The second half of the season opener for Agent Carter is “A View In The Dark.” While they solved the murder in the first episode, they ended up with a lot more unanswered questions. Chadwick and Frost are clearly up to something or other, and the weird black floating stuff they showed last time is definitely SSR territory.
Agent Carter returns for a second season of post-World War II adventure as a fill-in while Agents of SHIELD is on break. As in the real world, now that the Nazis (and in their case, Hydra) has been defeated, the enemy is Communist Russia. Or at least, that’s the big one they’re talking about. There’s more going on behind the scenes.
Celebrating 50 years of SHIELD, Marvel’s premier spy organization, they have released a series of one shot specials. The two before this were about Quake (Daisy/Skye on the Agents of SHIELD tv show), and Mockingbird/Barbara Morse. This one features Peggy Carter. Like most of the SHIELD-related comics over the last year or so, this tries to straddle the line between fitting the comics continuity but also not contradicting the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s an old saying about if you chase rabbits, you will catch neither.
This seems like a good time to take stock in the various hero shows out there. Agent Carter finished her initial season with no real word on if the show will be back, ditto for Constantine. Flash is on another of those odd few week breaks with no explanation as is Arrow. Gotham is still driving ahead, and there are rumors of new projects all over.
Agent Carter finishes her limited series with “Valediction.” The show started with another episode of the Captain America radio show they’ve been using to either contrast Peggy’s life or as commentary on the times. This one seemed to be a dramatization of the mission where Cap crashed, which made a bit of the episode more poignant.
Agent Carter’s miniseries is almost over, and “SNAFU” raised the stakes a lot. It was a very tense, well-written episode, and managed to rise above many of the problems I’ve been having with the series. It was also a brutal episode on a few fronts.
“A Sin To Err,” is the title of the latest Agent Carter episode, as the series builds towards its finale. The Stark plot seems to have been mostly dropped by the writers, and even the cast, barring obsessive agent Jack Thompson. Now, the focus is on Leviathan, the mysterious organization that is lurking behind the scenes in Russia.
I do give them credit for some clever titles on Agent Carter. “The Iron Ceiling” as an episode manages to both give a fair amount of background on Dottie, Carter’s new neighbor, and tie in to Black Widow’s past. The title itself is a play on the infamous Iron Curtain, as well as the glass ceiling that, to this day, plagues so many women. There are a lot of interesting surprises here, and they finally let Peggy get some credit at the SSR, which is a nice change.
Peggy Carter really does seem to be attacked from all directions in “The Blitzkrieg Button.” Leviathan is still out there somewhere, plotting. Howard Stark is back, and he has some questionable motives. And, due in part to how Howard came back, a smuggler called Mr. Mink is after Peggy and Jarvis, with a very odd weapon. It looks something like a Gatling pistol to me. And, of course, she’s still getting clubbed over the head by the “Men are awesome, women are worthless” theme of the show, over and over and over, but more on that later.
Agent Carter’s miniseries continues with “Time and Tide.” Like in the first few episodes, they manage a nice blend of humor, action, and period appropriate references and scenery. I like the research they did and the feeling that this is, indeed, very early in the Cinematic Marvel Universe. There were fewer references to the other Marvel projects (I can only think of one, if you don’t count Howard Stark himself), but I think that worked quite nicely.
