What If S01E01 Review: Captain Britain

What If, Season 1, Episode 1: What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?

Back in 2021, I did review the entirety of the first season of What If? in half-season batches. I was feeling a bit of burnout in general, and I didn't really think highly of the What If? project. And... after the second season concluded last year and I had more free time to breathe and rewatch some of the first season episodes, I decided that they deserve a bit of a more in-depth rewatch. Obviously these reviews are still going to be pretty short because, frankly, a lot of the first season, the episodes and what-ifs are pretty basic. 

Still, rewatching this episode is pretty damn fun. I've always had a sweet spot for these 'What If's and 'Elseworlds' and alternate universe storylines. They often provide a nice, standalone story that I can just digest without really thinking too much as to how this relates to the larger universe, and often times they let characters do crazy things or kill off characters that they wouldn't otherwise do in the 'real' timeline. And as I've said in my review so many years ago, What If as it applies to the MCU shows allows for characters that have been given less chances to shine in the broader MCU, either because of actor contracts or mainstream appeal or (like most of the villains) simply dying after their first appearance. 

And... I'm not the biggest fan of this series when it first aired, though I most certainly didn't hate it. I felt like it didn't really get better until much later, ironically when the stories started converging. Because it was admittedly a bit odd that we spent so much time -- 30 whole minutes -- around relatively simple concepts like Captain Carter here or Party Fratboy Thor later on, when the concepts themselves aren't that strong to be stretched out for so long. But knowing that these characters will show up later on does make it a bit more fun. 

I was also not the biggest fan of the quasi-3D animated artstyle for the series, though I will admit that they do a great job at making action scenes. This episode doesn't actually have much, but the shot of Captain Carter fighting against the Hydra jeeps and soldiers, and later on the double-team of Captain Carter and the Hydra Stomper fighting against a bunch of Hydra tanks are very smooth. But it's really just a matter of taste. 

And in a way, the first episode of MCU's What If (technically What If...? but I'm not typing the ellipsis every time I talk about the show) is the most basic. A simple change of which character became which superhero, and while the second half of the episode deviates relatively wildly from the movie this episode is based on, a good chunk of the first half of the episode is basically recapping the same events of Captain America: The First Avenger with the characters shuffled around. By default, this does make this first episode, and Captain Carter in general, a bit more boring than the rest of the season's characters... but I digress. We don't get to talk about the Guardians of the Multiverse before we talk about the First Avenger. 

The episode is narrated with a very brief intro and outro by Uatu the Watcher, at this point literally just the narrator, who gives a brief recap of the events of Captain America: The First Avenger before jumping straight into detailing what's different about this course of events. In this case, Uatu points out the exact point of divergence -- Peggy Carter decides to stand around in the operation booth instead of standing on the railway. 

This leads to a spiral of events that leads into the Hydra assassin shooting Steve Rogers critically before the operation (though surprisingly doesn't kill him) and after a bunch of yelling and an attempt to get a very unwilling Howard Stark into the vita-ray pod, Peggy decides to do it herself and becomes tall and buff... and proceeds to be completely grounded because of WWII-era sexism. 

Now it is just rather unfortunate that I've seen this whole storyline -- just substitute super-serums with SSR leadership -- in Agent Carter. Even featuring the same character and actor! We do get the rather surprising return of John Flynn from the Marvel One-Shot/disguised pilot for Agent carter, acting as the rather strawman-ish 'women should stay behind a desk' antagonist, which helps to drive this part of the story. But the sickly, thin Steve Rogers actually serves a rather interesting role, being as supportive to Peggy as Peggy was to Steve in the 'prime' timeline. Or 'sacred' timeline, I guess, going by Loki terminology. There's enough nice moments spread throughout the episode as it's clear that Peggy is as much heads-over-heels in love with Steve as her sacred-timeline counterpart.

Of course, we can't have a superhero movie without action, so Howard Stark sneaks Peggy an outfit an a shield painted over with the union jack, allowing Captain Britain -- sorry, Captain Carter* -- to go beat up some Nazis. Steve also later asks Peggy to help him rescue his buddy Bucky (and the rest of the Howling Commandos, though only Bucky and Dugan get any lines). The episode basically goes more or less how you expected, with action scenes and Captain Carter being a badass and taking over the role of Steve Rogers as the leader of the Howling Commandos...

*as a side-note, I really hate the 'Captain Carter' moniker. What's wrong with the perfectly cromulent 'Captain Britain' or even 'Union Jack', if you're willing to go a bit more obscure?

...with one major deviation, in that Peggy manages to steal the Tesseract before Hydra could get it. And this is where the timeline/episode gets a bit more interesting, because the recovery of the Tesseract allows Howard to have some scientific advantages that ends up with him creating a WWII-themed Mark I Iron Man suit for Steve Rogers, who the episode dubs the 'Hydra Stomper'. And we get a lot more action scenes, some of which are pretty fun and much more dynamic than most MCU fighting scenes who have to be, y'know, practical in real life most of the time. But that's not the case here, because animated Captain Carter can throw motorcycles mid-jump into Nazi watchtowers, or jump from biplane to biplane, and Hydra Stomper can punch tank turrets and it won't cost the showrunners much more than just having Carter punch a bunch of mooks. 

There is, of course, a bunch of in-jokes about how things are supposed to go in the normal timeline, like Bucky almost falling off the train and joking about his arm getting ripped off; or remixes of themes like the dance in the movie, or the talk between the two over some alcohol.

But ultimately, as the war goes on, Steve Rogers seems to 'die' in place of Bucky in that fateful train mission thanks to some explosives, though just like Bucky, Steve is merely captured. And with the Tesseract in hand, Red Skull goes a bit more insane. (Also, I completely forgot about the giant Yggdrassil wall in that Norwegian church that the Tesseract is hidden in; that's a very cool setpiece and I wished the Asgardian mythology got tied to the Infinity Stones a bit more)

How insane? Well, Red Skull tries to summon a 'Champion of Hydra' from beyond the stars with the Tesseract. It's not Hive this time either (hey, remember Agents of SHIELD?) but a big-ass giant space octopus. In a mission to defeat the Skull once and for all, a grief-struck Carter, Howard Stark (he needs to push a button), and the Howling Commandos storm the castle Red Skull is hiding in, though not before giving Colonel Flynn a dressing down. In the ensuing fight and in one of the hilarious dark comedy moments that these alternate timelines are allowed, the space squid just crushes and kills Red Skull. 

And in a sacrificial moment to parallel sacred timeline Steve Rogers's, Peggy has to fight and push the giant tentacle monster back into the interdimensional portal it came in through while the Howling Commandos and a recovered Steve Rogers open fire at it -- which also gives us the expected tearjerker farewell between these two lovers. 

The episode ends with presumably 2012-era Nick Fury and Hawkeye summoning Captain Carter out of a portal, promising some equivalent shenanigans for Carter as prime-timeline Steve Rogers had. And the Watcher closes the episode with a brief little line. And... well, I think I managed several more paragraphs than I thought I would be able to do for this episode. It's frankly not the most exciting "What If" concept ever, but it's a competently well-done twist on events we're familiar with. It's not the weakest episode in this season, that's for sure. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Uatu the Watcher is one of Marvel's most prominent cosmic characters, originally introduced in early Fantastic Four stories as a mysterious being based on the Moon, only able to watch and not interfere. In the original run of What If? comics in 1977, the Marvel comics anthology that this series is based on, it is often likewise narrated by Uatu. 
• A bit of less of an Easter Egg than anything, but it would be absolutely remiss not to mention that in the live-action Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Peggy Carter as Captain Britain/Captain Carter would be part of the Avengers in the alternate-reality of Earth-838. 
• While Hayley Atwell plays both versions of Captain Carter, and their uniforms are pretty much identical, they are confirmed to be variants of each other, with the What If episode taking place in what's designated as Earth-82111.
• Peggy Carter as an alternate Captain America was actually explored in the video game Marvel Puzzle Quest, and later back-ported into the mainstream continuity as a dimension-displaced member of the Exiles team.
• Her appearance here seems to be generally a combination of UK flag-wearing superheroes like Captain Britain and Union Jack. 
• The episode's storyline, of course, is a wholesale reference to Captain America: The First Avenger, and duplicates and/or remixes many moments from them. It would be a bit too much for me to list every single aspect of it that references that movie. 
  
• Steve mentions offhandedly that Peggy could've been 'stuck on a costume and made to go an USO tour', which was what happened to his sacred timeline counterpart. 
• John Flynn, meanwhile, makes an unexpected return from Marvel One-Shots: Agent Carter, which is rather interesting considering Flynn is nowhere to be seen in the subsequent Agent Carter TV series. 
• The final scene where Nick Fury retrieves Captain Carter from her otherdimensional prison is, however, a remix of the opening scene of The Avengers, with the room being similar to the Tesseract storage room that Loki emerges out from. 
• Also taken from The Avengers is the scene of Peggy punching a sandbag so hard it breaks free from the chain and slams across the room -- a scene that was very prominently featured in the trailers for this movie. 
• The Hydra-Stomper armour is very similar looking to the Mark I prototype Iron Man suit in Iron Man, and this episode confirms (or adapts) the long-running theory that the arc reactor technology that Howard Stark refers to in Iron Man 2 is based on research on the Tesseract. 
• Steve Rogers becoming an Iron Man equivalent in an alternate timeline was done in the Bullet Points alternate universe. 
• Bucky is rescued by Captain Carter instead of falling into his presumed death like in The First Avenger or the comics -- and he jokes about the rescue almost 'pulling [his] arm off', a morbid joke to the fact that after the train accident , Bucky would be missing one arm. 
• Howard briefly name-drops gamma radiation -- in the Avengers, the Tesseract is established to radiate gamma signatures. 
• This Reality is Designated... Earth-82111.
• Role Reprises: Hayley Atwell (Captain Peggy Carter), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Dominic Cooper (WWII-era Howard Stark), Stanley Tucci (Abraham Erskine), Toby Jones (Arnim Zola), Neal McDonough (Dum Dum Dugan), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye), Bradley Whitford (John Flynn)
• In addition, Ross Marquand takes over from Hugo Weaving as Red Skull -- Marquand has taken over the role in live-action in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and has seemingly inherited the role in animation as well.
• Notable non-reprisals are Steve Rogers, with Chris Evans being one of the large actors that did not reprise his role in What If. The character of Steve Rogers and all his alternate variants are voiced by Marvel animated veteran Josh Keaton instaed.