Agent Carter Review: “SNAFU”

Marvel’s Agent Carter‘s penultimate episode takes out another key character and unleashes a potential madbomb.

Title: “SNAFU”

Director: Vincent Misiano
Writer: Chris Dingess

Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter
James D’Arcy as Edwin Jarvis
Shea Whigham as Chief Roger Dooley
Chad Michael Murray as Jack Thompson
Enver Gjokaj as Daniel Sousa
Ralph Brown as Dr. Ivchenko / Dr. Fennhoff / Dr. Faustus
Bridget Regan as Dottie Underwood
Sarah Bloom as Loretta Dooley
Lesley Boone as Rose

Premise

Peggy and Jarvis come clean about their private investigation and the other agents start to believe her—but will they be too late to foil the Russian plot?

High Points

Dottie as the proto-Black Widow makes a perfect adversary for Peggy Carter and the team, and her escape down the stairwell made a memorable scene.

Low Point

Peggy’s discovery of Ivchenko’s Morse Coding seems a bit fortuitous—but if that’s as bad as the episode gets, it’s a good episode.

The Scores:

Originality: 3/6 Peggy gets to explain how and why she could do the action hero thing of working outside the system to help the system and, in this fictional context, it works.

Effects: 5/6

Acting: 6/6 They get extra points this week for the chemistry and timing demonstrated by Atwell and D’Arcy. It’s rather reminiscent of The Avengers— the classic British series, not the ones in Marvel’s universe.

Story: 5/6

Emotional Response: 5/6 The show creates a good deal of suspense heading into the final episode—even though we know the world’s not going to end and our heroine’s not going to die.

Production: 6/6

Overall: 6/6 Marvel’s ability to make their cinematic world a coherent whole without sacrificing storytelling is the model for other shared universes.

In total, “Snafu” receives 36/42

Historic Note of No Great Significance

S.N.A.F.U. is a military acronym, of course, but it was also a short-lived proto-Marvel magazine.

6 replies on “Agent Carter Review: “SNAFU””

    • I hope they don’t– though I believe this was always supposed to be a one-shot series.
      I kind of like it just being one really good story in the MCU. I’d hate to see an inferior follow-up.

      • Since it’s historical they don’t have to do an immediate follow-up. They could skip to some time after S.H.I.E.L.D. is up and running and doing something interesting. I’d like to see more with Agent Carter, but I agree it would be a shame if they forced it and it was inferior in any way.

  1. a) agreed on all counts with the above thread
    b) I find it interesting that two “genre fiction” spy-thrillers are currently using the “rage-trigger” macguffin as the endgame for the bad guys. Weirdly, a few seconds from the end of this episode I went “hm…why do I feel like they’re about to go with the “Kingsman” weapon here?“……and then they did.
    (note: spoilers are for both this series *and* “Kingsman, the Secret Service”.)

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