“I don’t get it.  Why are we mentioning Captain America’s blood again?  Why do we keep mentioning Captain America at all?” “You see, there’s this guy named Dustin Cabeal…”

This was a pretty exciting episode that left me pretty happy.  After watching I’m relatively sure we have seen the MCU debut of Dr. Faustus and Yelena Bolova as Black Widow.  That’s my assumption as those are the only Eastern European mind controlling therapists and blonde Black Widow’s I know of.  This episode sees it all come down as Peggy finally gets caught and all the sides are closing in.  Not only is the SSR on to her and what she’s been doing but our mysterious Russian assassin also comes face to face with our butt kicking protagonist and all the deceptions are dropped.

There are some really great moments in the episode that include an Automat fight where Peggy whoops all kinds of ass and a really tense scene involving a sniper that ends in an unexpected way.  That’s been the nice thing about Agent Carter so far is that it kind of keeps me guessing.  I can’t say it always keeps me guessing and sometimes the ways it keeps me guessing is kind of stupid but in this episode it works towards the show’s advantage.  For example I did not see her coming face to face with Dottie, our blonde Black Widow.  I did not see her getting incapacitated by her and I did not see their confrontation getting interrupted by the SSR.  I more or less predicted that she’d get away and it would be more meeting with Howard and Jarvis in secret places.  I thought the show would go formula and instead we end on a cliffhanger of her inside an SSR interrogation room in the same place and around the same time that the presumed Dr. Faustus is planning a raid on Starks tech.

I don’t really know where the show is going and it’s in a very good way.  I can’t really see how they’ll set up the dominos other than possibly using the vault raid as a way for Peggy to either escape or redeem herself.  The negative is, after beating up a half dozen special agents, how anyone would simply dismiss her as a “coffee girl” again leaving her where she was at the Marvel One-Shot.  I know I keep mentioning the Marvel One-Shot but that mini-film is the reason we have this TV series and there are some pretty big plot points established in the mini-film that either need to be established or dismissed.  Either way is valid storytelling but if you ask me dismissing it is lazy while providing competent establishing is strong storytelling.  We’ll have to see how it all ends and in that way the show is accomplishing its goal, it keeps driving me to the next episode.  The story gives the show a 3 but the fight scene adds a point for me.

Score: 4/5