Agent Carter S2E7 (Monsters)
Feb. 2nd, 2021 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8Oh no!
*So I have to say, I quite like Whitney Frost's explanation of her husband and several Council members' deaths. Boating accident is plausible and I guess that way, they don't have to come up with some bodies to present to the morgue or medical examiner or whatever. I can't say I like Whitney that much but I do admire her a lot. Excellent press conference.
*Aw, I'm so glad Jason got back to his corporeal self and it's totally adorable that Ana and Jason had dinner with the table half in, half out of the chamber they built!
*It is a rather Art Deco containment chamber. It actually looks nice in addition to functioning properly.
*All the lab stuff makes me wonder how long Howard is going to take coming back. His trip is clearly taking Plot Time, and he'll be back once they're ready to fix Jason I guess.
*Dottie talking about how she has tortured herself is alarming.
*Did Vernon literally have Daniel beat up?! Seriously? (SO RUDE) and then take over the LA SSR? Doesn't Daniel have a second in command? Ugh I hate Vernon so much.
*I did enjoy when Jarvis took out the tech to blast people in its range. Where, after all, would this show be, without Howard's useful and terrible inventions??
*Glad to see Jason isn't defenseless against Whitney. I think he and Whitney are the only ones to survive zero matter - I'm starting to think all of the other people she absorbed/killed/zapped away are just dead, not in some kind of pocket dimension. Which, yikes. But the initial decontainment involved BOTH Jason and Whitney and I guess behaved differently.
*Whitney's talk about making a better world where the downtrodden can be raised is not exactly borne out by her actions. It's not very convincing, I have to say...
*Ana getting shot is genuinely distressing. Also she is sort of suicidally brave, but definitely brave to confront them...at least, from the viewer's perspective, since we've seen just how many lengths Whitney will go (i.e. any) and doesn't seem to be disturbed at all by murder, even from the beginning - S2E1 has Chadwick and Whitney paying off a cop to shoot the crooked detective before he can spill their secrets.
*I did enjoy the small parallel with Peggy comforting Jarvis. Lots of the flipside in S1 where Jarvis acts as Peggy's support team.
Some other random thoughts:
*I enjoy that the show entered the atomic age generally - huge WWII shift should be reflected in the show that takes part afterwards. However I try to sort of block out the scientific talk since it's still a TV series based on comic books, and I neither require nor want perfect explanations. Honestly the more handwaving one does, the better. I really don't want to hear the explanations, think about them, and then go "wait what". Pls just show me the glowy things and the colourful liquids in test tubes and implausible explosions.
*The uranium rods do mildly distress me though. I get that they don't know that much about radiation sickness, acute or chronic, yet, but it hurts me so much to watch them handle it like the only risk is dropping it to create an explosion. Stop standing so close! Why do you even have exposed skin! Short term exposure at close range can be deadly and lead to immediate sickness!!!
(Also instead of Midnight Oil...I think what you are looking for is cocaine, Howard. Stop making these terrifying inventions!)
*It's weird to say that I enjoy the misogyny on the show, because I don't, but I do appreciate it's got a few nuances. I actually find Peggy's interrogation scene where she accuses them of totally missing who she is, in different ways, to be an enjoyable dissection. At the beginning...there's Daniel, who whiteknights for her (because she can't handle it?) and puts her on a pedestal, there's Jack, who just treats her like a secretary - his personal secretary - and there's Dooley, who refuses to see her war record and accomplishments and won't assign her any cases. It's also not just the evil who display/embody misogyny: it's deeply embedded in the beliefs as well as structure (i.e. look at the way Rose only gets to act as secretary despite her combat training, how Dooley says, "If one of my guys buys it, I'm the one who got him killed [by sending a woman]/If you buy it, I'm the moron who got a woman killed in combat" reputational risk).
I also found that one scene in Blitzkrieg Button interesting, the one where Peggy has just discovered it's Steve's blood & feels Howard didn't trust her, goes into the interrogation room in a ruffled state, and surprises Jack, who is retrieving a bottle of drunk whiskey from the trashcan where they were using it to get info from their recalcitrant witness. He says: "Why do you work here? [The rest of us get to do more than secretarial work]" and then says, "it's a hard truth, no man will ever see you as an equal", with a clear implication that he sees she is probably/maybe as skilled as he is, though I don't know that he knows yet - it precedes their little trip to the USSR. It's this weird contradiction that makes it seem so unfortunately realistic, that people can experience the truth that so-and-so is equal in their skill and abilities as you, and still cling to the previous attitude. As damnably satisfying as moments like Carol punching Yon-Rogg (dear god, IT WAS SO GOOD) I kind of like that Peggy ends up working through but also with those around her, allies or not. I don't know. Sometimes I feel the same way, eighty years on - I have this to do, and I prefer to work with you, but I'll work through you if necessary.
I'm willing to go along with wish-fulfillment - which superhero movies are, in lots of ways, the belief that a single person/small team can solve incredibly insoluble complex society-wide problems, often by punching - but I also enjoy seeing this slightly more human/realistic take. I don't think I need to see nastier misogyny, that's not really to my taste. But this is a good level, I think. It's more complicated than Strong Female Character, which for the record, I could write several god damn essays about (it's become a phrase that flags for either "shallow media analysis" or "gets off on women being violent/dominant but without recognizing them as people"). The problems of misogyny go much further past violence and permeate absolutely everything.
*So I have to say, I quite like Whitney Frost's explanation of her husband and several Council members' deaths. Boating accident is plausible and I guess that way, they don't have to come up with some bodies to present to the morgue or medical examiner or whatever. I can't say I like Whitney that much but I do admire her a lot. Excellent press conference.
*Aw, I'm so glad Jason got back to his corporeal self and it's totally adorable that Ana and Jason had dinner with the table half in, half out of the chamber they built!
*It is a rather Art Deco containment chamber. It actually looks nice in addition to functioning properly.
*All the lab stuff makes me wonder how long Howard is going to take coming back. His trip is clearly taking Plot Time, and he'll be back once they're ready to fix Jason I guess.
*Dottie talking about how she has tortured herself is alarming.
*Did Vernon literally have Daniel beat up?! Seriously? (SO RUDE) and then take over the LA SSR? Doesn't Daniel have a second in command? Ugh I hate Vernon so much.
*I did enjoy when Jarvis took out the tech to blast people in its range. Where, after all, would this show be, without Howard's useful and terrible inventions??
*Glad to see Jason isn't defenseless against Whitney. I think he and Whitney are the only ones to survive zero matter - I'm starting to think all of the other people she absorbed/killed/zapped away are just dead, not in some kind of pocket dimension. Which, yikes. But the initial decontainment involved BOTH Jason and Whitney and I guess behaved differently.
*Whitney's talk about making a better world where the downtrodden can be raised is not exactly borne out by her actions. It's not very convincing, I have to say...
*Ana getting shot is genuinely distressing. Also she is sort of suicidally brave, but definitely brave to confront them...at least, from the viewer's perspective, since we've seen just how many lengths Whitney will go (i.e. any) and doesn't seem to be disturbed at all by murder, even from the beginning - S2E1 has Chadwick and Whitney paying off a cop to shoot the crooked detective before he can spill their secrets.
*I did enjoy the small parallel with Peggy comforting Jarvis. Lots of the flipside in S1 where Jarvis acts as Peggy's support team.
Some other random thoughts:
*I enjoy that the show entered the atomic age generally - huge WWII shift should be reflected in the show that takes part afterwards. However I try to sort of block out the scientific talk since it's still a TV series based on comic books, and I neither require nor want perfect explanations. Honestly the more handwaving one does, the better. I really don't want to hear the explanations, think about them, and then go "wait what". Pls just show me the glowy things and the colourful liquids in test tubes and implausible explosions.
*The uranium rods do mildly distress me though. I get that they don't know that much about radiation sickness, acute or chronic, yet, but it hurts me so much to watch them handle it like the only risk is dropping it to create an explosion. Stop standing so close! Why do you even have exposed skin! Short term exposure at close range can be deadly and lead to immediate sickness!!!
(Also instead of Midnight Oil...I think what you are looking for is cocaine, Howard. Stop making these terrifying inventions!)
*It's weird to say that I enjoy the misogyny on the show, because I don't, but I do appreciate it's got a few nuances. I actually find Peggy's interrogation scene where she accuses them of totally missing who she is, in different ways, to be an enjoyable dissection. At the beginning...there's Daniel, who whiteknights for her (because she can't handle it?) and puts her on a pedestal, there's Jack, who just treats her like a secretary - his personal secretary - and there's Dooley, who refuses to see her war record and accomplishments and won't assign her any cases. It's also not just the evil who display/embody misogyny: it's deeply embedded in the beliefs as well as structure (i.e. look at the way Rose only gets to act as secretary despite her combat training, how Dooley says, "If one of my guys buys it, I'm the one who got him killed [by sending a woman]/If you buy it, I'm the moron who got a woman killed in combat" reputational risk).
I also found that one scene in Blitzkrieg Button interesting, the one where Peggy has just discovered it's Steve's blood & feels Howard didn't trust her, goes into the interrogation room in a ruffled state, and surprises Jack, who is retrieving a bottle of drunk whiskey from the trashcan where they were using it to get info from their recalcitrant witness. He says: "Why do you work here? [The rest of us get to do more than secretarial work]" and then says, "it's a hard truth, no man will ever see you as an equal", with a clear implication that he sees she is probably/maybe as skilled as he is, though I don't know that he knows yet - it precedes their little trip to the USSR. It's this weird contradiction that makes it seem so unfortunately realistic, that people can experience the truth that so-and-so is equal in their skill and abilities as you, and still cling to the previous attitude. As damnably satisfying as moments like Carol punching Yon-Rogg (dear god, IT WAS SO GOOD) I kind of like that Peggy ends up working through but also with those around her, allies or not. I don't know. Sometimes I feel the same way, eighty years on - I have this to do, and I prefer to work with you, but I'll work through you if necessary.
I'm willing to go along with wish-fulfillment - which superhero movies are, in lots of ways, the belief that a single person/small team can solve incredibly insoluble complex society-wide problems, often by punching - but I also enjoy seeing this slightly more human/realistic take. I don't think I need to see nastier misogyny, that's not really to my taste. But this is a good level, I think. It's more complicated than Strong Female Character, which for the record, I could write several god damn essays about (it's become a phrase that flags for either "shallow media analysis" or "gets off on women being violent/dominant but without recognizing them as people"). The problems of misogyny go much further past violence and permeate absolutely everything.
