What If, Season 3, Episode 3: What If... The Red Guardian Stopped The Winter Soldier?
Yes, turns out when your "what ifs" aren't so random after all, you make good stories!
This episode is extremely well done. The comedic moments land a lot better here than in the previous episode for the simple reason that the Red Guardian isn't just a vessel to yell meme lines like "technique!" and "kepitelist pig!". No, both the Red Guardian and the Winter Soldier actually get significant character development for these alternate-universe counterparts, while also actually building up their 'buddy-cop' routine. You actually do believe that Red Guardian grows attached to Winter Soldier and genuinely helps him to get a sense of identity. It's basically everything practically every other episode in What If's third season fails at doing.
The episode first makes it look like it's going to be a full-on comedy, not too dissimilar from the Kingo/Agatha episode. Red Guardian has always been an over-the-top character even in his origin movie, Black Widow, and seeing him in his prime, charging in and trying to sabotage the Winter Soldier's dark and gritty mission to assassinate Howard and Maria Stark? I think the sequence in the episode where we see, side-by-side, the Winter Soldier being deployed with those creepy brainwashing phrases while Alexei stumbles his way through airport immigration best showcases the tone that this episode is going for.
Except that it actually works. We get some establishment that Alexei is frustrated and that the higher-ups in the Red Room are seeing him as essentially deadweight, a failure of a super-soldier, and they're just siphoning all of the most important missions (in this case, the Starks' assassination and the recovery of the Super Soldier serum) to the hyper-efficient Winter Soldier. This, presumably, is also something similar that happened in the prime timeline.
Of course, Alexei's over-the-top interference botches the Winter Soldier's assassination attempt, forcing the two Russian spies to retreat... and the failure of Winter Soldier's mission. Red Guardian continues to be bombastic, yelling about how it's important to make the "capitalist pigs" fear them, and even when the two spies do go undercover, Alexei feels the need to yell the communist rhetoric at random McDonalds employees. It's not something that should've worked as well as it should, but David Harbour's performance matched with Sebastian Stan's dry 'straight man' routine works amazingly well.
But, again, just like what the previous episode lacked, we actually get a bit of an actual emotional conflict here. Alexei reveals that he came from nowhere, just some random child of a farmer who lucked his way into becoming Mother Russia's Super Soldier. Despite his eccentricities and gigantic ego, he truly believes in his cause, or the idea of fighting for a cause. He has this almost childlike idea of loving being a hero, something that is a nice extrapolation from the character we see in the movies if he was younger and wasn't abandoned by his country and stuffed in a gulag for years.
Winter Soldier, meanwhile, is super-morose. This is perhaps the first time that the programmed human weapon has been allowed to remain off the leash for so long, and he reflects on how he doesn't have memories. Alexei refuses to believe this, and at one point he tries to force Bucky to remember... and Bucky remembers bits of his time in Coney Island. Alexei latches on to this, calling Bucky "the hero of Coney Island" or something ridiculous like that.
Again, this is why the over-the-top comedy in the better MCU movies like Ant-Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy movies worked. It's not just clever witty jokes that people care about, but the integration of these jokes with the character growth and emotional core of these superheroes.
We've also got a bunch of other characters involved. General Dreykov, big bad of Black Widow, acts as the shadowy puppetmaster behind the Russian Red Room spies. He eventually gives Winter Soldier the order to kill Alexei, which leads to the first internal conflict within the otherwise mission-oriented human weapon. On SHIELD's side, we've got Dr. Bill Foster, a.k.a. Goliath. Apparently in this universe he managed to perfect his suit as well, giving us a nice return to the Goliath CGI model from What If's second season.
(Goliath also deputizes a lady called Ranger Morales. She's not a reference to Miles Morales, and she's just here to... uh... be the 'only sane person' to the superhero wackiness? I felt that she was kind of unnecessary addition).
The mid-episode fight and chase scene across the cornfields is also quite well-done, and surprisingly, the down-to-earth scene ends up being more impressive and fun to watch compared to the underwhelming Gundam-vs-Godzilla or the two cosmic entities beam-slapping each other in the first two episodes of the season. The fun dialogue of Alexei being exasperated at how quickly Winter Soldier wants to go straight into lethal bullets, as well as the action scenes with Winter Soldier pulling out bigger and bigger weapons to fire at the expanding Goliath, culminating in a shield throw and a 'look at these two idiots' car jump across a ravine... pretty fun.
We get the aforementioned bonding scene after this, I believe, and later on they confront 'Rook', who is the super-secret American sympathizer who totally wants to topple down the capitalist pigs that run America... only for Red Guardian and Winter Soldier to discover that 'Rook' is actually... Obadiah Stane! The idea that Obadiah Stane was the one who hired the Winter Soldier to eliminate Howard Stark -- or at least be complicit in this murder -- is actually quite interesting. It feels so natural, and if Phase I had been a lot more interconnected beyond leading up to Avengers, it does feel like it would've been a revelation that the MCU would do. I actually had to check to see if this wasn't the case in the MCU movies!
The despair that the Red Guardian realizes that "Red Guardian... is working for kepitelist pig?" is done quite well and very in-character for the larger-than-life character, and this time it's Winter Soldier who pulls him out of the funk. He rescues Red Guardian from Obadiah's attempted assassination on the distracted super-soldier, tosses Obadiah out of the penthouse to his death, and subsequently we get another ridiculous over-the-top scene as the two of them fall down the side of a skyscraper while bleeding off velocity with the Winter Soldier arm.
We get a team-up again as they face off against Goliath in the middle of Las Vegas, beating him with 'airborne technique'. Not much to say about that other than it's another fun action sequence.
All of this fun and games go into a head when they are caught in the crossfire of Red Room assassin agents, with SHIELD closing in not far away. Winter Soldier reveals that Dreykov has betrayed Red Guardian, but I also like that there was no question in Red Guardian's mind that Winter Soldier would betray him. With a roar, he destroys the super-soldier serum and declares that it's his turn to betray the Red Room. The MCU flirted with the idea that Captain America is loyal to ideals more than the flag, though never actually had the balls to actually show that on-screen, with most of his conflicts being with specific people in power. This is a nice moment for Alexei, for sure.
But Vasily Karpov, Winter Soldier's handler with the book of 20 phrases or whatever, show up and begins to rattle off the words to revert the Winter Soldier into a weapon again. And unlike the Kingo/Agatha speech from last episode, Alexei yelling at Winter Soldier to remember that he is his friend, that he is the Coney Island Hero, works. Winter Soldier shrugs off the mind-control, and the two charge into battle, free men fighting for what is morally good... and end scene.
In a surprising twist for a show that has always been a bit too guilty at giving us happy endings, the two of them fail. Winter Soldier is captured and returned back to the Red Room/Hydra base. It's something that actually is surprising particularly with the tone that the rest of this season takes. Meanwhile, Alexei manages to evade his enemies and goes undercover as a sports coach, but gets recruited by Bill Foster, representing SHIELD. We close off with this universe's version of the 2012 Chitauri invasion, with the Red Guardian counted among the member of the Avengers.
And... again, I really like this episode. I kind of wish the episode ended at Red Guardian going in on a mission to save Winter Soldier (the way that some of the season 1 Captain Carter episodes ended), maybe with Captain America next to him... which would've been more thematic than the Avengers turnaround shot. But overall? This has been a gigantic blast of an episode to watch, utilizing and expanding upon two secondary characters (instead of reducing them to caricatures) and a surprising gem among the rather bland mediocrity of What If's third season.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- The story takes place in the backdrop of the Winter Soldier assassination mission that is covered in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America: Civil War. Simultaneously, it also takes and annuls the Red Guardian's prologue mission to infiltrate the United States with Melina, Natasha and Yelena as a family.
- David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, Lawrence Fishburne and Gene Farber return as Red Guardian, Winter Soldier, Goliath and Vasily Karpov from the live-action movies.
- Meanwhile, Piotr Michael takes over General Dreykov from Ray Winstone; and Kiff VandenHeuvel returns as the alternate voice for Obadiah Stane after doing so in What If season 1, taking over from Jeff Bridges.
- Bucky's memories of Coney Island is taken from the last happy moment before he went to war in Captain America: The First Avenger.
- The final shot of the Red Guardian squeezing in net to Captain America among the Avengers is a reference to the iconic turnaround shot from The Avengers.
- The Goliath suit has never really been seen in the main MCU (though allusions to it was made in Ant-Man and the Wasp) but it was previously seen in another universe in What If's second season, with the '60s Avengers universe.
- While Obadiah Stane has never been mentioned to have had ties with Hydra in the canon MCU, is it... really that hard to believe that he had a role in Howard and Maria's assassination?
No comments:
Post a Comment