“A Sin to Err”
Directed by Stephen Williams
Written by Lindsey Allen
I thought last week’s episode really turned the corner and turned it from a good show with a good character, to a fantastic show with a bunch of interesting characters. I’m glad they were able to open things up before the end of the season, and I am looking forward to these last few episodes.
Another solid episode in my book. Is the Russian psychiatrist “somebody” in the Marvel Universe, or just a character for this series? What about Dottie?–she’s from the same or a similar program as the one that produced Black Widow, but I don’t recognize her from other comics.
Things are coming to a head! How many more episodes do we have left?
Also, I noticed something yesterday that bugged me. Peggy keeps meeting Jarvis clandestinedly in that diner where they don’t talk to each other directly and pretend to be strangers. But they go off on adventurers together, they go places and see Stark together. Why not just go over to Jarvis’s place when Peggy needs to talk instead of meeting in a diner that apparently one of her friends works in? After a couple times, she’d pick up that Peggy keeps sitting next to this one guy and mumbling
I’ve seen the Agent Carter one-shot, but that was several months ago and I don’t have access to it now. Were any of her fellow agents in this ongoing series also in the one-shot?
With 2 episodes to go, this story needs to wrap up fast, and I’m curious if they’ll bother to explain why the office in this series and the office in the one-shot are staffed by completely different people. Or if they’ll even acknowledge it at all. If it’s the case, of course.
I found myself hoping that
the agent the Russian ended up hypnotizing would turn out to be an agent of Hydra. He still may have been, despite what happened to him, but I’m guessing he was just weak-willed and particularly susceptible instead.
I was also thinking the chief may have been letting the Russian hang himself with his own rope during their discussion in his office, but apparently there’s only one agent (on the side of the good ol’ U.S.A.) in this series that can run a game on other people like that. And he’s a she.
I’m the late man on this - I watch the comic book shows on Hulu where they mostly come out a week late (free version, anyway).
The only thing with this show is that Peggy is almost the weakest character. She’s so much of a Badass that she ends up looking rather less human than anyone else. She basically doesn’t have any flaws. Not only is she a Strong Independent Woman, she’s also caring and nurturing while also being smarter than anyone and everyone around her.
Don’t get me wrong. I like her as a protagonist and the show is a lot of fun. It’s just that it comes off like somebody tried to put together a police drama that had Sherlock Holmes, Master of Kung Fu as the star.
Aside from basic details the one shot and the series do not reconcile so far. The SSR office has a completely different set of agents and there does not seem to be any suggestion that Peggy just solved a big mystery/saved the world/got off easy on a treason charge.
The one shot is set after Agent Carter and shows the SSR becoming SHIELD under Peggy’s leadership. In the series she’s made progress with her fellow agents but I wonder if they’re all going to be killed off and the new set just wants her to go back to fetching coffee. The SSR office in the one shot is quite a bit different as well:
True, but there are only three “face” agents left in the series, and there was only one in the One-Shot - her boss, Agent Flynn. It’s conceivable that Sousa, Thompson and Dooley are each promoted or killed at the end of the series, and everything is swept under the rug so Carter is left absolved of any wrongdoing but getting none of the credit, and a new boss who knows nothing of what happened is assigned to the office. All the other agents in the series & One-Shot are pretty interchangeable. I’m willing to let the physical layout of the office slide - what worked for 4 minutes of screen time in the one-shot wouldn’t necessarily have worked for an eight episode series.
Spoilered, because the ending of the one shot sort of gives away some of the ending of the series:
When Howard Stark calls Agent Flynn, Flynn treats him with deference and respect, and follows his orders immediately, regardless of how humiliating they are. It’s clear that Stark is back in the SSR’s good graces, and has possibly been assigned as the new civilian head of the SSR at that point.
The only thing with this show is that Peggy is almost the weakest character. She’s so much of a Badass that she ends up looking rather less human than anyone else. She basically doesn’t have any flaws. Not only is she a Strong Independent Woman, she’s also caring and nurturing while also being smarter than anyone and everyone around her.
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That was my complaint with the series as well. This last episode (and the one before that) have rectified that. Agent Carter is prone to misjudgment and errors and her co workers are smarter than what we might have expected.
Aside from Agent Johnson waiting in the alley for her with his gun drawn, smugly revealing that he knew she’d be hard to capture…before wandering close enough to her to get his ass kicked as well.
After Carter escapes, Agent TreeHill asks Agent Souza* is he “knew about this.” Which implies that Souza isn’t the one who put out the arrest order on Carter.
So who did? And why?
Am I the only one who spent the first two or three episodes thinking they were calling him “Susan” as an insult to his manhood?
Sousa told Dooley, the head of the office, everything he had figured out about Carter. Dooley then put out the arrest order, presumably without telling everyone exactly who discovered Carter was a double agent. So Thompson didn’t know that Sousa had been working on it.
And yes, I did hear “Susan” the first few times they said his name too. I thought it was pretty cold to call a guy who lost a leg in the war that.
ETA: I’m presuming that’s why Sousa wanted to talk to Dooley, and told him it couldn’t wait, interrupting the ring hypnosis treatment. Sousa waited until he had incontrovertible proof - the identification by the New Jersey guy from the second episode - before accusing another agent of treason.
Though it would have been nice for Sousa to bring pictures of a few different women to show the prisoner. Nothing like saying “Hey, I’ll get you a shorter sentence if you cooperate - is THIS the woman who beat you up?” to get a false ID.
After the season of her being pretty much perfect in every way, I was happy to see her missteps (meeting Jarvis CONSTANTLY at the automat, choosing the Griffith to live in, leaving the goods in her wall behind a painting (although I’m a little miffed that Dottie didn’t find that - basic spycraft fail there) it all came together delightfully to bite her in the ass this episode.
I laughed when they asked Sousa to “not take it easy on her” because he is constitutionally incapable of being rough on anyone. He’s such a cute little puppy in this show. Thompson on the other hand is likely to shit bricks, since he was just starting to unthaw towards her, and now she’s a traitor, AND she knocked him out.
I was telling a friend that Thompson is an interesting counterpart to Ward from SHIELD - both of them are assholes, but one went from being the “good” asshole companion to a heel-turn, and Thompson is slowly (SO SLOWLY) gaining sympathy and becoming a person behind a well-tuned asshole field. Interesting contrast.
I was really hoping that Vanko’s dad would pop up in Russia - that would have been awesome. Instead we get some creepy mesmerist who is putting a nice crimp in the well-oiled and thus-far capable department.
I was also hoping for a bit more time in the Red Room, but the creepy girls did not disappoint. Want so much more of that please and thank you. The enduring cuffs was an amazingly creepy little grace-note, as was the chanting along to Snow White.
I wonder why Dottie had a sniper rifle. If all she needed was the scope (with light-flashing thingy attached to the rifle), why didn’t she just use binoculars? Or was she going to take someone out as part of her plans, if things were maybe going south with the Russian psychiatrist? If so, who? The Russian or the SSR chief?
Oh, and it’s of course obvious that Leviathan knows where (this regional office of) SSR is located. What else do they know, and how did they get that info?
The flashbacks showed the young girls being ‘programmed’ to be cold and ruthless. One girl won her sparring match with another and clearly knew that the instructor’s nod meant ‘kill her.’ I’d hate to be in that P.E. class! During the Avengers movie, Black Widow said a few vague lines about the bad things she did in her past, such that, in the context of the scenes we’ve seen here, makes me believe she was raised/trained in just the same way. Somewhere along the way, she ‘woke up’ from the brainwashing, which likely led to her defecting to SHIELD. Which begs the question, how many more like Romanov (although not as good, certainly) are still out there (assuming that training program closed down at the end of the Cold War)?
The main agent guy, the blond one who froze in the field last week. Played by some actor with three names who was on One Tree Hill.
That works out — it’s what I thought, too — except for the fact that when Souza was asked “Did you know about this,” his response was “Of course not!”
I suspect that we are, in fact, correct, and the exchange in the alley referred to something else, which we forgot or is on the cutting room floor, or was just a screw-up by the writer(s).
