Agent Carter, Ep. 1.03, “Time and Tide” needs a little less talk
First things first, “Time and Tide” is a very boring hour of television compared to the boom of a start Agent Carter got off to in its first two episodes. It’s one thing to spend all of a season’s budget in the pilot, it is another thing to make that explicitly clear by having the very next installment turn out dull as dirt. Through the first 48 minutes or so of the episode, close to nothing happens besides small talk and exposition between various characters. What’s worse, much of this dialogue is used to dispense information the audience should already know, or at least be able to guess is coming a mile away. For a limited event series currently confined to eight episodes, an entire week dedicated to wheel spinning makes little sense and results in about as much entertainment throughout. Then even when the last few minutes start vomiting out important developments, they don’t hit with any weight whatsoever because the show is trying to have things resonate emotionally after only knowing these characters for a short period of time. The result is a great big mess of an episode that doesn’t do much in the way of convincing anyone that it can successfully maintain all of the thrills and feverish action that the strong suit of the pilot.