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Marvel’s Agent Carter Recap – “Valediction”

By Christina Roberts

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It’s the season finale of Marvel’s Agent Carter! With so much explosive action last week, how did they manage to wrap it all up in a neat, little, 43-minute package? Come with me!

Not-So-Short Summary:  Thompson, Sousa, and Carter head to the movie theater to investigate what happened. Peggy deduces they killed each other upon seeing a body with a large clump of women’s hair in its clenched fist. Sousa finds Item 17 inside, gets a spray in the face of the stuff, and immediately starts punching everything and everyone. When he’s calmed down and woken back up, he tells Agent Carter he remembers nothing after the gas hit, only that he wanted to kill everyone. He also apologizes for hitting her (but not Thompson).

The SSR comes to find out that the Doc has ten canisters to terrorize the city, but what is he trying to do? Enter Howard Stark, swaggering in like he’s a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, to tell everyone that Doc is targeting him. Of course, Thompson and Sousa hear no word of it because they’re still fixated on Stark being guilty. The scene of them badgering him with angered questions and him just rolling his eyes made me chuckle.

The gas is called Midnight Oil. The US Army wanted Stark to create something to keep soldiers awake for days at a time. However, his prototypes did nothing of the sort, instead causing psychosis, delirium, and in extreme cases, asphyxiation (hence the Leviathan agents with no voice boxes). The Army took Howard’s test samples and deployed it without his knowledge: hence, the Battle of Finow. Doc wants revenge on him for the bloodbath his invention created, so Howard offers to be bait.

Agent Carter, meanwhile, tries to suit up Howard to be able to take a bullet while he gives a public press conference, but he wants his own tech to protect him. She leads him to their labs where he immediately freaks out with how they’re treating his stuff. The bickering between Howard and Peggy fits their relationship, but it’s only when Howard confesses that he cares what Peggy thinks of him does it really hit home. He knows everything is his fault and he needs to fix it.

And then he steals Steve Rogers’ blood on the way out.

The press conference is in full swing with SSR agents everywhere and Howard making Thompson squirm with what Thompson has to say about Stark. Shots are fired from a hotel window, and when Peggy goes to investigate, they find it was rigged to go off on its own and create a diversion. In an attempt to get Howard to safety, Jarvis shoves him into a police car driven by Leviathan agents.

In the aftermath, Agent Carter and Thompson brainstorm what Doc and Dottie would want to do. They realize it’s VE Day and Leviathan is most likely targeting Times Square, already full of over 100,000 people. Jarvis knows where they’re taking Howard: His other vault. The one with airplanes.

Flash over to Stark at Dottie’s mercy, tied to a chair, while he tries to remember what her name was when they spent an evening together. There’s a flashback to that particular evening, and it’s patented Stark schmoozing on a pretty woman. And the fact that Howard can’t remember her name until five minutes to go in the episode cracked me up.

Doc (Ivchenko/Fenhoff/Faustus, whichever you prefer!) explains to Howard that he saw Midnight Oil in action and only survived because of the gas mask he wore. He watched his brother descend into madness and get decimated. Howard attempts to apologize–he sounds pretty sincere, too–but Doc will have none of it. He wants to make Howard suffer and takes his mind to the moment he most regrets.

He is mentally sent to a wintery tundra (which may or may not be Michigan right now, but I digress) and believes that they have found Steve Rogers and the crashed Hydra plane. In the actual world, Agent Carter and company show up just as Howard flies off the runway. With Jarvis the only one of them who knows how to fly a plane, he’s in charge of shooting down his boss if Peggy can’t talk him down once she fights her way to the radio.

Agent Carter finds Doc and Dottie, and the ensuing Black Widow/Peggy Carter fight ensues. It goes…rather poorly for Peggy; she gets her butt handed to her (and rightly so because Dottie is literally a tool designed for combat), until she kicks Dottie out the window and onto a plane several stories below.

As Agent Carter tries to talk Howard down, Thompson and Sousa try to hunt down Doc. Thompson gets knocked out by him, and Sousa lets Doc talk despite Thompson’s warnings thirty seconds before. Even as I screamed at my television for Sousa to shoot and not make the same mistake twice, he clocks Doc with his gun and pulls out the earplugs he had in. Touché, Sousa…

Agent Carter tries to talk Howard down, but he still sees himself somewhere over Greenland (or wherever Cap crash-landed, I don’t know if they ever say). It’s only when she focuses on Cap himself and how good a person he was even before Project Rebirth that Howard snaps out of it. As Howard returns to his vault, Peggy realizes Dottie isn’t dead and has taken off.

The next day when Peggy arrives at the SSR for her paycheck (since she was technically fired), her cowards greet her with a standing ovation. And then Agent Thompson takes credit for all her work, which ticks off Sousa to no end, but Peggy calms him by saying, “I don’t need a congressional honor. I don’t need Agent Thompson’s approval or the President’s. I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter.” That’s what Hayley Atwell brings to Peggy Carter: a brusque confidence that won’t let her get bogged down by the world that still has to catch up to her.

Howard Stark has offered Peggy and Angie one of his penthouses until they can find a better place to stay. When Angie runs off to see a telephone in every room, Jarvis tells Agent Carter that should she ever need backup for another mission, he will help her in a heartbeat. And then he gives her Steve’s blood, unbeknownst to Howard, because she’s the only one who knows what to do with it.

As “The Way You Look Tonight” plays, we watch Peggy uncork the vial of Steve’s blood and pour it into the river, giving her one last goodbye.

Marvel seems committed to making a second season with that final scene before the credits. We see Doc being put in jail with his jaw wired shut. We get to meet his cellmate, and I’m not going to lie, I started cackling because for once, I guessed something right! In last week’s “Brainstorm Session,” I mused about the “Marvel Easter Egg” that James D’Arcy teased, and Zola was my first guess! There’s a grandiose speech by Zola, which he ends by saying they are in an American prison, and America is the land of opportunity.

And that’s the end of Agent Carter, season one!

Badass Moment of the Week: Sousa having earplugs in when Doc is talking to him. I didn’t expect it at all–I just assumed he was going to fall for Doc’s hypnosis.

Best One-Liner: “And now do you feel now?” Agent Carter asks after Sousa explains the feeling of the gas.
“I still want to kill Thompson, but no more than usual,” Sousa answers.

Did anyone else love the throwback to the Captain America Adventure Program? I know I did. Please keep that around for the potential second season.

As soon as Agent Carter said she would radio Howard to talk him down, I knew there would be parallels between that scene and the final scene of Captain America: The First Avenger. Both scenes are heartbreaking, and this one hurts in an entirely different way when we hear Howard say that Project Rebirth was the one thing he’s done that brought good into this world, and he screwed that up, too. Howard and Peggy work well bouncing off each other, and I’d love to see them continue their relationship, especially whenever Howard settles down and marries Mrs. Stark, whenever that is.

Part of me was kind of let down by the last half of this episode with Howard under Doc’s control. Why? It came across as very anticlimactic because we know Howard can’t die. He hasn’t had Tony yet, and we have proof that Tony had his father until he was at least nine years old, so it’s not like they could just write Tony into it as the product of some one-night stand with a random woman. Normally, something like this wouldn’t bother me, and in retrospect, when I watch this episode again, I may enjoy it more. I want to blame the series finale for Parks and Recreation not airing until 10pm, so I was trying to mentally prepare myself for that. Confession: I cried at the end of both Agent Carter and Parks and Rec.

Does Dottie terrify anyone else? How she can go from over-the-top friendly, clueless woman to blank-faced killer in a split second gives me goosebumps. If I ever manage to travel back in time to 1946, I wouldn’t want to run into her down some dark alley.

If you’re like me, and I know I am, and you’ve enjoyed every second of this miniseries, be sure to tweet with #RenewAgentCarter on Twitter. I’ll be writing a bit of something later in the week as to why we should get a second season. I’d love to see how the SSR runs under Thompson now that he has more respect for Agent Carter. Or even jump forward to the 1950s when Carter’s more into a position of power or about to jump off and form SHIELD. Just as long as Jarvis is still involved in some regard.

The possibilities are endless and the fact that Hayley Atwell is constantly popping up in other Marvel endeavors as Agent Carter has me hopeful that perhaps we will get the same format next year: Agent Carter when Agents of SHIELD takes its winter break. I’m all for it, are you?

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