That’s the kind of meticulous character building that lays the groundwork for a truly climactic standoff, and after circling each other all season, we couldn’t be more primed to see Frost and Peggy go head-to-head. We were meant to see how two similarly brilliant women could be pushed down divergent paths by sexism and circumstance. In earlier episodes this season, time was spent to carefully set up tragic parallels between Frost and Peggy. The devolution of Whitney Frost is the finale’s first big misstep. Unfortunately, all that Zero Matter transfers directly to Whitney Frost, who has mutated from brilliant, emotionally hardened scientist into credulous, bug-eyed lunatic. When the dust clears, Wilkes is finally free, able to live as a normal (and corporeal) man again. Jason Wilkes unleashes his Zero Matter, sending everyone scuttling to the floor in the resulting shockwave. In the end, Agent Carter cheats the question of whether Peggy is actually bluffing. “You don’t have it in you,” Jack scoffs as he prepares to set off the detonator. “Hollywood Ending” begins, as a title card helpfully informs us, “60 seconds ago,” as Peggy points a gun at Jack Thompson outside Whitney Frost’s compound. After those movie-length installments, the 42-minute finale was doomed to seem anticlimactic.) (It didn’t help that ABC aired back-to-back episodes over the past two weeks. It’s a finale with so many stories to resolve that it didn’t have enough time to do most of them justice.
I wish I could say Agent Carter ended its second season at the top of its game, but “Hollywood Ending” was the weakest episode of the season. By the end of “Hollywood Ending,” Peggy Carter has closed the book on her big Los Angeles case - but like many mysteries, the journey turned out to be a lot more satisfying than the resolution.
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