The full story
A year after Season 1, Peggy and Jack Thompson catch the escaped Dottie Underwood back in New York. Peggy is then sent to Los Angeles, where newly promoted West Coast SSR chief Daniel Sousa is investigating a body pulled from a frozen lake in the middle of a heat wave—one that glows faintly in the dark. The case traces to Isodyne Energy, run by Calvin Chadwick and his actress wife, Whitney Frost, and to a substance called Zero Matter: a reality-warping discovery Isodyne stumbled into while trying to replicate the Manhattan Project's success.
Peggy meets Isodyne scientist Jason Wilkes, who explains what Zero Matter actually is. When the two of them try to steal it, Frost is exposed to it directly during the struggle, absorbing it into herself; Wilkes is presumed dead in the same incident, but is actually still alive—incorporeal and invisible, held together only by staying near more of the substance. Flashbacks fill in Frost's past: born Agnes Cully, a brilliant inventor whose ideas were dismissed because of her sex, she reinvented herself in Hollywood as a movie star instead. Zero Matter starts granting her real power—she can levitate objects, freeze people solid, and absorb other people into herself—while a black, cracked pattern spreads visibly across her skin.
The season introduces the Council of Nine, a secretive group of powerful men who've been steering major events from behind the scenes, allegedly including the 1929 stock market crash, meeting at the exclusive Arena Club. Vernon Masters, a War Department veteran, serves as their government liaison; Chadwick originally runs Isodyne's Zero Matter program on the Council's orders, before Frost's own ambition and growing power eclipse him entirely.
Wilkes builds a containment chamber to keep himself stable, but it needs more Zero Matter to work. Peggy engineers a prison break for Dottie Underwood to help extract it from Frost at a public campaign event; the plan works, and Wilkes briefly regains a physical body, though he stays tethered to the chamber. Frost, meanwhile, turns on Chadwick, killing him along with half the Council and declaring herself its new leader, elevating crime boss Joseph Manfredi as her second-in-command. Masters, hunting stolen atomic uranium, leans on Sousa to cooperate.
Jack Thompson, who arrives in LA seemingly to help, is revealed to be working with Masters the whole time—and to have found an incriminating file on Peggy in Masters's possession. He tries to use a gamma cannon to kill Frost, Masters and Wilkes together, but the SSR jams the device before he can fire it. At an Isodyne atomic test site, Wilkes is pulled into a dimensional rift by a live atomic bomb; the gamma cannon closes the rift and pulls him back, but now fully consumed by Zero Matter. Frost tries to absorb the rest of his power for herself; Peggy and her allies use the same machine to tear open another rift and expel Frost's Zero Matter entirely, leaving her mind shattered.
Frost is committed to an asylum, her ambitions destroyed along with her sanity. Wilkes is pulled back from the brink, but what's left of him afterward is never resolved. Thompson gives Peggy a secret Council key before he's shot dead in his hotel room—and the file on Peggy is stolen by his unseen killer, leaving the threat unresolved. Peggy chooses to stay in Los Angeles with Sousa. Jarvis's wife, Ana, survives being shot during the season but loses the ability to have children. ABC cancelled the series before a third season could resolve any of it.