What If S03E02 Review: Return of the Gods

What If, Season 3, Episode 2: What If... Agatha Went to Hollywood?

A question asked no one, ever.

In isolation, some of these concepts of what made this episode up are legitimately interesting 'What If's. Despite the lack of popularity of Eternals in the general MCU fandom, I've always felt like it could've been a nice hotbed to launch some stories of -- and even if the restructuring in Marvel isn't interested in doing much with it, having a What If episode showcasing what happens if the slumbering Tiamut awakens would've been interesting. The idea of a world where the Celestials intervened early and fought a batch of Marvel heroes would've been fun, if nothing else. I think I'm of the minority in that I wanted more to be done with the Eternals concept, except that they just simply don't have enough star power amongst Marvel's gigantic library of characters for them to ever compete. 

I've admittedly a bit Agatha'd out at the moment after her titular show, but having a villain show up and do something else in a different time period is also a plot thread that promises to at least deliver something new. While having this very magical villain try and siphon off the powers of the very sci-fi Celestial, done well, it might've led to something interesting. 

And... they tried for something unique here, something that brings to mind the Hela episode from season 2. Two completely unrelated corners of the MCU brought together -- Shang-Chi's Chinese-inspired wuxia genre with Hela's Nordic myth in that episode; Agatha's coven of witchiness and the cosmic sci-fi of the Eternals here. Except... we also force in a whole Hollywood pastiche around the whole thing, and have Howard Stark and Edwin Jarvis be the vessel of Agatha and Kingo trying to out-perform each other in a Hollywood dance-off, with backup dancers, in a bid to control the magical runes that lead to Tiamut slumbering deep beneath the Earth.

It's... it's a joke that goes on for way too long. The animation style, I don't think, is fluid enough to work with the elaborate choreography that such an episode would demand, and the dance number just feels like a long, winding 'why am I here watching this' distraction. This would, perhaps, be something that I enjoy more had it been in live-action since I would actually be impressed by the actors strutting their stuff, but as it is, I was just mind-numbingly bored throughout the first half of the episode, which isn't something that a dance-off should elicit.

There is almost a fun integration of a plot here, with Kingo being the last Eternal to be in a position to do anything... while Agatha is trying to rather understandably fight for mankind and stop all of these pesky giant alien god-robots from playing god with us. Of course, if this also means that Agatha drains the power of a slumbering god-robot herself, and that she also drains Kingo's powers, that's just the price to pay, right? 

And that's the majority of the episode, where after the super-long dance number, we get a drawn-out negotiation, leading to Agatha drawing up runes and sucking up Tiamut's power and becoming a giant star-studded cosmic deity. There is the cool sequence of Arishem -- who's only been an ominous background presence in the live-action material -- actually showing up and trying to fight, but the actual combat isn't particularly interesting aside from the final attack where Agatha uses the Wanda trick of making runes to hold Arishem in a crucified position and crush him. 

And... and if they had done something similar to Wandavision and Agatha All Along, and actually go all-in on having Agatha be villainous, I would've probably liked it more. As it is, this is an Agatha that feels like she's been declawed, with none of her 'villainous' threats sounding convincing at all. Sure, there are some token lines about Agatha going "bwa ha ha, I played the reluctant hero!" but unlike Hela in What If's episode 2 (and even that episode I didn't find the most convincing) the way that Kingo essentially friendship-talks a now-cosmic Agatha into just... hanging out and making movies, and maybe fighting a Celestial or two down the line? That is just really unconvincing and felt phoned in. 

Oh, and you'd think that Cosmic Agatha is set-up for something grand down the road, but just like the second season, this rather interesting variant is just not involved in the final episodes at all. 

I don't know. The concept itself is already weird, even with the handwaves that Howard's overacting is him already knowing what's going on and is just playing along. Again, it's a bit of a shame because both Kathryn Hahn and Kumail Nanjiani give the performances that make their live-action characters likable... the lines themselves aren't the problem. It's the fact that both Kingo and Agatha are reduced to one-dimensional caricatures to deliver a straightforward plot. 

For example, how did Kingo learn of the nature of Tiamut and the Eternals' mission? Finding that out was a revelation to the Eternals in their movie. And Kingo was notably the one that was super-conflicted between the Ikaris and Sersi factions, eventually deciding to remove himself from the final battle entirely. That also went unexplored. Having character focus on Kingo out of the cluttered Eternals movie to explore why he does what he does? That would've been fun. Instead, he just feels like a putz in this movie, the butt of finger-gun jokes and only there to give an impassioned speech at the end that borders on parody.

This goes double for Agatha. In Agatha All Along in particular, Agatha is deceptive and goes all-in on her card-carrying villainy and betrayal. Yes, there is a heart of goodness buried deep beneath a lot of treachery, but the show has to earn the right by actually displaying Agatha both being cruel and being merciful to certain people in that show. When they did the Hela episode in What If season two, they showed Hela interacting with Wenwu, with Jiayi, with Odin, in ways that are consistent with what we learned about her in Thor: Ragnarok. That is not what we get from this variant of Agatha Harkness, and thus when she betrays Kingo and then decides to not betray Earth, it feels unearned. 

At the end of the day, the episode wants to end with some moral of how stories (and Hollywood included) isn't just about the flashy lights and choreography, and that it's the stories that grab people's hearts... and I felt like this episode in and of its own actually does that very thing, with way more focus put into the dance number and cosmic fighting to actually tell Kingo and Agatha's stories properly. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• A lot of the plot of this episode is, of course, a riff on Eternals and Agatha All Along, but taking place in the '40s with the characters from that time period participating. 
  
• Speaking of which, this episode has a 100% attendance rate from their MCU counterparts, with Kathryn Hahn, Kumail Nanjiani, Dominic Cooper, James D'Arcy and David Kaye all reprising their roles as Agatha Harkness, Kingo, Howard Stark, Edwin Jarvis and Arishem the Judge.
• While not seen, Thena, Makkari and Gilgamesh are name-dropped by Agatha. She off-handedly claims that she's siphoned their powers and is keeping the other Eternals elsewhere, but considering her sacred timeline's track record of killing witches and lying to people, I wouldn't be surprised if Kingo was the last surviving Eternal in this universe. 
• Agatha defeats Arishem by essentially doing what Wanda did to defeat her in WandaVision's climax, shooting and apparently missing when she's actually setting up magical runes in specific positions. 
• A very obscure easter egg is the quick appearance of Bernard Stark, Howard's flamingo and a recurring joke in the short-lived Agent Carter TV show (where live-action Edwin Jarvis debuted). 
• The three Celestials that show up at the end are not named, but they bear the resemblances to Jemiah the Analyzer, Nezarr the Calculator and Ziran the Tester. It's a bit hard to tell, really.