Weak villain for a weak and ultimately disappointing season.
I have to totally disagree. I mean, Whitney's equivalent in season one wasn't Dottie Underwood. It was Fennhoff, a guy so uninteresting I have to constantly google the spelling. Actually, Whitney's place in season one is held by Leviathan. Yet the whole group failed to get as much development and character growth as Whitney.
We get to see her grow as a person from a young child working on the radio, to a young girl escaping out to Hollywood, to an aging actress and unhappy wife of a politician, to powerful super villain in her own right. And we see the motivation that drives her forward: power, respected, and most importantly, how those things have always been denied to her. Here you have a woman with clear, born, natural genius and yet all the world is interested in is her pretty smile. Even her own husband writes her future of as having babies and playing housewife which is fine if those are the things you want but that is never what made Whitney happy. Yet the thing she wants - the thing she has EARNED through scientific contributions - is something the entire world has decided to withhold. The counsel never speaks to women, Whitney. You need to abandon your interest for the sake of your husband's career, Whitney. You are getting too old to be important, Whitney.
Personally, I am a huge fan of when powers are used to exaggerate real life traits (Kilgrave as the abuser) or are metaphors for their issues (The Hulk as repressed anger/emotional trauma) so that alone would have pleased me. But I think it was put to best use in Agent Carter where it really mirrors the struggles of our protagonist.
It shows how both woman have been shaped and disenfranchised by a culture that promotes sexism and highlights not just the obvious differences on how they seek to deal with that but the startlingly similarities. Like that's all it takes is a push here or there. Peggy could have wound up married and likely as miserable as Whitney had she not been pushed into joining the SOE program and finding an outlet for her independence. That's an important reminder. Because Peggy is so awesome it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that she would have found a way regardless of how sexist society had been, and here we get to see how close she was to being your typical 40s wife. She is not some omnipresent being who somehow exists outside the culture that she was born into and lives within; she is just as much a product as every other woman in the system. And yes, some of them like Whitney and Peggy are so remarkable that if you give them even the smallest edge they will seize it, but they still need that edge.
Both of them also totally use those cultural assumptions as a means to their own gain. Whitney is able to get her place in Hollywood by being a young, beautiful girl. A man with her same ambition would have had the advantage of being allowed his own agency while Whitney constantly has to turn to the men in her life to get things done, true, but because she is a woman in a man's world she is able to manipulate behind the scenes without suspicion and she exploits this advantage. Which is the same one Peggy was recruited on. The whole idea of making her a spy is that men were less likely to expect a pretty girl be doing something like smuggling state secrets - clearly a man's job.
No, Whitney was a strong character and a great mirror to Peggy's own experience. Now, the final episode of the series was super weak and I won't argue that, and the whole thing was far from perfect but I don't think that falls on the strength of the characters.