What If S01E05 Review: Marvel Zombies

 What If, Season 1, Episode 5: What If... Zombies?!

Ah, the zombie one!

I really enjoyed this episode, mostly because of how irreverent and funny it is. And I don't think I would care for a show that's entirely just a dark comedy spin on a pre-established series, but I feel that one episode out of many -- and one that both adapts and lampoons one of the most trope-heavy genres of all time (after superheroes, of course) is pretty fun. 

It also honestly draws a lot more than I thought from the source 'Marvel Zombies' miniseries, which means nothing to most of the casual viewers, but I definitely appreciate it. 

This What If episode also features a rather sizable cast of random characters and gives all of them something to say or do -- a stark contrast to the terribly-handled finale to What If's second season where no one other than the main three characters had anything significant to say. 

The episode is kicked off with the zombie apocalypse already underway, with Hulk -- or, well, Bruce Banner -- dropping down onto Dr. Strange's sanctum just like the opening of Avengers: Infinity War. He's soon followed by Thanos's two goons, Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian, but unlike the prime timeline the streets are empty and there aren't any superheroes around. Ebony Maw gets some words of his monologue out until Dr. Strange, Iron Man and Wong show up... but they're zombies! And they immediately dispatch of the aliens and turn them into zombies. 

After this bit of glorious black comedy, Bruce Banner is rescued by a ragtag bunch of survivors, which is where I talked about unlikely characters meeting and interacting with each other. We've got Spider-Man, Wasp, Sharon Carter, Winter Soldier, Okoye, Happy Hogan, and Kurt. Kurt, if you forget, is one of Ant-Man's sidekicks from his movies. Oh, and Dr. Strange's Cloak of Levitation is around, too. 

Spider-Man (who is recasted for What If due to legal issues, but the Tom Holland energy is strong) gives us a rundown in his trademark annoying-teenager style. Riffing on Zombieland, Spider-Man shows Bruce, and ergo, the audience, about what's going on in the zombie apocalypse. And, well, in-between having jokes and introducing the audience to some of the more obscure MCU characters (like poor Sharon Carter -- I'm convinced her role in Falcon and the Winter Soldier is because the movie creators and audiences kind of collectively forgot she existed) and giving us some comedy in the form of naked Bucky. 

Unlike the comic-book version of Marvel Zombies (where the zombies retain their personalities and can speak), What If's Marvel Zombies work on regular zombie rules, with all the zombified people being groaning, shambling wights. And Spider-Man (and to a lesser extent Happy and Kurt) ends up being one of the funniest characters throughout the episode, constantly giving bits of pop culture references or genre-savvy commentary. He also has a great dynamic with Wasp/Hope, who acts as a surrogate big sister or mentor to her throughout the episode. 

And I'm going to go through Spider-Man's character first since I'm already in the groove, but I think one of the best scenes in this episode is Peter's later acknowledgement that he's doing this just to try and keep his team and himself upbeat in the face of disaster after losing literally everyone in his life. This proves that they can have their cake and eat it, by having Peter inject a source of levity into the otherwise dark'n'edgy topic, while also giving a fair bit of pathos to these characters. 

Anyway, after the big wacky introduction by Peter (and we get a handwave explanation for the zombie virus, which came during the retrieval of Janet van Dyne in this world's equivalent of Ant-Man and the Wasp), we are also very quickly given our first 'zombie video game mission', where our heroes want to investigate Camp LeHigh. We get a fun fight in the big train station in New York, where our heroes fight against zombie Hawkeye and zombie Falcon. Some hilarious comedy as Bucky lampshades his shared status as Captain America's sidekick with Falcon (and both Sebastian Stan and Bucky Barnes are great at this deadpan comedy). Zombie Captain America is the final boss of this little gauntlet in the train station, leading to a fight against Bucky, who ends up bifurcating Captain America and taking his shield. Captain Bucky, everybody! This is the closest we'll get to that since the MCU has to give the shield to Falcon!

And, just like any zombie apocalypse series, we get people dropping like flies. Happy gets pulled off by a zombie horde and continues going blam-blam-blam with his Iron Man glove even as a zombie. Sharon Carter gets zombified by Cap, before Wasp flies into her and expands, blowing up poor Zombie Sharon with some graphicness that would never fly for a real, non-zombie takedown. 

We get a moment of calmness and drama in the midst of all this as Peter gives a whole speech about losing people from his friends to his aunt to his Uncle Ben (making this alternate universe world ironically the first time 'Uncle Ben' is even properly mentioned in the MCU). The drama continues when Wasp discovers that she's been infected, giving poor Peter Parker another gut punch as this newfound big-sister figure goes Giant-Woman and tears through a giant wave of zombies to allow our heroes access to Camp LeHigh.

Afterwards, our heroes discover that the one that had sent out the distress call from Camp LeHigh is the Vision. Vision's Mind Stone is able to reverse part of the zombification process... leading to something that is technically a homage to a part of the original comic run, but is just another bit of ridiculousness in it all -- Ant-Man's head is in a jar. He's honestly kind of irrelevant other than to give Paul Rudd a lot of opportunities to crack jokes, but that's a good reason to have him around. 

And turns out that as our heroes talk a bit with Vision, turns out that Vision is luring survivors to the camp so that they can be fed to Zombie Wanda -- whose powers are too strong for Vision's Mind Stone to work on. Presumably, this is because of some infinity-stone related shenanigans? Zombie Wanda becomes the final boss for our heroes to take down. She kills Kurt and Okoye, but our heroes manage to talk to Vision and get him to see sense long enough to entrust the Mind Stone to Spider-Man. Our heroes run to try and get to a jet that will take them to Wakanda, which can hopefully create a cure. 

Zombie Wanda sees the destroyed body of Vision and goes insane. She continues to pursue our heroes, and there's a comical (and almost mean!) takedown of poor Bucky, before Bruce Banner jumps down and Hulks out to hold back Zombie Wanda. We get one last fight against a zombified, gigantified Wasp, but the survivors manage to fly off.

With their numbers reduced to two men, a head and a floating cloak, Spider-Man bemoans their fate. T'Challa, however, gives an amazing speech made more poignant by his actor's death (which was very recent at the time of the airing of this season) and the whole 'King of the Dead' aspect of Black Panther that the MCU hasn't quite managed to cover. “In my culture, death is not the end. They’re still with us, as long as we do not forget them.” 

Very appropriate to be the hopeful close-off to a zombie-themed episode... if only the episode didn't pull one last black comedy joke and show that Wakanda has already fallen to Thanos, who apparently got zombified offscreen. 

I do actually really like the zombie episode. It's got a lot of black comedy, and it's quite self-aware with how ridiculous all of these deaths are and how out-of-place Spider-Man and Ant-Man's brands of comedy are. At different parts of the episode, both characters actually do admit that what they're doing is driven by coping and madness respectively. There are a lot of honestly quite great moments in this episode for the characters, with Spider-Man and Wasp's speeches in the middle of the episode being one of the highlights. Black Panther and Vision also have quite a fair bit of great moments, but the more I write about this episode, the more I like it. This one's pretty cool. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• This is the first What If...? episode to not adapt events spiraling from a single movie, but rather an actual Marvel comics alternate-reality concept, that is Marvel Zombies. The zombies in this version are groaning, growling nearly non-sentient ones instead of Marvel Zombies' very sentient and intelligent undead, though. 
  
• Several plot lines -- like limbs of Black Panther being used to feed a zombified loved one by an insane superhero (T'Challa is held hostage by Hank Pym/Giant-Man); and a superhero surviving as a disembodied head (Wasp/Janet in the comics instead of Scott Lang) are taken directly from the comics. 
• Additionally, in Marvel Zombies 3, Scarlet Witch keeps the non-zombified but still alive remains of the Vision in a stronghold, which is the reverse of what happens here. 
• The timeframe of this movie -- specifically Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian's arrival -- lines up with Avengers: Infinity War.  
• Peter Parker also makes homemade films with annoying-to-those-around-him commentary in Spider-Man: Homecoming, though being the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse is a lot more grim than the background events of Civil War.
• Kurt keeps getting freaked out by what he thinks is the mythological creature Baba Yaga, as he was in Ant-Man and the Wasp. 
• Bucky makes a dark comedy joke about Steve Rogers' "until the end of the line", well, line from Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier .
• T'Challa's "death is not the end" line is a more somber version of the line he has from Captain America: Civil War.  
• This Reality is Designated... Earth-89521
• Role Reprises: New 'debuts' in this show include Evangeline Lily (Wasp/Hope van Dyne), Paul Rudd (Ant-Man Paul Bettany (Vision), Jon Favreau (Happy Hogan), Emily VanCamp (Sharon Carter) and David Dastmalchian (Kurt)
• Returning from previous episodes are Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), Sebastian Stan (Bucky), Danai Gurira (Okoye) and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor (Ebony Maw)
• Notable non-reprises are, surprising no one due to the complex 'sharing' of Spider-Man between Sony and Marvel, Spider-Man himself, who's voiced by Hudson Thames instead of Tom Holland.