Agent Carter: Life of The Party + Monsters Recap

Synopsis : Peggy turns to an old enemy for help saving Jason’s life, while Whitney makes a daring move. Jarvis and Sousa learn the consequences of their entanglements with Peggy.

Rating:?????

Agent Carter has, since it’s pilot, gotten consistently better with every episode. I adored season 1, but season 2 is blowing it right out of the water. The running storyline, the incorporation of old storylines, the new characters, the writing, and the whole aesthetic are top notch.

This week gave us another 2-hour event, with yet another planned for next week. Given the show’s setup as more of a long adventure movie than an episodic procedural (can I get an ‘Amen’?), this is a method that comes off well – the show gives itself a casual pacing in terms of revealing information, but also gives enough action in one go that you don’t feel your time is wasted.

A LOT happened in this double episode block, but it didn’t feel like a hodgepodge whirlwind of gags and gimmicks by any stretch of the imagination.

Frustrated by his intangibility and scared his condition is worsening, Jason confesses to Peggy that he’s losing his grip on reality, and something more needs to be done. They come up with a plan to build a containment unit for him, just like the one he designed for the Zero Matter originally. If, like before, they can obtain enough Zero Matter to make him tangible just for a minute, the containment unit should be able to hold him like that, keeping him from slipping into nothingness until a more permanent solution can be found.

The problem is, the only remaining Zero Matter in the world is inside of Whitney Frost. They discover she’s going to be at a fancy political fundraiser the following night but, as Sousa points out, Peggy is the only one among them who can quietly blend into the high society glamour, has the skills to take a surreptitious blood sample, and the training to throw down if it comes to it- only Whitney already knows her, and Peggy’s still barely upright from her injury.

Out of options, Peggy busts OG Black Widow Dottie Underwood out of prison. Under threat of a poisoned Tiffany diamond choker (aesthetic goals much?), Dottie is sent into the party with a high-tech device to take a sample of Whitney’s blood. She does, but in her escape, she gets trapped in a room with the Arena Club and, unbeknownst to Peggy and Sousa, witnesses Whitney’s hostile takeover.

Whitney nervously and excitedly reveals her powers to the council, expecting them to be thrilled at having a fascinating new resource at their disposal. Instead it seems, Chadwick has already informed them of her powers, and upon seeing that he did not exaggerate, they try to have her locked up. She’s genuinely hurt and scared – for about a minute.

Before they can even get her out the door, she uses her powers to kill almost all of them – including her husband, and then, calm as you please, informs the surviving members that it’s her club now. They nod meekly. Horrifying? Maybe a little. Completely awesome? Definitely.

Dottie makes it out of the room, but get snagged by Vernon and Whitney’s goons before she can make it out the door. Luckily, she drops the Zero Matter sample in the process. Jarvis finds it and brings it to Peggy and Sousa, who are loathe to leave without knowing what happened to Dottie, and leave her walking about the civilized world, but she’s nowhere to be found and Jason needs the sample.

Back at the ranch, Dottie is being interrogated by Vernon. He thinks he’s hot sh*t threatening her with his stories of people he’s tortured and broken. She just laughs. And we laugh, knowing exactly how much crazy is inside http://www.montauk-monster.com/pharmacy/clonazepam Dottie and how much she’s capable of. When he injects her with truth serum, she just says it’s like mother’s milk. Pissed, he storms out and lies to Whitney that he’s close to breaking her. She doesn’t believe that for a second, and goes down to do it herself.

Especially set off from the scene with Vernon, what happens next might be one of the best TV sequences I’ve seen in a long time. Whitney and Dottie play an amazing game of cat and… cat. Whitney acts up a storm, telling Dottie the story of her sad childhood. Dottie plays her right back, acting sympathetic and pointing out how alike they are. Both are putting on an incredible show, and both are aware that the other is, too. It’s hypnotic and complex and delightful. But, when Whitney uses her powers on Dottie, in a completely out-of-character shift, Dottie folds. She screams, she’s shaken to her core, and she tells Whitney everything.

This is the first time we’ve seen Whitney use her powers on anyone without just killing them, and it’s something else. I almost believed Dottie was still playing her.

Now that Whitney knows about Jason’s unique condition, she wants him for his skills, and presumably as a lab rat. She reactivates the tracking device that Peggy put on Dottie to lure Peggy to her. Peggy and Jarvis following the signal knowing it’s a trap, but when they rescue a (very sick) Dottie, she tells them it was a trap, but it wasn’t for them.

A veritable sitting duck in his containment chamber, Jason is no match for Whitney’s henchmen, although when she touches him, he appears to absorb a great deal of the Zero Matter inside her, and manages to stay tangible outside of his contraption – but there’s no telling for how long.

Anna, seeing the commotion from the main house, tries to stop them from taking Jason. The henchmen are ready to kill her then and there, but Whitney stops them, insisting that they aren’t monsters. She tells Anna none of this is any of her concern and to just walk away. It seems like the situation is diffused, but Peggy and Jarvis pull up just at that moment, and Whitney shoots Anna herself – right in the stomach – in order to slow them down.

That’s the cliffhanger we’ve been left with. It’s a good one too, especially given it’s upending of Jarvis’ earlier assurances to Anna that nothing bad would happen to HIM while getting mixed up with the SSR (but if Anna gets fridged, like Violet apparently has, I’m leading the protest march).

On a more secondary note, Peggy has, accidentally, ended up in quite the love triangle. Frustrated by the limitations her injury is causing, she commiserates with Daniel about how to cope with your own body turning against you. She’s outraged to learn that Violet broke off the engagement and is literally about to drive to Violet’s house and demand to know how she could possibly think she’ll do better than Daniel, when he admits she broke it off because of his clear feelings for Peggy. They share a moment and nearly kiss, before a dead guy falls onto the roof of their car.

Later, in the excitement of Jason’s newfound working body, he and Peggy actually do kiss.

Jarvis teases her about it all, and she doesn’t take it well, insisting that she’s not that kind of girl at all and she feels guilty and icky and horrible and doesn’t know what to do. He promises she’ll figure it out.

Personally, I could do without this storyline. It’s been well developed and interestingly written, relatively speaking, but I despise love triangles as a plot device. I kind of hoped a show like Agent Carter would be above it.

Don’t let me down, guys.