Snark Industries

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Peggy Carter is finally on the wrong side of the interrogation table, and Jon and Remy are here for every minute of it. The SSR's revolving door of questioning serves up a good cop, a bad cop and a.. confused cop, all while Dr. Ivchenko lurks in the chief's office pulling strings and Peggy stonewalls the very men she spent weeks winning over. Jarvis charms his way past the phone company front with a "signed confession" from Howard Stark, Dooley makes what may be the first smart call anyone has made in seven episodes, and a Morse code message flashed across the street finally pushes Peggy to come clean. From there it all unravels: Ivchenko hypnotizes Dooley into raiding SSR storage, a team of agents inexplicably splits up to hunt a Red Room assassin, and Peggy and Jarvis hurl a table through a two-way mirror. Dooley's sweet vision of coming home gives way to an overheating Stark vest, a tragic leap from a window, and a movie theater full of patrons turned on one another. Jon calls it his favorite of the series and can't shake the Kingsman comparison, though he still wants to know why Peggy didn't spill sooner. Remy agrees it's fantastic but has notes on the memory sequences and on Red Room tradecraft that leaves secret messages lying around a dead dentist's office. Both hosts tip their hats to Hayley Atwell and James D'Arcy, and both are chomping at the bit for the finale.

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Peggy Carter sits in SSR custody, facing a rotating interrogation from Daniel Sousa, Jack Thompson and Chief Roger Dooley. She refuses to explain her ties to Howard Stark or the orb in their possession, which secretly holds a vial of Steve Rogers' blood. Dr. Ivchenko lingers in Dooley's office, quietly steering the chief's suspicions. Edwin Jarvis bluffs his way into the SSR with a signed confession from Howard Stark and offers a deal for Peggy's release. Dooley accepts but refuses to let anyone leave until Stark arrives. Jarvis privately admits to Peggy that the confession is a fake. Peggy spots Ivchenko signaling a Morse code message to Dottie Underwood across the street. She finally tells the whole truth to win Dooley's trust. Thompson and Sousa lead a team across the street to find the recipient. Dottie leaves agents dead and slips away. Sousa recovers her transcribed messages from the office of a dentist she murdered. Ivchenko hypnotizes Dooley with his ring. Under his control, Dooley handcuffs Peggy and Jarvis to a table and sends the scientists away. With the lab cleared, Ivchenko finds what he came for, along with a strange Stark vest. He slips out and drives off with Dottie. Peggy and Jarvis smash their table through the two-way mirror, and Thompson finds them on the other side. Dooley dreams of returning home to his wife and son. He wakes slumped at his desk, strapped into the overheating vest. With no safe way to remove it, he asks Peggy to promise she'll get Ivchenko. He shoots out the window and leaps through it as the vest explodes. Dottie wheels a baby stroller into a crowded movie theater. She opens a canister of gas hidden inside. She jams the doors shut with a crowbar and walks away. The gas drives the audience into a murderous rage. A late-arriving couple opens the doors to find everyone inside dead.

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Jon and Remy dust off another Snarklet from 1966's The Marvel Super Heroes, where the death of Tony Stark arrives remarkably early in his career. Pepper and Happy have Iron Man pegged as the man blackmailing their boss, so Tony shoos them out and suits up just as the Mandarin, ten rings and all, hijacks a satellite and fires a long-distance beam that levels the very room Tony was standing in. With no body and no remnants, Pepper and Happy leap straight to "dead," and straight to Iron Man as the culprit. Iron Man traces the beam back to the Mandarin's moated castle, where a tractor beam drags him into a granite trap he cannot break through,.. apparently. until a conveniently placed grate drops him right into the villain's office. A clash of rings against high-frequency waves follows, then a paralyzer ray he somehow shakes off, then a karate death blow that Iron Man somehow manages to block. Strapped to a wheel and left spinning, Iron Man hears the Mandarin's origin: he stumbled onto an alien ship with the ten rings sitting inside, and he hates Tony Stark for reasons never explained whatsoever. A thumb knife, a recharge courtesy of that spinning wheel, a missile turned back on its own launch point, suction cups on the knees, and a Wile E. Coyote gag worthy of Acme, the soldiers he supposedly wiped out come roaring back in tanks, and Tony flies home to a household that had already written him off. The hosts delight in the spread-eagle flying, the granite kryptonite, and the Ten Rings finally doing real magic on screen, but they don't go easy on the Mandarin himself, a racist caricature in art and accent that makes the MCU's changes to the character easy to understand. Both land in the same place: fun, full of laughs, and totally skippable, with a shared hope that the MCU finds its way to a proper Mandarin someday, minus the problems.

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Jon and Remy dig into Agent Carter Season 1, Episode 6, "A Sin to Err," an episode that runs two threads side by side before slamming them together at the finish line. At the SSR, the rescued Dr. Ivchenko plays part scientist, part therapist to Chief Dooley, reading the man's crumbling marriage off a face-down photo and a toothbrush on his desk, while across the street Dottie dispatches a handsy dentist and lines up a rifle on the chief's window. The twist: Ivchenko isn't the target, he's the one giving orders, tapping out Morse code that puts Peggy in the crosshairs before twisting his ring to put Dooley under. Meanwhile, Peggy and Jarvis chase the theory that Howard's real betrayer is one of his many conquests, working a jeweler's list of every woman Howard ever sent off with a parting bracelet, a door-to-door montage that earns Jarvis a steady stream of slaps and shin kicks. Once Sousa's jailhouse informant pins it all on Peggy, the walls close in fast: a brawl at the Automat, Thompson disarmed and knocked cold, Sousa simply letting her walk, a window ledge the SSR's finest never think to check, Angie's gloriously terrible crying act, and a kiss from Dottie that drops Peggy just as the agents circle back, all while Ivchenko talks a fresh agent into a bourbon and a fatal stroll into traffic. Jon doesn't sugarcoat it; for him this is the first dud of the series, a plot held together by convenience, where Peggy hospitalizes federal agents instead of making her case to a team that finally respects her, and the mind control arrives with zero setup. Remy is more willing to let the contrivances slide, enjoying Ivchenko's mind games and another peek at how the Red Room builds its widows, but both land in the same spot: a speed bump in a show they still genuinely like, with the acting and action holding strong even when the story doesn't.

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With Dr. Ivchenko tucked safely inside SSR headquarters, Chief Dooley leans on the Soviet scientist for answers, never suspecting the man across his desk is the one pulling the strings. Across the street, Dottie Underwood talks her way into a dentist's office, kills the lecherous dentist, and trains a rifle on Dooley's window, only for Ivchenko to open it and tap out coded orders in Morse. Peggy and Jarvis, convinced the woman framing Howard Stark was one of his lovers, pry a list of bracelet recipients from Howard's jeweler and go door to door checking wrists for handcuff scars, a search that costs Jarvis plenty of slaps and ends at an empty apartment with a scarred bedpost. Sousa, meanwhile, gets a jailed informant to confirm his suspicions about Peggy and bursts into Dooley's office just in time to break Ivchenko's hypnotic hold on the chief. The SSR moves on Peggy at the L&L Automat, where she lays out a squad of agents with Jarvis in her corner, knocks Thompson cold outside, and walks right past a reluctant Sousa. Back at the Griffith, she pulls Steve Rogers' blood from its hiding place in the wall and waits out the search on the ledge, then slips away with Angie's help, only to run straight into Dottie. Back at headquarters, Ivchenko hypnotizes Agent Yauch into admitting only Dooley can reach Stark's confiscated weapons, then sends him to his favorite bar for a bourbon and a walk into oncoming traffic. Dottie's knockout-lipstick kiss drops Peggy just as the agents return, and with Dottie playing the innocent neighbor, Peggy is hauled in. The episode closes on the interrogation room, Sousa and Thompson across the table, and Dooley warning them not to go easy on her.

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Jon and Remy dust off another 1966 relic from The Marvel Super Heroes, and this Captain America outing may be the wildest yet. The Red Skull, stabbing a knife into the table and pointing at a map of what appears to be open ocean, sends a spy into a POW camp. A prisoner gets shot mid-escape, the spy takes his seat on the supply truck, and a suspicious stick tucked in an armpit turns out to be gas rather than dynamite. With the guards snoozing, the enemy makes off with a ray cannon that erases whatever it touches. Steve Rogers peels off his fatigues to reveal the full Captain America ensemble, shield somehow strapped underneath, and squares off with a spy who shrugs off a clang from the shield and a direct hit from a tank shell. The ray gobbles up the front half of a tank, taking only the important bits, until a little reverse psychology from Cap gets it cranked to full intensity, which apparently just makes it explode. Moments later, the sarge goes hunting for Steve Rogers while Captain America is helped to his feet five feet away, and nobody notices a thing. Packed off for some R&R, Steve and Bucky are knocked cold when their ship is shelled, then fished out and delivered to the Skull himself, who gasses Cap and holds Bucky hostage. The villain pauses for an origin story: an orphaned thief turned bellboy, handed a costume by Hitler and told to become evil personified. A chemical dose turns Cap into a saluting, sharpshooting puppet programmed to kill the Supreme Commander. Meanwhile, Bucky faces a firing squad still in full costume and mask, survives a cruel practical joke, and turns teenage tornado on his would-be executioners. Disguised as an enemy soldier, he tails Cap on a paratrooper drop to the general's headquarters, where the mind control fades at the last possible second, leaving the boys to wonder why no other soldier in the room just pulled the trigger. Once the credits roll, the Red Skull's origin lands with a thud for both of them, the MCU's deeper takes on the Skull and Bucky get some well-earned appreciation, and it's decided that nobody needs to see Captain America throw a Nazi salute ever again. A tally the boys lost somewhere in the six or seven range. Still, it is so incredibly awful that it loops right back around to great, and they cannot help marveling at how gloriously bad these vintage segments are.

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Jon kicks things off by walking back through the Red Room flashback, a deeply unnerving stretch of bare-knuckle sparring, girls handcuffed to their beds, and a classroom reciting Snow White word for word. From there it's Dottie palming Peggy's keys right under the nose of our resident super spy, Peggy cracking the Leviathan cipher in about thirty seconds flat, and a mission to arrest Howard Stark that lands her in the men's locker room, where Sousa finally connects the dots on his mystery blonde. The reunion with Dum Dum and a fresh batch of Howling Commandos has Remy reaching for some choice words, and the guys have plenty to say about a bulletproof vest that somehow still bleeds, a cell lock that folds at the first gunshot, and Dum Dum Kool-Aid Manning his way through a wall. They dig into their first real look inside the Red Room on this journey, Thompson's white flag confession on the flight home, and Dooley quietly starting to doubt the case against Stark. Both hosts enjoyed the ride. Jon welcomes the growth but feels the SSR's heavy-handed chauvinism would land better before Captain America than after it, given everything Peggy did in the war. Remy agrees, calling Thompson's turnaround welcome but abrupt after four episodes of hammering, and praises the parallel threads with Sousa, Dooley, Jarvis, and Carter all barreling toward collision. The real cliffhanger, though, is why Dottie sniffed that lipstick, and if you have a theory, the Discord is waiting.

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In 1937, a Soviet academy trains young girls to kill, chaining them to their beds each night and teaching them English through Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A sparring match between two friends ends with one snapping the other's neck. Nine years later, that killer lives next door to Peggy Carter as the sweet and curious Dottie Underwood. Over breakfast at the L&L Automat, Dottie knocks Peggy's purse to the floor and quietly pockets her apartment key. At the SSR, Peggy cracks the Leviathan typewriter message after a codebreaker from Arlington comes up empty. The coordinates point to Belarus, where Howard Stark is supposedly selling weapons to Leviathan. Chief Dooley sends Thompson, Li, and Ramirez to make the arrest, and Peggy earns her seat by calling in the Howling Commandos. While she changes in the men's locker room, Sousa spots bullet wounds on her shoulder that match his mystery blonde. Dum Dum Dugan meets the team with Happy Sam Sawyer, Junior Juniper, and Pinky Pinkerton in tow. Around the fire, Thompson tells the tale of how he earned his Navy Cross. Inside the compound, the team finds a classroom playing cartoons laced with subliminal messages. A lone girl stabs Dugan, kills Juniper, and vanishes. Deeper in, they free two captives, the engineer Nikola and Dr. Ivchenko, forced to build weapons from stolen Stark designs. Leviathan soldiers open fire, Li goes down, and Thompson freezes. Nikola takes Sawyer hostage to bargain for his freedom, and Ivchenko shoots him dead. Dugan blasts through a wall, and Peggy drags Thompson out with the rest. Ivchenko chooses to return to America with the SSR. On the flight home, Thompson admits the Japanese soldiers he killed were surrendering and that he buried their white flag. Back in New York, Dooley digs into Stark's past at Finow and leaves Jarvis his card. Dottie searches Peggy's room at the Griffith, studies her photos of Stark's technology, and practices being Peggy in the mirror. Dooley congratulates Peggy, and Thompson invites her out for drinks with the boys. Sousa declines to join them, staring at the photo of the blonde as she leaves. Dottie handcuffs herself to her bed and goes to sleep.

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The Snarklet that finally broke Jon and Remy's streak with these vintage segments, and not in a fun way. We open on Prince Namor laid low by a mysterious illness in Atlantis and dosed with a sleeping drug, only for the ailing prince to slip off to the surface world on some unexplained urge, pass out, and deck a cop who makes the mistake of drawing a gun on him. Amnesiac and mostly undressed, Namor flutters around Manhattan on his little ankle wings while the newspapers trumpet the Sub-Mariner's return, and the shadowy Mrs. B, whose face the animators bury behind furniture for the entire episode, keeps sending her goons Freddie and George to rough him up. Twice. Both times he swats them aside. He restores his fading strength by dunking his head in water, which teases the running gag the boys never let go: our hero is standing on an island ringed by ocean, yet somehow winds up captured in an aquarium, scooped out with a net like a common goldfish. A spell in jail and a suspicious bail later, Namor walks willingly into the unveiling, where Mrs. B reveals she is his grandmother and unspools his origin. Depth charges near the pole shatter Atlantis, a princess and a surface captain fall for one another, she faints in the open air and revives in the sea, they wed, her royal father is gunned down, and she dies of a broken heart, leaving Namor behind. Grandmother and grandson reunited, she sails off to her yacht while the prince strips back down to gaze at the water. Here Jon and Remy land in rare, total agreement, and it is not kind: the origin is disjointed, the mystery is mysterious for no reason anyone can name, and it plays, in the final verdict, not even silly, just dumb. The reigning head-scratcher is grandma's master plan, hiring goons to pummel the grandson she only wants to hand a fortune, when a simple phone call would have spared everyone the trouble. A weak one, folks, and there are many, many better ways to meet the Sub-Mariner.

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Snark Industries breaks down the fourth Agent Carter chapter, an episode juggling several arcs at once. The full plot gets run down: from Jarvis and Peggy recovering a smuggled Howard Stark from a rail car, to the women's-hotel dumbwaiter caper, to the camera-pin inventory run at the SSR, and on to the reveal that the so-called Blitzkrieg Button holds not a blackout device but a vial of Steve Rogers' blood, a lie Peggy catches thanks to Jarvis's legendary ear-tugging tell. Running alongside is Chief Dooley's trip to interrogate a condemned Nazi colonel, capped by the breath-mint gag after the cyanide-pill trade, and the Finnau massacre thread hinting at something monstrous. The hosts trace the one rich comic vein, the recurring Marvel theme of trying to recreate the super soldier serum from Steve's blood, and flag the deliberate date conundrum around Wilhelm Keitel's hanging that points to a sliding historical timescale. Personal thoughts land positive on both sides, with genuine enjoyment of the moving parts, appreciation for Peggy pressing the button on instinct, the Gatling-pistol goon and the acrobatic Red Room-coded neighbor, and shared amusement at the shutter-click camera pin as a monument to spoon-feeding the audience.

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