Agent Carter: Hollywood Ending Recap

Synopsis: Peggy and the gang make a risky move to keep Whitney Frost from ending the world. Howard Stark makes a surprise return, and Thompson learns a new secret about the Arena Club.

Rating: ★★★★☆

After all the hullabaloo at the end of last week’s episode, tensions are running high. Thompson is prepared to blow up the entire Isodyne operation to cover his and Vernon’s tracks, Peggy is prepared to kill him, and Whitney is still inside, desperately looking for a way to find and absorb more Zero Matter.

Which, conveniently, she gets, after Wilkes, in the stress of his torture and subsequent escape, loses control and expels all of the Zero Matter contained within him. Whitney absorbs it in turn, and becomes Mega Super Nuts instead of just regular nuts.

The blast stops Thompson from setting off the bomb, and Peggy from shooting him, and everyone is forced to work together in order to escape, which they do, with a timely entrance by Jarvis and Howard – returned from Peru and thrust into the fray (aside: why did Howard not have even a single line in concern for Anna? He spoke of her before we even saw her, and he spent the entire episode alongside Jarvis, and he never said a word about it? Rude. )

Back at the SSR, everyone’s running amok trying to come up with way to stop Whitney, who’s crazy has spun out into obsessive reclusion, and Manfredi has shown his face to ask for help. He wants the real Whitney back, and is willing to help them get the Zero Matter out of her, especially given that she wants to open a new rift to find more, and it could potentially end the world. You know, just regular Tuesday stuff.

While they look for a way to draw her out and remove the Zero Matter from her, Thompson shows back up, tail between his legs, waving an olive branch and offering his help, which Peggy accepts after only mild ribbing.

They manage to invent a device that will open a rift, and draw Whitney to it, and another device to force the Zero Matter out of her and back where it came from. It works, and a crazed, devastated Whitney is arrested, but the device fails to close the rift again as planned. So, as it is with such things, someone will have to manually turn it off and almost certainly be sucked into the black vortex and to Certain Death. While everyone else is tripping over each other to volunteer (“big damn heroes, sir.”), Daniel actually gets sh*t done, and enters the danger zone to turn the damn thing off himself.

His tether slips though, as they do, and everyone else makes a hilariously useless Looney Tunes-style human chain trying to keep him from being absorbed into another dimension.

All’s well that ends well though, and thanks to Jarvis’ quick-thinking and Howard’s flying car (you know, the one from Captain America?), they manage to fly the device into the rift and make it eat itself. And the car. It was pretty awesome.

Whitney is, notably, left in a mental institution where she keeps trying to claw her own face off and replicate the Zero Matter scar she no longer has. Her obsession has shifted and her powers are gone, but Manfredi’s plan backfired, and she’s as crazy as ever. He looks in on her sadly, while she hallucinates a happy life with Chadwick – the husband she killed. I expect we have not seen the last of her, especially given a conspicuous shot of the masks in her dressing room.

While everyone is preparing to leave, Thompson reveals to Peggy that the Arena Club pins transform into mysterious keys when opened. Before they can do anything with this information though, he is shot in his hotel room by a faceless intruder, come for said key.

Hello, next season.

On the whole, this finale and this season have been solid. Much better than last season in fact. I loved the flying car, I loved seeing some more Howard stark, I loved the increased diversity. I missed Angie, I could always use more Dottie, and I was sad that Wilkes (uncharacteristically and unexpectedly) told Peggy they probably just weren’t meant to be. It seems as though a great character is just going to be left to fade away. Something Agent Carter in fact has a habit of doing (See: Violet, Angie, The Howling Commandos). I suppose it’s better than killing them.

ON AN UPNOTE THOUGH, Peggy and Daniel finally get it on! He jokingly berates her for being so willing to die and refusing to let anyone else make the same sacrifices, and when he asks why she has no snappy retort, she just jumps his bones.