Four episodes in to Agent Carter season 2, burgeoning villainess Whitney Frost has become one of our favorite fascinating femme fatales. Here’s why!
She’s nasty
Whitney Frost is not a nice person. She isn’t sweet, she isn’t considerate, and she isn’t interested performing social niceties – unless she’s going to get something out of it, of course. Whitney’s flashbacks in “Smoke and Mirrors” demonstrated that she was always more concerned with developing her mind than interacting appropriately with the people around her. The intervening years have transformed Whitney’s indifference into ruthlessness, honing her brilliant scientific mind into a weapon of Machiavellian manipulation.
Whitney’s anti-social tendencies make her kind of a crappy person. But they also make her a unique and fascinating character, especially in the landscape of Agent Carter. Most of the women on the show have fairly sunny, positive dispositions; even Peggy tends to be friendly when she’s not dealing with bad guys.
But Whitney is cold, rude, and unapologetically single-minded. She’s like a gust of icy wind through Agent Carter season 2 — not pleasant, but incredibly refreshing.
She has an incredible amount of agency
Other than Peggy, Whitney Frost is probably the most “agented” female character in Agent Carter. She is fully the architect of her own success — and if her likely destruction evolves from her work, we suspect that will be her own too.
Whitney is the brain behind Zero Matter, the force behind Isodyne Energy, and now the active expression of this colossal power. “This is me,” she tells Chadwick, having demonstrated her new abilities, and it’s true. Whitney may not have intended to become the embodiment of Zero Matter, but there is no question that the life-sucking shoe fits.
As awesome as they are, few of Agent Carter‘s other female characters make the kind of independent decisions that Whitney does. Even Dottie Underwood, with all her incredible power, is a woman functioning under a childhood of brainwashing. Dottie’s choices are not entirely her own, and her actions always benefit someone else.
But even in her marriage, Whitney’s decisions benefit herself. She is as independent and un-bound an actor as Agent Carter season 2 has had — and with the Zero Matter at her disposal, we suspect she’s not going to be facing much competition.
She struggles with real issues
But Whitney’s agency is obviously hard-won, to a degree that reflects the lives of many real women of the past (and the present.) Peggy Carter struggles with being a woman in a man’s world, but Whitney has taken a more subtle and common path — playing the role assigned to her, while trying to achieve her own ends.
Peggy’s antagonists and challenges, as we have seen, have been intense and powerful, but for the most part she fights them head-on. She is a unique figure in her world, and for better or worse, is treated accordingly.
Whitney does not have that luxury. She represents the thousands of women who gained independence, skill, and agency during World War II, only to be shoved back into feminized boxes when the boys came home. Peggy is an outlier, while Whitney is the center of the bell curve — forced to adopt the persona of a smiling actress to survive, slithering into a powerful marriage to fulfill her derided ambitions.
The result is ugly and suffocating, and it was the fate of countless women throughout history. Whitney’s past gives that fate a voice; her present, empowered state, gives it an answer.