What If S03E07 Review: Exiles

What If, Season 3, Episode 7: What If... The Watcher Disappeared?

And we get the final two-parter for What If, which also comes right on the heels of the show's cancellation and how this is the final season that we get for the conclusion of the story. And it is admittedly a shame. There are many discussions about what the show should've been -- I think most people agree that the first season was great, but opinions are split on whether they would've preferred more straightforward 'alternate branches', more insane combinations of characters, or just more faithful adaptations of iconic multiverse stories. Whatever the case that the real collective groupthink might be, I think I am not alone in saying that the finales for What If's second and third season are a pretty easy 'jumping the shark' moment as the show gets wrapped up in its original characters at the expense of actually telling a 'What If MCU' story.

And... we start off with a take on the 'Guardians of the Multiverse' group from the first season, except they are called the 'Exiles' now. Two callbacks to the previous seasons show up here, as the extradimensional Hydra tentacle monster from What If's very first season tears through a dimensional portal to attack the universe inhabited by Super Nova Nebula form season 2. And this is a way to reintroduce... the Exiles, consisting of Captain Carter and Kahhori from season 2's divisive finale; Byrdie the Duck, all grown up with cosmic powers from this season; and just to bait the fans, Storm from X-Men. She's wielding Mjolnir!

And... and I really don't care for this team. Captain Carter is the only one here who I remotely care about, and that's mostly because over her writer's-pet status across the three What If seasons, she at least got some kind of character development as a long-suffering champion despite everything that fate has done to her. Having peeked into the next episode, Kahhori is also essentially a character with no real personality beyond being generically good and heroic. Byrdie is the same and even more of a cipher, with her personality being 'she's kinda crazy'... but they don't take her quite enough to be memorable, and she ends up leaving a pretty bad taste in my mouth. There's nothing in these two original characters' stories or personalities that make me really think that I want to watch them be part of the final episode of this multiverse over literally anyone else in this series.

And Storm? Storm's played very safe, taking the most basic parts of what made her iconic throughout various comic books, cartoons and movies. But just like the Illuminati were in Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, she feels like a cipher. Only unlike the Illuminati, we don't get much of a context about Storm's universe or who this specific character is... and I really would've liked to have her show up in an episode. Even if we didn't include the rest of the X-Men, even if it was only a Storm and Thor episode or something, it would've done a lot other than to have her be obviously just here as one last bone to throw to the fans and to make the trailer a lot more hype. Sure, they got her X-Men 97 theme song and voice actor back, but in a show that's supposed to explore the differences in character backstories and whatnot, she feels extremely tacked on. It's frankly kind of annoying, since they don't even do anything interesting with Storm as a character beyond having her show up -- just like the many random cameos in that tabletop foosball game. Cute, but without any real substance. 

But yeah. This team could have been an amazing sendoff to What If as a whole if it actually had the characters that were starred throughout the past 3 seasons. Or, shit, even have the people that the Watcher helped -- Vision!Ironheart and Kwai Jun-Fan as Iron Fist -- would've been so much better if you absolutely needed to take characters from this season. As it is, it's pretty lame. 

And the execution of this episode's plot is also not the best. Following up from the previous episode, the fight between the Watcher and the Eminence causes a bunch of glass shards from the Fifth Dimension to fall through the Multiverse and coincidentally end up in front of the Exiles. Captain Carter quickly realizes what's going on, and decides to save her friend. And... we take way too long to get going. Everyone gets their own turn to try and muck around with the shards, with Byrdie using technology and Storm using the magics within Mjolnir... which would've been fine if we learned anything about these new characters. But we don't, not really. They're all generic good superhero friends, and it was really hard for me to get invested in them. 

Carter then cooks up a plan to find a variant of Infinity Ultron from the first season that did not hear the Watcher's voice, and utilize him as a conduit to go into the Watchers' Fifth Dimension. The main crux of this episode's character arc for Captain Carter is, I suppose, a natural enough extension of what she did in the season two finale. She's worried that she's going to lose even more of her friends, the way she lost so much in season two, so she goes behind the Exiles' back to confront Infinity Ultron alone. 

The other Exiles panic, go to this universe and fight Infinity Ultron a bit when they think Carter's been vaporized by the synthezoid. It's all a big misunderstanding, however, because turns out this is an Infinity Ultron who's seen the error of his logic after millennia of isolation, and he was willing to fight alongside Carter until the Eminence shows up, uses his Watcher powers to beat Ultron and abduct Captain Carter. End scene. 

And... yeah. Again, trying to be positive, I do like the exploration of Captain Carter's messiah complex as she is so afraid of losing even more people. I do like the monologue from Ultron, as it's actually a valid 'what if' question on what would happen if you take this scenario to its extreme conclusion. But the rest of the episode? We barely learn anything about who the Exiles are, and the attempt to serialize this ends up falling short as only Captain Carter and Kahhori have any sort of stories behind them to make us invested in them (and Kahhori's lacking a distinct personality). While the episode could've done something interesting to make me care about the team last-minute, it... it really didn't. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• In the comics, the Exiles were a group of X-Men that were pulled across different doomed timelines by a race called the Timebreakers in order to fight threats that threatened to destroy the Omniverse. Over the years, the roster of the exiles has expanded to include many other characters from 'doomed' or 'concluded' alternate universes.
• This marks the first proper appearance of Storm (Ororo Munroe), one of the primary X-Men characters, in an MCU project. I think we've spoken enough about the X-Men in this blog that I don't need to talk too much about her origin story.
• The idea of a Storm who wields Thor's hammer Mjolnir is something that went as far back as 1985 in an X-Men Annual, where Loki crafted a Mjolnir-copy hammer called the Stormcaster and gave it to Storm. 
• The theme for the 90's X-Men cartoon (and by extension X-Men '97, which we'll review at some point in this blog) plays when Storm first enters.
• Captain Carter and Kahhori return after the final episode of What If's season 2; Byrdie returns (albeit aged up) from episode 4 of this season; the 'Nova Nebula' universe was the focus of the first episode of What If season 2. The giant tentacle monster was a recurring threat that menaced Captain Carter ever since the first episode of What If. Infinity Ultron was the primary antagonist of What If's first season, though the one we see here is from an alternate universe where he never discovered the Multiverse. 
• In the photograph of what's presumably a previous incarnation of the Exiles, we also see Captain Carter's two former 'Guardians of the Multiverse' teammates Star-Lord T'Challa, Thanos-killer Gamora, Party Thor, and presumably the Black Widow from the Age of Ultron universe.
• Returning voice actors from live-action projects include Hayley Atwell (Captain Carter); Karen Gillan (Nebula); Taika Waititi (Korg) Kat Dennings (Darcy); Seth Green (Howard the Duck). Storm is voiced by Alison Sealy-Smith, her voice in X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men 97. 
• Just like their previous recastings, Ross Marquand, Fred Tatasciore and Alexandra Daniels take over as Infinity Ultron, Groot and Captain Marvel.
• The Exiles fly around in Kang's orb-chair ship from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 
• TVA time-pruning charges from the TVA are mentioned as a feasible weapon by the Exiles.
• The foosball game that Byrdie and Kahhori play has a lot of cameos in the depictions of the players, many of which are iconic comic characters that hasn't appeared in the MCU due to rights issues.
• "Existing" MCU characters include: Thanos, Proxima Midnight, Infinity Ultron, Red Skull, She-Hulk, Black Panther, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, Kang, Loki (in his Old Loki outfit), Iron Man and Baron Zemo... and Netflix/Defenders characters Iron Fist and Luke Cage!
• Other Marvel characters include: mutants Magneto, Wolverine, Rogue and Mystique; Fantastic Four characters Invisible Woman, Galactus and Dr. Doom; as well as Beta Ray Bill and Power Man.