Ah, those pesky men.
A quick list of some of the finest specimens...
Agent Thompson - self important,egotistical,smug, sexist, bigoted asshole.
Howard Stark - skirt-chasing, two-faced, arms dealing liar.
Edwin Jarvis - stuffy, useless in a fight and far too loyal to his master.
Agent Souza - Dogged, intelligent, sympathetic but looked down on because of his war injury.
Chief Dooley - Stark-hating, devious, suspicious but finally showing some competence.
Mr Mink - sadistic, smuggling, extortionist murderer.
The prodigal billionaire returns as a smuggled package. Peggy and Jarvis deal with the smugglers trying to up their handling fee, but with nowhere of Stark's left unwatched by the SSR, there's only one place he can stay.
Howard Stark...in a hotel filled with young women...with his reputation? What were they thinking?
Suffice to say Peggy is disgusted with his fox in the henhouse impression and tells him so. The real reason he's there is to find out what devices have been moved to the SSR from the boat bust, he hands over a photo-pen and sends Carter on her way.
After a brief recon, the photos from the pen give a clue to one of the more dangerous gadgets, the titular "Blitzkrieg Button" that only Howard can defuse, he needs it back.
If there's one thing that Peggy has learned over the past few weeks is that not everything about Stark is legit, and she smells a very large rat.
Speaking of small furry creatures, Mr Mink has lost his cargo so he kills his own men and sets out for revenge...
In the meantime Agent Thompson is in temporary command and being particularly odious. He doesn't just sneer down his nose at Peggy, he gives Souza both barrels of his charming persona
So we have a very plot driven episode this week, Dooley is in Germany following a lead on the dead silent assassins from the Roxxon plant implosion, Souza is gradually piecing together the identity of the blonde from the Nitramene heist.
And Mr Mink runs into something quite unexpected. Once you've seen what happens you'll do a doubletake and want to see it again.
Because followers of the MCU will have definitely have seen something similar before...
There are some lighter touches this week, Peggy nearly getting caught smuggling Stark into the hotel, Stark's antics in the hotel, Stark getting a black eye. Are you sensing a pattern?
You can definitely see where Iron Man's alter-ego gets his cockiness from.
There is also the matter of a wider conspiracy forming, Leviathan, the Battle of Finnow, the mysterious radio-typewriter.
This episode is definitely pulling the story strands together, and you know what, it looks like the short series is paying dividends in its pacing. No "filler" episodes, its much more focused and tightly plotted than full twenty odd episode run. Is this the future of Marvel TV we see before us? With such a wide variety of characters and situations to mine , it could be a much more efficient way to bring new faces to the general public's conscious without them getting jaded and waiting weeks for something properly interesting to happen.
There is a nagging feeling though that they've got a lot to wrap up here, is this going to be a large car crash of plot threads at the end of the season, or can we expect a follow up...?