Bam Smack Pow
Fansided

Marvel’s Agent Carter Review – “The Blitzkrieg Button”

By Christina Roberts

facebooktwitterreddit

Welcome to this week’s episode of Marvel’s Agent Carter! Howard Stark returns! Plus lots of exposition and heartfelt speeches! The show was off last week due to the State of the Union address, and man did I miss it. Let’s dive in!

Not-So-Short Summary: Jarvis hand-delivers money to smugglers–and not smugglers of Pirate Cove. Carter shows up to save the day–the package these men delivered under the heading of Mr. Mink is Howard Stark, back in town to take care of some business. On the way to one of Stark’s hidden apartments, Agent Carter spots SSR agents. We get more smuggling when she puts him in the dumbwaiter, and a relatively funny bit when the over-the-top landlady believes she’s bringing in men. Plus Stark mysteriously disappears into the neighboring apartment. Womanizer, indeed.

At the SSR, Chief Dooley’s still working the case. He discovers a Nazi leader who could have connections to the Russian hit-men from Leviathan. Unfortunately, the colonel is being executed in Germany in two days. In his absence, he puts Thompson in charge, who wants all the men working around the clock until they find some proper leads and start busting heads.

Peggy goes into the lab where they are testing Stark’s inventions to take pictures of what they have with his camera pen. Howard needs to know what they have to figure out what’s still missing–or so he says.

In the meantime, Sousa heads off to test for fingerprints on the public phone and asks local bums if they saw anything. He ends up arresting one of them who refuses to cooperate and is “obviously” hiding what he saw. Sousa gives a heartfelt speech about how, upon his return, he was applauded by the public when he entered a diner, but it wasn’t because he was in his dress uniform–it was his crutch.

Nothing wins the hobo over, until Thompson comes in with a bottle of scotch and a burger. The hobo finally spills all and describes Jarvis and Peggy, but nothing more. He wasn’t close enough to get anything but a vague description of them.

In the communal dining hall back at Peggy’s apartment, she steals food and heads back to her room where Howard tells her he needs to steal an invention back–the Blitzkrieg Button, which blows electrical grids, and he’s the only one who knows how to turn it off. He made a fake of it, which Peggy slips into place easily.

But Jarvis was cagey in the car on the way there, telling her there’s only one button on it, rubbing his ear, and so she knows he’s lying. She pushes the only button to open the ball only to find a vial. A vial of what?

“Steve Rogers’ blood,” Howard mutters in her apartment, leading to a punch in the face from Agent Carter (rightly so!).

What follows is a heart-to-heart showdown between Peggy and Howard. Howard’s natural instinct is to lie and cover his butt because he came from nothing and sometimes you have to take the low road to climb the corporate ladder. Peggy has none of it. It’s another slight at her coming from someone she believed was a friend. It belittles everything she has worked for during and since the war. It belittles her, and she already has enough of that from people who don’t respect her. Coming from someone who does, well, that hurts a little too much.

We don’t get a full apology from Jarvis the next day–Stark is on his way to Rio, so it was a nice little guest stint for another episode–but I don’t anticipate Agent Carter’s animosity toward him lasting more than half of the next episode.

What we do get is Mr. Mink attempting to hunt down Agent Carter and Howard Stark, only to be killed by Dorothy “Dottie” Underwood in one of the only action scenes of this episode. Ballerina indeed–she leaps off the walls to break his neck because she wants his automatic gun.

And the vintage AIM machine has started to transmit something.

Badass Moment of the Week: Dottie being an impromptu hall monitor and taking down Mr. Mink. Natasha Romanoff the First, anyone? (But seriously, I have a whole speculative post over here from a few weeks back. Any guesses/theories as to who she really is are always welcome in the comments!)

Best One-Liner: “Hey…” Stan Lee utters to a perturbed Howard Stark. “Could I borrow the sports section?” Of course you can, Stan Lee. You can have whatever you want.

The kick-ass-ness is to a minimum in this episode; this outing was definitely more exposition, more setting up for the back half of this mini-season, and the emotional points almost every character gets to hit. We get Sousa grappling with his place in the world since the war, his injury painting him as a hero and making people feel guilty about it.

We get Howard Stark, giving great exposition about how he was raised, how he came from nothing, and how he got here, so he know how it feels to struggle and he never wants that again. And we get Peggy Carter, throwing it all back in his face for trying to blacken Steve Rogers’ name for his own personal gain.

But that isn’t it for Peggy. Before this scene with Howard, she happens to run into Thompson at the SSR HQ where he tells her how it is: No men will ever see her as an equal because she is a woman. No matter what she does. It’s the truth and it stings. You can almost see Peggy filing away this information for later because at that point in time, she is still grappling with what is in the vial in her purse. Because you know she knows it’s Steve’s blood.

I didn’t mention much about Dooley’s trip to Germany because it didn’t do much except set up information Thompson discovered in Dooley’s absence. That mysterious battle where all our Russian Leviathan agents “died”? Apparently there was no battle–the Russians were already massacred. And Howard Stark arrived on a plane the day after the “battle.”

If you missed the twenty-second teaser for the back-half of this Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD season, it didn’t show much. But what it did show was our SHIELD gang not quite sure what to do with Skye, who looks completely unhinged.

Next week we get the return of the Howling Commandos. The preview makes it look like we’re about to get into something that could have been cut from Captain America: The First Avenger. Hey, how long do I have to wait until I get a Chris Evans cameo that isn’t just stock footage? I want a flashback with him that we’ve never seen before! I may be waiting for a while…

More from Bam Smack Pow

Home/TV