Agent Carter, Season 2, Episode 5: The Atomic Job
Another strong episode from Agent Carter. Again, it's nothing particularly spectacular, but it was enjoyable, I didn't have anything that I dislike about it, and it progressed the main story. Where last episode we've got an origin story for our leading lady, this episode we have... a heist! And plot development! Jason finds out that he can suck up the Zero Matter within the autopsy chunk from the frozen lady, so Peggy and Jarvis go on wacky capers to steal the body... only to find out that Whitney Frost is literally a step ahead, and drains every single Zero Matter from the corpse.
What follows is, well, Whitney Frost wanting to re-stage the atomic bomb explosion that formed the Zero Matter in the first place. There's a bit of foreshadowing/world-building as both Jason and Whitney note that they are drawn to other sources of Zero Matter, but we'll probably save that for later.
What more exciting, though, is the heist! In addition to show regulars Peggy, Jarvis and Sousa, this time around we recruit two wacky characters. Rose, the fat jolly secretary lady who, like the grandma from Captain America: the First Avenger, is a fully trained agent on her own. She just never stepped into the battlefield. We also have the thankless passive-aggressive dr. Samberly, who's got a nice decent scene in the first two episodes that make him memorable enough. And honestly, I actually kinda feel for the poor dude. No one likes him, he gave up so much to join the SSR, and he really sin't appreciated. Yes, he gets to be a bit of a butt monkey and source of comedic relief, but is he so different from Peggy Carter herself, living a thankless life, no one remembering him, despite performing admirably? The dude invented a memory wipe, for fuck's sake! I mean, yeah, dude's a bit bumbling and a bit of an idiot, but I was glad he made it out safely.
Including Rose and Samberly actually also raised the stakes of the heist, really. I mean, we know Peggy's absolutely safe, and both Jarvis and Sousa are main characters and are safe enough until there's like a big end-of-season conflict or something. But Rose and Samberly? Especially with Sousa going on the tangent that Rose is untrained? Yeah, I was totally scared that one of these two would bite it -- they were actually likable people and having them die simply would be quite sad indeed.
Also, how hilarious was that slow walk? I mean, Guardians of the Galaxy did the 'slow walk while everyone isn't taking it seriously' first, and I bet some other movies did it as well, but how many of them have the group arrive at the spot, and then it turned out to be just wrong because Jarvis parked the car elsewhere?
We get a couple of wacky hijinks, of course, with Samberly accidentally locking Jarvis in a room with an atomic bomb, forcing our favourite butler to handle the disarming of the nuke himself. We get Samberly being all awkward around Rose, we get Rose taking down Maggia goons on her own, we get some crazy James Bond-style lightning field disc grenade thing courtesy of Samberly... it's all fun and good, and we even get a great climax with Peggy facing off against Frost. I mean, yeah, we all know that Peggy's not going to be eaten by black goop or die from that rusty spike, so it's a good thing the show doesn't treat us like idiots and have the show cut straight to Nurse Violet patching Peggy up.
Not really a big fan of Violet being all "you're still in love with her, aren't you?" bit, though Sousa's disaster of a marriage proposal earlier this episode was actually pretty freaking hilarious. Sousa's not going to survive this series, is he? He's definitely grown on me since season one, being actually likable instead of being just the love interest archetype. But that scene where Violet confronts Sousa about his old love really felt jarring considering the really sweet and well-done awkward confession earlier in the episode.
I've gone through nearly the entire episode without talking about Whitney Frost, but man, she's also awesome! She's basically running this show now, and that fact is further enforced by the scene in the end where Chadwick refuses to help her out after they failed to get the nuke, and she basically puts her feet down. But Whitney Frost has been dominating every scene, more and more subtly undermining Chadwick's supposed authority over her.
The scene with where she dominates the conversation with the mob boss and basically forces her husband to be indebted to Maggia mastermind Joseph Manfredi is awesome. Joseph Manfredi is better known to Marvel comic fans as the anti-hero Blackwing, and is the leader of the Maggia, Marvel Comics' version of the mafia, though the organization went unnamed in this episode. Manfredi had a short scene, though he definitely stole it with his eccentricities, like totally beating the crap out of one of his bodyguards for "undressing a lady with your eyes". I'm not sure if Manfredi's going to be a secondary antagonist for the second season, or if it's just a nice little nod to the fans, but I could very easily see this psychotic mob boss be an ally for Whitney Frost... especially since Chadwick is scared shitless and summons an emergency meeting of the Council of Nine at the end of the episode.
We also get more references to Thomas Gloucester this episode as a powerful influential member of the Council of Nine -- he showed up as 'Tom' in the Council's first appearance and the previous two episodes made references to him by name. I dunno, I hope more of the Council's members actually do something instead of just being ciphers or bumbling idiots like Hugh Jones (who I honestly forgot had met Peggy Carter before, actually). As a side-note Thomas Gloucester is also apparently based on a Marvel comics villain as well, so hopefully he manages to do something interesting.
I do like how basically both Peggy and Whitney play their hands to each other -- Whitney displays her power and Peggy shows that she's totally onto Whitney -- so we won't have too much silly subterfuge between the two main players in the episodes to come.
Oh, and Jason also possibly disappears elsewhere, so we're definitely hopefully getting more about that mysterious Zero Matter origin dark dimension thing that I've been trying to avoid spoilers about. It's overall a mostly light-hearted episode right until the final scenes where things get serious. I thought that Peggy-goes-undercover scene with Hugh Jones or whoever the Roxxon head is went on for too long, but holy shit abusing the memory wipe device is hilarious.
We get some plot develpoment, we get development of primary and supporting characters, the plot goes on... yeah, I honestly didn't see myself really getting this hooked to Agent Carter, but I actually am. It's never going to get 10/10 or 9/10 scores if I were the type of reviewer to give scores, but it consistently scores between the 7-8/10 range and above-average consistency is definitely something I can appreciate.
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