Wonder Woman (1975) episode 2 turns down the established ‘70s quirkiness, and serves as a sort of prologue to the previous episode.
Wonder Woman episode 2 (“Wonder Woman Meets Baroness Von Gunther”) centres on the return and reorganisation of that Washington-based Nazi spy ring that we met in the first episode, not so very long ago – they managed to bounce back pretty bloody quick, didn’t they? The scheme that bunch are running this time around, as led by Baroness Von Gunther (Christine Belford), is actually fairly similar to the last one. They’ve positioned one of their own spies inside the U.S. war department, again, but now the mission is: do everything possible (stealing secret documents, disrupting training exercises, destroying weapons, you name it) to make the army, and the FBI, believe that Major Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) is a feckless idiot turned Nazi double agent – which obviously isn’t true!
I’d certainly never accuse Steve Trevor of being a feckless idiot, or an empty-headed klutz, or a clumsy pen pusher, or anything like that. Nope, not me. What I will say though, it’s rather fortunate that Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) volunteered herself to babysit the bloke. Major Trevor would have been imprisoned, or killed several times over by now otherwise, and this is only the second episode! What she sees in that man I will never know. And no, thank you very much, I am certainly not jealous.
Aside from all this, I’d unfortunately say that Wonder Woman episode 2 is a bit of a step down from the first. It’s a little less fun. There’s less of 1970s extras pretending to be 1940s civilians, there’s less slapstick fist-fighting (aside from a climatic moment in which Wonder Woman and the Baroness roll down a lawn like John Wick down those Sacré Cœur steps), there are less quips of the Paradise Island-feminism variety, and there’s altogether a lot less humour – the only thing tickling me particularly in this episode being the large shadow of a crane, centre-frame, during a harness-based stunt that no doubt made use of that exact crane.
It currently seems to me that, going forward, there’s going to be less of Paradise Island too, which was to be expected I suppose, but still feels a slight shame. And perhaps there is going to be more of this Washington-based Nazi spy ring? I couldn’t quite tell if the immediate return of that lot in this episode was the setting-up of a regular series nemesis for Steve and Wonder Woman, or if their presence was more in the service of providing a bridge between the pilot and the rest of the series, a tying up of loose ends as it were.
Personally, I’m hoping it’s the latter. By 1975, Wonder Woman had been knocking about in comic book form for over three decades. I’m sure that in all that time she faced down more than a couple of spies, and so I’ve my fingers crossed for this series to introduce some more variety in the following episodes.
Episode 2 of Wonder Woman (1975) is now available to watch on digital and on demand.
