While still considered an enemy and traitor, Thompson, Sousa, and Dooley all try their best to get a confession out of her. Sousa tries using guilt over their friendship. Thompson tries offering her a deal that sounds like a lie. Dooley just yells at her like he's her dad and she's busted a vase. Carter resists them all. She tells them to come back when they're ready to play chess instead of checkers.
It's a stalemate in the interrogation room, and the only big change is that a weirded out Thompson doesn't think Ivchenko should be watching the interrogation. He also has the sad news that Agent Yauch's been found dead, an apparent truck accident after leaving the office and drinking. Dooley doesn't consider it enough to warrant his undivided attention. In fact, nothing tears him away from Carter until a bigger fish is on the hook.
After getting away, and with the chance to leave the country, Jarvis does the bravest thing I've seen him, or anyone in this series do. The chap who only wanted to be contacted between 9am and 9pm literally walks into NY Bell Company, in full view of the operators, and asks Rose to open the elevator so he can see Chief Dooley. Rose, at first, thinks she can put him off- but Jarvis has been here before, through the back door, and starts rattling off the place's true identity and names of Agents inside.
Don't mind me, I'm just here to make things interesting
Rose, who's been totally under utilized, turns out to have her own protection: a handgun concealed under her table, and she's about to shoot Jarvis when he holds up his briefcase, and declares that it contains Howard Stark's confession. This stops every operator, and Rose decides Dooley will want to see him after all.
Dottie, who has moved out of the Hotel Griffith, has gotten herself a snazzy dress suit for baby carriage shopping. The sales lady is happy to believe her story, sell her a lovely carriage, with a pink baby blanket. And Dottie is happy to play the part of expecting and well off. What, exactly, is she bringing into this world?
Carter finds herself taken, still handcuffed, to a conference room where Jarvis lays out Stark's deal: he'll return to the States, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey (where private planes land, don't you know), and sign the typed out confession Jarvis waves around. But only if Dooley will free Carter and Jarvis. The confession has Stark taking all the blame, including for Carter's actions, which are explained by insisting that he manipulated her little weak girl feelings. Carter's more insulted than relieved. Especially when Dooley will only free her when Stark arrives and signs the confession. And he definitively fires Carter. Which hurts her feelings more than it should.
Seriously, I'd rather hang
Why would Carter be so unhappy and dejected to leave a place so unwilling to even give her real work? At every turn, almost every agent has belittled her, disrespected her, and discarded her. So, why the sad? Because Carter's termination isn't just Carter's termination. She's the first, and now, the last female agent at the SSR. Sexism means that it's not just you who's judged for your failures- your gender is, too. It's also the end of Carter's dream. She's been protecting the world from the epically evil for a good five years; what will she do now?
Her first step is to clean out her desk, and commiserate with Jarvis. And Jarvis' nervous news makes their situation even worse. He lied. He lied he lied he lied. Stark's not coming. Jarvis' plan was a bluff. Carter asks Jarvis if he knows what being hung feels like, but their fears for nightfall are forgotten.
Because Ivchenko, reveling in his new best bud Dooley, is having a victory lap in Dooley's office. Dooley apparently took Ivchenko's advice on his marital problems, because he's telling his wife that they're going to work everything out and he's going to be a better husband, etc. Ivchenko is proud of him, but gets right back to the Morse code on the window sill, with Dottie across the street, still using the dentist's office and her rifle scope to make out his messages. Look, I know New Yorkers are famous for not looking up, but for this long? When someone has a gun? And how often do New Yorkers look out their windows during the day? (Hint: like, every five minutes). How is this still unnoticed?
No matter how, Ivchenko is still signalling Dottie, but he's made one mess up, or the show's producers have. Ivchenko is now tapping on the interior window sill (he used the outside last week), which anyone in the office can now see. Unfortunately, newly-fired Carter is the only one who does. She quickly rustles up a pad and paper, and she works on recording the dots and dashes. When Jarvis chimes in with his own translation, they rediscover how much they like working together. It's not long before Carter has a message giving them a little less than 20 minutes before shit hits the 1940s fans all over.
Carter, desperate and now knowing Ivchenko is a mole, plays her last card: the truth. She waltzes out into the main office, and when Dooley confronts her, she informs him of Jarvis' bluff and that she's going to make her own confession. Dooley, who's been thrown a lot of curve balls today, is at his wit's end, but Carter lays it all out for him, Thompson, and Sousa, with Jarvis in attendance. She ends with her description of giving Sousa the credit for finding Stark's merch, which must have made him squirm. If Carter is, in fact, the woman's he's been looking for, he can't deny that she did hand him Stark's merch instead of keeping it or even getting the credit.
Carter's whole ordeal in SSR hands is the subject of her best lines, where she verbally smacks down Team SSR Guys. She's not a stray kitten. She's not Howard Stark's whore. She wasn't Captain America's, either. She's not a secretary. She's not a damsel in distress. She's not a nuisance. She's not a burden. She's been doing this work longer than they have, and they didn't even bother to know that about her. She could conduct her whole, secret investigation with them only figuring out after the fact because they've ignored her from the start. She was literally hiding in plain sight, and Team SSR Guys have the decency to be embarrassed at their own incompetence. But, they still can't believe her story. It could be true, but when Carter produces her own accusation against Ivchenko, Dooley digs in.
Carter insists that he's really a plant, and tells them exactly what to look for: go across the street and find the window he's communicating with. You'll find a Leviathan agent there, and it will turn out to be my pretty blond neighbor who you've just happened to have already seen. Once again, she's done all the footwork and put the pieces together, and she hands them the arrest in shiny paper and a red bow. They're about to doubt her entirely now when Carter decides she can convince them she knows what she's talking about. And that she's been on their side. She sends for the ball she was arrested with. Team SSR Guys has been playing with it all day, hoping she'll explain why she had it, and now she offers to tell them.
It's Dooley who opens it, looking worried he'll blow himself up first. But it opens and reveals a vial, still perfectly preserved. Carter looks wistfully at the last piece of Stephen Rogers, that was safe and sound in her wall earlier. Now, she's placing a lot of faith in the SSR to protect it. Team SSR Guys think that she's got to earn her trust, but as she makes it clear just how valuable this vial is, it's clear that she's making the leap of faith in trusting them. Will the SSR use the last of it in a fruitless attempt to copy it? Or will the SSR just get sloppy, and let it fall into the wrong hands?
Or will they drink the blood?
Maybe Team SSR Guys is worth trusting after all, because they immediately decide to at least test Carter's advice. Dooley keeps her confined in the conference room, but he decides that it's time for Ivchenko to close the window. It's a few seconds too late though, because Agents are plainly coming for Dottie from the street, and Ivchenko decides it's time to play his end game with Dooley.
Dooley's really got a lovely family for such and old-looking sourpuss. And they really need him to get to the turkey carving on Thanksgiving already. It's a vision concocted by Ivchenko's plain gold band that is surely a fake wedding ring. And it's the same trick he used at the episode's opening flashback on an amputation patient, luring him from reality into a fantasy world. He's not doing this so Dooley can feel no pain, though. He's been found out, and knows he needs Dooley to act now. First on Ivchenko's list is neutralizing Carter, which Dooley does by locking her and Jarvis into the interrogation room at gunpoint.
You should take this as a compliment
Next is a trip to the SSR lab, where about four scientists are confused by Dooley's insistence that they all leave, right now. But Dooley, totally under Ivchenko's control, points the magic finger of authority at them and they report to a briefing room to supposedly figure out how Carter got Roger's blood from them. Ivchenko, alone with Dooley again, barely has to play with his ring again to get Dooley to peacefully hand over Item #17, which isn't shown. What is shown is a fancy brown vest that Ivchenko seems to think is just the thing for Dooley.
They part at the elevator, but not before Dooley teases us all with the possibility that he was playing Ivchenko all along to get the guy to incriminate himself. Instead, Dooley hands over Item #17, and Ivchenko instructs Dooley to put the vest on.
Thanks, sucker!
Thompson and Sousa and some unnamed (read: soon to be dead) agent search the building across the street. Thompson and Sousa admit to each other that they do believe Carter, and Thompson warns Sousa that these agents are deadly as kids; the full grown version should just be shot on site. Sousa tries to follow his advice, sort of. Dottie is still using the boorish, dead, dentist's office, and as Sousa approaches, he can see her silhouette in the textured glass windows of the time, and he realizes that Carter was right about that blonde. He's clever, but he too is betrayed by his own shadow, and Dottie's surrender is fake. She lays him on the floor, and beats him to the stairwell, where Sousa can only watch in stunned awe as she catapults herself down the stairwell by the railings. Dottie kills the unnamed agent on her way out. But Sousa's not done with the dentist's office.
He turns up the fly-covered dead body, as well as the written-down messages that Dottie left behind to document her next move. Which, really, was not smart of her. A convenient laxing of Dottie's standards so Sousa could know that Carter's been a pain in Leviathan's ass the whole time.
Thompson, meanwhile, decides to race back to SSR HQ, where he discovers that even chained to a table, Jarvis and Carter can cause some trouble. Handcuffed to a rectangular table, they have to turn it 90 degrees, and Carter has to inform Jarvis that they'll spread glass all over the next room, and perhaps get sprayed in bullets. Jarvis just can't help stopping the battering ram exercise until these points are spelled out. To his credit, he keeps going and he and Carter are pleasantly surprised when it turns out no one has to die today. But, they realize together they're still chained to that table. So, it's a good thing that Thompson has decided to investigate the noise. Carter immediately sicks him on Dooley.
Pretend it's Howard's face!
Dooley's been having a great dream. His son is building a bird house on the kitchen table, despite Mom's possible wrath, and Dooley can't believe he's home in daylight hours. Neither can Mrs. Dooley, but they quickly decide it's great that Dooley came home early, and Dooley confesses that he thinks he's done something terrible at work. He's not sure what, and he doesn't know what to think of it, but Mrs. Dooley is reassuring, and little Dooley Jr. is finishing his birdhouse, tapping nails into the roof.
Oh, that tapping is actually Thompson and Carter pounding on his office door, demanding he wake up. The Brown Vest of Trouble is already glowing red, and Dooley is disheveled and disoriented, but the whole office quickly puts the pieces together. Jarvis fearfully explains that the jacket was designed to warm cold soldiers, but it could never work and always ended up overheating until it exploded. And, once again, I can't believe the stuff Howard Stark just keeps lying around.
The SSR scientists, now summoned out of wherever they were holed up, have no solution. Jarvis says there really isn't any. But Dooley comes up with one, which Carter tries half-heartedly to talk him out of. Dooley, once again, and for the last time, isn't listening to her. Instead, he insists that Carter has been on top of this from the beginning, which means that it's her who has to promise to get the bad guys. The price of competence is that everyone depends on you, I guess. 'Atta girl, Carter. Dooley treats her almost like a daughter before he dashes out the nearest window, the suit starting to shine and smolder, and launches himself out the window and into a Manhattan canyon as he explodes.
The blast tears a hole in the SSR HQ, and Sousa returns to a shell-shocked office. The dead agent count is up to six. Leviathan has what they wanted, and a happy Ivchenko is still chipper and confident despite losing his cover. Carter, as the Agent who brought Ivchenko in, is devastated. Leviathan pulled one over her, by concealing a real trap in an obvious one. She knew Stark wouldn't be in Belarus, so when she "discovered" something that looked like the real goods, she bought it. She doesn't have time for moping, though- there's a vial of blood that has to be checked on. When it's found safe and sound, there's a scrambling until Item 17 is known to be missing. Trouble is, not even Jarvis knows what Item 17 is. And the guy who does has no plans to be in the country anytime soon.
Dottie knows what Item 17 is. It's something small, that can be concealed under a fluffy pink blanket in a baby carriage. It's a gas, that Dottie happily releases into the air as she exits the crowded movie theater, only arousing the suspicions of one other audience member, as she barricades the door. It doesn't take long for the audience to launch into violent acrobatics, enthusiastically ripping each other apart. Which an usher discovers, to her horror. Leviathan's test is a total success. On to their real intended horror. Also, when in doubt, show up to the movie seriously late. Mrs. Pay-for-parking should take her husband out for dinner.
Interlude: this show constantly beats the woman-defeating-sexism drum, in every episode. At a lower volume, but just as important, has been Agent Sousa and Enver Gjokaj's portrayal of him. The other agents wouldn't dare openly mock a war veteran's injuries, but they do constantly underestimate him when they shouldn't. From finding the homeless man who saw Jarvis call the SSR, to actually discovering Carter's secret investigation, he's been showing up Thompson at almost every turn with his honest devotion to solid detective work. Thompson's been set up as the awful example of every 1940s social problem, and I cringe at how the guy would treat a Black Agent (the show has featured Asian and Hispanic Agents in the Belarus episode, and Thompson kept his stuff together, but I'm still curious). Dooley's been the boss who has to referee everybody's hang ups.
Keep in mind, disabled people were kept invisible before the 1970s. FDR rarely allowed a photograph to depict his wheelchair. People didn't talk about sickness or disabilities, considering it a private matter to suffer in silence. So, Sousa's open cane walking, alongside his fellow agents, would have freaked out everyone. Sousa is tolerated because he's a man who got his disability defending his country, but Thompson treats him with pity half the time. Sousa brushes off the pity, and gets back to work. The one time he tries to use his disability to get some solidarity with a witness, he's brushed off, but he can't be blamed for wanting a connection with someone going through the same thing.
And now, with Carter practically in charge of a catastrophe, we move into the finale. Has Stark come home at last? Will the SSR start making the progression into SHIELD? Will Dottie and Carter have a good fight to cap things off? Most importantly: WILL WE EVER SEE MRS. JARVIS???????
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