“We have at our fingertips the means to change the world and they just want to throw it away.”
- Mrs. Chadwick
If you thought Peggy’s adventure was going to get dull any time soon, you’d be dead wrong. She’s quite keen to keep working the murder investigation and she’s convinced it has something to do with the lab. But before she can make any headway there, she’s got to get past Mr. Jarvis doing his morning workout (complete with silly looking unitard). It was quite hilarious to be honest and I’m glad we are getting to see more of Mrs. Jarvis, too. At the office, Sousa is worried about how to tell Peggy he’s got a girlfriend but he doesn’t have to worry because the two have already met and hit it off famously.
The SSR aren’t the only ones interested in what’s going on at the lab. A group of men (including a guy who I swear is Gideon Malik from SHIELD) are meeting and have voted to shut down the facility without Chadwick’s input. I have to believe they are the follow-up to Hydra after the war. Chadwick isn’t pleased with this situation but he’s got no choice, really. When Peggy and Sousa head to the lab with a warrant to look around, they find that the facility is under a hazard warning. When Peggy confronts Wilkes, he slips her a note, asking her to meet him at a club that night, alone. Sousa insists he’s going to go with her but Peggy convinces him she can handle it. Besides, he’s got a very important dinner with his girl, Violet (Peggy finds an engagement ring). With a little help from Ana in the wardrobe department and an assist from Jarvis (Stark’s crazy, tricked out evening car), Peggy heads for her interrogation.
It seems we have to be more worried about Mr. Chadwick’s wife, too. Sure she’s kind of creepy and not in the best of moods thanks to her director being kind of a pig about her being an older actress, but she’s not overly thrilled when her husband shares the news that the lab is being shut down and their experiments with “Zero Matter” are going to go away, too. A little more on that in a bit. After Peggy ends up sharing some of her own backstory with Wilkes, he tells her that he has some idea of what’s happening at the lab. He wants to show her what he discovered and so they head to a nearby observatory where he gets to share his own story with Peggy. He explains that he came up from nothing and earned all he has. He also laments that the lab who hired him was the only one willing to take a chance on a Black guy. I appreciate the authenticity of the period but it just kind of irks me the way Wilkes gets treated by other people.
The observatory is rather illuminating. It turns out after the war, the company that runs the lab continued to do tests with atomic power and an experiment went wrong, creating what they call Zero Matter. It’s liquid like but it doesn’t conduct heat (it’s why it’s always the coldest thing in the room). They don’t know how it was created or if it’s even of this planet but it makes sense why Hydra 2.0 would want to experiment with it. It also means it isn’t the monolith because as we see it has much different properties. It acts almost like a black hole. Peggy wants to steal it from the lab but that’s going to prove a bit difficult because guys with guns show up, looking to take them out. After stealing a car (and leaving an SOS for Jarvis thanks to Stark’s creepy ride), getting horribly offended by a racist clerk and stealing another car, they manage to make it to the facility. Along the way Peggy also picks up another lapel pin like the one Dottie stole. Of course whoever Dottie is working for is linked to that. I have a feeling we will soon find ourselves with an East vs. West SSR showdown. Based on Sousa’s reaction to Peggy goes missing (he starts smashing up his office), he’d willingly go against Jack if it came to backing Peggy’s play.
The situation at the lab seems to be going well (Peggy is taking out some bad guys while Wilkes is securing the Zero Matter) but then things go horribly awry. Mrs. Chadwick shows up with a gun and threatens to shoot Wilkes if he doesn’t hand over the Zero Matter. He makes the correct assumption that she won’t shoot him while he’s holding it but then a scuffle ensues and the container breaks, unleashing the Zero Matter. Despite urging her to run, Wilkes doesn’t make it out. Peggy is pretty distraught about this but tries to push through until Sousa orders her to go home and Jarvis happily obliges to drive her there. As Ana points out over a glass of whiskey, sometimes it doesn’t take long to know that you care deeply for someone. It was rather sweet and makes me kind of sad that we won’t get to see Peggy have a shot with him. But at least Violet is a pretty cool girl. She seems to know that her boyfriend stops bad guys and she’s totally okay with that. It still doesn’t stop me from thinking he seriously carries a torch for Peggy that is not yet burned out yet.
In the tag, we see that Mrs. Chadwick survived the Zero Matter but she’s not faring so well. As we know, direct exposure to the substance leads to poisoning and death. I can only assume it will kill her eventually. That or maybe disfigure her and drive her crazy, this is Marvel after all. Either way, the SSR has a lot to deal with and I don’t think any of them quite know just how insane their lives are going to be.
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