2x09 A Little Song and Dance

6.5/10. There were some positives here. The titular song and dance number (with unexpected but pleasant return of Angie!) was a lot of fun, and showed off some hidden talents from the cast. It's churlish to continue to compare this show to Buffy, but this is just the kind of flight of fancy that series would employ from time-to-time to liven up things a bit and show that beneath the genre-trappings of its premise and occasionally darker and more serious material, it could kick back and just entertain. The colorful costumes, the well-employed dream logic, and the hoot of an ending made the opening of "A Little Song and Dance" one to remember.

And what's more, the scene between Peggy and Jarvis as they were walking along a desert role is one of the best in the entire series. It felt true to those moments when friends are at their lowest and know how just what to say to hurt the other. Jarvis's statement that everyone around Peggy dies was coldblooded, and his immediately dismayed reaction after saying it perfectly underscored what a terrible thing it was to stay. And yet Peggy, paragon of strength, not only wipes away her tears and remains unshaken, but turns around and not only owns the uncomfortable truths and justifying virtues of what she does with her life, but rightfully spits it right back at Jarvis for the lack of any price he's had to pay for these adventures. And his confession to Peggy about his wife's inability to have children, about his cowardice and his unspoken guilt at having been the cause of it, it doesn't change the truth or honesty of anything Peggy's said, but it changes her perspective and attitude. Jarvis is having his first taste of this kind of loss, and finding it doesn't agree with him.

But the rest of the episode was fairly dull and uninteresting, even as it was attempting to be flashy. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- I have little-to-no investment in the love triangle between Peggy, Sousa, and Wilkes. Sousa continues to be a sort of formless space-eater of a love interest, whose dogged agent routine was tired before the show kept trying to glue he and Peggy together. Wilkes is, at least, a bit more interesting with the way he's been affected by the zero matter, but despite his scientific background, he hasn't been able to conjure up much real chemistry with Peggy either. So when too much of the episode has Peggy stumbling over these issues, I tend to push back.

Still, those elements didn't overwhelm the episode like the boring and repetitive plotting did. Agent Carter hasn't proven itself to be particularly adept at layering crosses and doublecrosses on top of one another in an intriguing way. With all the attempts at betrayal and charades and attempts to discern where real loyalty lay, the episode felt jumbled. While the various twists and turns on that front were not especially difficult to follow, they just felt gratuitous and unnecessary, and not early as mysterious or intriguing as they seemed to be pitched as. How many times did we need to see someone unexpectedly hold someone else at gunpoint in this episode? Eventually, it becomes comic.

Of course, with my utilitarian leanings, I tend to side with Agent Thompson for wanting to blow up three dangerous people who have each shown themselves willing to take the lives of others (two of whom have nigh-uncontrollable superpowers) rather than risk their killing anyone else. I realize that Peggy wants to save Wilkes on principle (and her defense of her decision to save Dottie and accusation that Jarvis is a would-be murderer dovetails nicely here and served as another layer to their earlier argument), and I can appreciate the idea (played with in Jessica Jones as well) that bad guys need to be brought to justice rather than summarily executed by the people going after them.

That said, we know, and they know, the kind of damage that Whitney Frost has caused, could cause, and seems poised to cause. Any of it that comes to pass is on Peggy's head now, because she and her team had a chance to stop these people and refused to take it. Even if, as Peggy believes, Wilkes is a purely good and innocent man who's being warped by the zero matter, how many other good and innocent people will have to die because she could have stopped Whitney Frost, or at least allowed it to happen, and wouldn't.

But hey, that's network television for you, even with a show that's as adventurous, and occasionally script-flipping as Agent Carter. The rest of the episode was hit or miss. Jarvis's scene with Ana was another strength here, as Ana Jarvis, who started out as a collection of quirks, has been sketched out well in her brief time on screen as someone who believes in facing facts even if they're unpleasant, while not letting them get in the way of her and her husband's lives. The support and love shown between the two of them is impressive, especially considering "Mrs. Jarvis" was an unseen character in Season 1. And Samberly continues to hew too close to the irksome side of the annoying-endearing spectrum for comic relief characters.

"A Little Song and Dance" is the kind of episode that earns being just above the doldrums through one incredibly fun scene and one with incredible emotional weight and character moments. The rest of the episode falls into cheesier tropes and messy plotting, not to mention weak romantic angles, that do no one in the show any favors. While there's plenty of interesting elements that have been teed up for the finale (I suspect we haven't seen the last of Howard Stark's gamma cannon in relation to Wilkes's transformation), this episode doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence that the series will be able to stick the landing in terms of its plot, even if it can pull off a pair of superlative sequences that show of the show's creative side and display the amazing relationship and strong performances between its two leads.