TV Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter “Time and Tide”

Heroes Get Fleshed Out as Marvel Series Keeps Swinging

Marvel’s Agent Carter “Time and Tide”
Review by Brandon Wolfe

Where last week’s two-hour premiere was packed to the gills with series-establishing exposition, Agent Carter slows its roll this week, taking a breath and allowing us to get to know our protagonists and the situations they occupy. Though she has had a firm place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for going on four years now, Peggy Carter is still a character we aren’t intimately acquainted with. Her role in Captain America: The First Avenger was fairly thin. She was little more than a tough-bird love interest to Steve Rogers, even if Hayley Atwell’s performance was richer than what was on the page. That film also skirted the plight inherent to a woman of that era working in such an overwhelmingly male-dominated field. Carter had an inordinate amount of agency in the film, rubbing elbows with government and military bigwigs without being met with any documented resistance or disdain. She wasn’t the focus of the film, and therefore delving deeply into the sexism she almost certainly would have faced wasn’t Priority One.

But now that Carter is the focal point of her own project, there is no longer the need to tap-dance around such things. She exists at a point in time when women were openly dismissed as second-class, relegated to kitchens or secretarial pools. Her peers at SSR will never see her as an equal, or anything more than a skirt who’s easy on the eyes. Worse, when she needs to bail Jarvis out of a jam as he’s being sweated in the interrogation room by Dooley, she has to lean into the dizzy-dame stereotype she constantly contends with to purposefully lose a pertinent file, getting chewed out in front of the entire office and bolstering the collective impression of her as an incompetent. That the series is intent of tackling the issue of sexism rather than turning a blind eye to it in favor of light escapism is one of its emerging strong points.

“Time and Tide” is also a pivotal episode for Jarvis, who was introduced last week as a wry, hugely capable ally to Carter, but was otherwise something of an enigma. Hauled in for questioning by the SSR to account for the whereabouts of one of Howard Starks' cars, the license plate of which was located at a crime scene, it comes out that Jarvis was dishonorably discharged from the army due to treason charges brought on by the forging of a superior’s signature as a means of getting his Jewish wife out of harm’s way during the war. He has Howard Stark to thank for extricating himself from that mess and keeping his (still unseen, in Maris fashion) wife safe, which speaks to the butler’s devotion to rescuing his boss from persecution. It also, however, reveals Jarvis’ pressure point. He almost cracks when he and the missus are threatened with deportation. Jarvis may be a loyal soldier, but he is also vulnerable in a very significant way. If someone needs to break him, it’s now clear just how they can do so.

Beyond sketching in our heroes (who, again, it must be said, have more personality and empathy after three episodes than anyone on Agent Carter’s sister series does with a season and a half under their belt), “Time and Tide” is a pretty breezy affair. The forces of the mysterious Leviathan are mostly left idling this week in favor of watching Carter and Jarvis keep one step ahead of the SSR. This includes the duo locating the bulk of Stark’s stolen weapons cache, stored in a boat not far from the mansion from which they were pilfered. Carter is forced to fend off and disable a brutish henchman before having Jarvis call the authorities using a wonky American accent. This development also furthers Carter’s workplace dilemma. Here she’s tracked down a score that would essentially force her colleagues to take her seriously, yet she isn’t able to take credit for any of it due to the shady means through which she’s come upon it. Professionally, she just can’t catch a break.

Carter also faces a rigid authoritarian environment in her home life, as she has moved into an all-female apartment complex lorded over by a den mother who will not allow male visitation under threat of eviction (which, wasn’t this the exact sort of place that Tom Hanks had to infiltrate in drag on Bosom Buddies?). Her covert career as an agent also alienates her from her slightly anachronistic roommate Angie, who attempts to open up to Carter in a way that simply can’t be fully reciprocated. The restrictive umbrella that Carter lives under in all facets of her life is really forming the backbone of the series in an intriguing way.

Already nearing the midpoint of its abbreviated run (with ratings not currently robust enough to instantly guarantee more to come), Agent Carter has emerged as a solid entry from the Marvel factory, already besting its contemporaries in the comics-to-TV scene. While it remains somewhat light on Marvel tie-ins, it makes up for this by having strong, engaging characters and a salient point of view. Maybe it can’t directly set up a future Marvel film the way that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. can, but at least it has something to say and people worth hearing it from.

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