Peggy Carter has been arrested by her SSR colleagues, and former friends verbally spar in their attempt to learn the truth. Meanwhile, Leviathan prepares the last few steps in securing what they need for their unknown plan.
Tropes:
- The Bad Guy Wins: Dr. Fennhoff / "Ivchenko" brainwashes Dooley with ease, gets his hands on Item 17, escapes along with "Dottie" and murders Dooley by hypnotically forcing him into wearing an exploding vest. Both Leviathan agents then field-test Item 17 in a crowded movie theater, which turns out to generate a Hate Plague that causes everyone inside to turn on each other in an orgy of violence.
- Bait the Dog: Faustus helps Dooley reconnect with his wife. And then kills him.
- Batman Gambit: Jarvis prepares a fake confession from Howard Stark in hopes that the SSR will receive Stark's confession of guilt in exchange for letting Jarvis and Peggy go. Unfortunately, it doesn't work out; Dooley isn't ready to believe the confession is real, and demands confirmation from the real Stark by the end of the hour.
- Broken Pedestal: Sousa's faith in Peggy is seriously broken, to the point that he's ready to believe she killed her own coworker Krzeminski. Gradually, his faith returns as her claims start to show themselves true.
- Cane Fu: Dottie gets thwacked a few times by Sousa's crutch in their fight.
- Cassandra Truth: At first Peggy isn't believed regarding the claims of her good intentions and of Dottie's malevolent ones. As she comes fully clean, the SSR sees she has more to lose by revealing the truth and so decide to take her claims seriously.
- Call-Back: A cross-series one. Item 17 was one of the HYDRA items captured and boxed up by the Howling Commandos during the raid on Dr. Reinhardt's lair on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
- Deadly Euphemism:
- At the store, Dottie, pretending to be pregnant, asks for a pink blanket (implying a girl). The store lady responds Dottie's moving quickly since she doesn't look pregnant. Dottie responds: "It's happening sooner than you think", of course not meaning her "pregnancy".
- There is Ivchenko's habit of ordering his pawns to do "one more thing", i.e. killing themselves.
- Destination Defenestration: Dooley self-inflicted this in his Heroic Sacrifice.
- Did Not Think This Through: Peggy has a rare moment of it when she and Jarvis use the table they're handcuffed to as a battering ram on the room's one-way mirror... then remember they're still handcuffed to the table so this does no good at all.
- Downer Ending: The bad guys sail closer to their Evil Plan and Da Chief dies.
- Dramatic Irony: Dr. Ivchenko, remarks behind the one-way mirror that Peggy is a pathological liar after she says that "someone else" note is pulling Dottie's strings.
- Everyone Knows Morse: Peggy has good reason to know morse; she served in an active war zone. Jarvis has somewhat less justification.
- Eye Scream: At least one person during the Item 17 testing has their eyes gouged out.
- Fake Pregnancy: Dottie pretends to be pregnant as a reason to buy a baby carriage, which is used to transport Item 17 to a theater.
- Gone Horribly Right: Howard Stark tried building an armored vest designed to keep the wearer warm against the coldest winter. He ended up with a heating vest so powerful it roasts the wearer alive... if it doesn't explode first.
- Handicapped Badass: Agent Daniel Sousa. Holding your own against a Black Widow with only one good leg and a crutch is no easy feat. He doesn't defeat her, but he does manage to deter her long enough for him to escape.
- Hate Plague: What the gas from Item 17 generates. It's potent enough to get an entire movie theatre full of innocent bystanders to turn against each other, leaving no survivors.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Chief Dooley is tricked into wearing an explosive vest, threatening to blow up the whole SSR office. After finding there's no way to get it off without it exploding sooner, Dooley chooses to throw himself out a window so as to get all his employees and collateral civilians out of its lethal blast radius.
- Idiot Ball: Despite Thompson's instructions for all of the agents to shoot to kill upon encountering "Dottie", most of them don't do anything of the sort. Sousa goes for the kill shot immediately after seeing that Thompson is not exaggerating.
- Made of Explodium: The heat vest Dooley gets locked in, which Fennhoff put on him so as to turn him into an unwilling suicide bomber. The agents and scientists try anything they can to get it off him, but anything they suggest just risks it exploding faster.
- Madonna-Whore Complex: Peggy's diagnosis is that this is Sousa's particular brand of sexism. Once the pedestal he had her on broke, he assumed it was because Howard Stark seduced her.Peggy: The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore.
- Mundane Utility: In the opening flashback, Ivchenko is shown using his hypnotic skills to allow surgeons to safely operate on the wounded without anesthesia.
- Mythology Gag: Dr. Fennhoff / Ivchenko is introduced in a flashback reading The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, which is where his character's codename comes from.
- Never a Self-Made Woman: The men of the SSR have always believed that Peggy only had a job with them because she was supposedly sleeping with Captain America, so it's no surprise that they believe the only reason she would turn on them is because she's sleeping with Howard Stark.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Dr. Fennhoff gets a very worried look on his face when he sees SSR agents heading into the building across the street, having been tipped off about Dottie.
- Jarvis gets a major one when he sees what Dooley is wearing.
- Le Parkour: When Dottie needs to make lobby, and fast, she springs between the outside railings of the central staircase. Just about all the SSR agents are too stunned to take a shot at her. By the time they get a bead on her, it's too late. Note that this is before Parkour was invented, hence why Sousa has no idea how to describe what is going on except to say that she is going down the stairs very fast.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Without her job to worry about, Peggy takes the opportunity to lay into the rest of SSR for the sexism she's suffered, and for their far worse transgression of shoddy police work.
- The Reveal: The first scene of the episode reveals Dr. Ivchenko's true identity: his real name is Johann Fennhoff, known in the comics-verse as Doctor Faustus
. - Shout-Out: According to the episode's writer, Private Ovechkin is named for Alexander Ovechkin, the current captain of the Washington Capitals.
- Soft Glass: Averted with Dooley's heroic sacrifice. He swipes Thompson's sidearm beforehand to fracture the window as he's running. This is also averted for the agents inside the office after Dooley explodes. We see at least one soaking blood from a head wound in the aftermath.
- Spotting the Thread: Twice Fennhoff's subjects notice something briefly off about their illusionary world.
- Private Ovechkin, imagining he's back in a meadow with his mom, spots a hospital bed with a patient nearby, but Fennhoff tells him not to pay attention to it and it vanishes.
- When imagining himself in his home at dinner, Dooley tells Fennhoff to get away from the window like he did before. For a moment the wall looks like the one from the SSR office, but Fennhoff distracting Dooley's causes it to change back to the home's wall shortly after.
- Translation Convention: During the flashback to Russia in 1943, everyone speaks English with a thick accent. Heck, Fenhoff is even reading Faust in English.
- Would Not Hit a Girl: When they investigate the building across the street, this is averted with Thompson (who has experience against an incompletely trained Black Widow and dreads an encounter with a fully trained one) and Sousa (who becomes the first to survive a throw-down with Dottie), but many of the other agents hesitate to fire on Dottie. One pays the price for his mistake with his life.
