Marvel’s Agent Carter Review – “Bridge And Tunnel”
In the second hour of Marvel’s Agent Carter premiere, we delve a little deeper into how far Agent Carter will have to go to clear Howard Stark’s name.
(For the pilot episode’s review, “Now Is Not The End,” click here.)
Not-So-Short Summary: It’s the Captain America Adventure Program! It’s cheesY, corny, all sorts of wonderful, and ticks off Agent Carter to no end. If you’ve never listened to a radio show from the 1940s, just know that this is very similar to how they sounded (maybe a bit more exaggerated just to show Peggy’s frustrations with it).
Jarvis shows Agent Carter one of Howard’s houses where she can stay since she is now without an apartment. Our mysterious baddie gets another AIM message about Leviathan getting impatient. The mysterious man needs to get the Nitramine back (the Nitramine is what they weaponized from Stark’s formula).
She has a vita-ray detector to help in her search for the milk truck full of the orbs. Agent Carter dresses as a health inspector to search the milk company’s premises and I honestly didn’t even recognize her in the getup. A truck is missing.
As Peggy tries to slip out of work to take care of some “personal matters,” Sousa gets the pictures from the photographer who was at La Martinique, but gets sidelined by other matters. He stuffs it in a locked drawer and Peggy doesn’t have a chance to break in and steal them. Her attempts, however, are very slapstick and while they are hilarious, they are just a bit out of character for a woman who just seamlessly passed as a health inspector scenes before.
The SSR is looking at the remains of the Roxxon Oil refinery, trying to figure out the bigger picture. Dooley thinks Stark did it. They head over to Roxxon to see if they can’t piece together why Stark would have done it. James claims his wife came between them, and that’s why Stark would try to destroy him.
They drag Peggy down to Roxxon Oil to use the vita-ray to test all the Roxxon employees for vita-radiation residuals. She gets rid of her wristwatch, which sets off the vita-ray, and while they are scanning employees, she recognizes the man she temporarily blinded the night before at the refinery. He takes off and Agent Carter helps take him down.
Dooley tries to cut Brannis a deal, but he doesn’t bite. They do, however, get the milk truck driver’s location, which is where Peggy is headed with Jarvis, so everyone is going to the same place! The milk truck is there, still full of the glowing orbs, and there’s a fun scene where her fighting with McPhee coincides with the fighting within the Captain America radio show. It’s a clever parallel, showing slabs of meat getting punched as Peggy socks McPhee in the gut/face/arms/legs.
Jarvis assists Agent Carter in taking down Leet Brannis and returning the truck to the SSR. The unnamed baddie with the AIM machine hops onto the roof and there’s a fun fight scene on the moving milk truck between him and Peggy. She nails him to the roof with a knife through his hand, and Agent Carter, Jarvis, and Brannis all escape and send the truck reeling off a cliff and into a river, exploding. Brannis dies before they can get much information from him–all he does is draw a heart with a squiggly line through it. Any guesses?
The SSR guys find the wreckage, ticked that someone is always a step ahead of them. They find a woman’s footprints and assume it’s the blonde from the club.
Back in the hotel room, Jarvis stitches up Peggy’s and they have a heart-to-heart with mentions of Steve that make my heart warm. “From what Mr. Stark told me, Captain Rogers relied heavily on you,” he muses when Peggy tries to brush off how much she accomplished in World War II and how much she relied on Steve.
Badass Moment of the Week: Peggy, taking a guy out with a briefcase. Or their fight on top of the truck. Just know it will probably always be Peggy beating someone up
Best One-Liner: “Oh no, Nazis! Again!” Nothing like running an idea into the ground, 1940s radio!
Leviathan is a what, not a who. No surprises there, since Marvel loves their evil organizations.
In case anyone is keeping track, the photographs from the club have no good angles of the “mysterious blonde,” so that’s a dead-end, but Krzeminski (Kyle Bornheimer, who was most recently Teddy on Brooklyn Nine-Nine) finds the license plate from Jarvis’s bumper, which could lead them back to Peggy.
Angie, our waitress friend, keeps trying to get Peggy to move in next door to her, but she doesn’t bite. I assume it’s because she doesn’t want Angie to get hurt since her heart-to-heart with Jarvis touches on how everyone close to her gets killed. By the end of the episode, Peggy ends up moving into the women’s apartment complex next door to Angie.
Can someone tell me if the unnamed baddie with the AIM machine actually has a name? I know when Agent Carter was asking Brannis, he said he doesn’t have a name anymore, but I may have missed it if it was mentioned.
And of course, there’s the premiere of the Ant-Man teaser trailer at the end of the episode. You can read Nick’s take on it and watch it over here. I still don’t know what to make of it, but that’s not a bad thing because I felt the same about Guardians of the Galaxy.
Jarvis is quickly becoming one of the best characters on this show, and it’s only been two episodes. He has shown his willingness to get his hands dirty as well as interrupting his own personal life to aid Peggy by any means necessary. I only hope that we get more Howard Stark in upcoming episodes.
Marvel’s Agent Carter is on Tuesdays at 8pm. With only seven weeks’ worth of shows, it’s going to fly by before we know it. I’ll see you all back here next Wednesday!