Marvel's What If?, Season 1
I really didn't care all that much about this show when this was mentioned, let's be honest. It's an MCU project, but it just... tells standalone tales about weird 'for want of a nail' fanfiction moments? I've always been a low-key fan of these sort of standalone stories, admittedly, and have read my share of 'what if' timelines in DC and Marvel comics. But as part of the MCU, I had originally thought that it was a bizarre usage of a 'slot' in an honestly ever-increasingly hard-to-keep-up fictional universe. We used to have a couple of movies ever year, now we have that and multiple TV shows? And it's non-canon? But that's just me being a sourpuss, because this show was definitely a lot of fun.
But then, being standalone also has the benefit that the contents of What If? is completely optional and there's no rush for audiences to go and watch it or they'll be missing out on some subtle thing or other for the next big MCU project. And, more importantly, when trailers started to really come out, the fact that a majority of the roles are going to be the MCU actors reprising their characters... it's definitely pretty interesting! It's not just 'lol let's see this character be that character' all the time, because in some of these episodes we get to see some characters who died a bit too early in the MCU movies actually be brought up into... well, a what-if scenario, for lack of a better term.
As a side-note, each and every episode is narrated by the cosmic entity Uatu (voiced by the excellent Jeffrey Wright), a familiar face to most Marvel fans. Uatu himself doesn't really have too much of a role beyond being a narrator, but having a narrator is definitely important to contextualize some of these episodes. The animation is very crisp for being cel-shaded CG models, and while some of the faces admittedly do look a bit weird, the show as a whole is nice. The voice-acting... not all of them work as well, and I suspect it's because some of the live-action actors aren't as used to working in voice-acting; but there's nothing too jarring for me to point out. There's also a metric ton of Easter Eggs in every single episode, whether it be references to MCU movie events, random props or minor characters popping up here and there, and stuff. This'd honestly be the place to do it. If I was still doing episodic reviews, I probably would've had a field day with this show.
It still took me a while to watch through them, and I wouldn't really call them all that necessary to the whole proceeding of things. This will cover the first half of the season -- I intended it to have every episode on a single page, but turns out that, well, I ramble a lot.
Episode One: What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?
And... and that's more or less what happens here. Uatu the Narrator gives us a quick talk about the premise of the show, and after some faithfully-recreated shot-by-shot scenes, we jump straight to where the timeline diverges. Peggy gets into the super-steroid-vita-ray machine instead of Steve Rogers, and ends up becoming the super-soldier instead. It's the easiest and most classic alternate-universe superhero story idea ever, but as the first episode, being basic isn't all that bad. Most of the story in this episode essentially follow the plot of Captain America: The First Avenger only with Peggy in the place of Steve, some additional character concepts that are definitely easier (and cheaper) to do in animated format than live-action format, and a whole lot of wink-wink-nudge-nudge jokes on the canon timeline. 'Sacred Timeline', I guess, since we've got that term from Loki. Ha ha, Bucky almost fell off the train and he makes a joke about losing his arm. Stuff like that.
And this episode is mostly... it's mostly slow-paced. There's the almost obligatory but very logical plotline of Peggy having to deal with misogyny (and having seen it twice over in Agent Carter, it's the same feeling I get when I saw Peter Parker being bit by that spider again in Amazing Spider-Man), but things kind of go a bit more off the rails. Not being a live-action show lets the animators be a bit free in over-exaggerating how Captain Carter (she doesn't get to become "Captain Britain"?) tosses trucks around. And hell, sickly ol' Steve Rogers even joins in the war effort because in this timeline, Howard gets the Tesseract and is able to build an Iron Man HYDRA Stomper suit for him. Their romance is preserved, which is kind of sweet. Ultimately this mini-movie ends with a desperate Red Skull summoning a giant eldritch tentacle-monster from space (a somewhat similar thing happens to the Hydra from the animated Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes) and this being the huge thing that Peggy stays behind to fight in her huge heroic sacrifice moment.
It's competently done, and Hayley Atwell is a delight to see as ever, but, well, this one's kind of basic. Beyond pointing out more Easter Eggs and praising the performance of the voice actors, I honestly don't have a whole ton to say here.
This was probably the one that everyone was talking about, because... well, it was Chadwick Boseman's final performance as Black Panther. He recorded his dialogue for this episode before his untimely death, and this episode is rightfully dedicated to the actor that brought the character to life. And on paper, it's another "what if X character was Y character instead?" And... and I wasn't the biggest fan of this episode's concept, I'm not going to lie. It sounds like a crack fanfiction, but, again, the writers proved me wrong because this episode was pretty dang enjoyable.
T'Challa gets to become Star-Lord in this continuity because, in this continuity, Kraglin and Taserface were the ones in charge of kidnapping Peter Quill and nabbed T'Challa instead. And T'Challa ends up staying with the Ravagers and becoming Star-Lord... but an actual famous outlaw of the galaxy, someone that everyone knows about, a fun pastiche on one of my favourite MCU memes -- Korath's epic "Who?". But I was still a bit hostile to the concept until the episode itself actually peeled away all my questions on why T'Challa would even stay with the Guardians at all. It's no big leap to say that T'Challa always wanted to look to the world beyond the closed borders of Wakanda, but he's always struck me as a very responsible prince. Even if he was delighted with the aliens, wouldn't he want to go back to Earth? Well, Yondu told T'Challa that Wakanda was destroyed, because he wanted to 'keep' T'Challa as his son, so to speak. And then at the end of the episode, T'Challa gets to go back after sorting things out with Yondu, not forgetting about the legacy of his homeland. It's a running sub-plot that goes in the background of this otherwise over-the-top crazy episode, which I feels really helps in grounding this episode in the fact that the main character is T'Challa. Again, though, without making this one run for too long, all the wacky continuity wink-winks are neat and all, but it wouldn't be that good of an episode if we didn't have T'Challa's arc of seeing who his family is, and what his roots are. That moment when he finds the Wakandan spaceship is easily the strongest part of this episode.
As with anything relating to the MCU's cosmic side, this episode was a lot more nuts-to-the-wall crazy than the previous one, which was mostly serious. From the moment when Korath fanboys over Star-Lord T'Challa, we increasingly make the gags funnier and funnier. T'Challa apparently talked Thanos down from a Mad Titan to a reasonable low-key gangster here, and both Fanboy Korath and Gardener Thanos sticks around as part of the Ravager crew. Nebula (with hair!), free of Thanos's abusive parenting, gets to become a femme fatale member of the underworld. Drax is a bartender, the Collector killed/beat half the MCU cast off-screen, and the Black Order are glorified security guards... it's manic in the fun way that the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is manic. I particularly like this episode where it seems like some characters are just going to show up for a gag, but they extend the gag into how the character would be.
It's a heist show, and heist shows are fun. Especially when this incarnation of the Collector (one of those 'underused characters' I talked about before) is a lot more chattier, and has revealed that he's got a whole ton of stolen weapons from MCU characters like Hela, Korg, Thor, Malekith, Captain America, and many others. The Black Order, a bunch of one-note mooks with fun designs that I've always had a huge soft spot for, end up getting a pretty fun role here, too, as minions of the Collector. And we even get a logical 'yeah, some other things proceed badly, shrug' moment when Uatu casually shows that without the events of the two Guardians of the Galaxy movie, it does mean that Ego is free to abduct a completely human Peter Quill for his plans of universal domination.
Episode Three: "What If... The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?"
Where the concept of the previous episode does feel like something special, though, this one... is a bit less derivative? I did laugh a lot when the first huge change is shown to the audience, admittedly. But this one feels a lot less interesting than the previous one. Someone is killing off all the Avengers one by one during the events of the 'big week' of Iron Man 2, Thor and The Incredible Hulk, leaving Earth vulnerable as Nick Fury, Black Widow and Agent Coulson try to fix it. It's an interesting mystery problem, and it turns out that the villain is Hank Pym as Yellowjacket -- a nod to Hank's comic-book instability. And I don't actually have a problem with that. Casting Pym as a villain is interesting, and there are indeed some bread-crumbed clues on how it's someone with Ant-Man powers doing stuff. What's not made clear, however, was the bit of a random revelation that Hope van Dyne is a SHIELD agent who died in this particular timeline.
The rest of the episode is competently done, at least, and I really did particularly like Loki in this episode. There's a sense that while he's doing a lot of grandstanding, at the very least part of his outrage at Thor's death is real. We all know Loki's a bit of a softie. At the end of the episode Loki lays a particularly badass beatdown on Yellowjacket Pym with his illusion powers, too, and in the middle of it he loses his composure when Hank dismisses Thor's death. It does feel like perhaps this episode was stretched a bit too much? I'm not quite sure what made me a bit too restless in this episode compared to the other two.
Episode Four: "What If... Dr. Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?"
Another relatively predictable one, I feel, but one that is elevated beyond its concept. It's probably one of the easiest 'what if' prompts ever, right next to 'what if a supporting character is the hero instead' -- what if someone that's normally a superhero ends up becoming a supervillain? It's never something that's going to happen in the mainline MCU movies, considering how hard they have been in pulling back any sort of implication that the MCU heroes like Nick Fury or Iron Man could have any sort of moral gray area, but in a show like What If, they definitely can do it.
In this episode, the point in time that changes is that Christine Palmer was in the car that Dr. Strange was driving in that fateful day, and instead of his hands, the casualty of that car crash is Christine herself. This leads to a moment after the events of the Doctor Strange movie where Dr. Strange ends up deciding to reverse time to save his girlfriend... only to fail again and again. Turns out that Christine's death is an 'Absolute Point', and because of the paradox that it will cause, the universe itself basically ensures that her death would happen. A different car crash, a freak fire accident, a mugger... it leads Dr. Strange into spiraling into darkness, looking for other sorts of magic that leads him into ultimately going into an ancient library and doing rituals to consume demons and otherworldly beings (including the tentacle monster that ate Red Skull in episode one) for centuries.
Not the biggest fan of the third act, with the revelation that the Ancient One split the timeline (and the Dr. Stranges) in half, leading to a 'good Strange' vs. 'Strange Supreme'. I get that it's there to give some action before the finish, but I felt like it's a bit of a distraction. At least we get those Jack Kirby energy-beam warbles, which I thought was cute. Ultimately Strange Supreme dispatches of 'good Strange', absorbs him, and actually manages to resurrect Christine... leading to the paradox that causes the utter annihilation of their universe, leaving Strange Supreme alone in the small bubble that remains of that particular universe. In an interesting manner, Uatu actually interacts with Strange Supreme, albeit in the form of a conversation, basically telling him that this is all his fault.
It's not the most original 'what if' storyline out there, but I think what elevates this beyond its concept is how well done Benedict Cumberbatch's voice acting is here, really exploring the various facets of the Dr Stranges we see in this episode. Plus, the particularly despair-inducing bit in the second act where Christine Palmer just keeps dying is executed pretty damn well. A very interesting 'bad timeline' for sure.
Episode Five: "What If... ZOMBIES?"
Not the biggest fan on the Zombieland parody orientation video, but the rest of the episode was pretty neat. We toss together a bunch of characters (Spider-Man, Wasp, Okoye, Bucky, Happy Hogan, Sharon Carter, the Cape of Levitation and Ant-Man's buddy Kurt) and have them fight against a bunch of zombies. The first half is pretty typical "let's you-and-you fight" with no real consequences, because some of the people are zombies, and this is an alternate universe anyway so the showrunners get to kill off whoever they want. As a surprisingly upbeat Spider-Man himself also notes, we go through a lot of zombie apocalypse tropes as well. The cast gets whittled down, one of the cast gets infected via a cut and pulls off a heroic last stand, a seeming ally turns out to be a psychopath that's feeding people to a zombified loved one... only except these characters are all MCU characters, which is where the black comedy comes in.
Some pretty neat things that happen here include Bucky actually getting the Captain America shield ('Captain Bucky' probably will never happen in the primary MCU since Sam gets the shield there). And I think this is the first time Spider-Man ever says 'Uncle Ben' in the MCU? Wasp also gets to activate the Giant-(wo)man abilities of her suit. We get a (zombie) Scarlet Witch vs. Hulk fight. We get Scott Lang reduced to a head in a jar (all this accomplishes, really, is to allow Paul Rudd to say Paul Rudd lines). We get a homage to the original Marvel Zombies with someone catching Black Panther and using him as 'takeout'. Black Panther is actually voiced by Chadwick Boseman here, and it's kind of poignant that he gets a line in this episode is about how death is not the end.
The episode kind of ends abruptly with the survivors escaping two waves of zombie Avengers and a zombified Scarlet Witch, going to Wakanda to make a cure, not realizing that zombie Thanos is already there. (Don't ask how he's in Wakanda, trying to analyze this particular episode too hard is going to give you a headache -- just accept the funny and move on) I did feel like the tone of this episode does feel a bit 'off', with gruesome deaths jumping straight into comedy. It's fun, but ultimately it's a pretty all right alternate universe.
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