What If What If What Iffd?

When it debuted, Marvel’s What If…? TV series delivered on a simple promise: let’s go back to specific events during the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. and see what would have happened if things played out just a little differently. What if Killmonger rescued Tony Stark (instead of Tony rescuing himself), or what if Steven Strange lost his heart instead of his hands, losing the woman he loved in the fateful car crash, or what if Thor were an only child? In each of these scenarios we saw familiar characters (sometimes voiced by the actors from the movies) going through scenarios that play slightly differently (or sometimes very differently) to what we knew. Sometimes the stories were funny, sometimes serious, but very often they delivered on their scenarios creating interesting, investing takes on Marvel’s continuity.

The series was created by A.C. Bradley and its first two seasons were overseen by him, with Bradley serving as head writer. These two seasons both had great stories and impressive, interesting ideas. They saw the rise of fan-favorite character Captain Carter, the introduction of the totally new (in all Marvel continuities) character Kahhori, and enjoyable takes on fun Marvel side projects like Marvel 1602 and Marvel Zombies. Not every episode was a winner, but under Bradley’s care most episodes worked really well and had interesting ideas about the MCU conveyed each time.

This third season, though, saw a shift in leadership, with Bradley stepping down as lead writer. That role was taken over by Matthew Chauncey, who had written a number of the episodes in the first two seasons. The hope was that Chauncey could continue the care and attention this series had gotten, ushering it through one last solid season before the series ended on Disney+. Fans were hopeful, and waited eagerly for the release over the 2024 holiday season. But then, when the episodes debuted, fans and general audiences were let down. There was a notable dip in the quality of the writing, the stories weren’t as engaging or interesting, and everything felt less than it had been before. It was clear that Bradley had been the driving force on What If…? and with him out of the picture (only contributing a single script for one of the better episodes this season) the series just couldn’t hold up anymore.

As with previous seasons, this third and final run of episodes sees various potential side stories for the MCU continuity. Weirdly, most of these don’t feel like true “What If” scenarios, though. Instead of taking scenes from previous Marvel films and twisting them, these episodes felt more like a collection of random “wouldn’t it be cool” moments. What if the Avengers all had mechs? Or what if Howard the Duck got married? Or what if Marvel… but a Western? It feels like the show is casting around, just throwing everything against the wall and expecting something to stick without having a clear vision for what any of these ideas could actually mean.

As an example, let’s take the episode with the mechs, “What If… The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?” In this story, Bruce Banner tries to squash the Hulk within by giving himself even more gamma radiation. That sounds like a really stupid plan, and it is, because while he is able to remove the Hulk inside himself, he externalizes it into a giant, hulking, kaiju monster that then goes about spawning more kaiju monsters while attacking and destroying cities. To combat this, Tony Stark builds all the Avengers mechs, and they’re able to beat back the Hulks… at the risk of their own lives. Now Sam Wilson / Captain AmericaCreated by Simon and Kirby in 1941, Captain America was a super soldier created to fight Germany and the evil HYDRA. Then he was lost in the ice, only to be found and reborn decades later as the great symbol of the USA. II, gets a new team of mech enabled heroes together to fight the kaiju in their mechs.

I get what the story is going for. The creators wanted to do Pacific Rim, but in the MCU. Like, that’s a fun idea if you have a reason for it. But here’s the thing: you already have superheroes. These are people, like Moon Knight and Photon, who have superpowers and could probably take on massive threats, even like a kaiju. Putting them in a giant metal suit takes away from their superhero status. When it’s Moon Knight driving around in a giant mech, you question why it had to be Moon Knight doing this. Couldn’t someone else, a soldier trained in this specific kind of combat, maybe with a partner to help carry the load, have done this job and… oh, I just made it Pacific Rim again. The episode doesn’t have anything to say specifically about the heroes in the mechs, it’s just an excuse for a bland Pacific Rim riff, and up until now the show was better than this.

The same can be said for the Western episode of the season, “What If… 1872?”. In this episode, Shang Chi and (Kate Bishop) Hawkeye team up to find his lost sister who was (supposedly) kidnapped by a villain, the Hood. The story tries to involve itself in a tale of Chinese workers coming over to America and getting taken by this villain to work on his projects… but it doesn’t actually do much of anything with its setting. Outside of some costumes and some stylish guns, this is a tale that could have been told in the modern era and not as a Western. In fact, I’d wager it could have worked better as a modern-set story since then it would actually have something to say about current politics. But instead, the writer said, “let’s do a Western,” and then didn’t think much beyond that. It’s empty and stale, like the sandy wastes the characters ride through.

This isn’t to say that every episode of the season is bad, mind you. As strange and goofy of a premise as “What if… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?” might be, and the worrying implications it makes about duck/human biology and breeding, it was at least a light and funny episode that entertained me. Sure, it really didn’t have anything to say about the MCU, and was in fact a sequel to a season one episode, “What If… Thor Were an Only Child?”, but it’s an amusing lark. In a sea of weak episodes, this one was fun.

The best episode of the run, as noted, was written by original head writer, A.C. Bradley. “What If… the Red Guardian Stopped the Winter Soldier?” actually does what the series was best at, taking a sequence we knew from the movies, twisting it around. In the episode the Red Guardian, disaffected by his treatment from the Red Room and Mother Russia, strikes out on his own to prove himself. He catches wind of Bucky’s attack on Howard Stark’s parents (as seen in Captain America: Civil War) and gets in the way, preventing their murders. This then pushes the two supers out on a road trip together, and the adventure is just fun and silly and entertaining as hell. It works because it actually comments on characters and settings we know and spins out into an interesting direction from there. That’s what we want and need.

It is just sad that these moments in the series are few and far between. And, worse, they don’t build to anything worthwhile. The last two episodes of the season, which also act as an intended series finale, sees some of the heroes we know from across the series – Captain Carter, Kahhori, Storm (with the powers of Thor), and Byrdie (the adult daughter of Howard the Duck and Darcy Lewis) – have to work together to save the Watcher after he’s arrested by his Watcher buddies for interfering in the events of the Multiverse. It’s an interesting concept for a series finale, taking us to the edge of it all and exploring the people that watch our stories. In execution, though, it fails to deliver. The last act of the whole thing basically amounts to a bunch of Dragon Ball Z explosions and posing, with very little meat to the story. There’s a lot of fighting, a noble sacrifice, a change of heart, but it doesn’t really feel satisfying in any meaningful way. It just… exists.

It feels like the show had to end, and the people behind it knew they had to end it, so they tried to take the show out in a blaze of glory. They certainly got the blaze part down (there are so many particle effects in the final battles) but the glory? Not so much. This last season feels underwritten, underbaked, and poorly conceived. Some of these episodes are fun, and there are plenty of ideas that could have led to great stories. On the whole, though, this season doesn’t have the same kind of deep storytelling on impact that the previous runs managed. They send the series out not with a bang but a whimper.

Truly it’s tragic that the show ended this way. It didn’t have to. And, hell, it didn’t even really need to end. But the needs of streaming services require fresh names, fresh shows, and keeping the number of long running shows to a minimum. Whether Marvel outgrew this show (as the higher ups claim) or the streaming service was simply done with it, the result was the same: a poor third season that failed to give the series the send off it deserved. What If…? was better than this, and its characters absolutely deserved to go out with adventures that truly let them shine. This was not that season.