Agent Carter - 'The Lady in the Lake' and 'The View in the Dark'

The sincerest form of flattery.

A dark-haired lady in a red hat moves through a crowd of grey-suited men, but this is not Peggy Carter, but her nemesis, proto-Widow Dottie Underwood. She's robbing a bank, but oh, snap! Peggy's waiting in the vault to see what she's stealing (a fancy tie pin.) Scuttlebutt at the SSR is that if anyone cracks this nut, it'll be Agent Carter, which is perhaps why insecure action man Chief Thompson sends her to Hollywood.

Nice guy agent Daniel Sousa is the Chief of the new West Coast station, and he's asking for someone to help out his rookie agents in the case of a woman found frozen in a lake during a heatwave. The cops think she was done in by the Lady in the Lake killer, but the ice is a bit of a mystery. Fortunately, Sousa isn't the only one to have made the move to California. Howard Stark is getting his Hughes on, making moves and making movies, which means that Edwin Jarvis is at a loose end and eager for adventure.

"I think I broke him."

Back in New York, the FBI takes over the Dottie Underwood investigation. Thompson's mentor warns him that the SSR is a wartime outfit and its days are numbered.

In California, as more bodies start to freeze, evidence points to the shady labs of Isodyne Energy, eccentric physicist Jason Wilkes, and his high profile boss, Calvin Chadwick. But is Chadwick really the mastermind? Is Wilkes really into Carter, or does he have eyes only for the wibbly evil in the lab? Why does Mrs Jarvis have a garter belt with a gun holster? And what will Jarvis do with that flamingo?

This is pretty wild for the 40s.

'The View in the Dark' picks up pretty much where 'The Lady in the Lake' left off, as a hired gun murders two SSR agents to steal the body of the Lady in the Lake. As dead ends follow dead ends, Peggy gets a note from Wilkes, asking her to meet him. They talk and experience prejudice together, and he agrees to help her retrieve evidence of Isodyne's experiments into Zero Matter, a mysterious substance that fell through a rift in reality after a nuclear test and which, quite frankly, wobbles and sloshes like a Kree portal monolith at high tide.

Unfortunately, Isodyne is cleaning house. Chadwick's cohorts in the Council of Big White Money have pulled the plug on Zero Matter. They flatter him that his Senate campaign is more important, but his actress wife Whitney Frost is clearly livid as hell. She goes to retrieve the Zero Matter at the same time as Peggy and Wilkes. Wilkes is seemingly killed in an explosion, but Frost shows up at home with a strange, black scar on her brow.

...

Also, Peggy discovers that former admirer Sousa is dating a nurse and plans to propose.

The plot of Agent Carter season 2 is, so far, nothing all that new, but it scores over big brother Agents of SHIELD in the strength of its characters, relationships and sheer joie de vivre. New faces like Ana Jarvis (a wonderfully bubbly, tactile presence, flitting between the ramrod figures of her husband and new bestie and generally getting the hell out of them both) and old hands like Rose the receptionist, who has transferred from the New York office's telephone exchange to run the front desk of the alleged Auerbach Talent Agency and thus forced to deal with all the wannabes who find them despite their appalling publicity, mesh and bounce off each other. The whole thing bloody scintillates.