Marvel’s Agent Carter Recap – “The Lady In The Lake”
It’s the return of Marvel’s Agent Carter! Have we all been waiting impatiently or is it just me? Just me? That’s fine. Onward!
Not-So-Short Summary: It’s Peggy’s iconic red hat! Except it’s Dottie, ready to rob a bank. Peggy’s waiting for her in the vault, and the SSR is everyone else upstairs. We waste no time in getting some hand-to-hand combat action, Peggy and Dottie landing punches and using sacks of coins as weapons.
It’s 1947 in Los Angeles. A murderer has risen again, leaving a lake half-frozen and the murdered woman in a giant block of ice. FYI, Sousa is Chief of the SSR on the West Coast.
Back in NYC, Agent Carter interrogates Dottie. It doesn’t last long–Sousa needs her in LA, where Jarvis picks her up with Bernard Stark in the back of the Mr. Burns convertible (Bernard is a flamingo).
“They eat avocados with everything,” Jarvis complains about California, among other things including the traffic conditions and the so-called dry heat. Peggy has Jarvis take her to a talent agency, which is the hidden HQ for the SSR West, as I have now dubbed it.
Agent Carter strides in and completely floors Sousa. Looks like there’s a history between the two in the last year that we missed. In talking with the LAPD, she mentions that perhaps the frozen lake and the body are connected. The trio head to the morgue to check out the latest body, but it’s still frozen solid, even under the heat lamps.
Oh, and the body glows blue. It turns out it’s not ice and that the victim worked with a particle accelerator at Isodyne Energy in Pasadena, which is what’s causing the glow.
Peggy sneaks in and gets taken under a scientist’s wing, where he has her taste ethanol he turned into wine. He lets Peggy know that the victim had a close relationship with the owner of the company, Calvin Chadwick. While the LAPD sends an SOS through the press, Peggy has Jarvis take her to the race track to interrogate Calvin.
That’s when we get to meet Jarvis’s wife, Ana! “She’s an embarrassing creature,” Jarvis utters, red-faced, after she kisses him. She outfits Agent Carter for the race track, where she makes very little headway with Calvin Chadwick (though we do get a fun American accent out of Hayley Atwell).
They check out the body again where the mortician gets shattered into a million pieces, almost as if he was touched by the Terrigen Mist! No wait, wrong Marvel TV show… after a bit of sleuthing, Sousa and Peggy realize that it’s Henry, the LAPD officer, who’s been doing this, but not before he steals their helpful Isodyne scientist and takes off with Jarvis’s car.
Too little, too late–a cop accidentally shoots Henry and shatters him to pieces before Agent Carter and Sousa get a chance to let him turn himself in. (And of course the cop was paid by Chadwick to take Henry out.)
On the Dottie-front, Thompson makes zero headway in interrogating her. No surprises there. The FBI barges in and takes Dottie into custody for reasons that probably won’t turn out well.
Post-Credits Stinger: It turns out Isodyne has the Gravitonium we saw in Agents of SHIELD!
Badass Moment of the Week: That opening fight sequence between Peggy and Dottie was certainly a way to start a new season of Agent Carter.
Best One Liner: “Are you the science cop?” the LAPD officer asks of Sousa when he arrives on the scene.
Kudos to the writers/designers/whoever that decided to use Johnny Mercer and the Pied Pipers’ “The Hills of California” to kick off this new season. Johnny Mercer is my absolute favorite, so
The second episode premiered right after this one, and our recap will be up shortly! is up and waiting for you to enjoy!