Season two of Marvel’s Agent Carter opened with a bank robbery by someone dressed in Peggy’s iconic blue suit and red hat. Dottie Underwood, the Russian girl raised in the Red Room, is after a mysterious lapel pin stored in one of the bank vaults. She is quickly taken down by the SSR and the real Peggy Carter. Back at the SSR we get a glimpse of the new normal. Peggy is getting to do more than fetch coffee as she interrogates Dottie. Jack Thomson, who was promoted to chief last season, still doesn’t have much respect or appreciation for Peggy though and when Daniel Sousa, who’s been appointed chief of the new West Coast division of the SSR, calls asking for back up on a new case he has, Jack quickly ships Peggy off to Hollywood.
Sousa’s case involves the discovery of a woman’s body at the bottom of a frozen lake during a heat wave. Clues from the body lead to Calvin Chadwick, head of Isodyne Energy. At Isodyne, Peggy meets Jason Wilkes who tells her that the woman was having an affair with Chadwick, who is also running for Senator.
Back in New York, Jack is doing a poor job of interrogating Dottie when the FBI shows up to take her, led by Jack’s old mentor, Vernon Masters. Vernon takes Jack out for drinks to tell him that the SSR will soon be replaced and he’ll be out of a job unless he adapts.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, it turns out that Chadwick and his wife, actress Whitney Frost, hired a couple of cops to cover up the woman’s murder after the affair.
There were two mysteries in the lake: who was the woman and why was the lake frozen? Episode one answered the first question and episode two began to unravel the second.
Peggy goes back to Jason for answers. He reveals that Isodyne has been working to replicate the Manhattan Project but in the process discovered something called Zero Matter. The woman came in contact with the element which caused her to freeze and the lake she came in contact with later. Peggy convinces Jason to steal the Zero Matter but things go south quickly when Whitney shows up to steal it herself. A fight ensues and the container holding the element breaks exposing both Jason and Whitney to it. Jason is presumed dead (though this is a comic book show so “No body = no death”) and Whitney has absorbed the Zero Matter which seems to be effecting her both physically and emotionally.
A great start to a new season. What did you think?