Agent Carter - 'Hollywood Ending'

"What brings you back to town, sir?"
"I got a contract for all season finales."

It's time for the big showdown as we hit the season finale of Agent Carter.

Jason Wilkes' big boomeroo turns out simply to have expelled the Zero Matter from his body. He is alive and free of its influence, but all of the Zero Matter is now concentrated in its new and much more amenable prophet, Whitney Frost. Vernon Masters is super dead, but just as Peggy and the team look set to join her, Jarvis and Howard Stark turn up.

Stark: Jarvis, you just hit a woman with my car!
Jarvis: I know.
Stark: She's a two-time Oscar nominee.
Jarvis: Miss Frost is quite resilient. She's fine. Trust me.

As much as I worry about Stark turning up and stealing the limelight, hit repartee with Jarvis is always a delight.

With Frost now completely committed to opening a rift and inviting the Zero Matter in to consume the cosmos, Joseph Manfredi decides that the proper and loving action is to follow his Mama's advice and make a deal with the devil. He shows up at Stark's mansion and briefly holds the team at gunpoint before embracing Howard as an old friend. He agrees to distract Whitney long enough for them to copy the notes papering her walls. With Stark, Wilkes and Samberly working on the project and the industrial might of Stark Industries, they can beat her to the punch and, once opened, the rift will draw her like a moth to the flame. Then it's gamma cannon o'clock, close the rift and home for tea and crumpets.

I'm not wild about Peggy getting romance stuff, but at least
we're out of the triangle.

Mostly this goes off all right. Sousa is almost sucked into the rift, but Jarvis sends Stark's flying car into the rift and detonates it and the day is saved. Bereft of Zero Matter, Frost becomes catatonic. In a painfully melancholic moment, Manfredi is warned not to bring her roses because she'll try to use them to reopen her Zero Matter scar, and he sits with her as she hallucinates planning greatness with her late husband.

Speaking of husbands - or potential husbands anyway - Peggy seems to have settled on Sousa, with Wilkes going off to a high-paying gig with Stark. This seems to entail more holiday in LA, although I'm wary of seeing her end up as Sousa's assistant. I guess there's a possibility that the interim between here and Season 3 - if there is one, fingers crossed - would be a somewhat altered version of the original short, leading into proto-SHIELD work with her and Sousa roughly equal. This is a possibility because the New York office is again down a chief, with the freshly redeemed Jack Thompson getting mysteriously plugged in the chest in the closing moments, leaving the gig free for Bradey Whitford's unmitigated douchebag.

I really hope that we get another series of this, not least because it's fun, and also because it's one of the few female led properties in the current MCU. Despite its ups and downs it's been consistently superior to Agents of SHIELD, doing considerably more with less, and I'll always have time for a period piece with snappy suits and Tommy Guns.

Agent Carter - 'A Little Song and Dance'

Wait... What?

The unconscious Peggy Carter dreams of a black and white SSR office which segues into a dance hall version of Season 1's diner set for a song and dance number about her love triangle, which is charming, but ultimately reinforces the slightly unfortunate drift towards a focus on her love life. Still, on the plus side it's a neat little period appropriate original number played by actors who turn out to be really rather talented in the musical department; at least good enough for one show (with choreography and backing dancers courtesy of Dancing with the Stars, the USA's version of Strictly Come Dancing.) It's also nice to see the all-too brief return of Angie from Season 1.

Freud would be doing his pieces over this image.

Woken by Edwin Jarvis - apparently appearing in the role of Howard Stark in Peggy's dream, flanked by Dottie Underwood, Ana Jarvis and Whitney Frost - she finds herself in a truck on her way to bad places. They escape, but the tension between them boils over as the walk through the desert, with Carter absolutely furious with her erstwhile partner's attempt to assassinate Frost, until she learns that he did so because Ana can never have children, and because he is too much of a coward to tell her. It's a nice scene, although I hope Ana will get some quality screen time and development in the last few episodes to keep her from taking up residence in the fridge. So far she's been great and I don't want her to suffer a tragic and traumatic injury just to move Jarvis forward.

Welcome to the desert of discomfort.

Meanwhile, Jack Thompson bluffs for America, converting a death sentence for himself, Samberley and Sousa into a fighting chance to talk Vernon Masters into letting them set a trap for Whitney Frost. Thompson sells this to Masters and later a different line to Frost by letting both believe that he is after a spot on the Council, but it becomes clear as the plan goes into action that the truth is that he is setting both Frost and Masters up for a fall, intending to take them both out and become the hero. Even on the side of the angels, he's a dick.

Frost and Wilkes have a bad week. Bereft of her role as prophet of Zero Matter and unable to extract it from Wilkes, Frost descends into babbling supervillainy; a sorry pass for a character originally shown as a strong, brilliant woman to be demanding power from a man, and for the series' only black man to be overshadowed by an unfortunately hued sinister force. Both, along with Masters, are seemingly killed when the Zero Matter overtakes Wilkes, although I suspect that his asplosion was more in the nature of a metamorphosis and hopefully Frost will have survived as well.

I really hoped to see Peggy running a slightly stronger hand than she plays in her confrontations with Thompson and Sousa this week, and she genuinely seems to be letting her feelings for the now less-than-innocent Wilkes control her in just the way she criticised Sousa for last episode and Jarvis early in this. This is currently the MCU's flagship female-led production - nuff respect to Jessica Jones, but TV still just about trumps streaming for exposure - and it needs to do better.

Also, can Marvel stop hating the black man? Please? I'm... 90% sure they don't mean it, but Daredevil and Jessica Jones both featured the brutal murder of a highly principled black supporting character in a largely white cast, and now Agent Carter's mostly principled black character has exploded after a substantial lapse in principles, and possibly been possessed.

Agent Carter - 'The Edge of Mystery'

Agent Carter finally has a damsel in distress and she's a sassy war survivor
who was gutshot defending her home from superhumans and gangsters.

The shooting of Anna Jarvis has everyone on edge at not-the-SSR, but there is also the kidnapping of Jason Wilkes to deal with and Jack Thompson showing up with a file full of conveniently findable blackmail on Peggy. To the latter's credit, it starts him asking the right questions at last, as well as provoking Peggy to a confession: Despite her many tirades, she respects Thompson and believes him capable of success without patronage, and while she might go behind his back, she would never betray him and never abuse his confession to her in Russia. It's a bit of a wakeup call for Jack.

Peggy and Sousa get Samberly to mock up a set of fake Uranium rods, and use Frost's gangster boyfriend to set up a meet. The exchange goes almost without a hitch, until Wilkes turns heel and threatens to shoot Peggy until Sousa reveals the location of the real rods. It seems that Zero Matter is getting to him as well. Peggy is stoic, but Sousa tells Wilkes where the rods are, only for Wilkes to phase out of the van, now apparently a full-fledged superhero. Jack Thompson almost stops his mentor stealing the rods, but gets amnesia zapped.

Anna begins to recover, but the doctors tell Jarvis that she can never have children. The look on his face makes it clear that this was something that the couple were hoping for, and Jarvis is now clearly plotting revenge. Samberly is tasked with creating a gamma cannon based on specs sent by Howard Stark, and while they are unable to prevent the detonation of Frost's test warhead and the creation of a new Zero Matter rift (to which Wilkes, not Frost, is drawn) the cannon seals the rift and Jarvis shoots Frost. Hurrah!

Or not, as Frost recovers and Carter and Jarvis are taken captive to provide leverage on Wilkes, who seemingly possesses that which Frost most covets: The true secret of Zero Matter.

Agent Carter ramps up the action as the conspiracy elements fall into place, with Jarvis' quest for revenge throwing a spanner into the works even as Thompson comes back on board. This remains for me the top of the line in the MCU's TV wing; not as dark or edgy as Daredevil or Jessica Jones, but a whole lot of fun and just miles ahead of its nearest equivalent, Agents of SHIELD.

Also, I hear next week is a musical episode.

Agent Carter - 'Monsters'

"I need a cool name; something Widow, perhaps?"

Peggy has two priorities now: First, to get Wilkes into a containment field, and second to recover Dottie Underwood before it all goes to hell. In order to get this done, Ana Jarvis is tapped to work with Wilkes, which both reveals to her the level of danger her husband might be getting himself into and makes for some lovely moments.

"Look at us; crying into our $400 bottles of wine."
"Would you like to cry into a $1,000 bottle?"

Whitney Frost is moving forward with her plans. She wants the fuel rods back and, after showing Dottie Underwood that there are still things in the world for a proto-Widow to be afraid of, she wants to know what's up with Jason Wilkes. Reactivating the tracker is just obvious enough a trap for Peggy to go for it, but alas the trap is not for her. While she and Jarvis rescue Dottie (despite a few hiccups), Whitney breaks in to confront Wilkes and - finding that she can not merely suck the Zero Matter from him - abducts him, shooting Ana Jarvis in the process.

We finish up with Dottie in the wind, Ana in the OR and Sousa put on gardening leave after being attacked.

'Monsters' does a good job of balancing out the romance focus of last week's episode, keeping Peggy professional despite a near kiss with Sousa and an actual kiss with the suddenly solid Wilkes. She has a lovely heart-to-heart with Jarvis, who gets that she's a hottie far more than she herself does, and that that is her USP, but himself sees her almost as a sister. I applaud the refusal to let them be anything other than awesome buddies, even when the show gets soapy.

Agent Carter - 'Life of the Party'

Like Nick and Nora Charles, but with less sex, more loathing and a lot more
bodies.

With Jason Wilkes slipping away, desperate remedies are called for. He believes that he could create a containment system to keep him corporeal, but first he would need a Zero Matter sample to become corporeal. As there is only one remaining source of Zero Matter, this means getting close to Whitney Frost, and as Peggy is both a known face and still badly injured, the team needs another expert infiltrator who won't look out of place on Jarvis' arm at Chadwick's fundraiser. Apparently determined that a bad idea is better than no idea at all, Peggy recruits an unlikely ally in the form of that ever-trustworthy agent of global Communistic revolution, Dottie Underwood.

Over the course of the episode, we see things go from bad to worse - mostly outside our heroes' perspective - as Frost takes control of the Council after they try to eliminate her, and Dottie goes rogue before being captured by Thompson and then handed over to Frost. All is far from rosy on the home front as well, with Violet breaking off her engagement and Ana Jarvis beginning to worry that her husband's sideline in adventuring might lead him into serious danger.

Peggy Carter's serious injury is a masterstroke, forcing our highly active and aggressive heroine onto the back foot and compelling her to act as the strategist. It also gives her a renewed connection with Daniel Sousa. On that note, however, I'm not wild about the increased emphasis on romance in our Peg's life. She's already 'Captain America's ex'; it hurts the character to give her too many man-centred motivations.

Agent Carter - 'The Atomic Job'

Hello world, I'm your wild girl...

Almost by chance, Wilkes discovers that he can absorb the Zero Matter energy from other affected samples in order to regain solidity. Carter and Jarvis break into a secure morgue to try to retrieve the body of the Lady in the Lake, only for Whitney Frost to beat them to it and claim the energy for herself. On the upside, this positions them to learn that Frost intends to steal an atomic bomb.

Wilkes realises that Frost must want to nab one of the two remaining test devices from the Isodyne trials, identical to the one that first opened the Zero Matter rift. While Frost enlists Chadwick to grease palms and secure the aid of a self-styled gentleman gangster in her heist, Team Carter set up their own job. Still working unofficially, with the War Office watching them for the Arena Club and Carter technically using up the holidays accrued by not taking a vacation day since Pearl Harbour, she and Sousa recruit SSR receptionist Rose and antisocial lab tech Samberly to break into a maximum security facility and steal the Uranium from the bombs in question.

Peggy secures a key from the head of Roxxon Oil - the scene where she applies her direct action bias to the problem, with Jarvis pointing out the fatal countermeasures sure to ensue in each case was a delight - and the team rolls into action. Rose is an unassuming badass, and Samberly a technical wizard when he can get his head in the game, but it's Jarvis who steps up to the plate when he's locked in the room with the bombs and obliged to disarm them himself. Meanwhile Peggy confronts Frost, a virtually unstoppable force with a lethal touch, and is lucky to get away with a rebar in the ribs. The team rush her to Sousa's newly affianced partner Violet for emergency treatment, at which point Violet sees that her fiance is still in love with Peggy, even if he wasn't admitting it to himself.

'The Atomic Job' is a cracking heist episode; not quite Leverage good, but then it's what Leverage does and Agent Carter is just slumming. It's a fun, exciting ride, packed with nice character moments and women who feel no more need to be rivals than the men. Even when she sees that her husband to be is in love with Peggy, Violet's reaction is sadness, not screaming jealousy. It was also good to see more women stepping up to show that Peggy isn't being presented as some sort of mancapable fluke of nature, but one of half of the species that is collectively as capable and flawed as the other half.

Agent Carter -'Smoke and Mirrors'

Mirrors in this episode are, like, important.

Carter and Jarvis are tracking Senator Caldwell and looking for evidence of wrongdoing, which seems to be provided by the presence of a driver with the same wound Carter inflicted on her would-be assassin. In the meantime, Jason Wilkes continues to try to prevent his own dissolution and Whitney Frost experiments with her ability to absorb people using her Zero Matter powers. Eventually, Carter and Sousa are able to capture Mr Hunt and obtain a few names, but before they can move on the Arena Club, Thompson's sinister mentor swoops in and places the entire office under investigation for getting too close to the truth. Team Carter therefore play a long-odds gambit and let Hunt escape, with a bug on his back, but although they learn a little the bug is destroyed when Frost noms down Hunt to feed her Zero Matter, leaving the agents nonplussed and Caldwell utterly shitting himself.

The meat of this episode, however, is taken up by contrasting flashbacks to establish the backgrounds of Agent Carter and Agnes Cully, the woman who would become Whitney Frost, and hammering home that, like Dottie, Frost is a dark reflection of Peggy.

Born into modest wealth, Carter was a tomboy as a child, playing at knights and scrapping with her older brother, much to her mother's dismay. Early in he war she worked as a codebreaker at Station X, where she accepted the proposal of a well-meaning stiff at the Home Office; the sort of man her parents approved of wholeheartedly, but whom her brother Michael - now a Captain in the British Army - could not respect, especially when Fred pressured her to reject a transfer to the SOE for which Michael had recommended her. In the end, it was Michael's death that spurred Peggy to follow her calling for adventure, instead of living the safe life others had planned for her.

Important.

In contrast, Agnes is shown growing up in a poor Oklahoma neighbourhood, her brilliant mind unappreciated by her mother, her mother's sleazy boyfriend/landlord or the local college. "No-one cares what's inside your head," her mother tells her bitterly, at the same time hinting that their 'provider' might not have left them in the lurch if Agnes has 'been nicer' to him, which is pretty creepy talk from a mother who just noted that sleazo's new belle is barely older than her daughter. Movies provided Agnes with an escape, first as a distraction and then after she was spotted by a talent agent.

Peggy's life-altering lesson seems to be that life is short and you can't rely on anyone to be out there fighting for you. Agnes' is that you can do as little or as much as your looks let you get away with. Honestly, however, with that backstory we'd be rooting for Agnes if she were only slightly less of a mouse-devouring sociopath.

Agent Carter - 'Better Angels'

It's that man again.

Peggy Carter is feeling bad for not being able to keep nice Dr Wilkes safe, which visiting SSR chief Jack Thompson naturally interprets as a surfeit of womanly feels when she argues that the sudden glut of evidence against him - Russian passport under the floorboards, Russian pistol under the bed - are as obviously planted as they are. Thompson shows up, rewrites Carter's report to implicate Wilkes and tells the West Coast agents to drop the case.

With official channels temporarily clogged with testosterone, Peggy turns to Howard Stark for scientific support on the Zero Matter question, which means we are treated to another round of the truly marvelous (no pun intended) three-hander between Hayley Atwell, James D'Arcy and Dominic West. As the retroincarnation of his son, there is the danger of Stark running roughshod over the regulars, but once more he's worked in perfectly, rocking his science mojo and getting our unsuitable leads into the "strictly pale and male" Arena Club, not by pretending to be one of them but by dragging a crowd of girls into the masculine preserve as cover for Peggy planting bugs.

When evidence proves hard to come by - the bugs are shorted out by the Club's security protocols and she can't swipe the future newspapers that the club uses to lean on people - Thompson locks down on further investigation and orders Peggy back to New York. He also hands over the Zero Matter film to his dodgy mentor. Interestingly, he does this because Peggy comes at him hard, pushing his frustrated masculinity into a corner, and it will be more interesting still to see how he reacts to seeing that her accusations were true in the closer. Sousa points out that this is no way to handle Thompson, although he later turns down a drink which might have been a good way to get inside Thompson's armour.

Original science bros.

On discovering that Peggy is being stalked by a manifestation of Zero Matter, Stark uses a special photographic emulsion to make the manifestation visible (and audible)... as Jason Wilkes. So far intangible, he none the less bonds with Stark over shared technical language as they work on his... condition.

Elsewhere, we see Whitney Frost manipulating her husband into ordering a hit on Peggy after Carter questions her, then Zero-Matter-eating her touchy-feely director. It comes as little surprise to learn that Frost is the Hedy Lamarr of evil, a brilliant scientist whose work during the war hasn't prevented her being serially undervalued afterwards (when she suggests retiring from acting, her husband promises that after the election she can retire and have 'all the babies you want.') Like Dottie, but in a completely different way, Frost is a dark reflection of Peggy Carter, choosing to embrace instead of fighting her invisibility.

So, Season 2 now has a clear binary antagonist: The Arena Club, striving to maintain their white, male deathgrip on power (it's so sad that we basically know they'll get their way) and Whitney Frost, who is using her husband - and through him the Club - to further her scientific work, and her obsession with Zero Matter. With Thompson teetering between antagonistic ally and part of the problem, the season is shaping up well.

Agent Carter - 'The Lady in the Lake' and 'The View in the Dark'

The sincerest form of flattery.

A dark-haired lady in a red hat moves through a crowd of grey-suited men, but this is not Peggy Carter, but her nemesis, proto-Widow Dottie Underwood. She's robbing a bank, but oh, snap! Peggy's waiting in the vault to see what she's stealing (a fancy tie pin.) Scuttlebutt at the SSR is that if anyone cracks this nut, it'll be Agent Carter, which is perhaps why insecure action man Chief Thompson sends her to Hollywood.

Nice guy agent Daniel Sousa is the Chief of the new West Coast station, and he's asking for someone to help out his rookie agents in the case of a woman found frozen in a lake during a heatwave. The cops think she was done in by the Lady in the Lake killer, but the ice is a bit of a mystery. Fortunately, Sousa isn't the only one to have made the move to California. Howard Stark is getting his Hughes on, making moves and making movies, which means that Edwin Jarvis is at a loose end and eager for adventure.

"I think I broke him."

Back in New York, the FBI takes over the Dottie Underwood investigation. Thompson's mentor warns him that the SSR is a wartime outfit and its days are numbered.

In California, as more bodies start to freeze, evidence points to the shady labs of Isodyne Energy, eccentric physicist Jason Wilkes, and his high profile boss, Calvin Chadwick. But is Chadwick really the mastermind? Is Wilkes really into Carter, or does he have eyes only for the wibbly evil in the lab? Why does Mrs Jarvis have a garter belt with a gun holster? And what will Jarvis do with that flamingo?

This is pretty wild for the 40s.

'The View in the Dark' picks up pretty much where 'The Lady in the Lake' left off, as a hired gun murders two SSR agents to steal the body of the Lady in the Lake. As dead ends follow dead ends, Peggy gets a note from Wilkes, asking her to meet him. They talk and experience prejudice together, and he agrees to help her retrieve evidence of Isodyne's experiments into Zero Matter, a mysterious substance that fell through a rift in reality after a nuclear test and which, quite frankly, wobbles and sloshes like a Kree portal monolith at high tide.

Unfortunately, Isodyne is cleaning house. Chadwick's cohorts in the Council of Big White Money have pulled the plug on Zero Matter. They flatter him that his Senate campaign is more important, but his actress wife Whitney Frost is clearly livid as hell. She goes to retrieve the Zero Matter at the same time as Peggy and Wilkes. Wilkes is seemingly killed in an explosion, but Frost shows up at home with a strange, black scar on her brow.

...

Also, Peggy discovers that former admirer Sousa is dating a nurse and plans to propose.

The plot of Agent Carter season 2 is, so far, nothing all that new, but it scores over big brother Agents of SHIELD in the strength of its characters, relationships and sheer joie de vivre. New faces like Ana Jarvis (a wonderfully bubbly, tactile presence, flitting between the ramrod figures of her husband and new bestie and generally getting the hell out of them both) and old hands like Rose the receptionist, who has transferred from the New York office's telephone exchange to run the front desk of the alleged Auerbach Talent Agency and thus forced to deal with all the wannabes who find them despite their appalling publicity, mesh and bounce off each other. The whole thing bloody scintillates.

TV Round-Up - Agent Carter, Wayward Pines and Dark Matter

Symbolism!

I've been letting the TV reviews slide a little of late, so here's some catch up.

The season finale of Agent Carter, 'Valediction', delivered hard, from Howard Stark's return to save the day, through his failure and Peggy Carter's quiet triumph, defeating Dottie in combat before talking the hypnotised Howard down before Jarvis had no choice but to fire on his plane.

Stark had a lot of nice moments, playing up his own attachment to Captain America, the only good thing he ever helped to create, and finally realising that he needed to destroy his 'bad babies' rather than hoarding his mistakes. I was impressed by the doomsday weapon of choice, the rage gas proving not to be a deliberate invention but an accidental one intended to allow soldiers to operate on minimal sleep. Howard Stark is far more interesting as a flawed genius whose good intentions always end up creating weapons (which is of course a fine parallel to his son, and a family trait which culminates in the birth of Ultron) than as a father of monsters. Sousa also gets a much deserved hurrah, disabling Ivchenko while wearing earplugs.

We end with Thompson accepting all the credit, because he's a douchebag, if not without redeeming features, and Carter's recognition that what matters is that she knows what she is worth. It was also good to see the strengthening friendship between Carter and Jarvis, which has been a delight all season.

"The hell just happened..."

After a strong opening and an excellent couple of revelatory episodes, Wayward Pines sort of lost its way in the latter half of the season, leaning heavily on a contrived conflict between Ethan and Ben - engineered largely by the almost pointlessly Svengaliesque schoolteacher - and the emergence of the upperclassmen of the Wayward Pines Academy as the Midwich Militia, breaking into the Sheriff's office to execute insurgents in the name of the 'rule of law'. The Academy's curriculum is clearly short on illustrations of irony.

When Ethan reveals the truth to the people, Pilcher shows his true colours as a control freak and shuts down the fence, intending to start over with the next batch in storage. Ethan and Kate lead the population to safety and Ethan sacrifices his life to allow Kate, Theresa and Pam to build a better Wayward Pines, only for an epilogue to reveal that creepy, sociopathic youth has had its day as Ben awakens from a coma to find the town just as locked down as before, with added lynchings and a messianic statue of Pilcher; the kind of pleasant small town you hope will soon be eaten by the deformed cannibal descendants of humanity, because fuck those snotty little American Psycho wannabes.

Never trust anyone who wears a business suit on a spaceship.

In Dark Matter, it's time for a heist. Rescued by 'friendly' corporation Mikkei from a distinctly unfriendly flotilla, the crew of the Raza are encouraged to consider joining another crew for a vault job. Two doesn't trust the offer, but is overruled by the boys, because they're idiots. The heist primarily serves to establish Five as a full member of the team, rather than 'the kid', while the sudden but inevitable betrayal is used to expose Two's true nature as a largely indestructible superwoman. No, seriously; in addition to shrugging off the zombie plague and healing in hours, she can now add 'surviving in hard vacuum' to her achievements.

The poor Android, meanwhile, creates a holographic version of her default programme to monitor her for errors, and then gets ambushed and deactivated again, since she's basically too badass for the rest of the crew to be in peril if she's not out of it.

I'm not sure if Dark Matter would hold out for a second season, but it's been enjoyable enough. I am definitely looking forward to the finale of Dark Matter and a new season of Agent Carter, but honestly I couldn't care less if Wayward Pines got renewed. 

Agent Carter - 'SNAFU'

The plot thickens.

“I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me. Because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I am invisible.”

Handcuffed in the interrogation room, Peggy Carter is submitted to every approach at the SSR's disposal, to little avail. The men she has worked with think that they can get to her because they know her, but she knows them much better and she knows their methods.

“To you, I’m a stray kitten left on your doorstep to be protected. The secretary turned damsel in distress. The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore.”

Enter Jarvis, bearing Howard Stark's confession in return for Carter's freedom. It's not exactly flattering for her to be 'saved' by a false confession which paints her as "A patsy? A doe-eyed idiot who succumbed to the charms of America’s mustachioed Casanova?" but it turns out that it isn't even real; Stark is still unreachable, but Jarvis has finally decided that his loyalty to Carter outweighs that to his employer and the partnership that emerges from the deception and its later abandonment is stronger, richer, and quite utterly delightful.

Carter warns that Leviathan is coming, after spotting Ivchenko signalling in Morse across the street. Dooley is under Ivchenko's mesmeric sway, but Thompson and Sousa are persuaded to search the building opposite, finding 'Dottie' but failing to capture her. Dooley secures Carter and Jarvis and helps Ivchenko to steal 'Item 17', leaving Dooley strapped into a prototype armoured vest that was abandoned on account of its tendency to explode. Dooley gives his life for his people, after charging Carter with running down his killers, but Dottie and Ivchenko are already moving, deploy Item 17 to cause a theatre full of moviegoers to turn and slaughter one another.

Jarvis: “What if there are people behind this mirror we’re breaking?”
Peggy: “Then they may get hurt. There will be a spray of glass.”
Jarvis: “What if those hypothetical people behind the mirror have guns?”
Peggy: “Then we may get hurt. There will be a spray of bullets.”

The penultimate episode of Agent Carter is possibly the best yet. Charming, quirky, yet still powerful; the danger to Agent Sousa when he tried to take Dottie alive and the Chief's ultimate sacrifice were no hollow gestures. The gender politics achieved a new level of subtlety as well. Thompson is aware enough to still respect that Carter saved his life, and to warn Sousa of Dottie's likely capabilities, although he tellingly refers to the Leviathan proto-widows almost as animals, and the eyes of the SSR are slowly opening despite their ingrained prejudices.

Most importantly, however, Haley Atwell and James D'Arcy sparkle throughout the episode. It's almost impossible not to adore them, and they carry us through any wrinkles created by the necessarily swift approach to next week's resolution. Atwell also delivers the critical rebukes to Carter's colleagues without seeming strident, which takes some doing when addressing 70 year old gender politics, however little may have changed in real terms.

I ma both really looking forward to the finale, and a little misty eyed to see the series go. I can only dream that they will learn some lessons from the success of the series and bring some of its verve to the next season of Agents of SHIELD.

Agent Carter - 'A Sin to Err'

"Hiding on a window ledge outside a girl's bedroom. Is this what it feels like
to be Howard Stark?"

After her performance in Russia, Carter is finally getting what she's wanted all along, as Chief Dooley sends her out to chase down her own leads. This means hooking up with Jarvis again and chasing down Stark's old girlfriends, because Carter reasons that if Leviathan are training female sleeper agents then no-one is more likely to have got close to Stark than a dangerous woman. Meanwhile, said woman - Griffith Hotel resident and proto-Widow Dotty - makes contact with the supposedly unwilling Leviathan psychiatrist Ivchenko, who is revealed to be a master hypnotist intent on penetrating the SSR lab to steal... something.

"No... This is what it feels like to be Howard Stark."

Sousa uncovers Carter's deception, distracting them from the real threat as they go after her. She takes out a room full of agents from Washington, and Agent Thompson, but has to return to the Griffith for Steve's blood. Angie helps her evade the SSR, but Dotty surprises Carter with her stolen Sweet Dreams lippy and only the timely arrival of Thompson and Sousa saves Carter from a slit throat.

With two episodes to go, we close with Carter a prisoner and the SSR finally taking her seriously, because in the minds of men like Agent Thompson it makes sense that the only capable woman is a bad woman. A Nazi agent or Russian spy might be a lethal femme fatale, but not a 'real' American woman. Of course, Carter is British, and that probably doesn't help; where the other agents see strength in women it's brass and banter, but Carter is all steel and reserve, like a female post-war Benton Fraser. As an Agent, she makes the tea; as an enemy, she gets no slack, although they still can't bring themselves to see her as an actual equal.

While overall benefiting from the shorter run time, I'm in two minds about whether Agent Carter could have done with an extra episode of the SSR taking her seriously. Still, if it would have been better what we have isn't bad, and it will be interesting to see how they turn this around.

Agent Carter - 'The Blitzkrieg Button' and 'The Iron Ceiling'

Maybe it's the wallpaper that makes this look like a rehearsal shot from a
play.

A two-episode catchup today.

In 'The Blitzkreig Button', Howard Stark returns to New York and hides out in Peggy's room while romancing various of her neighbours. He tasks her with photographing those of his inventions in custody, and then retrieving the titular blitzkreig button, a device intended to black out a city in case of air raid, the effects of which are too widespread and irreversible. Despite his hopes, however, Peggy is not blinded by loyalty, and discovers that the 'button' is actually a container for a preserved vial of Steve Rogers' blood, provoking her to break with him, concealing the vial in the wall of her apartment.

In a subplot, a dodgy individual whom Howard paid to sneak him back into the country betrays him, leading to a cold open of Carter rescuing him from a ransom attempt. He pursues Carter and Stark with an unfeasible rotary machine pistol, but is killed by Carter's bubbly neighbour Dotty, who turns out to be a total kung fu badass.

Oh, hells yeah!

At the head of 'The Iron Ceiling', we learn that Dotty is the result of a Russian training programme to create ruthless sleeper agents; a sort of proto-Black Widow. Meanwhile, a message on the magic typewriter suggests that a Stark weapon is being handed over to Leviathan in Belarus. As Carter knows the codes, the language, the area and is able to set up an operation with the Howling Commandos, she gets a field assignment under Agent Thompson.

The op is, of course, a trap, but they retrieve a Stark blueprint and a psychiatrist kept prisoner by Leviathan to keep their captive physicist stable while he works on it. There is also a killer nine year old girl on the loose, which is creepy enough even without her kicking off y crying in a corner like the Witch from Left4Dead, and home truths to be revealed from the man of action Agent Thompson.

There's a particularly neat moment, when Carter is obliged to change in the men's locker rooms and Thompson tricks Souza into going around to her side of the lockers. After a moment of awkwardness, he catches sight of an old bullet wound on her shoulder which connects her to the disguised photos from the very first episode. I appreciate the arc continuity, as well as the continuing competence of the other SSR agents.

The other arc development involves the battle of Findhelm, in which a great many Russians were massacred by no-one knows who, and which seems to be linked to Stark and to Jarvis's past.

Agent Carter - 'Time and Tide'

Agent Carter: More interrogation scenes than your average police procedural.

The SSR follow up on the dropped hotel key (Man in Green's, not Carter's; my bad) and find the magic typewriter. They also learn that Leet Brannis was a Russian agent who died two years ago. Based on the license plate from Stark's car, they haul in Jarvis for questioning, leaning on him using a shady past including a charge of treason and a dishonourable discharge. While Carter is able to spring him, to do so she has to actively fluff the investigation, thus seriously damaging her hard-won credibility with her male fellow agents.

Peggy Carter may not be a great conspirator, but she excels at the rough stuff.

There is a bit more detective work and Carter and Jarvis track the remaining stolen weapons to a boat, but the focus of the episode is on Carter and the consequences of her off-the-books investigation on behalf of Stark. Unable to take the credit for her find, she has Jarvis call in an anonymous tip, but this leads to the death of an SSR agent when someone rubs out the only witness. As the witness was also able to finger Carter for her activities, we're left to ask: Who had the man killed? Was it Leviathan? Or was it Stark or Jarvis? The killer was thin enough to be Jarvis, but had a bit more swish in his - or was it her? - step. Regardless, it is clear that this is no longer doing a small favour for a friend, as the Agency determine that the boat and the tip were a trap set up to kill one of their own.

The message of the episode is that Carter may be an excellent agent, but she's a terrible spy. It's not that she can't keep a secret; just that she is fundamentally honest. She can lie to her enemies, but struggles with lying to her allies, even the ones who don't like her much. We see also that her relationship with her non-work friend Angie is threatened by her secrecy, and that despite her determination to keep clear of attachments, this hurts Carter. Again, she lacks the detachment of a true spy, a trait which, like her honesty, speaks of her true nature as a hero. Despite her desire to gain respect as an agent, she is willing to drop the credit and even to seem incompetent to protect a friend, and we can expect the strain of her double life to tell more than ever as the series progresses.

I think this is one of the greatest successes of the series so far; that the writers have steered clear of the common failing of equating 'strong female character' with a lack of flaws and weaknesses. Carter is physically capable, intelligent and quick witted, observant and a skilled actress, but she is also loyal to a fault and incapable of entirely switching off her emotions, then again without coming off as irrational. If anything, Jarvis's cool rationality in a crisis is eerie by comparison, and like so much else hints at an even patchier past than some forged letters of transit for his future wife.

Agent Carter - 'Bridge and Tunnel'

Before big screen TVs, people had to make their own entertainment.

Continuing the search for Howard Stark's 'bad babies', Peggy Carter tracks down the milk truck used to steal the molecular nitramene, at the same time continuing to assist her fellow agents with their investigations into Stark's assumed activities, including the destruction of Roxxon Oil's refinery.

On a more personal level, Carter is looking for a new place after the murder of her roommate. She is offered a luxurious apartment - one of Howard Stark's - by Jarvis and a room in a hotel for respectable single women by her waitress friend Angie, ultimately choosing the latter, although she is concerned that her work could get Angie - or indeed Jarvis - killed.

Tracing the nitramene and the man who stole it - named as Leet Brannis - Carter and Jarvis are attacked by the second scar-throated man on the orders of the mysterious 'Leviathan'. Brannis is killed and the nitramene destroyed, and the SSR retrieve the key to Stark's apartment and the license plate of his car from the two blast sites.

The miniseries format is working well for Agent Carter, maintaining the sort of tight focus that we saw in Daredevil, instead of the sagging filler episodes of Agents of SHIELD. Peggy Carter is delightfully badass, but also canny and adaptable, as seen when she swipes a lab coat from Stark's roleplaying wardrobe to masquerade as a health inspector and inspect the milk company's vehicles. The scar-throated assassin (aka the Man in Green, apparently*) is a truly sinister henchvillain, with his utter ruthlessness, his enforced silence and neat little cue cards, and his magic typewriter conveying orders from an unseen superior with a biblical name. Although as yet the SSR agents feel a little underutilised, with the exception of the big dumb one, they rise above the level of mere strawmen for the sexism of the era, which was their place in the short (which was okay, because it was a short and a short can stand some strawmen for shorthand in a way that wears in a series.)

* I'm colourblind, so I have to take that on trust

Agent Carter - 'Now is Not the End'

Sadly not yet.

Agent Carter was one of the best of the Marvel One-Shots which sadly no longer grace their BluRay releases, featuring Peggy Carter from Captain America kicking arse in retrosexist post-war America and then heading off to found SHIELD with Howard Stark. It had just enough Mad Men-esque period sexism to make you want to smack Bradley Whitford's smug SSR boss (seriously; outside of The West Wing has he ever played a character with any redeeming features?) and lashings of action; it was, in short, a joy.

Well, when it came to making a series to fill in the mid-season gap in Agents of SHIELD, they clearly didn't want to do SHIELD: The early years so much as they wanted more of what was in the One-Shot, and maybe getting Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper on a weekly basis was a touch costly, so Agent Carter the series, has a bit of a soft reset. Stark has been accused of selling weapons to the enemies of America and so SHIELD is presumably on hold, while Carter is back at the SSR being treated like a secretary, despite her obvious skills and the fierce independence represented by her red hat. She is rooming with a girl named Coleen whose work in the factories is similarly under threat from a returning male workforce who are preferred despite a lack of training or ability.

Because she goes against the flow, you see.

We open with Stark going on the run. Carter doesn't believe that he is a traitor, but when the SSR is tasked with bringing him in she knows she is the woman for the job. Her bosses, in particular action man Jack Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) and grumpy supervisor Roger Dooley (Shea Whigham) naturally disagree. She does have some support from crippled war hero Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokai), although Carter notes that if he stands up for her it makes her look like she needs him to. Stark is two steps ahead of the SSR, however, and not only eludes capture but also recruits Carter to secretly hunt down whoever stole and is now selling his 'bad babies', the inventions that turned out too deadly to ever be released. To help her, he leaves her with his butler, Jarvis (James d'Arcy), a very proper, very English man whose experience with espionage apparently extends to catching the petite cook stealing some spoons (although he and Stark may both be hiding things from Carter.)

Agent Nice-Guy, Senior Agent Douche, Chief Grumpy and
Agent Carter

The first baby is a horrifically explosive gas being sold via a nightclub owner and fence. Carter dons a blonde wig and sparkly dress and deploys knockout lipstick and a safe-cracking watch to acquire the formula before the SSR, only to find that the formula has already been weaponised. Adding a MacGuyver slant to her James Bond antics, she gathers several bottles of household chemicals to neutralise the explosive. In a nice touch, one of the bottles is bourbon, and that she reserves for after the delicate operation is complete.

Car, Stark, Carter and Jarvis.

That is the moment that she finds her flatmate murdered and is attacked by an unspeaking and apparently unstoppable man with a scarred throat, who walks away after she throws him out of a third storey window. After a pep talk from Jarvis, she consults with Stark Industries scientist Anton Vanko (c.f. Iron Man 2) and tracks the production of the explosives to a Roxxon Oil (because we don't have enough Easter Eggs yet) facility, where she clashes with another scar-throated man who speaks to her with a voice synthesiser, declaring that he and the man who attacked her are somehow at odds, before destroying the facility and escaping with a van full of the gas bombs.

'Now is Not the End' is a strong opener, showing a lot of the promise that Agents of SHIELD never delivered on. It's got conspiracy, triple identities and two factions of dudes without voice boxes, one of whom communicates with his bosses through a remote typewriter. It's like Alias (wigs and all) crossed with Fringe and a goodly dollop of old-fashioned pre-noir detective glitz. There is, in short, a lot to like, and I am at this stage (which is to say an entire series behind; thanks UK broadcasters) cautiously optimistic.