When we first met Violet, Sousa's new California squeeze, I rolled my eyes a bit. After the longing looks shared between Peggy and Sousa upon the former's arrival in Los Angeles, Violet seemed like a cliche, unnecessary corner to a standard TV love triangle. But then, a funny thing happened. Violet was charming. Whether she was having a pleasant conversation with Agent Carter, or being incredibly understanding about her boyfriend's day job, there was a spark to her that made her feel like more than just a nondescript hurdle between the inevitable Peggy-Sousa love story.
And that continued in the early going of "The Atomic Job". Much of the credit goes to actress Sarah Bolger, who has a sparkle to her in the few times she's shown up on screen. But even Sousa, who's more or less defined the concept of bland love interest, felt warmer and more real in his bumbling proposal to Violet than he's felt in the entire rest of the show. There's a chemistry between the two of them, and while the moment fell into the proposal-wing of the Museum of Meetcutes, the performances sold it well, and gave me hope that maybe the show was on to something despite the forced romantic tension between Agent Carter and her chief.
Then, of course, Peggy is injured (Cordelia-style), and can't go to a hospital for ill-defined reasons, so she ends up on Nurse Violet's couch being looked after by her and her now fiancee. As is seemingly unavoidable, Violet witnesses Sousa telling Carter that she's important and getting that puppy dog look in his eyes. So of course she suddenly knows that he came to L.A. to run away from his feelings for Peggy. It's overwrought, and the score swells to a pique of ridiculous melodrama, and we're back to the same tired love triangle we'd seemingly escaped as viewers.
One of the nice things about the first season of Agent Carter is that the show didn't feel the need to pair Peggy up. Sure, there was something going on with her and Sousa at that point, but it was mostly shuffled to the background, and even when Sousa asked her out, Peggy turned him down, with the implication being that it wasn't some smoldering sense of forbidden love that made her brush off the question, but that she was strong and independent, beyond the simple cliches of Strong Female Characters™, and that just wasn't what she needed or what the show was about. But now, whether it's Sousa's drama or the goo goo-eyed, just as dull Wilkes, we can't go an episode without some forced romantic element. It's a shame because it's not the show's strong suit, and it discards Violet, a character who can actually make Sousa a little more likable, in favor of a worn out trope.
But there are still a few things the show does better than its Marvel television counterparts, and comedy is chief among them. The scene where Peggy continues to use the memory ray on Hugh Jones while she searches for the key to the Roxxon facility and grows more and more annoyed with his increasingly bad yet hilarious come ons was a laugh riot. There's a timing that this show has down pat in its comedic scenes that really helps it shine in the humor department.
At the same time, the band of misfit toys that Peggy puts together, adding Rose and Scientist Daniel to her usual coterie of Jarvis and Sousa, results in a hilarious little slow motion walk segment that's half-Resevoir Dogs and half-The Big Green. Rose and Daniel themselves, however, were a mixed bag. When Peggy chastises Sousa for underestimating Rose, and points out that she has the same training as the men upstairs, it's a nice moment, and expands the female solidarity element of Peggy's character in a natural, non-showy way. (The call out to Agent Thompson was a nice touch in that regard.) But both Rose and Daniel are played as pretty broad characters, with a generic nerdy romance, replete with the usual stammering and whatnot. Rose got a few good lines in (and a good punch for that matter), but it was a part of the episode I liked more in concept than in execution.
But it deed lead to another nice comic setpiece, with Jarvis playing his overwhelmed butler best as he has to be coached how to disarm an atomic bomb through a locked door. I've praised James D'Arcy's performance to high heaven, so I'll just say that he has the upper crusty, timid tiger nature of Jarvis down perfect at this point, and his final rejoinder to Sousa (not to mention his sweet exchange with Peggy) at the end of the episode were the icing on the souffle.
Of course the main plot had to advance a bit as well. It's a fine concept to have Whitney Frost and Wilkes each feeling the call of the zero matter, and having it pull their allies into conflict with one another. Frost's feeling more like a generic baddie as this season unspools, but I did appreciate the evolution of her dynamic with Chadwick. The sense in which he's frightened by a woman with so much power, the way he tries to escape and continually is stopped and stongarmed by the wife he used to effectively order around is an effective one. And while their final scene, where Frost tells him to watch his tone, is a little too over the top (in performance and in the overdone musical sting) to work as well as it needs to, it's a good beat.
What's more, Frost's part of the episode also leads her and Chadwick to mafia boss Joseph Manfredi, played by the inimitable Ken Marino. Like with Frost's show of strength to Chadwick, Manfredi is far more interesting than the ham-fisted final beat he's given that's meant to establish his ruthlessness, but it's impossible not to love the charming smarm that Marino imbues Manfredi with as he toys with Chadwick on his home turf.
As a whole, there was a lot of momentum to this episode, with solid comedic highlights, a steadily progressing plot that gave good reasons for the good guys and the bad guys to come into conflict, and some nice character moments as well. But a handful of overdone performances, and a completely unnecessary turn in an unnecessary romance, drag this one down at the end.
