Agent Carter - A Sin to Err - Review

Agent Carter, “A Sin to Err,” was written by Lindsay Allen and directed by Stephen Williams. Allen’s other credits include Arrow, Eli Stone, and Green Lantern, so she has plenty of comic experience (though mostly DC!). Williams’ extensive credits include Intelligence, Person of Interest, and Lost. This was a fast paced episode that really moved the plot along. Hayley Atwell (Carter) and James D’Arcy (Jarvis) deliver terrific performance once again. Like last week’s episode, this feels like the show we’ve been waiting for. Unfortunately with only two more episodes to go in this season, the show may have taken too long to establish itself to ensure a second season.

The episode maintains some tension with the fiction that Ivchenko (Ralph Brown) is a victim for a good part of the episode. It would seem he’s an unwilling victim of Leviathan as he tells his tale. This is reinforced by the fact that we see Dottie (Bridget Regan) doing the killing in his story, and we already know that she is one of the bad guys. The tension is further ramped up as we see Dottie infiltrate a dentist’s (Rick Peters) office by killing him with his own drill (!) in order to use his window to aim a sniper rifle at Dooley’s (Shea Whigham) office. It looks like she’s going to kill Ivchenko, and then they communicate by morse code. It looks a lot more like Ivchenko is the one in charge and makes a lot more sense with him having shot Nikola (Alex Veadov) so quickly in the last episode to shut him up.

Clearly, as a psychiatrist, Ivchenko is a master manipulator and he worms his way into Dooley’s confidence. We learn that Dooley’s wife has cheated on him. This could certainly help to explain why he’s been so hard on Carter all along – and doesn’t bode well for her going forward as he’s already had one woman betray him. We see Ivchenko interrupted in his attempt to hypnotize Dooley, but he does succeed with poor Yauch (Alexander Carroll). After getting the layout of the SSR and the location of Stark’s inventions, Ivchenko has no further use for Yauch and sends him off for one final drink – at least he made it a good one – and his death by apparent suicide or accident. Had Yauch been able to gain him access to Stark’s inventions, I wonder if Ivchenko would have spared his life? Will he try again with Dooley? My bet is yes, and Dooley was pretty susceptible.

It was great to see Carter gain some respect from her service in Russia as Dooley may cut off her interrogation with Ivchenko on the Russian girls, but he does tell her to run with her hunch. It makes it all the harder when Sousa (Enver Gjokaj) reveals his evidence, and Dooley decides she’s a spy working against them. I liked that Dooley was also right to pursue more information on Leviathan, but it was fitting that Carter would be the one to recognize how insidious a woman spy could be – after all, who would suspect a woman? Certainly not the men of the SSR – except maybe Sousa…

At least we get to see Carter at her best for most of the episode. I love Jarvis as her wingman!
It’s hilarious when he takes her to Stark’s jeweler (Steven Hack) for the list of all the women Stark had seen in the past year. I loved Jarvis stopping her from crossing Ginger Rogers off the list because when he escorted her from Stark’s apartment, her eyes were “the darkest gates to the abyss!” There’s also a delightful play on words when Jarvis doesn’t want to have to help call on Stark’s former girlfriends because of his tendency to “prematurely evacuate.” Well done, writers, well done!

It was fun watching Carter chase down her leads. It was also nice structurally for Sousa to be doing the same, including visiting Sheldon (Devin Ratray) for an id of the woman who beat him up. I know that we all caught the reference to Ida being a dancer and connected the dots to … er… Dottie, but of course, we already knew to suspect her. Carter does see the scratches on the bedpost, however. This turns out to be a dead end, so it’s hard to know where Carter would have gone if she and Jarvis hadn’t been waylaid by the SSR. I loved her immediately recognizing the procedure and that she was about to be apprehended. This was a great fight scene – made even better by Dooley’s incredulous a girl took out an entire team of SSR men! But perhaps the best part of the fight is Jarvis’ face when he brains the one agent with a dinner tray!

Neither Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) nor Sousa do the disservice of under-estimating Carter, anyway. I loved her disarming and knocking Thompson out – easily and after apologizing for having to do so. She knows them well too. She knows she has to knock out Thompson because he likely would have shot her, but she also knows that Sousa has feelings for her, which she unfortunately has to exploit. It’s worth noting though that Sousa is sure there must be an explanation until Carter runs.

We finally get to see Angie (Lyndsy Fonesca) play a bigger role. Carter gets back to the Griffith to retrieve Steve’s blood – I still wonder at Dottie having missed that! She then escapes onto the window ledge. It’s hilarious to watch how outraged Miriam (Meagen Fay) is at Thompson and Sousa and their men barging through her women-only domain. It’s a nice touch that we see Angie reciting lines from Ibsen’s Dollhouse (a proto-feminist play) from another failed audition. She’s at the end of her rope after a year spent without getting a part, so she’s packing in her acting career to go to secretarial school. However, her true acting talents come out to dupe Thompson and Sousa. I loved her getting them to leave by crying, knowing it would make them so uncomfortable and that they couldn’t deal with it. I love that this steeled her resolve to pursue her acting career! Though I’d like it better if Carter recruited her for the SSR.

Angie, of course, had an inkling Carter didn’t work for the phone company, and believes in her enough to try to help her escape. I loved Atwell’s face when Angie says she knew she didn’t just work for the phone company! Dottie waylays Carter. It’s also lucky in the end that Sousa knew Carter well enough to be convinced that Carter was there. Sousa and Thompson arrive just in the nick of time to stop Dottie killing Carter after using her own knock-out lipstick against her. Regan is just excellent as Dottie, going from wide-eyed innocent to flat, shark-eyed killer.

Carter is completely woozy from the knock-out lipstick and therefore unable to even try to escape. She is marched through the SSR in disgrace. Dooley tells Sousa and Thompson not to go easy on her because she’s a girl. Things look pretty grim given the evidence against her, but hopefully, she can either convince Sousa and Thompson of her innocence – surely they both know her well enough by now! – or Ivchenko or Dottie will tip their hand. Either way, with only two episodes left, it would seem things are going to be unfolding pretty quickly!

What did you think of the episode? Do you think Carter will have to escape or will she win over her team and prove that she’s not a traitor? Are you sad to see only two episodes left? Are you hoping for another series? I suspect a second series could be a lot more action-packed now that the characters have been established. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

About the Author - Lisa Macklem

I do interviews and write articles for the site in addition to reviewing a number of shows, including Supernatural, Arrow, Agents of Shield, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Forever, Defiance, Bitten, Glee, and a few others! Highlights of this past year include covering San Diego Comic Con as press and a set visit to Bitten. When I'm not writing about television shows, I'm often writing about entertainment and media law in my capacity as a legal scholar. I also work in theatre when the opportunity arises. I'm an avid runner and rider, currently training in dressage.