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Peggy’s been having a
terrible time lately. She is ignored and
taken advantage of at work, her roommate was killed, she’s been shot at least
once in the series, and it seems like everyone she’s close to has been taken
away. However, up until this episode
she’s been able to count on Howard Stark trusting her and giving her all the
information she needed to complete his mission.
Or so she thought. Turns out,
Howard doesn’t trust her and is taking advantage of her almost as much
as the S.S.R. does. What’s a girl going
to do?
Reminder: Retro-Reviews contain potential spoilers for everything to-date.
The episode begins
with Peggy and Jarvis on a mission to acquire something which Howard Stark had
paid smuggler Otto Mink to bring into the country for him. While Jarvis pays the smugglers, Peggy
dispatches all three of their lookouts in a matter of moments. When the smugglers try to triple the price,
Jarvis activates a device on his briefcase that releases sleeping gas. The two of them take the money and open the
shipping container to find none other than Howard Stark playing pool. On their way to one of Stark’s least-known
residences, Peggy recognizes a pair of S.S.R. agents staking the residence out,
so she decides that the safest thing would be to bring Howard back to the
Griffith and let him stay in her room while he’s in town. Miriam Fry, the prudish landlady, nearly
discovers Howard as Peggy is smuggling him upstairs in the dumbwaiter, but
Howard succeeds in escaping getting out of the dumbwaiter before Peggy and
Miriam get up to her floor. Naturally,
Peggy discovers Howard in the room of one of her neighbors—which happens at
least one other time during the episode.
While his “visiting” Peggy’s neighbors is funny and plays up the dynamic
between Howard and Peggy, I’m not sure if it is entirely necessary. We get that Howard Stark is a playboy—and
that Tony came by it honestly—but do we need to be reminded of it four times in
a single episode? However, like I said,
those moments are funny and build Peggy’s character as she starts thinking of
Howard less as an old friend and more as another man who sleeps around and
doesn’t respect women.
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Of course, Howard
isn’t just back to chase women; he has a new mission for Peggy: first he needs her to take pictures of all the
inventions which the S.S.R. has recovered.
Once she does that using a camera-pen of Howard’s invention, he tells
her that all the inventions are there, but she needs to steal one back from the
S.S.R. and return it to him because it is too dangerous for the government to
get their hands on it. This device, which
he calls the eponymous “Blitzkrieg Button,” was designed for the Brits so they
could hide their cities from German aerial bombings. Activating the device was supposed to turn
off all electricity in the city, turning off the lights and taking away the
Germans’ ability to see their targets.
Unfortunately, the device could only turn the lights off; it
couldn’t turn them back on because it simply blew out the infrastructure. Consequently, setting the device off in New
York City would kill the power in the Tri-State Area for years. Howard gives Peggy a mock-up of the device
and tells her to switch it out for the real thing and bring it back to him
without setting it off. And surprisingly,
Peggy has very little trouble completing this mission—unusual, to say the
least.
However, as soon as
she switches out the mock-up for the real device, she gets suspicious of her
mission. While Jarvis was driving her to
the S.S.R., she noticed him tugging his earlobe a couple times when she
suspected him of lying—which was actually an interesting callback to the
old-school spy genre, where a character having a “tell” was used somewhat
regularly (think James Bond and Casino Royale, which also subverted that
trick). Peggy ducks into a storage room
and presses the button on the device, which does not destroy the entire
city’s infrastructure but instead opens the top, revealing a vial containing
what looks like blood. She makes her way
back to the apartment, where she finds Howard and demands to know what’s in the
vial. After his attempts to deflect fail,
Howard finally admits that it is a vial of Steve Rogers’ blood—prompting Peggy
to give him a black eye! He explains
that he received a vial of the blood as one of the lead scientists on Project:
Rebirth, and the government took the other 11.
He believes that Steve’s blood can potentially unlock cures to various
diseases—Peggy accuses him of simply wanting to profit off Steve Rogers’
sacrifice. I find this whole scene
fascinating for the insight it gives us into both their characters. Howard does not come from money; his parents
were extremely poor and he had to work to get ahead. Because of this, lying has become
second-nature to him. For her part,
Peggy had been feeling underappreciated at the S.S.R. because they were not using
her skills properly, and that drove her decision to help Stark. Seeing Steve’s blood, however, brought her to
the realization that working for Howard against the S.S.R. was wrong,
especially when he is just out for himself and not for the greater good. I feel like I understand these two characters
a lot better after this episode, which is the definite benefit of having
Dominic Cooper return as Howard Stark for more than just a couple brief cameos.
Peggy kicks Howard
out, and the next morning Jarvis apologizes to Peggy on Howard’s behalf. After the fact, he talks to Howard at a
shoe-shine stand and tells him that he does not approve of what they did in
lying to Peggy about the Blitzkrieg Button before leaving. I find it interesting just how Peggy has
changed the dynamic between those two.
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However, Peggy,
Howard, and Jarvis actually fall into the background for this episode as
Thompson, Sousa, and Dottie all receive more screen time than usual. Thompson takes charge of the S.S.R.
temporarily while Dooley is in Nuremberg interviewing Nazi Col. Ernst Mueller
about the Battle of Finow (which never actually happened; the Russian troops
were massacred before the Germans ever arrived). Thompson actually proves himself to be a
capable chief, though the most we see him do as chief is put everyone on
overtime and tell Peggy to take lunch orders.
Meanwhile, Sousa goes to the docks to print the payphone to try to get a
lead on their mysterious tipster. The payphone
is a dead end, but he finds a pair of bums nearby, one of whom refuses to talk
to him. Sousa brings him back to the
S.S.R. Headquarters for interrogation, and this gives us some interesting
character development from both Sousa and Thompson. Thompson at first dismisses the idea that the
bum knows something, but eventually comes around and bribes the information out
of him. Sousa, meanwhile, tries to coax
the information out of him by explaining how he came back from the war
damaged—and no one sees him for who he is, only for the crutch he needs. Thompson always treats Sousa poorly, but in
this episode he finally starts to appreciate Sousa as he realizes that Sousa’s
instincts about the bum were correct. I
suspect that this is when Thompson’s relationship with Sousa changes for the better—he
appreciates him as a partner instead of just “the cripple.”
We also get a huge
reveal about Dottie when the smuggler, Otto Mink, comes to attack Peggy at the
Griffith. I really liked how they used
Mink to pull the rug out from under us.
Mink was introduced as the evil boss of the smugglers from the beginning
of the episode. He was so angry with his
men because Jarvis and Peggy succeeded in taking Howard without paying them
that he killed both of them with a 6-barreled automatic mini-gun pistol. He then spent the rest of the episode
following Peggy and Jarvis around while trying to kill them for revenge. Finally, he snuck into the Griffith through
the air ducts and got up to Peggy’s door.
However, before he can break in and kill her, Dottie comes out of her
room to find him standing there. She
approaches him, asking if he’s looking for Peggy. He turns on her and tells her to return to
her room. She sees his gun, and asks the
question that any normal woman would ask when confronted by a gun-wielding man
in a women-only boarding house: “Is that
pistol an automatic?” Wait… And then she followed it up with, “I want
that” before leaping into action, jumping between the walls of the hallway,
wrapping her legs around his neck, and bringing him to the ground, snapping his
neck in the process. Did this move look
familiar to you? I remember being
surprised when this episode first aired but immediately connecting Dottie’s
fighting style with that of Natasha Romanoff, the modern Black Widow. It’s not 100% clear in this episode, but the
immediate following episode does make it clear:
Dottie is a proto-Black Widow, a product of the same training and
enhancements used on Natasha Romanoff. I
love the twist of introducing her as a somewhat benign character, setting her
up against a hardened killer, and then having her immediately wipe the floor
with him. And I also love that they are
using Agent Carter to introduce and explore so much of the back story
for everything in the MCU.
Overall this was an
interesting episode. It did not contain
a lot of action outside of the first few minutes and the last few minutes, but
it gave us some needed character development for all the characters, and
especially for the background characters.
It also gave us one of our major villains for the season (possibly
extending into season 2) as well as a hint at the background of Natasha
Romanoff, surprisingly. I really liked
the inclusion of the vial of Steve Rogers’ blood, though I was a bit
disappointed with the resolution of that particular plot thread at the end of
the season—not because it wasn’t a touching scene, but because I was hoping it
would play a part in a future development, like the origin of Isaiah Bradley,
the Black Captain America.
What did you think of
this episode? What parts of the MCU’s
history do you want to see explored in Agent Carter season 2? Let me know in the comments!
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