Agent Carter - 'Hollywood Ending'

"What brings you back to town, sir?"
"I got a contract for all season finales."

It's time for the big showdown as we hit the season finale of Agent Carter.

Jason Wilkes' big boomeroo turns out simply to have expelled the Zero Matter from his body. He is alive and free of its influence, but all of the Zero Matter is now concentrated in its new and much more amenable prophet, Whitney Frost. Vernon Masters is super dead, but just as Peggy and the team look set to join her, Jarvis and Howard Stark turn up.

Stark: Jarvis, you just hit a woman with my car!
Jarvis: I know.
Stark: She's a two-time Oscar nominee.
Jarvis: Miss Frost is quite resilient. She's fine. Trust me.

As much as I worry about Stark turning up and stealing the limelight, hit repartee with Jarvis is always a delight.

With Frost now completely committed to opening a rift and inviting the Zero Matter in to consume the cosmos, Joseph Manfredi decides that the proper and loving action is to follow his Mama's advice and make a deal with the devil. He shows up at Stark's mansion and briefly holds the team at gunpoint before embracing Howard as an old friend. He agrees to distract Whitney long enough for them to copy the notes papering her walls. With Stark, Wilkes and Samberly working on the project and the industrial might of Stark Industries, they can beat her to the punch and, once opened, the rift will draw her like a moth to the flame. Then it's gamma cannon o'clock, close the rift and home for tea and crumpets.

I'm not wild about Peggy getting romance stuff, but at least
we're out of the triangle.

Mostly this goes off all right. Sousa is almost sucked into the rift, but Jarvis sends Stark's flying car into the rift and detonates it and the day is saved. Bereft of Zero Matter, Frost becomes catatonic. In a painfully melancholic moment, Manfredi is warned not to bring her roses because she'll try to use them to reopen her Zero Matter scar, and he sits with her as she hallucinates planning greatness with her late husband.

Speaking of husbands - or potential husbands anyway - Peggy seems to have settled on Sousa, with Wilkes going off to a high-paying gig with Stark. This seems to entail more holiday in LA, although I'm wary of seeing her end up as Sousa's assistant. I guess there's a possibility that the interim between here and Season 3 - if there is one, fingers crossed - would be a somewhat altered version of the original short, leading into proto-SHIELD work with her and Sousa roughly equal. This is a possibility because the New York office is again down a chief, with the freshly redeemed Jack Thompson getting mysteriously plugged in the chest in the closing moments, leaving the gig free for Bradey Whitford's unmitigated douchebag.

I really hope that we get another series of this, not least because it's fun, and also because it's one of the few female led properties in the current MCU. Despite its ups and downs it's been consistently superior to Agents of SHIELD, doing considerably more with less, and I'll always have time for a period piece with snappy suits and Tommy Guns.