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| Image Courtesy www.screenrant.com |
As an aside, I’m really
annoyed with ABC right now. I wasn’t
home to watch the episode, so I recorded it on my VCR (a used VCR and some VHS
tapes is way cheaper than a DVR).
Unfortunately, somehow ABC must have gotten off last night, so I recorded
4 extra minutes of Muppets and missed the last four minutes of Agent Carter
and had to find… alternate means to watch it.
H/T to Comicbook.com’s
helpful episode recap, also, since that helped me get a jump on my review
before I could finish the episode.
Last night’s episode
of Agent Carter, “The Atomic Job,” highlights both the best and worst
aspects of this series. Now, don’t get
me wrong; there are a lot of best aspects to this series: the cast is absolutely stellar, especially
Hayley Atwell and James D’Arcy. The 1947
setting of the series is a definite plus (and something which they really lean
into) which lends itself well to the exploration of both sexism and
racism. I’m a huge fan of the number of
comic book characters which Agent Carter introduces, and of the way that
they adapt some of the odder ones (Controlling bats? Really?).
This series is much “brighter” than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which
also lends itself well to the 1947 setting.
Oh, and I love the humor in this series.
However, there is one
glaring issue with the concept of Agent Carter: we know the broad strokes of Peggy’s life
already. She works for the S.S.R.,
leaves the S.S.R. to help Howard Stark found S.H.I.E.L.D., and survives through
all the events of the MCU beyond Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The only aspect of Peggy’s life which we do
not yet know is whom she marries—the husband who had been saved by Captain
America that she mentioned in The Winter Soldier. And because that’s the only important aspect
of Peggy’s life that is still a mystery, that’s what they are really
leaning into. Without spoiling anything,
this episode sees a little more payoff for the love triangle they’ve set up—something
I am never a fan of. I’ve said it before
and I’ll say it again: I like my relationship
drama simple and my plot complex.
The episode opens with
Wilkes standing over Peggy and trying to wake her up—and she sits bolt upright
and points her gun through Wilkes’ head!
Wilkes brings her to the lab and shows her that the Zero Matter in Jane
Scott’s tissue sample is actually being drawn to him—and he to it. Suddenly the Zero Matter passes directly
through the glass sample jar, absorbs into his hand, and Peggy is momentarily
able to touch him. After this Wilkes is
able to pinpoint exactly where Jane Scott’s body is, and suspects that if he
absorbs the Zero Matter in her body it might be enough to make him permanently
tangible again.
Meanwhile, Chadwick
clearly has not adapted to his wife’s newfound ability to suck an entire human
body into herself using Zero Matter, as he is sitting awake while listening to
her mumble in her sleep. When he gets
out of bed to dress, Whitney startles him (there is something unsettling about
that woman…) and tells him that he needs to help her get to Jane Scott’s body.
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| Image Courtesy www.mcuexchange.com |
Both groups—Peggy and
Jarvis, and Chadwick and Whitney—arrive at the Cold Storage facility around the
same time. Peggy and Jarvis sneak in through
the vents but only get to the correct room in time to watch Whitney absorb all
the Zero Matter out of the body, feel a surge of power, and tell her husband
that “I need an atomic bomb.” Wilkes
believes that Whitney is trying to replicate the original Isodyne incident,
which means that she will need to detonate the same kind of bomb at the same
location as the original test. And the
rest of Isodyne’s bombs are in a Roxxon storage facility. Peggy goes undercover to sneak into Hugh
Jones’ office and get the key to the Roxxon facility (which is otherwise
impenetrable), and brings along a device the Samberly invented which will make
someone forget the last 2 minutes. Peggy’s
disguise is good enough to get her into Jones’ office, and she manages to talk
her way into being left alone while he’s at lunch (after which he seems very
interested in “crunching her numbers”). However,
as he’s getting in the elevator he remembers that he’d met her in New York,
bursts back into his office, and promptly has his memory erased. This happens a couple of times, with Jones
coming around and Peggy sending him away, but eventually Jones is left
catatonic on the floor, with Peggy searching him for the key (It’s in his belt
buckle) and zapping him every couple minutes.
I think this might be the funniest scene so far this season, between the
situational comedy of Jones alternately forgetting and remembering, the
pathetic attempts at flirting, and Peggy’s discomfort with taking off Jones’
belt, even if it’s to save the world.
In an interesting
parallel, both Peggy and Whitney need to recruit help to break into the Roxxon
facility and get to the bombs—Peggy to disarm them and Whitney to steal
one. Whitney approaches one of her old
contacts (I’m guessing an ex-boyfriend), Joseph Manfredi,
who is every well connected in the L.A. underworld. He agrees to supply manpower for them in
exchange for Chadwick giving him some lucrative contracts and keeping his name
out of the papers. However, there is a
surprising moment in which he beats one of his own men senseless for looking at
Whitney wrong… This dude is pretty
crazy! But, at least he doesn’t dress
like a Batman knock-off and train live bats like his comic book counterpart…
Peggy, Jarvis, and
Sousa, meanwhile, realize that the three of them do not have enough manpower to
infiltrate Roxxon by themselves, so Peggy insists on recruiting Rose to help
them, despite Sousa’s reluctance to bring her in the field. Peggy accuses Sousa of being as sexist as
Thompson, but I don’t buy it based on what we know so far: We’ve never seen anything to indicate that
Rose has more than basic S.S.R. in self-defense techniques, and that’s not
enough for Sousa regardless of the agent’s gender. At the beginning of the season he called Thompson
to send backup because his agents were too green, and some of them had military
experience. He didn’t want to bring
Samberly into the field, either, for the same reason: no experience. However, this does set up a funny scene of
Sousa and Peggy watching Rose beat up an angry performer in the office, at
which point Sousa agrees to recruit her.
Samberly also insists on joining their team because he doesn’t trust
anyone else to use his inventions. I really
enjoyed these scenes of Peggy and Sousa putting together their team, and even
the comedic moment of the five of them walking out to the car in style, only
for Peggy to turn to Jarvis and ask him where he parked the car!
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| Image Courtesy www.hypable.com |
The group drives to
the Roxxon facility, where Samberly and Rose attempt to distract the guards. Rose does just fine, but Samberly has clearly
never been in the field before and gets tongue-tied when he realizes that he
and Rose are posing as husband and wife.
They still manage to use one of Samberly’s devices to shock the guards
and short-out the electric fence, but they realize that these guards are too
fancily-dressed to be actual guards. When
they find a knocked-out guard in the basement, it becomes abundantly clear that
Whitney has beaten them to the facility.
Rose fights off a couple of Whitney’s men (it’s really cool to see a larger
woman as a secret agent taking down bad guys left and right) while the others
locate the room with the atomic bombs. Unfortunately,
Jarvis gets locked inside the room with the bombs without Sousa, who’s the
bomb-defusing expert (thanks to his time as a recon scout). Peggy takes out a couple more of the bad guys
before going after Whitney, while Sousa talks Jarvis through defusing the bombs—which
is yet another hilarious moment in an episode that really pushed the humor.
However, this is when
stuff gets real. Peggy confronts Whitney,
who attempts to absorb her. Peggy breaks
Whitney’s hold (evidently Whitney hasn’t progressed past absorbing someone
while in physical contact with them) but falls over the railing and is left
holding onto the ledge with her fingertips.
Whitney reaches down to absorb her, but Peggy lets go and falls onto a
pile of materials, impaling herself through the abdomen with a piece of
rebar. This all happens in front of
Sousa, who (along with Jarvis) stems the bleeding and brings Peggy to Violet’s
house.
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| Image Courtesy www.mcuexchange.com |
To backtrack, Sousa
finally popped the question to Violet early in the episode (after breaking into
her house, making dinner, falling asleep on the couch, and losing the ring in
the couch). Here at the end of the
episode, Violet essentially becomes the “proto-Night Nurse” (in the same way
that Dottie is the “proto-Black Widow”):
a bleeding, half-dead hero is brought to her house in the middle of the
night insisting that they not bring her to a hospital, and Violet has to patch
her up and save her life. I guess that
means we’re potentially seeing 3 different “Night Nurses” in the MCU in 2016
alone: Violet, Claire, and Rachel
McAdams’ character in Doctor Strange (rumored to be a fellow doctor). I really like this development from Violet’s
character, though I’m not a huge fan of the following scene, in which she
confronts Sousa with the fact that she now knows that he still loves
Peggy. Like I said at the beginning, I understand
that this is the only big mystery in Peggy’s history, but I don’t like it when
a love triangle is your answer to dramatic tension. I’d prefer for them to pick a direction and
go with it; no looking back.
The episode concludes
with two developments. First, Chadwick
calls an emergency meeting of the Council while Whitney is asleep. Considering that she threatened to absorb him
next, he’s definitely scared of her, but I don’t know if he’s really going to
betray her. Second, Jarvis puts Peggy in
bed and leaves her with Wilkes. Wilkes
evidently knows more about the Zero Matter Dimension than he is letting on
(probably because he’s partly there and partly here), but he doesn’t want to
talk about it with Peggy—he does call it “dark,” though (as in “Darkforce”). They turn on music, and Peggy falls asleep
while Wilkes fades out and vanishes. This is a
very interesting place to leave the episode, as it looks like Whitney’s man may
be betraying her and Peggy’s “man” may be abandoning her. I’ve really liked the way that the last
couple episodes highlighted the parallels between Whitney and Peggy, though I think
“Smoke and Mirrors” did a much better job.
I really liked how
this episode explored some of the side characters, particularly Rose and
Samberly. We also learned quite a bit
more about Sousa in this episode than we knew previously. The humor in the episode was also very
welcome. However, I do not think this
was the best episode of the series for the reasons mentioned. I really hope that they don’t draw out the
Peggy/Sousa thing too far, as that is by far the least-interesting element of
the season for me.
What did you think of
this episode? Do you want Peggy and
Sousa to get together, do you want Sousa to stay with Violet, or do you just
want them to pick a direction, already? Let
me know in the comments!
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