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| Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com |
You know, I think this might
be their best episode yet for the parallels they create between the hero and
villain. Peggy Carter and Agnes
Cully/Whitney Frost really are not such different women. Both are driven to excel in fields from which
they are largely barred due to their gender.
Both of them feel the pushback of a society that does not think they can
contribute in those fields. Both of them
attempt to conform to societal standards.
But Peggy gets one thing that Agnes/Whitney does not: an opportunity.
Marvel seems to
believe that every TV season needs at least one “flashback episode”
(admittedly, it’s an effective technique for fleshing out back stories—some of
them are among my favorite episodes from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil,
and Jessica Jones), so it’s not surprising to find one in Agent
Carter season 2. What really set
this episode apart (at least over season 1) are the direct parallels between
Peggy and Agnes. I think that if things
had turned out differently, either one could have been the hero and either one
could have been the villain. Daredevil
season 1 came close to this with Matt and Fisk, but ultimately did not make as
much of a parallel between them as we see between Peggy and Frost.
The episode opens with
the first of a number of flashbacks showing Peggy before we first met her in Captain
America: The First Avenger. Peggy as
a little child is playing a game inspired by a book about knights and
dragons. However, where society would
expect her to be the lady needing to be rescued, Peggy instead pretends to be
the knight, something in which her older brother, Michael, encourages her. Later on the next flashback jumps forward to
1940, when Peggy is recently engaged to a soldier named Fred (we later learn
that he works in the Home Office, while Michael is serving at the front
lines). Peggy is a code breaker, but she
is given a letter from the Special Operations Executive, which wants to recruit
her to become a spy and work with resistance movements behind enemy lines. Peggy is at first questioning if this is
something that she can do, but agrees to discuss it with her fiancé. Evidently they decided that she would not
join the S.O.E., though this disappoints Michael, who had recommended Peggy to
them in the first place, which Peggy learns from him at her engagement
party. Michael seems to dislike Fred,
and I don’t think it is exclusively because he doesn’t think he’s right for his
sister (though there’s that, too!).
Michael tells Peggy that he knows her better than anyone—perhaps even
better than Peggy knows herself at the moment—and that he knows she will not be
happy marrying Fred and sitting behind a code breaker’s desk for the rest of
the war. Peggy doesn’t want to hear this
at the time, but later on, after learning that Michael was killed in action (it’s
not clear if he was killed, wounded, or missing), she decides to leave behind
the safe, comfortable life that society wants for her (including the
milquetoast fiancé) and join the S.O.E.
As I was watching, I was
rather confused by Peggy’s initial reluctance to join the S.O.E. as that seemed
to run counter to what we saw from the little child flashback and to what we
know of her now. However, the rest of
the episode makes it clear: Peggy in
1940 is desperate to conform to societal norms, and that means working in a “woman’s
job” as a code breaker, marrying the “safe” option of Fred, and foregoing the
life of adventure that she dreamed of as a child.
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| Image Courtesy www.mcuexchange.com |
Peggy’s relatively
normal and fun childhood contrasts very sharply with that of Agnes Cully (or as
we know her now, Whitney Frost). As a
child we see Agnes working on a radio at her kitchen table while her mother is
expecting her “gentleman company” (Agnes’ mother is basically a
prostitute/mistress/“concubine” for this “Uncle Bud” character). It becomes quite clear just why Agnes needs
this radio by the end of the first flashback, as she turns up the music to
drown out the sounds coming from her mother’s bedroom while she does her
homework. When she is older and looking
at colleges (1928), Agnes is again working on homework when her mother has an
all-out fight with “Uncle Bud,” who throws them out of “his house.” In fury, her mother turns on Agnes and mocks
her for applying to the University of Oklahoma’s science program: all that matters to Agnes’ future is her
face, not the brain inside it. Consequently,
it appears that Agnes left Broxton, Oklahoma, for Hollywood to try her luck at
conforming to society’s expectations. She
is discovered by a talent scout in 1934, at which point she starts modeling and
acting—exactly what society would want from a woman. However, Dr. Wilkes makes it clear that Agnes
never gave up her true dream of science, as in 1943 she patented a generator 1,000
times more powerful than the neutron reactor in Los Alamos. She was not given the same opportunity that Peggy
received; she had to fight for it, and it wasn’t until she had already become
wealthy as an actress that Agnes/Whitney could finally pursue science.
The similarities between
these two women are very interesting. Both
aspired to a profession/life from which society would bar them. Both eventually achieve their goal, but the
way they do it is what really sets them apart.
And at the end, Agnes/Whitney isn’t really a villain—or at least not
based on the flashbacks. The rest of the
episode, however, makes it quite clear that she’s the villain.
Peggy and Jarvis learn
that Chadwick’s driver is none other than Rufus Hunt, the assassin that
Chadwick sent to kill Peggy in the previous episode. The two of them attack Hunt and capture him
by tranquilizing him—though it does not go according to plan as he shrugs off
the tranquilizer at first and attacks Peggy, and then he sticks Jarvis with the
dart, knocking him out. At Howard’s
house, Peggy runs into Sousa, who quickly surmises what Peggy has done and is
upset that she did not discuss it with him (“I thought we were a team”). Peggy says she was trying to protect him by
giving him “plausible deniability” while she commits a felony, but in the end
the two of them agree to interrogate Hunt together. They do this in style, as Peggy injects Hunt
with “Stark’s weaponized malaria” (in reality a particularly virulent strain of
the common cold) and telling him he only has 20 minutes to live. Hunt breaks quickly when Sousa and Peggy
start arguing about whether or not to save him to interrogate further. He gives them two names (Hugh Jones and
Thomas Gloucester) and explains that the “Council of Nine” is involved with pretty
much everything, from the Great Depression to the McKinley assassination (that’s
not quite on the same level as Magneto being responsible for the magic bullet
in the Kennedy assassination, but it’s up there). He also tells them that the Council records
all their meetings, giving them something to look for at the Arena Club. Peggy and Sousa take this information to the
S.S.R. and call to get a search warrant to search the Arena Club and seize the
tapes.
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| Image Courtesy www.mcuexchange.com |
However, before they
can get the search warrant, Vernon Masters (who evidently works for the War
Department) comes in with a group of his men to make life miserable for Peggy and
Sousa (seriously; he really doesn’t hide his intentions). He stops them from raiding the Arena Club and
begins an extensive audit of the S.S.R. office’s case files. He confronts Peggy about the informant on
whose word they were planning to raid the Arena Club, but Peggy refuses to
divulge the name. At this point he
starts accusing Peggy of espionage and threatening everyone she knows and loves
with being branded a communist. I get
that he is trying to send them a message, but if he was trying to prevent them
from continuing their investigation, I think a little more subtlety would have
been in order.
After Masters leaves,
Peggy and Sousa regroup and decide to continue the investigation despite the
risk to their careers and freedom. How are
they going to shake free a new lead? By letting
Hunt escape and listening to what he does.
Sousa takes a punch and lets Hunt escape with a listening device
attached to his suspenders, and Hunt immediately goes to the Chadwick
residence. When Chadwick returns home,
Hunt explains that Peggy had kidnapped him, and Chadwick loses it against
Peggy. Of course Frost is the smart one
who asks what Hunt told her. Hunt
finally reveals that he’d named names, and he and Chadwick start threatening
each other with Council sanctions. Finally
Frost solves the problem for them.
How did Frost do
that? She’s been practicing with her
Zero Matter absorption ability by experimenting with lab rats. By absorbing the rats, Frost learned how to
absorb on command, but she also discovered that each use of her powers expands
the Zero Matter crack in her forehead. By
the time she absorbs Hunt, the crack is all the way down her face with a couple
of lines also going up into her hair. Chadwick
is horrified to learn what his wife is capable of, but Frost appears to feel freer
than she has in a long time.
The only other plot to
discuss with this episode has to do with Wilkes, who seems to be feeling a pull
from the Zero Matter. The strain of
being intangible and unable to sleep, eat, or feel anything is really taking its
toll on him. I wonder if by the end of
the season he will have finally been sucked into the Zero Matter Dimension.
Overall I really
enjoyed this episode, and especially the tandem exploration of Peggy’s and
Whitney’s histories. It’s amazing that
after four movie appearances, a One-Shot, and an 8-episode miniseries, this is
the first we’ve really seen of Peggy’s history before World War II!
What did you think of
this episode? Do you think they are
going to fix Wilkes before he gives in to the pull of the Zero Matter
Dimension? Let me know in the comments!
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