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Season 2 of “Agent Carter” returns with more Peggy and Dottie

The Agent Carter season opener, “The Lady in the Lake,” covers a lot of ground very fast. Dottie (Bridget Regan) is still on the loose; Sousa (Enver Gjokaj) is Chief of the new L.A. SSR office; Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) (ugh) is no longer acting chief of the New York office, but it’s real, honest to goodness muckety-muck, to borrow a phrase from the smooth and mysterious Vernon (Kurtwood Smith). No sooner have we returned to the Dottie/Peggy (Hayley Atwell) show than we find Peggy shipped off to L.A. to assist Sousa with a mysterious murder, where she encounters Jarvis (and finally Ana!), flamingoes, a charming physicist, another hard-headed bigot of a law enforcement agent, and remarkably stubborn ice. In general, the show seems to have made some effort to address the criticisms it faced last season regarding diversity, though with somewhat mixed results.

Let’s start with what is, for all of us here at AfterEllen, the juiciest bit: Dottie is clearly obsessed with Peggy. I would like to note for the record that this is the fulfillment of all my hopes and dreams as stated in my recap of the Season 1 finale. Dottie has clearly not identified a self of her own to be; instead, she’s being Peggy. As she said in “Valediction,” “I used to be so jealous of girls like you. I would have done anything! To walk like you, to talk like you…”

Well, she’s doing it. (Okay, she doesn’t walk like Peggy, but she dresses like her and for one brief moment talks like her.) This is obviously creepy in the general way-which is par for the course for Dottie-but in the context of Agent Carter’s heightened, slightly pulpy world, I love it. It goes beyond the fun misdirect in the opening, with a woman we might presume to be Peggy in her bright red hat going against the crowd of grey-suited men (note that still, she’s walking in the opposite direction Peggy was in her equivalent shot-a nice little bit of symbolism!). It’s how Dottie seems to eat up every glimpse of Peggy she gets. How she stares at her. How she asks for her when she’s gone and makes sure to tell Thompson to tell Peggy “bye.” (I’m sure he won’t, because he’s a selfish prick.)

The thirst is real. (Source)

Somebody’s got a massive, deeply unhealthy crush! I’m so on board! The return of the “girls like you” conversation tickled me pink. I’m doubly pleased that we saw Dottie again after the opening, as it suggests she may show up again this season. I hope she’s part of the New York plotline and not just a premiere callback.

Intellectually, I’m on the fence about this development in terms of representation, I admit; if Dottie truly does have feelings for Peggy (of the heart or the pants variety), it would be another case of Queer Villainy. One of the odd things about the era we live in is we’re starting to abandon queercoding (assigning traits that read as queer to evil characters to help show that they are deviant), but only in favor of villains who are just openly gay. I’m not sure this is an improvement. While I’m well aware of all this, and we’ll see where it goes, for now, I’m still just really enjoying Dottie’s dynamic with Peggy. I’d understand if others don’t, but I am eating this up with a goddamn spoon.

Moving on to the rest of the episode: it seems clear that Thompson picked Peggy to send out to L.A. for two reasons, neither admirable. First, as Peggy pinpoints immediately, he’s insecure. Just before he makes the decision to send her, he spends a while sitting in a room with two complete Peggy fanboys, and it’s clear he’s uncomfortable with their admiration for her. Second, I sincerely believe he just wanted to mess with Peggy and Sousa because of their epic case of missed connections. It’s exactly the kind of thing the same guy who set up Sousa to walk in on Peggy while she was changing would do.

Speaking of Thompson’s low morals and weak character, I have the feeling that Dottie’s release to the FBI and the mysterious promises made by his buddy Vernon are hinting at the beginnings of HYDRA’s return. (If any of you watch this show and nothing else of Marvel’s, HYDRA was the spooky Nazi division that Captain America and Peggy defeated in the first Cap film, which we learned in the second had actually reconstituted itself within SHIELD-an agency that will be born from the SSR-and slowly rebuilt its power and influence while hiding in plain sight.) My bet is if we see Dottie again, this will be why. This is a very smart direction to take the odious Thompson. It’s entirely fitting that he’d be the dupe who backdoors HYDRA into SHIELD, though I suppose it also creates the opportunity for a redemption arc. Let’s not do that, though. (By the way I quite liked the little nod to networks of privilege in that bar scene between him and Vernon: he got his job at least partly due to family connections. Of course he did, the twerp.)

Out in L.A., Peggy and Sousa investigate a legitimately intriguing case: a woman’s corpse was found in a lake, which froze around her in the middle of a heat wave. It becomes clear very quickly that something hinky is going on with the body, as it all but refuses to thaw and glows in the dark. From the second we met Detective Henry (Sean O’Bryan) and his mysterious summer cold, I knew the strange freezing was going to be contagious, and it was going to take him; I have watched this procedural television thing before, you know. What I appreciated about his arc was that rather being a good cop tragically lost to fantastical contagion, he was an antagonist. That’s an unusual choice! Henry spends his screentime talking down to Peggy, making racist assumptions (yes, Det. Henry, the man in a lab coat is clearly a janitor, great detecting), and getting in the SSR’s way. He died as he lived: an asshole. I like this because it avoids mawkish, manufactured sentiment and instead makes his ultimate demise not only useful exposition but a fun minor chase scene.

It turns out that the dead woman was a physicist who worked with a particle accelerator (of course! This is the atomic age, people!) and she was having an affair with the lab’s owner, nefarious politician Calvin Chadwick (Currie Graham). I like that she was a physicist and not a secretary! I also suspect we may discover that they weren’t having an affair, and all of this is covering up a much bigger secret at Isodyne Laboratories, but that remains to be seen. In the meantime, as Peggy and Sousa chase down leads, we meet another new character: admitted genius Jason Wilkes (Reggie Austin).

Let’s start with the good here. Wilkes is charming, sweet, helpful, black, brilliant, and very into Peggy. If Peggy’s going to have a male love interest, I am fine with this. I’m pleased to see the show putting a character of color front and center, and making sure his intelligence and competence are emphasized. His slight aw-shucks demeanor (which sits alongside a much more knowing charm-“I’m glad to know you find me interesting,” I see) fits nicely into the slightly madcap, very funny tone the premiere largely emphasized. That Peggy actually can’t date him is also very much not a problem for me here at Peggy/Angie and also Peggy/Dottie HQ. Why a physicist who “works in containment” is both able to run tests on frozen chunks of former bodies and synthesize deliciously unnaturally-colored wine is beyond me, but we’re in comic book land here. I really enjoyed spending time with Wilkes!

And then in the very last shot of the episode, my heart sank. They seem to be hinting that Wilkes is a villain. Anyone familiar with the idioms of TV knows what a shot like that means, but anyone who watched the first season of Marvel’s Agents of Shield also recognized that squirmy blob he was staring at. It’s the same blob that the show introduced as the Darkforce. I’m not going to go into all the details of what this thing is and its history in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but trust that it is Bad News, it is almost certainly the reason for all this iceberg madness, and-well, technically spoilers, I think. (You can read about it here if you want to.) Regardless, if our brand new delightful black character turns out to be a bad guy I will be pretty disappointed.

On the whole, however, I loved this episode! I laughed a lot: James D’Arcy has really cranked up the comedy as Jarvis and is knocking it out of the park, his chemistry with Hayley Atwell remains unbeatable, and his finally-onscreen wife, Ana (Lotte Verbeek), is exactly as fantastic as Peggy declared her to be. The aesthetic is still working for me (loved the new credits with vintage L.A. footage) and the flamingo is an admirable replacement for Howard Stark. Most of all-I already loved the characters-I’m legitimately intrigued by the mystery we’ve been given. While the show seems to be setting up a number of points of continuity with the larger MCU, it’s doing so with a light touch, and the trappings of the case itself are fun and different for the show. (I recognize that human bodies freezing and shattering to pieces is not typically described as “fun,” but when you compare it to last season’s hypnotic ramblings they start to seem pretty lightweight, I’m just saying.)

Bits and pieces:

  • Loved Jarvis’s concern for his #aesthetic.
  • “He’s the devil in pink.”
  • Does anybody else get distracted wondering if police procedure was different in the 1940s? I saw Wilkes sitting on the back of that police van in time-honored television fashion and got sidetracked for a while wondering if that was a thing back then.
  • I was also pleased to note that the headcount of women is higher this year! Or maybe not the absolute headcount, but women with significant speaking roles felt more abundant to me. I hope they keep it up.
  • Also, I hope to see Rose (the SSR doorkeeper) on a surfboard one day. Please give this to me.
  • HAHA, DOTTIE CLOWNING ON THOMPSON.

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