What If, Season 3, Episode 4: What If... Howard the Duck Got Hitched?
And here we go with this one.
Sometimes, the concept for an alternate universe is a simple place of 'different people in a different time'. Sometimes the concept is 'what if the villain won'. Sometimes the concept is a whole different genre altogether. Zombies! Medieval knights! The future! Mechas versus kaiju! Stuff like that. What If's third season has been leaning a lot harder into the zanier and wackier, with the exception of the Red Guardian episode.
But there are some parts of a show when you hit a certain episode and go 'yeah, no'. I think this episode was it for me. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'll still be reviewing the rest of the season, but I just find this episode to give me such a huge "what the fuck are they doing"? And I didn't have this feeling in the dance numbers or the original character episode last season. They took a joke that was somewhat funny in one of What If's more comedic episodes an stretched it out to a whole episode... and then made it an excuse to shoehorn another original character to the climax, which I didn't realize when I was watching this episode for the first time but in retrospect it makes me like this episode a fair bit less.
In season one's "What If Thor Was An Only Child", there was a running gag of Howard the Duck (who himself is also a running gag in the MCU) going on a date and a shotgun wedding with Thor's supporting character Darcy. It's... it's a ha-ha gag that calls back to Howard's infamous live-action movie where there were a bunch of jokes about alien-duck and human copulation. It's a joke, it's funny. But then they decided to make a whole episode about the result of that episode. The uncomfortable implications of the physics of this aside, I really don't think either Howard or Darcy are funny enough to carry the episode... especially when the entire episode is just them running around trying to stop random villains from attacking their egg-baby.
Which, by the way, that egg baby has cosmic powers for no real adequate reason other than a handwaved hybrid-baby stuff, which also feels like really lazy writing.
The episode takes Howard and Darcy around on a trip through a lot of the MCU's villains, all of whom want the egg for their own purposes. The Grandmaster from Thor: Ragnarok wants to turn it into an omelet. Kaecilius from Doctor Strange wants to use it as a vessel to summon Dormammu into this realm. Malekith from Thor: The Dark World is trying to use it in the Convergence for something or other. The Black Order from Avengers: Infinity War recognize the cosmicness of the egg. Zeus from Thor: Love and Thunder also show up to do... stuff, I guess. Oh, and Nick Fury and Coulson show up as the obligatory shady government agent deciding stuff for civilians, and that's such a waste for the returning actors. We also get an evil child-kidnapping Yondu moment, although he gets killed quickly by the Kaecilius cultists.
And... I have to remind that this is the What If debuts for a lot of these characters. Remember how one of the constant themes I have throughout these What If reviews is that they're an avenue for underutilized characters in the canon MCU? Characters like Hank Pym, Peggy Carter, Red Guardian, Hela, Kingo, Ultron and a bunch of others? There is, somewhere in a world with better writers, a What If episode that explores a timeline where Kaceilius and Dormammu won, or what the Convergence in Dark World is all about... but it really is just kind of a shame that all we get is a huge joke out of these characters.
I'm not familiar enough with Howard the Duck as an IP to know if this is a 'proper' Howard story. He's more zany and stuff, I get it. But the comedy on this episode just... it just didn't grab me. I don't know if it's just the lack of chemistry, if it's the animated format, if it's the bad singing or if it's just me being utterly divorced from everything that's happening on screen, but I didn't enjoy any of the two lead couple yelling at each other. I like my MCU content funny, don't get me wrong, but the comedy in this episode just does not land for me. I also feel like none of the supposedly romantic sequences in the episode really worked.
Ultimately the fight and chase leads our heroes to run all the way to Jotunheim. In this timeline, Loki was never adopted by Asgardians and is more of a frat-bro, and he's created a ski resort in Jotunheim -- probably one of the few genuinely good jokes in this episode. All the villains come in with their respective armies, and Thanos even makes a brief cameo yelling about stones... and then the baby egg hatches and creates a cosmic baby that literally turns every villain and their army into dust.
So yeah, I don't know. I just really don't like this episode. I'm not the biggest fan of creator's pet original characters taking over established franchises, but at least Captain Carter and Kahhori had some stories tied to them. Taken either as an origin story or as a standalone story, this entire episode is just one bad joke after the next, and honestly feels like everything that the critics throw at modern MCU distilled into one big unfunny package. I'm sorry.
Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:
- This particular What If universe is a branch off of "What If Thor Was An Only Child", or the Party Thor universe (season 1, episode 7), from What If's first season. In addition to Howard and Darcy's one-night stand, some aspects of that universe like the chill dude-bro Frost Giant Loki are revisited here.
- The events of this episode is taking place during the Convergence, which places it in a timeframe equal to Thor: The Dark World in the sacred timeline.
- Returning actors from live-action projects include Seth Green (Howard the Duck), Kat Dennings (Darcy), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Clark Gregg (Phil Coulson), Michael Rooker (Yondu), Josh Brolin (Thanos), Rachel House (Topaz) and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor (Ebony Maw).
- Despite Jeff Goldblum and Ophelia Lovibond reprising the roles in the previous seasons, the Grandmaster and Carina are recasted to Matt Friend and Kari Wahlgren respectively.
- Making their What If debuts in this episode, Jared Butler replaces Mads Mikkelsen as Kaecilius, Steve French replaces Christopher Eccleston as Malekith, and Darin De Paul replaces Russell Crowe as Zeus. Andrew Morgado returns as the replacement for Laufey over Colm Feore
- Howard the Duck having a romance with a human woman is the source of the most often-mocked aspect of the 1986 Howard the Duck live-action movie, where they filmed an 'almost sex' scene.
- Vormir is mentioned a place to do 'couples' diving'. Vormir was the planet in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame where you need to sacrifice someone or something you truly love to get the Soul Stone.
- Kaecilius gives a twist of the iconic "Dormammu, I have come to bargain" line from Doctor Strange, by telling Yondu that Dormammu does not come to bargain.
- Howard's neighbour Mrs. Switzler is a reference to Beverly Switzler, one of Howard's supporting cast members from the comics and his love interest in the movie.
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