Marvel’s Agent Carter Recap – “Smoke And Mirrors”

On a very rainy February evening (that’s very weird for Michigan), what did Marvel’s Agent Carter bring us? Action, punching, action, punching, and malaria. Onward!

Not-So-Short Summary: “I’m a genius. Whitney Frost…she defies categorization,” utters Wilkes as he and Peggy brainstorm about Agnes Culley.

Agent Carter and Jarvis are on the hunt for Whitney Frost, who’s been a no-show on set since the director “disappeared.” In stalking her husband’s  campaign, they come to the realization that Peggy’s attacker from the other night is Chadwick’s driver and head of security at the Arena Club. Who knows what he’s heard!

Jarvis bangs on Hunt’s door and pretends to be the police, with hilarious results, while Hunt runs out the back door, directly into Agent Carter’s waiting tranquilizer shot. Of course, the dosage for a rhino doesn’t quite do it; it takes another shot and a conk on the head to knock him out.

In arriving back at her quarters, Peggy finds Sousa waiting for her, but she’s unable to brush him off before Hunt starts yelling from the trunk. By the way, “stashed in the boot” is the most British thing I’ve heard so far in 2016. Sousa isn’t a fan of how Peggy’s running things behind his back, so he offers to help.

Hunt refuses to give Sousa any information, so Agent Carter injects him with malaria… which is actually a shot that brings on an intense cold in minutes, courtesy of Stark Industries. Now that would be torture. He cracks in the final minutes, throwing out a few names, including someone at Roxxon. The people he works for are in everything, and if they can’t buy it, they destroy it. And that includes President William McKinley. They call themselves the Council of Nine.

The SSR is going to raid the Arena Club as soon as they get the warrant. Vernon Masters, War Department, shows up to derail them with a Federal order to basically check their work on all of their cases.

In Vernon and Peggy’s faceoff, she indulges a little too much until Vernon starts asking about the name of her and Sousa’s source, wanting to interrogate him personally. Instead, she plants a bug on Hunt and let’s him go, where he runs immediately to Whitney Frost’s hideout.

When Chadwick arrives home, everyone gets to talking, and that’s when Whitney Frost cleans up another one of his mistakes using her zero matter powers. The SSR listens in, unaware of what exactly she did since their feed goes out with Hunt’s demise.

By the time this episode closes, the zero matter scar runs down to the bottom of her cheek.

Badass Moment of the Week: The amount of tranquilizer it took to take down Hunt. Plus that bash to the face with the butt of the gun.

Best One Liner: “Jarvellous!” Jarvis exclaims just before he passes out from the tranquilizer.

This episodes gives us a heavy dose of backstory for both Agent Carter and Whitney Frost. We see Peggy as a young child, roughhousing with her brother, Michael, while Whitney has a darker childhood, her gifts squandered and ignored by her mother. She vows to escape her house as a teenager, and only does so once she moves to Hollywood and a talent agent picks her up on the sidewalk outside of a movie show.

On the Peggy side of things, she gets engaged right before she receives a proposal from the SOE to be a field agent helping the war efforts. As it turns out, her brother  recommended her for the SOE job that her fiancee says she turned down because Peggy doesn’t belong in the field. We make it all the way to a dress fitting before news of her brother’s death reaches home. That’s when she trades in her engagement ring for the SOE letter.

I didn’t make any mention of Whitney Frost’s experiments with the rats, because it didn’t seem to have much weight to it. It seemed fairly obvious that she would figure out what triggers it after the first rat didn’t disappear.

Jason Wilkes is still sidelined as a corporeal spirit or whatever, but now the zero matter is calling to him. They need to find a cure sooner rather than later, because this “being stuck in Stark’s lab” is really hindering his character.

Next week looks like it ramps up the super villain action with Whitney Frost going full-out. All she needs now is a mask!