What If S03E08 Review: Original Sin

What If, Season 3, Episode 8: What If... What If?

And so it ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper. 

This episode is the climax of the What If storyline, particularly that of Uatu the Watcher, as the Exiles come to rescue him. We do get some context about Uatu (or rather, 'the Watcher' for a good chunk of this episode) which on paper is well done. Jeffrey Wright and Jason Isaacs deliver a serviceable performance as the Watcher and the Eminence respectively, with what little material they are given. 

But there was so little that we got, and what little we got is so... generic. It's what you expect from a story like this. The Watchers as this vague multiversal organization-slash-race have an oath they take and they are sworn to watch and never interfere. There's also a theme of Uatu surrendering his name and being known as 'the Watcher' forevermore, and he regains that sense of identity later on as he redefines what 'Watching' means. And of course, over the course of watching through these episodes with us, the Watcher realizes that he's starting to get invested in the lives of these seemingly insignificant mortals, and that life is precious and all that stuff. He likes these little heroes he's been watching.

Except... it's delivered with the absolute bare bones that you can deliver a story. The Eminence and his two goons whose names I can't bother to look up are such flat cardboard cut-outs that are clearly just here to eat up screentime while they also serve for villains for a big punch-up finale. Uatu's decision to reclaim his name comes rather randomly at the end. While the "you only watch, you do not see" line is pretty cool, the rest of his conversation with the Eminence feels rushed and unconvincing, and I'm really not buying their mentor-student relationship or if that talk manages to convert them over to Uatu's vision. The episode is also frustratingly unclear -- is Uatu and the Watchers going to interfere more with the Multiverse's events? 

Anyway, the episode opens up with a flashback, which only really shows Uatu and the Eminence's relationship. Unlike how we at least had some exposition to build up the TVA and why they do what they do, there's really not much beyond an excuse plot for the Watchers. While I didn't really expect a tie-in, the Eminence and his intense desire to keep everything purely just watching feels muted and underwhelming when we don't even really have a reason why beyond 'that's juts been the way'. 

(Also, having the Eminence and his two goons make the same Madisynn joke -- a very unfunny joke in She-Hulk, but it's okay there because humans were saying it -- really didn't do much in making me take them seriously).

The Exiles and Infinity Ultron show up, and Infinity Ultron gets rather predictably killed holding off the three evil Watchers. Kind of a lame exit for one of the few characters in this episode who actually has some sort of a defined character motivation. They have some plan to trap the evil Watchers in a universe where another being reigns supreme, that being Strange Supreme, which... okay, sure. Of course, the three evil Watchers show up, and we get a long, almost 15-minute fight. 

And I don't mind extended fight sequences... if they were good. I really enjoyed the fight in What If season 1's finale because everyone had different wacky powers. Here, the Watcher gives Carter, Kahhori, Storm and Byrdie all Watcher armour and powers halfway through the fight, and the showdown... really isn't interesting to watch (Storm being the notable exception, because bless her for still using thunder and lightning). Not that Byrdie's generic Captain-Marvel-ripoff beam spamming is super interesting in the first place, but it makes everyone feel the same. 

And, to be frank? I really don't care about any of these characters. Byrdie and Kahhori and this variant of Storm are all ciphers. The evil Watchers are even worse, and they also all look like each other (and Uatu) so they're very indistinct even visually. There are a couple of neat sequences and unlike the kaiju-mecha fight at least there's some budget being given into this fight... but it also feels empty. Comparing this to the excellent Ultron-vs-Uatu fight in season one, or even the Strange Supreme vs. Carter and Kahhori at the end of season two, this one just feels so bland. 

The climax ends with some attempt by the Evil Watchers to try and erase every variant of the Exiles, which is just an excuse for the animators to sneak in a whole ton of Easter Eggs. Hey, look, Peggy Carter as Sabretooth! Hey, look, Kahhori as Apocalypse! X-MEN CONTENT GUYS! But of course it doesn't land. Captain Carter pulls off a very bland heroic sacrifice, the mechanics of which is left confusing. She's dead or ascended or something, which... I'm not the biggest fan of What If's treatment of Captain Carter, but this is a very poorly-written exit for her, regardless of whether or not she actually 'ascended' to a higher plane beyond the Watchers.

This brings down the Evil Watchers enough for Strange Supreme as a 'living universe' to sap their powers, allowing Uatu to friendship-talk the Eminence. And... the message that Uatu delivers is good, and fits with the show, but... again, the climax is so drawn-out that it really is hard to get invested in these cardboard cutout characters. Between the Burning Spirit Power-Up, the Generic Heroic Sacrifice, and the Friendship-No-Jutsu Talk... it's all of the worst aspects of storytelling from shonen anime, except at least that genre tries to get you to care about the characters beforehand. No such thing happens here.

It really is a bit of a shame, because both of What If's first two seasons tried to wrap up its finales by incorporating aspects of all the episodes in the season. But no such thing really happens here, and I wonder if the finale would've been more interesting if the Exiles had thought to bring in all the multiversal heroes or something. Hell, bring in at least the people that Uatu saved -- Vision!Ironheart and Cowboy Iron Fist! Bring in the heroes who hasn't made an appearance in the finales, like Light Goddess Hela or Celestial Agatha or something. Infinity Ultron being taken out so early also felt very cheap. Hell, when all the variants are torn away from the Exiles, have them fight. That's four avenues for something more exciting and less boring. But... eh. what are you going to do.

And, well... this is the final nail in the coffin, and while it's a bit of a 'wink wink, this is what you missed' bit, Uatu then shows around 20 different variants of exciting characters smooshed together. Ghost Rider as a samurai? Thanos-Wolverine? Jubilee-Silver-Surfer? Blade-Moon-Knight? ZOMG and all that jazz... but again, it also is very annoying that these are the kinds of 'what ifs' that the audience would've really liked to see more than some of the less exciting blunders in this season. While there are two or three episodes that I really did like from this season, I do think that this, unfortunately, has been the weakest season of Marvel's What If. Hopefully the zombies spinoff would fare better!

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• No need for an attendance this time, since everyone that appears here are the What If regulars.
• Dr. Strange Supreme's dead universe first appeared in his debut episode in What If's season 1, episode 4; and it was revealed to have been corrupted and transformed in the two-parter finale for What If's season 2.
  
• I have been calling the Watcher alternatively as 'Uatu' or 'Watcher' throughout my reviews of all the What If episodes, but this episode makes the fact that the show hasn't called Uatu by name a major plot point. In the comics, this was never the case.
• The last shot of the Watcher and the Eminence sitting on a moon looking at a sunrise on a planet is likely a reference to how in the comics Uatu is based on the dark side of the Earth's moon.
• When the Eminence and his two lackeys seemingly fuse together, the vibrating appearance of a three-headed multiversal god brings to mind another Marvel comics cosmic entity, the Living Tribunal. Statues of the Living Tribunal previously made cameos in the MCU in Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. 
• In addition to the interferences we've seen in this show (Captain Carter in season 1-2; Ironheart in episode 5 of this season; Kwai Jun-Fan in episode 6 of this season) Uatu has also apparently gone around to help a version of Reed Richards, a version of Nick Fury, and a version of Madisynn. Madisynn is Wong's fling during the events of She-Hulk, and the Eminence repeats the terrible joke they make in that show.
• Reed Richards and presumably the Fantastic Four fighting against Galactus was the very first appearance of Uatu in the comics. 
• Nick Fury and Uatu were heavily involved in the 'Original Sin' miniseries, where Uatu was mysteriously killed.
• Among the 'multiversal variants' seen for the Exiles include:
• Captain Carter as Black Knight; Sabretooth; Elektra; Deathlok; Valkyrie and Wolveirne.
• Kahhori as Apocalypse; a winged Captain America; Cloak; and the classic yellow-blue X-Men uniform.
• Storm as Black Panther; as well as wearing other notable outfits from the X-Men runs.
• Byrdie as a Nova corps member; as an Iron Man; as an actual duck alien. 
• The final shot show a bunch of crazy fusion What If's:
• A six-armed Spider-Man, a reference to an arc in the comic famously adapted to the 90's Spider-Man: The Animated Series when Peter Parker's mutation went a bit further.
• A Silver Samurai/Ghost Rider fusion.
• Ironheart wearing a Punisher-styled armour.
• Gamora wearing... a bridal outfit (?).
• Blade as Moon Knight (notably, the actual Blade movie has been delayed a lot).
• Thanos as Wolverine, specifically the Weapon X outfit.
• Kingo as Iron Man.
• Kamala Khan wearing a Wasp suit while still having her bangles.
• A bearded Hulk based on the evil 'Maestro' future version of the Hulk from Future Imperfect, but also with Dr. Strange's magic powers and cloak.
• Howard the Duck as an evil Scarlet Witch, who was glimpsed briefly in What If season 2's final episode as one of the 'world-destroyers' collected by Strange Supreme.
• A lizard-man Hawkeye (?) whose horns kind of make the classic Hawkeye mask?
• Jubilee as the Silver Surfer.
• A Skrull Captain America, who may be a reference to Pitt'o Nili, a Skrull that impersonated Captain America and went insane, believing he is actually him.
• A version of Howard Stark and Sersi that are romantically involved.
• Deadpool with a backpack filled with a lot of weapons. ...he's just regular Deadpool.
• Kid Hela wielding Mjolnir; apparently from a different What If web-project 'An Immersive Experience'.
• Shang-Chi as Star-Lord, wielding a staff and the Ten Rings.
• Cowboy Loki, who was also glimpsed in What If's season 2 finale.
• Scarlet Witch as 'Infinity Witch', a variant of her that collected the Infinity Stones from the What If web-project 'An Immersive Experience'.
• Captain Marvel as a Nova. 

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.

What If S03E06 Review: 1872

What If, Season 3, Episode 5: What If... 1872?

We return to our irregularly-scheduled What If coverage, after finishing up Daredevil: Born Again!

As a side-note: I have some long-form content set up until around the end of May, but I'll be very busy with IRL moving so I'll not be very active on the blog. 

________________________

As the last standalone episode before the two-parter finale, What If's third season takes us to the cowboy time period, where all of the modern heroes somehow exist in the year of 1872. It's a premise that Marvel comics had played with before, and I do enjoy that we get two of the newer, more underused heroes -- Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop -- as the main characters. Using Shang-Chi and adapting his story to tie with the historical enslavement of Chinese immigrants forced to build railroads in America at this time is a bold move... which the episode doesn't really do a whole ton with other than as setup.

In this world, Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing were separated due to all of this nastiness, and Shang-Chi goes off as a cowboy on a quest to get his sister back. At some point, he is joined by Kate Bishop. They both get cowboy-style monikers, with Kate Bishop being (obviously) Hawkeye, while Shang-Chi gets to become the "Ten Rings" after an urban legend where ringing a bell ten times causes the vigilante cowboy to show up. Oh, and he swore not to use guns, which is unique in this time period while he goes around kung-fu fighting everyone evil.

After a nice setup where they beat up a bunch of goons in a saloon -- with a nice cameo by John Walker as a racist goon -- they continue on their journey to hunt down the evil Hood who Shang-Chi thinks has some information about the fate of his sister. In a slight twist of her being driven to heroism because her father died in the prime timeline, Kate Bishop set out to avenge both her parents who were killed by Hood's gang. Throughout their journey, they are joined by a tagalong kid called Kwai Jun-Fan, which fits the genre, I suppose. (Jun-Fan is a very minor Iron Fist in the comics that would be active in the 1800's).

The child endangerment is a bit silly even for a superhero show, especially when Kate and Shang-Chi bring Jun-Fan into a moving train for no real reason. In the train, they find a bunch of Chinese immigrants hypnotized and unresponsive, and it's revealed that they are being controlled by... Sonny Burch, a minor antagonist from Ant-Man and the Wasp who is certainly a bizarre choice to have here. He's also got a hypnotic watch that also feels kind of randomly assigned to him. The bad guys have a monopoly on some strange technology beyond that of the 1800's, which almost feels like magic. 

Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop are essentially taken hostage, but Jun-Fan manages to escape after some encouragement from Shang-Chi... but he nearly gets killed because he's a kid fighting against grown men with guns... and once more, the Watcher intervenes, rescuing the heroic boy which is yet another tie-in to how he saved Riri Williams last episode. 

There is a pretty cool standoff as Shang-Chi face off against the Hood, who uses a mixture of invisibility and teleportation to run rings around the cowboy. Kate Bishop, meanwhile, deals with Sonny Burch (who is revealed to have been the one that wiped out her family) with the helpful interference of Jun-Fan. The Hood is revealed to actually be Xialing -- who killed the Hood and clawed her way up to becoming the head honcho -- which I thought was a nice, cool twist that helps to give us some modicum of payoff to a plot point teased and shelved thanks to Marvel Studios' very inconsistent sequel output. 

The conclusion to the confrontation is also quite nifty, with Shang-Chi managing to talk Xialing down from actually delivering the killing blow. There's also the hint that the mystical Hood is actually influencing Xialing's actions and making her more evil than usual. However, Kate Bishop had no idea what Xialing looks like, and what she sees is the villainous Hood about to kill her friend, causing Kate to take the shot and kill Xialing. The episode ends in a bit of a tragedy with Xialing's death, but at least she dies free of the Hood's corruption. In the denouement, Kwai Jun-Fan is inspired by the heroes, while Shang-Chi and Hawkeye ride into the sunset, ready to right more wrongs. 

But that's not the end of the episode, because the Watcher finally gets another storyline of his own after being mostly passive in season two. Three other Watchers (who are really hard to tell apart since none of them really have a personality beyond being outraged at our Watcher) -- called the Eminence, the Incarnate and the Executioner -- appear, and attack the Watcher for interfering one time too many. This should lead to something interesting about the Watcher, about his role in seeing all these multiverses and what the calling of a Watcher is, which the next two episodes will delve into. 

Ultimately... I'm not really feeling this episode. I like Shang-Chi as a character, and I'm happy to see him represented anywhere. But I felt that while the climactic showdown between Shang and Xialing are done amazingly well, the rest of the episode felt very perfunctory. Admittedly, part of it is because I'm not the biggest fan of the cowboy genre, but the world of 1872 here just feels quite small. I'm not super impressed when I watched this episode other than the final five or so minutes, but it's still ultimately a pretty neat effort. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• 
  This episode's What If is based on 1872, one of the many 'alternate time period' reinventions of the classic Marvel heroes which was part of the 2015 Secret Wars event. However, the prominence of these specific characters is original to the What If episode. 
  
• Simu Liu (Shang-Chi), Hailee Steinfeld (Hawkeye/Kate Bishop), Zhang Meng'er (Xialing), Walton Goggins (Simon Burch) and Wyatt Russell (John Walker/USAgent) reprise their live-action roles, making this episode one of the few in the third season with a surprisingly full attendance.
• The Hood is a traditional Spider-Man villain, who was originally a petty criminal who ended up by chance finding the discarded equipment of a demon which gave him magical powers. In the MCU, the Hood was supposed to debut prior to What If, season three, as the antagonist of Ironheart, but with that project being heavily delayed, this makes the MCU debut of 'a' Hood. 
• Kwai Jun-Fan in the comics is the user of the Iron Fist powers that was active in 1878, wandering Wild West Texas until he was killed by the immortal Zhou Cheng, who hunted down bearers of the Iron Fist. 
• Shang-Chi jokes that Kwai Jun-Fan has 'iron fists', alluding to this. While Iron Fist hasn't appeared outside of the Netflix-Marvel shows (which had a complicated relationship with the greater MCU), it's a nice little nod.
• The Eminence (and his two flunkies, the Executioner and the Incarnate) is an original character to What If, although other Watchers have judged Uatu the Watcher for his bias towards heroes. Other Watchers who had judged him have included Emnu, his father Ikor, and He Who Summons. 
• Shang-Chi's horse, Morris, shares the name with the magical Hundun that accompanied his ally Trevor Slattery in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. 
• Shang-Chi and Hawkeye identify the equipment in the train as coming from Stark Munitions, Hammer Steel and Cross Manufacturing, referencing Tony Stark (Iron Man), Justin Hammer and Darren Cross (Yellowjacket). 
• The fight against John Walker's goons is started with a slow-motion chest punch by Shang-Chi, which homages the start of the fight against Razor Fist in his movie -- which was prominently shown in a lot of trailers. 
• The post-credits scene of Shang-Chi show Xialing embracing the role of being a villain, which has not been followed up yet. This marks the first incarnation of Xialing that manages to do the 'tragic villain' thing. 
• Among the other universes seen by the Watcher are:
• A universe where Crossbones is a pirate captain. 
• A universe with Throg (frog Thor) and Alligator Loki. Both of them appeared in Loki's first season, though they never interacted with each other. 
• A universe where Ultron was a famous singer. 

What If S03E05 Review: Future Imperfect

What If, Season 3, Episode 5: What If... The Emergence Destroyed the Earth?

This is a very strange 'What If' title. When I first saw the title, I thought that we were going to get a nice, proper follow-up to a bad future featuring the Eternals. It makes sense, right? We've gotten some Eternals content earlier in this season of What If, and having a 'villains win' sequence for the events of the Eternals movie while also having the Eternals interact with the greater Marvel universe as a whole -- even in the annals of the multiverse -- seemed to be an interesting enough concept to take! Except... it's nothing of the sort. The emergence of the slumbering Celestial within Earth has barely anything to do with the plot, and none of the Eternals actually show up. So there's a bit of a confusing branding going on here.

That said, the concept of this universe and what we got out of it is actually... not bad! It's a rather typical post-apocalyptic universe, and between the 'Age of Ultron' and 'Marvel Zombies' ones we've already gotten, it's not exactly our first rodeo in such a concept. The Earth is shattered and people are living in the physics-defying shattered chunks of the Earth and struggling to survive.

We get a smattering of random minor characters in a world ruled by... by Mysterio, and having a Spider-Man villain be the primary antagonist here is definitely a huge, surprising but extremely welcome aspect of this world. Mysterio has taken over the nanotech technology of Stark Industries, and between his primary enforcer -- White Vision from WandaVision -- and a literal army of technological Ultron-style drones, Mysterio has became the unlikely ruler of this corner of the multiverse.

And our heroine for this episode? Riri "Ironheart" Williams, who has so far only shown up as a supporting character in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I'm not sure why they seem so allergic to calling her by superhero moniker, because I don't think anyone's called her 'Ironheart' at all in this episode at all. But she's just kind of struggling in this world where Mysterio's agents are everywhere. There's some fun Cyberpunk-noir style seuqence in the beginning when Riri meets with Sharon Carter/Power Broker, only for it to be revealed as a Mysterio drone with a hologram. 

She survives the ambush and gets recruited into the 'alliance', consisting of a bunch of random characters -- Wong, Valkyrie, and the character that would be her mentor, Ying Nan from Shang-Chi. But Riri is bitter and pessimistic, and while the Alliance does give her the chance to do something against Mysterio's brutal reign, Mysterio sends in his enforcer, White Vision, to take out the alliance. Who, by the way, are based on a giant floating ship, which is just the right kind of comic-book silliness I appreciate.

Admittedly, this smattering of characters aren't the most interesting ones the MCU has to offer. Ying Nan plays the nice guiding mentor quite well, but Valkyrie and Wong really barely do anything. The episode does give the impression that the Watcher's narration is what's important here, as he is a bit more yappier than your average What If episode and we get to see him highlight how in all variations of this particular timeline, Riri Williams always fails. 

Around the halfway point of the episode, Ironheart and her allies defeat White Vision, and she's able to reverse-engineer a suit out of the Vision nanotech. Not my favourite design in the show, but it does allow her to see through Mysterio's illusions and lets her fly around in a version of the Iron Man/Ironheart armour. This leads to the Alliance having the advantage and pressing on towards victory... until, of course, it all turns out to be a trap. Mysterio lets Riri hack into his technology only as far as it makes her think she has an advantage over him. 

Old Man Mysterio himself is also pretty fun as an antagonist. Driven insane and into a control-freak by being constantly plugged into his nanomachines, this is a character that's driven to the brink compared to his more suave portrayal in Spider-Man: Far From Home. And just like the canon Mysterio, this Mysterio is also willing to gamble with his own life as one big last 'fuck you' to the heroes. Mysterio knows he's about to die soon, that there are limits to his life, but he's going to make sure he fucks over the Alliance before he shuffles off the mortal coil. Later on, though, he realizes that Riri's tinkering with White Vision allows him the ability to perhaps cheat death and transfer his consciousness into the White Vision body after all. 

We also get a rather brutal sequence where Ironheart's resistance against Mysterio is revealed to be futile. At one point Mysterio dispels the illusion of his secret underground base, showing that Wong, Valkyrie and Ying Nan have been brutally killed. This breaks Riri enough, and Mysterio begins to drain the Vision nanotech from her body. 

And at this point, the Watcher, who has been talking and monologuing to himself and the audience that Riri Williams' fight is hopeless despite her heroism and noble soul... decides to interfere. It's nothing quite as grandiose as cosmic intervention, but he gives some words of encouragement. This gets Ironheart the one Shonen Anime style push to dig her heels in, scream louder and rip off the nanotech away from Mysterio.

...and as the otherwise rather simple 'bad future' plot is wrapped up with the heroine having defeated the villain, Uatu the Watcher smiles in contentment... and we cut away to other Watchers getting pissed off that the Watcher has once again broken his vow. An interesting setup to the season finale, and giving Uatu some character storyline throughout the season as a way to cap off the series is, on paper, a pretty good thing to do. 

Overall, I did honestly find both Ironheart and Mysterio in this episode to be quite... flat. They are executed competently, but Riri's very morose and Mysterio's a very hammy card-carrying-villain. That works for the story that they're telling, though, so I can't really complain all that much. I guess I almost wished that they used some more recognizable characters for the resistance, which would hit a bit harder than these C-listers? 

Anyway, it's not the most memorable What If episodes, but I can't fault them for it. It's very competently done. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• The Emergence is the final result that the Eternals were trying to prevent, with Tiamut rising and destroying Earth in its wake. 
  
• This episode isn't exactly based on any real comic book storyline, although I'm sure there's been a lot of 'bad future' storylines throughout the various Marvel universes.
• Out of the live-action actors, we've got Dominique Thorne (Ironheart), Tessa Thompson (Valkyrie) and Emily VanCamp (Sharon Carter)... and that's it.
• Alenjandro Saab takes over from Jake Gyllenhall as Mysterio; Michelle Wong takes over from Michelle Yeoh as Ying Nan; Kenna Ramsey takes over from Danai Gurira as Okoye; and David Chen takes over from Benedict Wong as Wong. Notable because Gurira and Wong have both returned a lot in previous seasons of What If. 
• While not speaking, Bruck Rumlow (Crossbones) has a cameo as a member of the alliance, although this is also the result of them reusing a scene from What If season 2 where Rumlow's crew were preparing to attack the Hydra Stomper.
• The idea of Mysterio using his illusions to manipulate a hero into killing her allies is the plot that kickstarted the bad future of the iconic "Old Man Logan" miniseries. While the episode keeps it ambiguous if it's Riri who kills her allies, or if it's just Mysterio's cannons, the effect of Mysterio making an illusion disappear to show dead bodies is similar. 

What If S03E04 Review: Trapped In A World He Never Made

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. 

What If S03E03 Review: The Winter Guard

What If, Season 3, Episode 3: What If... The Red Guardian Stopped The Winter Soldier?

Oh yes. Here we are. Out of the episodes in this season, this is the one that I loved the most, and I felt like what was the truest distillation of a proper 'what if' in the MCU. It was such a blast to watch, the performances were so well done, the storyline fit in the greater MCU lore, and it utilizes a batch of characters that could've afforded to have gotten a lot more focus in the mainline stories. 

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?

What If S03E02 Review: Return of the Gods

What If, Season 3, Episode 2: What If... Agatha Went to Hollywood?

A question asked no one, ever.

In isolation, some of these concepts of what made this episode up are legitimately interesting 'What If's. Despite the lack of popularity of Eternals in the general MCU fandom, I've always felt like it could've been a nice hotbed to launch some stories of -- and even if the restructuring in Marvel isn't interested in doing much with it, having a What If episode showcasing what happens if the slumbering Tiamut awakens would've been interesting. The idea of a world where the Celestials intervened early and fought a batch of Marvel heroes would've been fun, if nothing else. I think I'm of the minority in that I wanted more to be done with the Eternals concept, except that they just simply don't have enough star power amongst Marvel's gigantic library of characters for them to ever compete. 

I've admittedly a bit Agatha'd out at the moment after her titular show, but having a villain show up and do something else in a different time period is also a plot thread that promises to at least deliver something new. While having this very magical villain try and siphon off the powers of the very sci-fi Celestial, done well, it might've led to something interesting. 

And... they tried for something unique here, something that brings to mind the Hela episode from season 2. Two completely unrelated corners of the MCU brought together -- Shang-Chi's Chinese-inspired wuxia genre with Hela's Nordic myth in that episode; Agatha's coven of witchiness and the cosmic sci-fi of the Eternals here. Except... we also force in a whole Hollywood pastiche around the whole thing, and have Howard Stark and Edwin Jarvis be the vessel of Agatha and Kingo trying to out-perform each other in a Hollywood dance-off, with backup dancers, in a bid to control the magical runes that lead to Tiamut slumbering deep beneath the Earth.

It's... it's a joke that goes on for way too long. The animation style, I don't think, is fluid enough to work with the elaborate choreography that such an episode would demand, and the dance number just feels like a long, winding 'why am I here watching this' distraction. This would, perhaps, be something that I enjoy more had it been in live-action since I would actually be impressed by the actors strutting their stuff, but as it is, I was just mind-numbingly bored throughout the first half of the episode, which isn't something that a dance-off should elicit.

There is almost a fun integration of a plot here, with Kingo being the last Eternal to be in a position to do anything... while Agatha is trying to rather understandably fight for mankind and stop all of these pesky giant alien god-robots from playing god with us. Of course, if this also means that Agatha drains the power of a slumbering god-robot herself, and that she also drains Kingo's powers, that's just the price to pay, right? 

And that's the majority of the episode, where after the super-long dance number, we get a drawn-out negotiation, leading to Agatha drawing up runes and sucking up Tiamut's power and becoming a giant star-studded cosmic deity. There is the cool sequence of Arishem -- who's only been an ominous background presence in the live-action material -- actually showing up and trying to fight, but the actual combat isn't particularly interesting aside from the final attack where Agatha uses the Wanda trick of making runes to hold Arishem in a crucified position and crush him. 

And... and if they had done something similar to Wandavision and Agatha All Along, and actually go all-in on having Agatha be villainous, I would've probably liked it more. As it is, this is an Agatha that feels like she's been declawed, with none of her 'villainous' threats sounding convincing at all. Sure, there are some token lines about Agatha going "bwa ha ha, I played the reluctant hero!" but unlike Hela in What If's episode 2 (and even that episode I didn't find the most convincing) the way that Kingo essentially friendship-talks a now-cosmic Agatha into just... hanging out and making movies, and maybe fighting a Celestial or two down the line? That is just really unconvincing and felt phoned in. 

Oh, and you'd think that Cosmic Agatha is set-up for something grand down the road, but just like the second season, this rather interesting variant is just not involved in the final episodes at all. 

I don't know. The concept itself is already weird, even with the handwaves that Howard's overacting is him already knowing what's going on and is just playing along. Again, it's a bit of a shame because both Kathryn Hahn and Kumail Nanjiani give the performances that make their live-action characters likable... the lines themselves aren't the problem. It's the fact that both Kingo and Agatha are reduced to one-dimensional caricatures to deliver a straightforward plot. 

For example, how did Kingo learn of the nature of Tiamut and the Eternals' mission? Finding that out was a revelation to the Eternals in their movie. And Kingo was notably the one that was super-conflicted between the Ikaris and Sersi factions, eventually deciding to remove himself from the final battle entirely. That also went unexplored. Having character focus on Kingo out of the cluttered Eternals movie to explore why he does what he does? That would've been fun. Instead, he just feels like a putz in this movie, the butt of finger-gun jokes and only there to give an impassioned speech at the end that borders on parody.

This goes double for Agatha. In Agatha All Along in particular, Agatha is deceptive and goes all-in on her card-carrying villainy and betrayal. Yes, there is a heart of goodness buried deep beneath a lot of treachery, but the show has to earn the right by actually displaying Agatha both being cruel and being merciful to certain people in that show. When they did the Hela episode in What If season two, they showed Hela interacting with Wenwu, with Jiayi, with Odin, in ways that are consistent with what we learned about her in Thor: Ragnarok. That is not what we get from this variant of Agatha Harkness, and thus when she betrays Kingo and then decides to not betray Earth, it feels unearned. 

At the end of the day, the episode wants to end with some moral of how stories (and Hollywood included) isn't just about the flashy lights and choreography, and that it's the stories that grab people's hearts... and I felt like this episode in and of its own actually does that very thing, with way more focus put into the dance number and cosmic fighting to actually tell Kingo and Agatha's stories properly. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• A lot of the plot of this episode is, of course, a riff on Eternals and Agatha All Along, but taking place in the '40s with the characters from that time period participating. 
  
• Speaking of which, this episode has a 100% attendance rate from their MCU counterparts, with Kathryn Hahn, Kumail Nanjiani, Dominic Cooper, James D'Arcy and David Kaye all reprising their roles as Agatha Harkness, Kingo, Howard Stark, Edwin Jarvis and Arishem the Judge.
• While not seen, Thena, Makkari and Gilgamesh are name-dropped by Agatha. She off-handedly claims that she's siphoned their powers and is keeping the other Eternals elsewhere, but considering her sacred timeline's track record of killing witches and lying to people, I wouldn't be surprised if Kingo was the last surviving Eternal in this universe. 
• Agatha defeats Arishem by essentially doing what Wanda did to defeat her in WandaVision's climax, shooting and apparently missing when she's actually setting up magical runes in specific positions. 
• A very obscure easter egg is the quick appearance of Bernard Stark, Howard's flamingo and a recurring joke in the short-lived Agent Carter TV show (where live-action Edwin Jarvis debuted). 
• The three Celestials that show up at the end are not named, but they bear the resemblances to Jemiah the Analyzer, Nezarr the Calculator and Ziran the Tester. It's a bit hard to tell, really. 

What If S03E01 Review: Monsters Unleashed

What If, Season 3, Episode 1: What If... The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?

I was debating on whether to do Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man first or What If's third season first. Some of these reviews have been floating around as half-completed drafts in late January, but I thought that pushing out the Spider-Man reviews would be much more timely compared to What If which, to be honest, is something I'm a bit more lukewarm towards. But turns out that I'm lukewarm towards both projects, so I suppose it's best for me to do the two Marvel animated projects chronologically. 

___________________________

So What If is given a third season to close the series out... which is a bit of a shame, since I've always thought that if there was a MCU concept that could run indefinitely and rotate in various underutilized actors and characters, it would be What If. But I suppose with the streamlining of Marvel's bloated output post-Deadpool-and-Wolverine, it is inevitable. And I was a rather outspoken critic towards What If's second season, particularly how the last couple of episodes were handled. 

And... while I did watch some of the season 3 episodes when they aired at the end of 2024, it took me a while to actually sit down and talk about them due to how they are such a mixed bag. 

"What If... the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers" is a premise that no one has ever asked. And, by the way, the Hulk did not fight the Mech Avengers in this episode, it was an evil split personality gamma clone. Get your what ifs right, people! Unlike most previous What Ifs, this one isn't really a proper spin on any specific moment in the MCU timeline, but just an excuse to give us a Pacific Rim homage. Giant gamma monsters take the place of the kaiju, and we get a bunch of mechs based on a bunch of the 'modern' roster of Marvel superheroes. The artwork and designs for the mechs were interesting, and... I'm going to say that for the most part, the episode doesn't really actually deliver on the mecha-vs-monster action that it promised. 

Oh, sure, we get some cool shots of the mechas. A bunch of them do a lot of interesting things, too, with my favourite being how they attached a bunch of Gundam-sized magnetic Ten Rings to Shang-Chi's mech. But the combining scene into an Avenger-Voltron was a letdown because the episode kept cutting to the characters talking; while the actual action scenes aren't particularly interesting as the robots mostly just fired missiles and maybe swung a giant spear once or twice. Compared to season 2's Wacky Races in Space episode, I felt like this one dropped the ball. 

Another complaint is that a lot of the secondary characters -- who never interacted together in the 'main' MCU -- felt, more than ever, like glorified cameos. It's also a bit hard to tell who is who with the limited screentime. Sure, it's easy to identify Red Guardian and Moon Knight since they were suited up, but it took me having to look at credits to figure out that it was Melina Vostokoff and Nakia who were part of the ensemble, with how little they actually contributed to the plot. As much as the geek in me really love seeing the return of characters like Shang-Chi and Moon Knight, at the end of the day... did it really matter when they barely did anything or said anything true to their character? 

But that's the bitching part done. What did I like about this episode? The actual core of the story, however basic it is, is actually a nice one. We get a theoretical deeper friendship between Bruce Banner and Sam Wilson, and as a character that the MCU had utterly made into a joke, I really liked that this episode delved a lot more into Bruce Banner's self-loathing about how much the Hulk made him a liability and a danger to his friends. Sam Wilson is a great choice to have here, with his oft-forgotten role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier as a counselor to soldiers. 

Sam helps Bruce out with a lot of his anger issues, until a fateful day on a boat when an accident causes Bruce to Hulk out and nearly harm Sam and his family. This is something that I really wished the MCU explored a bit more. Age of Ultron, Thor: Ragnarok and even Infinity War did a fair bit of good character work with the Hulk, but when Endgame just refused to give any proper payoff beyond a handwave... it's hard not to get frustrated for the 'main MCU' Hulk when a story similar to this could've been explored. 

Driven into desperation, Bruce Banner tried experimenting and ended up creating this universe's threat -- the Apex, a spiky gamma monster separated from Bruce Banner, who quickly grows to kaiju-size and began creating a whole lot of gamma babies that ravaged the world, forcing the original Avengers to swoop in and essentially sacrifice themselves to wipe out the gamma monsters. This leads to the status quo where Sam Wilson is Captain America, leading a group of newer Avengers.

Well, I say that, but realistically it's mostly Sam Wilson and Monica Rambeau that gets any kind of screentime. Bucky gets a bit of off-panel work as Monica sends him to look for Bruce's location behind Sam's back, but it's mostly Sam being stubborn about not wanting to talk to Bruce, and Monica being the sane sidekick to him. 

And lo and behold, just like any kaiju movie, turns out the monster isn't quite dead and they find thousands of them in the Arctic. We get a bunch of action scenes where the mechas are defeated, and Sam ends up meeting Bruce in his hideaway. And, again, these confrontations between Sam and Bruce are better-done than the actual kaiju/mecha stuff. Bruce is reluctant to undo all the help that his hermitage has done for him, but is willing to give Sam some help... while Sam realizes that he should've talked to Bruce earlier. 

Bruce gives the Avenger mechas a combination protocol, which leads to the aforementioned 'they tried, but it's not as cool as it could've been' action scene. Ultimately, Bruce proves himself a hero and drops himself with a gamma bomb on the Apex, and merges with it to transform into a kaiju-sized Mega Hulk himself. Kaiju-Hulk beats down the Apex, and everyone else is ready to fight against the out-of-control monster... but Sam ends up taking Monica's advice and talks to the monstrous Mega-Hulk. While most of Bruce's mind seems to be gone, in true Godzilla fashion, Mega-Hulk recognizes his friend and wades off into the sunset, not causing any more harm. 

That said, it's still an okay episode to start off this season, and I think they're just trying to do this to clean the slate after the primarily negative reception to how What If's second season diverged too far off from MCU content with Kahhori and a significant Captain Carter focus. I'm not the most impressed by the frankly random Pacific Rim homage, but I did appreciate the Hulk/Falcon story we got here. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Season 3 has a lot less live-action actors reprising their roles, particularly for side-characters. Returning actors are Anthony Mackie (Captain America/Falcon), Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), Sebastian Stan (Winter Soldier), Teyonah Parris (Photon), David Harbour (Red Guardian), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi) and Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight).
  
• Meanwhile, Nakia is voiced by Brittany Adebumola instead of Lupita Nyong'o; while Melina Vostokoff is voiced by Kari Wahlgren instead of Rachel Weisz; and while Sarah Wilson is credited under 'additional voices', she definitely isn't voiced by her live-action actress Adepero Oduye.
  
• The plotline of this episode is more inspired by the kaiju/mecha genre of movies (particularly Pacific Rim) than any specific Marvel run, though various runs have featured kaiju-sized monsters, and while less commonly, giant mechanical suits.
• While the term 'Apex Hulk' is original to this episode, he seems to be inspired by the villainous 'Devil Hulk' or 'Titan Hulk' personalities from the comics, who have also been separated from the main Bruce Banner body. The idea that the Hulk can grow to a gigantic, potentially world-ending threat is also explored in some Hulk comic runs, most recently and famously in Immortal Hulk. 
• The scene of Sam Wilson and Bruce Banner becoming friends is a spin on the 'on your left' meeting of Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers from Captain America: The Winter Soldier, albeit with Sam taking the place of Steve. 
• The idea of Hulk taking the Hulk monsters to a secluded island is a reference to the location Monster Isle in the comics, where a group of giant monsters created by a supervillain was allowed to live in peace. 
• The in-universe cartoon Tony Stark is a homage to the 90's cartoon show Iron Man: The Animated Series. 

What If S01E09 Review: Secret Wars

What If, Season 1, Episode 9: What If... The Watcher Broke His Oath?

And so the first season of What If, this extremely experimental animated series, ends with a very predictable bang. And it is still a bang. I still hold fast to the fact that the final episode of What If's first season is a nice middle ground between what everyone expected of the series. Around 80% of the season were basically standalone episodes, but there's enough interconnectivity that is expected from an MCU project with this climax that the season doesn't just get dissolved into "oh, just watch these couple of episodes, ignore the rest since they don't connect with each other". With how fragmented and haphazard the post-Endgame state of the MCU has been due to this exact problem, the fact that What If's first season ends with a rather typical team-up is both predictable and comforting. 

And so, with a formula that was tried and true back in 2012 (which is more than a decade ago, holy crap) the Guardians of the Multiverse get assembled as Uatu goes around the multiverse picking the heroes that he has been seeing all throughout the season. I do really like the pick-up sequence. Not because of how fast it is, but that they actually show how our heroes from the past eight episodes haven't been standing still. Captain Carter's timeline has moved forwards all the way into an equivalent of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, with her fighting against Batroc the Leaper as per that movie's cold open. Star-Lord T'Challa is going through an early variation of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2 with Ego running rampant, while Killmonger's universe has him embroiled in a fight against the Pepper/Shuri alliance. Party Thor, of course, we saw fighting against the Ultron invasion, so his universe is already tied to the multiversal Ultron crisis.

One very random addition, which a lot of people disliked due to the lack of buildup but I actually like because of it, is "Thanos-Killer" Gamora. It actually is a deleted episode (which gets fully animated in season 2... a bit to my disappointment) but they kept the concept of the character. And I do really like that this is a nice little nod to how expansive the multiverse is, and how the nine episodes we're seeing in this season is just a microcosm of the MCU's multiverse. There are alternate worlds beyond alternate worlds, and the audience is never going to see everything, just snippets here and there. 

Everyone is gathered in a magical, mystical pub created by Dr. Strange Supreme, which... honestly, I feel like it's just there for some style. There is some attempt at quick infodumps (which the cast has to take at face-value and nod because we need to get the ball rolling) and a plan is made revolving Gamora's very convenient Infinity Stone Crusher machine. While all of this is going on, we do get some fun interactions between the characters, though to my slight disappointment... not quite enough between T'Challa and Killmonger. I do like the little foreshadowing of how much Killmonger's going around tinkering with the Ultron sentry heads even this early on, though. 

The Watcher dumps the Guardians of the Multiverse in some empty universe, and after some magical armour is cast upon them by Dr. Strange Supreme (which is going to explain how some of our more mortal heroes don't get sqiushed immediately by the cosmic Infinity Ultron) Party Thor accidentally attracts Infinity Ultron's attention with a giant blast of lightning.

And at which point, it's just a six-on-one action scene. Again, the problem I stated last episode is amplified a fair bit since Infinity Ultron is just reduced to a generic cosmic anime enemy, without much of a motivation beyond cosmic domination and multiversal genocide. There is the odd one-liner here and there, but as someone who thoroughly think the MCU's take on Ultron is pretty damn great and is just ruined by the choppy movie, I did feel a fair bit of disappointment about Ultron's lack of personality here. 

We do get a whole lot of wacky stuff, like Dr. Strange Supreme using a multiplication spell on Party Thor's Mjolnir to bombard Infinity Ultron; him summoning a three-headed dragon demon that freaks the other heroes out; or him later on summoning the entire zombie horde from the Marvel Zombies universe down like a rain onto Ultron as a distraction. It's a nice way to not overload the episode with too many characters, but still incorporate these other episodes. While Ultron, Thor and Strange do all these spectacular moves, Star-Lord T'Challa sneaks in and manages to steal the Soul Stone, and everyone bounces off while Ultron has to deal with the wave of zombies. 

The Guardians land in Infinity Ultron's post-apocalyptic home universe, with Thanoskiller Gamora ready with her funky machine to destroy the Infinity Stones. In perhaps one of the weaker parts of an already cluttered episode, Captain Carter chooses this moment to talk about how she's totally BFF's with Black Widow from her home universe... just right as the Post-Apocalypse Black Widow rolls up. It feels a bit awkwardly shoehorned in, honestly, and I still maintain my stance last week that Post-Apocalypse Widow is more of a plot device than an actual character. It really is a bit hard to do much with her, admittedly, with so many moving parts. 

Infinity Ultron arrives, and we do the cool The Avengers scene of the camera rotating around the fully-assembled Guardians of the Multiverse as they all load their weapons. We get a much more cooler fight scene scene in that everyone gets to pitch in instead of just Dr. Strange, with Ultron tanking and getting hit by all the Guardians. It's not the best crowd-fighting scene, but if we're being honest it does feel a fair bit more cohesive and makes use of the assembled heroes better than some of the Avengers shows. We also get another cool moment from Strange Supreme as he fights Infinity Ultron's five stones with one of his own.

They play a bit of "everyone fight for the plot device" with the Soul Stone skidding on the ground of the combatants, until our heroes manage to grab it and shove it into Gamora's Infinity Crusher... at which point the Crusher fails to destroy it and our heroes realize that each multiversal Infinity Stone is juuuust different enough that the crusher can't work on it. It's... it's something that gets explored a bit in the Loki Disney+ TV series, and there's also the weird contradiction that Infinity Ultron spent the last episode waltzing around warping reality in worlds that are not his own, but I also appreciate the restraint of the writing team in not making the Deus Ex Machina they introduced in this episode with a character they introduced this episode be the solution to the problem. 

(It does raise the question on whether we needed the whole Infinity Crusher subplot to begin with, but eh)

Infinity Ultron blows our heroes away, and decides to focus his power on the only character in the Guardians of the Multiverse who actually is on his power level, Strange Supreme. As the two fight, Apocalypse Widow and Captain Carter find out the USB arrow containing Arnim Zola. The Guardians dogpile Ultron while we get some motorcycle stunts going on, and ultimately Apocalypse Widow manages to use the dead Hawkeye's bow to shoot the USB arrow right into Ultron's eye. Again, there is some poetic justice in that it's Ultron that caused Hawkeye's death, but as I keep mentioning, Apocalypse Widow isn't really much of a character so it's a bit hard for me to care. 

Speaking of not-much-of-a-character, despite having been in our face for the past episode and a half, Ultron gets very unceremoniously wiped out and taken over as the AI-fied Arnim Zola and Ultron do battle in cyberspace. There is, of course, a nice, delicious irony that Ultron -- whose goal is to replace all organic life with metal -- gets fucked by organic life that's turned into a digital one. But this thing happens so fast and Ultron is forgotten so unceremoniously that I really do wish that this episode had a couple of extra minutes to let these moments breathe. 

We do go from one plot twist to the next, though. As Arnim Zola takes over the core 'Vision' body and has his head appear on the techno-organic body's chest (hey, comic book reference!); Killmonger finally decides to actually remind the audience that he's still a villain, that the previous What If episode doesn't make him a hero in any stretch of the word, and ends up stealing the metallic parts of Ultron's suit, donning the infinity stones and armour. There is a brief moment where Killmonger actually tries to mind-game the rest of the Guardians by picking on what little he knew of them from the pub scene and the pre-fight drinks, trying to promise a world where Dr. Strange and Captain Carter could get their loved ones back... but it goes straight into a fighty-fight as Arnim Zola and Killmonger clash against each other... and as the infinity stones gets ripped around by the two people donning Ultron's body, Dr. Strange Supreme casts a spell that holds them in the same pocket dimension that he was trapped in at the end of his episode, except time is stopped with the two villains suspended in time. 

Dr. Strange realizes that the Watcher didn't intend for them to win, just to take Infinity Ultron's stones out of play, which... raises some questions about the logic of Uatu's plan, but he is the Watcher, not the Planner. Dr. Strange Supreme, the only one without an existing home universe, resolves to make himself the guardian that will watch over Killmonger and Zola, while Uatu sends everyone back to their own universes. 

All except for Apocalypse Widow, who finally decides she's had enough of being a plot device, and starts getting on Uatu's case and yelling at him that "we're all just stories to you". And... I really wished that this two-parter had done a better job at highlighting Uatu's character development, or if the previous episodes (other than Uatu's callousness when Dr. Strange destroyed his universe) had highlighted Uatu actually seeing people as stories. But Uatu decides to wrap up this one errant plot point by transplanting Apocalypse Widow from her universe into the 'Avengers are dead' universe, where the Loki invasion is underway. 

The episode ends with the Watcher in a cosmic shot monologuing about how he'll keep watching over the multiverse, and there's a brief kinda-sorta post-credits teaser where Captain Carter finds the Hydra Stomper from her episode. 

And... it's a fun episode. A lot of action scenes, and once I try not to analyze the writers' attempt to use these characters too much, I did really enjoy the wackiness and the fanboyism going on in this episode with all the characters running around. There are a lot of plot holes going on, yes -- why doesn't the Watcher pull in more characters on the power-scale weight class as Dr. Strange Supreme? What was the point about the Infinity Crusher? There's all the questions about the lack of consistency on how or where infinity stones can work or not. There's a lack of fun interactions between the different 'what if' characters. There's a lot to be improved, of course, particularly the lack of character growth showcases for Ultron, Uatu and Widow... but all in all? It's fun. It's a lot of fun, I felt like most of the characters got a fair amount of showcase in the team-up (which is not the case when they tried to repeat the formula in season 2) and I had a lot of fun rewatching this first season. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• While the concept is a bit more dire than Secret Wars, that's perhaps the original crossover event of various heroes plucked by an otherworldly power to fight in a battle.
• Uatu gathers heroes from every single episode in the What If season (plus Gamora, from an episode cut from this season and would be released in the second season). The zombies episode get referenced when Strange Supreme summons all the zombies to fight Ultron briefly; and episode 3 (the universe where the Avengers were killed by Yellowjacket) is the one that Resistance Black Widow relocates to.
  
• Arnim Zola's design as a humanoid robot with his human face on a screen on the robot's torso/belly echoes his iconic (and sometimes-mocked) comic-book supervillain form. The Ultron head also only has one eye left, which, while not technically an 'eye-for-a-head', still kind of counts. 
• Strange Supreme's protective spells take the form of their comic-book counterparts' attires. 
• Captain Carter is going through a version of the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, fighting Batroc the Leaper on top of a hijacked ship. Her costume has also been changed to the blue-and-white 'stealth suit' that Steve Rogers wore during the first half of that movie. 
• Thanos-killer Gamora and Sakaarian armour Iron Man are in Nidaveliir, where Thor recruited Eitri to forge Stormbreaker in Avengers: Infinity War. 
• The Guardians of the Multiverse get a 360-degree spin-around shot that is meant to resemble the iconic spinning shot of the Avengers from The Avengers.
• This Reality is Designated... Earth-29929 again, technically. 
• Role Reprises: One last role reprise in Georges St-Pierre (Batroc the Leaper). Other returning reprising actors include Hayley Atwell (Captain Carter); Chadwick Boseman (Star-Lord/T'Challa); Michael B. Jordan (Killmonger); Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange); Chris Hemsworth (Thor); Toby Jones (Arnim Zola); Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury); Tom Hiddleston (Loki); Frank Grillo (Crossbones); Kurt Russel (Ego)
• A new face among the non-returning actors is Cynthia McWilliams as Gamora. Ross Marquand, Lake Bell and Mick Wingert continue their roles as Ultron, Black Widow and Iron Man respectively.