What If...Sloppy Storytelling Marred Marvel's What If?

Starting in August Disney+ premiered What If...? an animated series based on the old What If? Marvel comics that postulated on things like if Captain America hadn't been frozen or the Avengers hadn't gotten together or whatever else.  As I've noted in other entries, lots of other companies have done similar things like DC recently with its Tales From the Dark Multiverse series.  I even did some of my own what ifs for Tales of the Scarlet Knight and Girl Power!  

Overall, I think this series ranged from Good to meh but nothing really great or really awful but some sloppy storytelling at the end marred the overall experience.

Episode 1 was the What If Peggy Carter took the super-soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers?  The setup being that when a Nazi tries to sabotage the experiment, Steve is shot and so Peggy takes it instead.  She becomes Captain Carter (because Captain Britain is already an actual Marvel character) and Steve joins her as a sidekick.  When they capture the Tesseract, Howard Stark builds Steve an Iron Man-type suit called the Hydrastomper.  He and Peggy work together to stop the Red Skull.  Unlike in the movie there's no plane full of Tesseract-powered bombs.  Instead there's some kind of portal with a hydra monster.  When Peggy goes into the portal to stop it, she winds up in 2011 with Nick Fury.

So this episode wasn't really a positive or negative change.  Kind of a push as basically the same stuff happens only gender swapped.  As far as an opening episode goes it was safe and didn't really try to do anything too big.  Grade:  Meh.

Episode 2 reaches out a little more to have more fun with the concept.  What if the Ravagers had kidnapped T'Challa instead of Peter Quill?  The result is that T'Challa, being much smarter and more charismatic, completely changes the cosmic Marvel Universe.  He convinces the Ravagers to do good and convinces Thanos not to go through with his plan to kill half the universe.  Instead of a joke "Star Lord" really is kind of a lord of the stars.  

The plot of the episode has the Ravagers going to Knowhere to take down the Collector, who is more of a bad ass than in the regular MCU--he has Captain America's shield, Thor's hammer, and a ship from Wakanda.  T'Challa defeats the Collector and then uses the Wakandan ship to go home to his father, who is still alive.

This was a fun episode and what really made it special is it was one of the last appearances of Chadwick Boseman before he died of cancer.  I think it would have been better if instead of just finding a Wakandan ship he would have met Shuri out there looking for him; I don't think she was even in the episode.  There were some other characters missing like Gamora, Rocket, Groot, and the Nova Corps.  Still, Boseman is so funny and charming that it really makes the episode good.

This episode was mostly a positive change except at the end where Ego the Living Planet shows up in Missouri to meet Peter Quill, who's mopping the local Dairy Queen's floor.  [ominous music...]

Sad Fact:  According to the clickbait sites there were plans to spin this episode into a whole series but Boseman's death derailed that.

Episode 3 is kind of an obscure scenario.  It's framed as a murder mystery.  Nick Fury, Black Widow, and Coulson go to see Tony Stark at a donut shop like in Iron Man 2.  But when Black Widow gives Tony a shot for his radiation poisoning, he drops dead.  A day later in Virginia, Banner turns into the Hulk but then his heart explodes and he dies.  A day later, Hawkeye is lining up an arrow on Thor when the bow goes off on its own and kills him.  This prompts Loki, Lady Sif, and a bunch of Asgardian warriors to show up.

Black Widow does some digging and before she too is murdered tells Fury "it's all about Hope."  Hope not as in the emotion but as in Hope van Dyne, Hank Pym's daughter.  The obscure scenario is that Hope joined SHIELD and died on some mission and so Hank is using the Yellowjacket suit to kill the prospective Avengers out of revenge.  With Loki's help, Fury takes Hank down, but then Loki decides to take over the planet.

This episode was a negative change as Loki takes over the world, though at the end Fury finds Captain America frozen and summons Captain Marvel.  The episode itself was meh because it was kind of an obscure scenario as I said, but afterwards I got thinking I really wish there were a follow-up.

I mean you could have a rewritten Avengers movie where Captain Marvel and Captain America team up and maybe recruit others like Peter Parker, Sam Wilson, James Rhoades, or maybe even T'Challa or some of the Netflix ones like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, or Luke Cage.  Or go the Suicide Squad route with Whiplash and Abomination, neither of whom would be dead yet.  Lady Sif could join them and maybe help convince Heimdall to take them to Asgard so Fury and the Captains or whoever could convince Odin to bring the Asgardians back.  It would actually probably work better than the random aliens in the original Avengers movie.

Episode 4 is kind of a clichéd scenario.  Instead of his hands getting damaged in a car crash, Dr. Strange's girlfriend is killed.  He becomes Sorcerer Supreme trying to find a way to save her but like Anakin Skywalker winds up being corrupted and going to the dark side to try to save her.  Each time he tries to change history, his girlfriend still dies because her death is an "Absolute Point" in time for...reasons. (Maybe it's because of what happens in Episode 9?)

Ultimately Strange's attempts save his girlfriend...for about two minutes before the whole universe collapses.  This is definitely a Tale From the Dark Multiverse kind of story.  But like I said, it's pretty cliché.  The idea of going back in time to save someone but that person dying anyway has been done in movies like 2003's The Time Machine.  I even did it in the original version of Book 2 of the Scarlet Knight series!  It wasn't really a bad episode, just meh.

A Fun Fact is that Dr. Strange is the only one in the series who can see Jeffrey Wright's The Watcher character.  He begs the Watcher to save his universe but the Watcher basically told him he made his bed, now he has to lie in it.  A lame clickbait article tried to say this was the Watcher breaking the rules for Watchers--like the Prime Directive in Starfleet, they're not supposed to do anything to interfere with the timeline--but acknowledging a guy when he sees you and talks to you and then saying you won't help him doesn't seem like interfering to me.  It seems like pretty much the opposite.

Episode 5 was one of the most anticipated.  It had already been hinted at from a couple of the action figures released--or soon-to-be-released--on Amazon and other sites.  One was a "Zombie Hunter Spider-Man" and another a Zombie Captain America.

If you don't already know, Marvel Zombies was a series originally written by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman before that series took off.  It wasn't really that great because it started after the zombie plague had already pretty much taken over the whole planet.  When it starts, "Colonel America" and some of the other zombified Avengers are hunting down Magneto.  Over the remaining issues they devour the Silver Surfer and with his power even devour Galactus!  Then the zombie Avengers take off into space to eat the rest of the universe--including Ego the Living Planet!

This episode takes a little different tack.  It starts with Bruce Banner returning to Earth like near the beginning of Infinity War.  Only now like Walking Dead or 28 Days Later, he finds the world overrun with zombies!  Like in Episode 3 it's Hank Pym's fault the world gets fucked.  This time it's because when he goes to the Quantum Realm to find his wife, she's turned into a zombie from some disease she picked up there.  Hank turns and with the shrinking tech he's able to infect a lot of others before Banner returns from space.

With help from the Wasp, Spider-Man, and Dr. Strange's cloak, Banner manages to escape and meet up with other survivors like Bucky Barnes, Sharon Carter, and Happy Hogan.  Basically a lot of sidekicks.  There's a signal coming from nearby Fort Lehigh in New Jersey so they hotwire a train from Union Station but along the way they lose people to the zombies.

At the Fort, Wasp turns giant to get them inside, where they find the Vision.  He's used his Mind Stone to pacify a lot of the zombies and even cured Ant-Man, Scott Lang, though all that's left is a head in a jar like Futurama.  And then comes the twist that the Vision has Black Panther still alive, though his leg has been cut off so he can feed it to the Scarlet Witch, who has also turned.

In the end Spider-Man, the cloak, Ant-Man's head, and Black Panther escape with the Mind Stone to fly to Wakanda, where the plague has been held back by force shields.  But meanwhile, a zombie Thanos has shown up with the rest of the Infinity Stones.  The implication being that he'll destroy the survivors in Wakanda to complete the gauntlet--or something.

It was a good episode and actually better than the comic book series.  It was neat how they used a lot of secondary characters along with Spider-Man.  They really made the scenario plausible within the confines of the MCU.  It would be great to see a sequel to it or maybe a series focusing on some of the other characters as the plague spreads.

A rare helpful Screen Rant article said in the original Marvel Zombies series it was Hank Pym who carved up Black Panther to keep himself sane long enough to find a cure.  But in a later comic I read, Marvel Universe vs The Avengers, where it's "cannibals" instead of zombies, Dr. Doom carves up Black Panther the same way.  Some people were grossed out by that or calling it racist or whatever, but I was just psyched because I actually got the reference.  

In Marvel Zombies Return, a follow-up series also written by Kirkman, it's the Wasp whose head is in a jar (or bubble really) instead of Ant-Man.  The kind of silly "cure" was basically to go cold turkey.  If a zombie just didn't eat for a while they'd regain their faculties.  The Mind Stone thing actually makes more sense.

Episode 6:  This is a really convoluted scenario.  It begins with Tony Stark's convoy in Afghanistan being attacked.  Instead of getting captured, he's saved by Killmonger from Black Panther.  This begins an elaborate series of double crosses that would make Frank Underwood in House of Cards shake his head.  Killmonger convinces Stark to build robot drones, then uses Rhodey to contact Ulysses Klaw to secure vibranium, and then creates a war between the US and Wakanda so he can become the savior of Wakanda.  In the process he kills most everyone:  Stark, T'Challa, and Ulysses Klaw among others.  In the end Shuri and Pepper Potts join forces to expose Killmonger, but it just ends there.

It's the kind of elaborate plan that really you'd need to be clairvoyant for it to work.  It would have been a lot simpler if they had just made it What If He Had Killed T'Challa in Their Duel and really put his plan into action.  That would be a lot more relevant too.  Which is maybe why they didn't want to do that.  Comic book movie fans are not the most tolerant, open-minded bunch.

Episode 7:  After four darker stories, they decide to change pace with a goofy story.  The basis for this is What If Thor Had Been an Only Child?  Instead of keeping Loki, Odin gave him back to the Frost Giants, so Thor was an only child.  He's basically an overgrown frat boy who throws killer parties--literally.  When Odin goes into the Odinsleep and Frigga goes off to somewhere else, Heimdall is left to babysit Thor.  But instead Thor easily slips him to go to Earth.  

He lands in Las Vegas and soon is throwing the biggest bash the world has ever known.  Jane Foster tracks his landing down and goes to find him before ending up in his bed.  Nick Fury tries to stop the party but is knocked out so Maria Hill takes over along with Coulson and Crossbones.  Hill calls on Captain Marvel to stop the party, but not even she can.  It's Jane Foster who figures out how to get to Asgard to get Heimdall to transport her to find Thor's mom.  Like a kid who's thrown a big party only to find out his parents are coming home early, Thor and his friends have to clean up Earth.

Besides Asgardians like Lady Sif and the Warriors Three, a lot of the cosmic Marvel characters show up like Drax, Nebula, Surtur, Jeff Goldblum and Taika Waititi's characters from Ragnarok, and Loki as a Frost Giant!  It's all pretty fun and about as serious as a Looney Tunes cartoon.  Then there's a twist at the end when Ultron studded with Infinity Stones shows up with a bunch of minions.  Even the Watcher is surprised by this, which means some bad shit's going down...

Episode 8:  So now we reveal where this Ultron came from.  It was a universe where he successfully bonded with the body with the Mind Stone that in the regular universe became Vision.  With the Mind Stone, Ultron kills almost everything on Earth.  Then Thanos shows up with the rest of the Infinity Stones and in one of those rigged one-sided fights, Ultron instantly kills him and takes the other stones.  Then he realizes that there's a whole universe out there to kill.

(If Ultron in the Vision's body could so easily beat Thanos, why didn't Vision just beat Thanos in Infinity War?  It's one of those things that doesn't make sense.  Really it's just a convenient plot device because they didn't have time for a long drawn-out battle.  Naturally the clickbait sites had thinkpieces on this and for once I agreed with them.)

The only Avengers left are Black Widow and Hawkeye, who go to Moscow and find information on Arim Zola, the former Nazi scientist who became a computer program.  A copy of him was in Camp Lehigh in Captain America: The Winter Soldier but the original is in Siberia.  So they go there to download him to put into an Ultron drone and then hopefully destroy Ultron.  But it doesn't work because Ultron is no longer in the universe.

Why?  Because he became aware of The Watcher and realizes there's a whole multiverse of organic life to destroy.  He and The Watcher battle and Ultron wins!  The Watcher takes shelter with the evil Dr. Strange from the 4th Episode.  Now they're going to raise a whole multiverse army to defeat Ultron...something DC Comics does with literally every event.  (Seriously, they're doing it right now in Infinite Frontier.)

I read on some clickbait site that What If...? is the lowest ranked Marvel series right now except for maybe that Inhumans show.  I think a lot of the problem is people thought this was an anthology series and so it's not really something that would appeal to common people.  But now that you're saying there is some big overall event story at play here.  Why didn't they hint at this from the beginning?  Maybe with some cookie scenes at the end of each episode?  That way people might have realized it was more than an anthology series.  But then some people might just be waiting for all the episodes to drop to binge it so maybe the popularity will pick up now that everything has aired.

Episode 9:  The Big Finish!  It starts with Captain Carter in a tweak of the opening to Captain America: Winter Soldier.  As she's fighting pirates, she's suddenly abducted by the Watcher.  Soon after T'Challa from Episode 2, Killmonger from Episode 6, Thor from Episode 7, and Gamora from some other dimension where she and Tony Stark killed Thanos and found a way to crush Infinity Stones are all brought to the Watcher's sanctuary with Dr. Strange from Episode 4.

In an imaginary pub they all get together and the Watcher explains he's brought them all together to stop Ultron.  They form a half-assed plan but Thor accidentally draws Ultron's attention before they're ready.  So they start their plan, focusing on destroying the Soul Stone.  T'Challa steals it from Ultron and they eventually try to crush it but that doesn't work.  They wind up in Ultron's home universe, where Black Widow has the virus arrow.  With Captain Carter's help she gets it into Ultron and he's soon taken over by Zola.

But Killmonger betrays them to take the Infinity Stones for himself.  He and Zola start an eternal tug-of-war for the Stones while the Watcher traps them in a pocket universe monitored by Dr. Strange.  And everyone goes back where they belong.

Except what's cool is since Black Widow has no one else left on her Earth, the Watcher sends her to the Earth of Episode 3--where the alternate Avengers movie I wanted is happening!  Except instead of in New York, they're fighting Asgardians on a helicarrier.  Still, I called it!  There's also a cookie scene in the credits where Black Widow tells Captain Carter the pirates founds something:  the Hydrastomper!  And there's someone inside--presumably Steve Rogers.

Other than at one point bringing in the zombie Scarlet Witch to fight Ultron, there was really nothing from Episode 5 involved.  I thought Spider-Man would be part of their team, but maybe they could only get Tom Holland for that one episode.

Then there was that whole Gamora thing.  Why didn't they actually have an episode for that?  They could have done that instead of Episode 3.  If you want to go through a clickbait article, it says the likely explanation is that Covid interfered with the production and that episode got bumped to maybe next year.  Apparently that episode would involve Tony Stark going to Sakaar (the planet from Ragnarok) and meeting Jeff Goldblum's Grandmaster and creating a suit that could transform into a car--which is why it looks like a Robotech Cyclone.  But just throwing in this reference in season 1 without the episode to support it didn't really make much sense.

I think in the end they could have done a better job of indicating there was an overall plan and bringing it to life.  It wound up seeming a bit half-assed.  Not really as good as the live action shows to date.