Welcome back to this week’s look back at last night’s episode of Agent Carter. Or, as we called it in my house, “HOW-LING COMMAND-OS! *CLAP* *CLAP* *CLAPCLAPCLAP*”
We have fun here.
1. The Red Room
Last night further teased the existence of the Red Room, a place where little girls are trained to grow up to be Scarlett Johansson Black Widows. No one has said it outloud, it’s all heavily implied by way of the character Dottie and a stray little girl that this is in fact the facility which gave us the only female character in the Avengers.
What’s interesting about it all to me is how subtle the show is being about it while also hitting us over the head with it. I think it’s fair to assume we’d be seeing some of the Red Room in Age of Ultron (you can kind of make a guess, based on the visual of Cap wandering through a strange, snow-y facility that has the exact same aesthetic as the place in this episode), but to have the basics of what it is set up on this show is a smart way to help build the universe. It ultimately did very little for the episode, although Dottie clearly has a larger role to play coming up, but it was certainly a smart way to continue setting up some smaller, quieter conflicts in the background while everyone else worries about the Cold War years too early.
2. The Howling Commandos
The highlight of last night was getting re-united with our favorite Howling Commandos, albeit a fairly different troop. While Dum-Dum Dugan stayed a part of the gang, everyone else is different: gone are Gabe Jones, Jim Morita, James Montgomery Falsworth and Jacques Dernier and in are Happy Sam Sawyer, Percival Pinky Pinkerton and Jonathan Junior Juniper — all of them straight off the comic pages and onto your TV sets.
If I had one complaint, it’s that we didn’t get to see the rest of the team as much as we did Dum-Dum and Peggy. While it was nice to see aspects of that relationship built-up as they clearly have a strong rapport, it did leave the rest of the team hanging out in the wind a bit. When Happy’s life is put in danger you don’t necessarily feel for him because you know him but rather because you know what he and his team represent, which is a bit of a let down (though the same could be said about Agents Li and Martinez, who also act as decoration for Atwell, Sad Michael Murray and Neal McDonough). It’s nice to see Marvel play with their toys a bit more, but it would be nice to see them spread the love around to characters as well.
Although Neal McDonough is kind of adorable, so I guess it’s slightly forgivable.
3. Leviathan
Now that we’ve seen inside the beast, can I just say: boy, was that a bit of a disappointment or what? It’s not necessarily fair to compare the comics to the shows, but I’m going to do it anyway because the Leviathan of the comics is awesome. And while both Agent Carter and SHIELD have been repurposing aspects of Jonathan Hickman’s “Secret Warriors” run from which Leviathan comes from, it’s still a bit of a shame to see a crazy powerful and wonderfully visual group of crazed bad guys reverted to… well, Russian soldiers in bland army uniforms.
Obviously budget is a constraint, and I’d imagine that the setting of the show prohibits them from wanting to really go too far down the technological spectrum (that, or they blew everything they had in the second episode with Roxxon). But Leviathan as an idea represents something huge and colossal, and so far everything we’ve seen of Leviathan has been kind of flimsy, barely holding itself together in unstable conditions. There’s a handful of episodes for Leviathan to be redeemed, but so far the hype created by including that organization as a villain is pretty much the same letdown that AIM was in Iron Man 3.
4. Hooray! We Beat Sexism Forever!
As the episode began, Jarvis told Peggy Carter that no one would ever respect her because she’s a woman, just like she was told in last week’s episode by Agent Thompson. Peggy uses this as a launch pad to bring the heat down on Agent Dooley, demanding respect and getting it by pulling together the Commandos for an overseas mission in which she saves Thompson’s life, holds her own while drinking and stands in the middle of a hallway firing her gun at nobody in particular.
Continued belowReturning home, Peggy finally has earned the respect she’s always deserved: Dooley congratulates her, Thompson invites her out for drinks with the guys and 1940s-era sexism has been defeated forever and will never be a problem ever again. We did it!
But… wait.
5. And It’s All Downhill From Here
So, Agent Sousa knows Peggy’s secret, we’re in the height of a story in which spies play a central role and no one trusts anyone, and there’s a mysterious organization pulling strings behind the scenes. Peggy may have beaten sexism, but Leviathan is still out there — and now Sousa knows that Peggy is not being truthful about everything she’s up to.
So in the last section, I was being a bit glib with a serious subject and I realize that. The show has utilized the institutionalized sexism aspect as a main element to the drama, and it’s weird to see them treat that dynamic as a switch that can be flipped on and off (if next week’s episode tease is any indication). I am really glad that Atwell got a chance to stand-up and tell everyone to stop treating her like shit, and I think that was a really positive element of last night’s show, but I am nervous about how the show will treat it going forward as we’ve still got quite a few episodes left — and I’m specifically nervous about it if only for Shea Whigham’s line something to the effect of “No matter what, if I send you overseas and you let me down it looks bad on me.”
If Peggy has ‘earned’ her right to be respected only for future drama in the show to tear down that progressive element as an excuse, that’d be a shame. We have three episodes left so there’s plenty of time for them to hate her and love her again, but I just hope that with whatever is to come the show doesn’t drop the ball completely on its otherwise smart representation of a woman in a trying time and place, because I’m afraid I see at least the chance for a fumble.
