Marvel’s Agent Carter Review – “Time And Tide”

This week’s Marvel’s Agent Carter delves into Jarvis’s back story, uncovers the heart symbol Leet Brannis drew last week, and generally moves faster than I anticipated. You have to remember this is only a seven-week series, so there aren’t a lot of loose ends that will last as long as Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. To the recap!

Not-So-Short Summary: We start with a man scaling Agent Carter’s apartment building and  coming up to her window to be face-to-face with a gun. In fact, he needs the next apartment over. There is also a look at the SSR’s investigation after Leet Brannis’s death and the license plate they pull from the Roxxon oil wreckage. They task themselves with going to Howard Stark’s place and looking into Brannis’s possible Moscow connections.

Peggy arrives at the Stark residence where Jarvis resides (at least I assume that’s where it was? I feel like that wasn’t made clear). She believes that if she sees how the thieves broke into Howard’s vault, perhaps she can figure out where they went after. Before they can get far, the SSR shows up, asking questions about the missing car. They take Jarvis downtown without seeing Peggy around the corner.

During Jarvis’s interrogation, Agent Carter makes her way into the viewing area with Chief Dooley, feigning that she only knows Jarvis from the files on Stark. The interrogation with Jarvis is full of dry, British sass and you think he’s going to get away. They cannot track down the stolen car report Jarvis filed and while that does not back him into a corner, they pull out the trump card:

Jarvis was charged with treason at the start of the war, and whatever he did disappeared under piles of Stark dollars. He is threatened with deportation and for them to call his wife, Anna, and let her in on it all. Jarvis freezes.

Peggy leaves, only to return to get Dooley’s signature and overhear them in the hallway discussing what to do with Jarvis and all the implications. As they go in to lock him away for some time, Peggy comes up and saves Jarvis’s butt by saying she happened to have the stolen car file, it must have gotten mixed in with the rest of the things she grabbed.

The absolute reaming she gets from Dooley afterward, the sheer humiliation is such a frustrating, angering scene to watch, because you know she’s not the mess-up they believe she is and they don’t know the bigger picture. It’s in Hayley Atwell’s eyes and trembling expression that gets me. If you’ve ever taken the fall for someone, you probably relate to her more than even I do.

So what was Jarvis’s treasonous past? Before the war, he met Anna in Budapest. Her being Jewish, he wanted to take her to safety, so he stole some of the papers from the general he worked under and forged his signature. He got caught filing the papers, Stark got him out of the hot water, though Anna has no idea about any of this. (Anyone else believe Anna is going to be some sort of unexpected cameo? They way she’s just a disembodied voice so far has me thinking…)

Agent Carter and Jarvis head down into the blown-out vault, discussing his past, and following the sewer to the bay–on the night of the burglary, thunderstorms hit the city and with the excess run-off being sent through the sewer system, Brannis floated the treasure out to sea.

At the end of the tunnel, they find a boat with Brannis’s heart symbol on it: The Heartbreak. And no, not the hotel, that’s ten years from now. Stark’s bad babies are still in crates on the ship. As Agent Carter wants to head off and call it in, Jarvis throws questions at her, questions her SSR coworkers will ask, like how she came to find this, why she would conduct her own investigation, things that don’t have good answers.

“I will call them in and they’ll respect me,” she claims. “But they won’t,” Jarvis replies, and she knows it’s true. So he calls from a nearby payphone and throws his voice, hilariously so. “Hey, Mack,” he begins his call in an awful…New York? Boston? accent. I need more people saying “Hey Mack” in conversations like they’re in a black and white gangster film from the 1930s. Sousa gets the call at the station and heads down with Krzeminski.

Peggy waits for Jarvis to return, but instead a huge muscly man shows up to try to take her down. The fight is intense, because this dude is built like Thor, and Peggy flits from place to place, making jabs and having a mean left hook. Does anyone know how much of the action scenes Hayley Atwell does herself? I feel like 95% of it, but someone back me up on that. Jarvis shows up near the end of the fight when Peggy decides to use the glowing green “muscle massager” to freeze the man’s arm and temporarily paralyze him. She and Jarvis flee as Sousa and Krzeminski show up to find the crates of things.

Krzeminski is happy everything is wrapped up in a neat little package, but Sousa is doubtful. It seems too easy. Dooley, once he shows up to orchestrate the Stark tech back to HQ, feels the same way.

On the way back to HQ, Krzeminski has the Strong Man in custody (turns out he was one of the freaks at Coney Island). Strong Man asks if the British dame works for the SSR, and Krzeminski begins to wonder what the hell he’s talking about when they are rear-ended at a red light. Krzeminski gets out of the car, ready to ream the driver, only to be shot and killed. Same with Strong Man.

So much for that plot thread unraveling.

Agent Carter comes into work the next morning to weeping women and a mourning office, flowers on Krzeminski’s desk. Sousa is taking it badly, having flashbacks to World War II, talking about how you come to realize that death can hit you anywhere at any time, it’s not just during a war. He blames the anonymous tip from Jarvis while Dooley makes a heartfelt speech about blaming Stark for Krzeminski’s death, whether he turns out to be innocent or not.

Badass Moment of the Week: Since there was really only one big fight scene, let’s do an unconventional one and say Jarvis’s wonderful accent while making the anonymous call to the SSR. I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would. Probably for the pained faces he was making and how he ended it with “Have a lovely day,” or some similar polite, British thing to say.

Best One-Liner: “Well this will be novel, I haven’t been in the back of a car in years,” says Jarvis as he is taken downtown by the SSR.

That catch-up spiel at the beginning with the Agent Carter voiceover: like or dislike? Is that their “opening credits,” kind of like what Sleepy Hollow did for the first half of season one? I’m not sure, I feel like it’s too corny.

Can I confess something to you guys? I’m having a hard time keeping all of the SSR men’s names straight. Is it just me or do they feel interchangeable? I mean, this week’s episode was better, but of course the only guy I could distinguish before this–Kryzminski–gets killed at the end.

Sousa and Kryzminski get some bonding time on their night shift, but it’s awful because Krzeminski is literally the worst, rubbing in Peggy’s Captain America past. “No girl is going to turn in a red, white, and blue shield for an aluminum crutch,” he jabs. Excuse me, his shield is Vibranium, thank you very much. Don’t you forget it!

We are introduced to Dorothy Underwood, a new woman living in the commune/apartments with Peggy and Angie. She has about two lines and she’s way too innocent and I’m just going to assume she’s some sort of undercover Leviathan agent.

There was a very intense theme of loss in this episode, even more than in the first one with all the Steve Rogers flashbacks. In the first episode, we see Peggy’s immediate emotional response to her roommate being viciously gunned down in her bed, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Likewise, our responses to her tears after that are empathy for putting another person close to her in harm’s way.

With Krzeminski’s death, however, Peggy’s response is more internalized. Yes, Krzeminski was a jerk in every sense of the word, belittling her at every turn. But the loss of a coworker is still a loss, and one she had a direct hand in orchestrating. It is less of a primal response, like with Colleen the roommate, and more of an internalized guilt. It completely changes her role as a double-agent within the SSR.

We also get a lot of bonding time, both with Sousa/Krzeminski and Peggy/Angie. Angie tries to come into Peggy’s room and bond, but she is actually “tired” and wants to go to bed at 8pm, and by that I mean she goes to wander the sewers beneath Stark’s house. In the end, though, it’s Angie’s diner to which she goes for comfort and to vent about her day.

Looks like Howard Stark returns in two weeks when we come back! Wait, two weeks until a new episode? That’s not a good thing, ABC!