientist. Says computer!Zola: "Excuse me. I was Swiss."

Hmm. Sounds interesting!

Ah, Toby Jones, that why he seemed familiar. I couldn't place him.

Also add that the AI version of Zola was supposedly destroyed in an explosion in The Winter Soldier, but the majority of fans consider it extremely unlikely that he never backed himself up.

Sounds rather likely he did that, yeah.

which should please Peggy/Angie shippers

It pleased this Peggy/Angie shipper :-D

including Howard originally designing the gas as something else, realising it was unusable and dangerous in time but the military going ahead with it anyway

I don't think there was any way it could be anything else. I wasn't sure what Howard had originally intended--although a gas to keep them alert and fighting makes sense--but there was no way he designed it to do what it actually did. And the effects make sense, actually, when you know what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, the military taking it and using it anyway is entirely too plausible :-(

I did like that he decided, at the end, to destroy everything. Hopefully he actually did it. I can sort of understand not wanting to destroy things he put so much of his life and work into. That would be hard. It's good to see him realising that he made the wrong call and that there's no way they can be stored safely without someone deciding to take them and use them. If they exist, someone will want them.

There were so many lovely parts to this episode. I've adored the relationship between Jarvis and Peggy, and it felt like this was the episode where it came to full fruition.

Maybe one of my favourite moments, though, was Peggy saying that she knows how good she is, and that's enough for her. I've always liked characters realising they don't need outside validation to know how good they are.

And Peggy saying goodbye to Steve for good was perfect. I really, really want a season two and they've left enough dangling threads and open endings to make a season two easy to do, but if we don't get one, then I'm glad we got this ending.

Although I plan to throw an epic tantrum if season two doesn't happen :-D

I shall throw a tantrum with you, but yes - if this is the end, it's a good one, and a great place to leave Peggy at, the future ahead of her and the knowledge she put the past behind.

Meanwhile, I hope for many a "Peggy and Jarvis fight crime!" case fic. Howard can design a 1950s Cartermobile for them to drive with. :)

Yes, I want all that fic! So much fic is possible :-D And we've got, like, ten months to write it all if we get a second season with the same timing as this one :-DDD

The fact that Finnau was out of his control might have played into the choice of illusion, too. We didn't get many details, but it sounded rather like he wasn't aware it happened until after the fact -- no point of intervention means no fantasy of changing it.

Excellent point! I mean, I suppose he could have imagined himself not inventing the stuff at all, but "not doing something" doesn't make for an active illusion scenario of the type Ivchenko needed, whereas "rescue Steve from the ice, bring him home to Peggy" does.

I was just completely delighted by that episode. Everything went just the right way - Chad Michael Murray didn't suddenly become a good person (I work with a lot of ex-military men of the same low-level-but-persistent asshole stamp, and I was really worried the show would suddenly attempt to 'redeem' him), Peggy got to emotional closure as part of her own journey and not as part of a romantic relationship with anyone, Angie's still around and on Team Carter, 100000% agree on the need for "Mr. Jarvis, we're needed".

For the murder gas, I'm sticking with the "sex pollen gone wrong" theory. 'Midnight Oil' indeed.

ETA I also liked how much it didn't hedge around Howard repeatedly saying he loved Steve.

Edited 2015-02-25 19:35 (UTC)

Everything you listed made me dance in the aisles. Well, mentally at least.:) I want all the Peggy & Jarvis case fic in the world!

I also liked how much it didn't hedge around Howard repeatedly saying he loved Steve.

Oh quite. There is no "in a brotherly fashion, of course!" disclaimer, and Peggy paralleled their type of love when talking to Howard. Considering I'm in another fandom where the fanboys are still wailing and shouting about the horror of having a manly man character outed as a bisexual, it's refreshing that no such utterings were posted (that I saw) in this case.

YYY! And also how it didn't try to define it, whether "er I mean AS A BROTHER" or "oh by the way Peggy, I'm into guys too because I am a sexy bisexual playboy". Just "Yep, I have strong love feelings towards this person".

Heheheh. You are spot-on about that; I really adored the Howard/Steve bit for how clear and honest and non-sensational it was played on all levels.

Your reviews of Agent Carter have been part of my enjoyment of the entire series. I, too, am hoping for a second run.

I think Ivchenko's abilities are amazing, but can only work on something that's core to his target, about something the person cares deeply about at a heartfelt level. the Russian soldier's longing for his mother; Jauch's self-respect; Dooley's love of his family; presumably self-respect and respect from others for the black policeman (extraordinarily rare in wartime New York which, from a Watsonian point of view, would make him vulnerable) etc. Ethical regrets, no matter how deeply felt, do not trump love or yearning, so Ivchenko might use the Finnau guilt as an entree, which he did, but then move on to what he might know would be the more deeply felt issue.

I, too, have cheered the lack of a romantic tie for Peggy, and the construction, instead, of strong friendships. It rings true, and healthy. (Although can someone remind me of whether Sousa was injured in the European or Pacific theater? Didn't Peg ultimately marry someone who'd been in a Japanese camp? Am I completely mad here?)

I also love how each of the characters were, to my mind, sympathetic, even when they did rotten things (humans are like that); for instance, I knew Thompson would act as he did, and yet I appreciated us seeing that what he was was an extremely fallible man unable, because of arrogance, to be better than what he was. I could appreciate the amount of flexibility he was able to show when backed into a corner, and realize he would still be what we see as a complete dick at the end, without failing to recognize the qualities that got him to the SSR. I felt much the same for Dooley (only with more positive emotion; by the end of his run - an unfortunate phrase, I recognize - I liked and respected him, even as I saw his fallibility.

That's the kind of writing of secondary characters that I can cheer for.

Dottie .... what a tragic and dangerous creation she is. And yes, Dottie, even though you survived, Peggy was indeed that good.

My only rather intellectual question is how to retcon the first short film we saw Carter in, in which she was basically held in even lower regard by the nascent SHIELD folks before she was put in charge. Surely the SSR would want to keep her?

Augh. Definitely want to see a second run. Is it ready yet?

By Word Of God, the Agent Carter short film is out of continuity now. It was basically a pitch by the writers to show TPTB what an Agent Carter series could look like, it resulted in the tv show, which now is the real story.

Didn't Peg ultimately marry someone who'd been in a Japanese camp?

In the Smithsonian Captain America exhibition which Steve walks through in Winter Soldier, she says that Steve saved so many the people "including the man who would later become my husband". No Japanese camp mentioned, and Steve was never in the Pacific war theatre. Fans have assumed this to mean she marries one of the Howling Commandos, since we see Steve save them in the first Captain America movie, but that doesn't have to be the case - he saved other people, too! And I suppose it's possible a soldier he saved in Europe could have been later transferred to the Pacific. But not that likely. Unfortunately, I can't remember where Sousa was wounded. Thompson's war time story involved Japanese soldiers so places him in the Pacific theatre, though.

Agreed on Dooley and Thompson. And Dottie, of course! I loved how through the series, we saw the two women have very different fighting styles. Dottie has the one reminiscent of the current day Marvelverse superheroes, not identical to, but similar to Natasha's - which makes sense given their shared background. Acrobatic, fluid. Peggy is a bruiser. A bulldozer. Just going for whatever works.

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Agent Carter 1.08

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SPOILER FOR BOTH CAPTAIN AMERICA MOVIES

Re: SPOILER FOR BOTH CAPTAIN AMERICA MOVIES

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