What If…? – Season 2, Episode 8: What If… The Avengers Assembled In 1602? (2023) – Review

I think I’m not being too out of line when I say that whenever the MCU tries to directly adapt and existing storyline from the comics, the results tend to be a little controversial. While I’ve never truly expected the ginormous franchise to follow the pre-existing plots down to the exact, tiniest detail, sometimes the results have strayed pretty far from the origins, leaving die hard comic fans feeling cheated.
Sometimes it works, with Infinity War being a famously rousing aproximation and Civil War matching the drama – if not quite the scope – of its funny book forebearer; but other times it really doesn’t with Iron Man 2 being a watered down image of Demon In A Bottle, Secret Invasion being a boring dud and the less said about Thor: Love And Thunder’s treatment of the source material the better. Well, apart from a perversion of the MCU tie-in, Fury’s Big Week, What If…? has kept well away from adapting the comics directly, however, with their latest episode, the Watcher finally flings his oversized hat into the ring as the epidode bears more than a little resemblance to Neil Gaiman’s 1602.

After falling through a red, hexy wormhole and winding up in a whole other universe, we catch up with Captain Carter a little ways after she arrived in a place where all of our favorite characters had first surfaced in the year of 1602. Multidimensional rifts had started opening up thanks to a mysterious, unknown figure arriving from another universe and an earlier date. Despite the Watcher sadly implying that this is a universe that is about to expire, Carter had been summoned here by this Scarlet Witch in order to smoke out this “Forerunner” and eliminate him.
However, months later and Carter is no closer to finding this person than ever, and after Queen Hela is sucked into the latest of these emerging rifts, the newly crowned King Thor has lost patience with this so-called savior from another universe.
However, after refusing an offer from the Watcher to be sent back to her own reality (so much for not intervening, eh?), Carter doubles down on her mission and viws to solve the mystery whether King Thor likes it or not. Enlisting the aid of boozy inventor Tony Stark, tormented monster Bruce Banner and the talents of Rogers Hood and his merry men (Bucky Barnes and Scott Lang), she formulates a plan to steal the Infinity stone located in Thor’s regal sceptre and use to power a device that will locate the Forerunner once and for all.
With Thor’s army of Yellowjacket assassins and the Destroyer Armour standing in their way, this plucky band launch an all out attack on Thor’s court in order to set things right, but when things don’t quite turn out the way she wanted, Carter will have to accept help from an old acquaintance.
A Strange one…

I’ve rattled on over the past few days about how What If…? greatest asset is the freedom it has to utterly make and remake entire universes on an episode by episode basis; however, with What If… The Avengers Assembled In 1602? the show may have actually surpassed itself as it finally brings a semblance of the universe so artfully created by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert back in 2003 to the screen. While, like most comic-to-screen adaptations, it isn’t an exact match (What? No Peter Parquagh?) some aspects manage to work extraordinarily well. Plonking Captain Carter into the middle of it all I guess technically makes her the MCU’s Captain Britain and while making Steve Rogers a Robin Hood style outlaw may not be as artful as making him a Dances With Wolves type of white man who is aligned with the Native Americans like something out of Last Of The Mohicans, but it’s certainly less problematic – especially in the wake of the Kahhori episode.
The rest of the cast slot into the period setting rather neatly with Wanda Maximoff playing court magician, Bucky and Ant-Man playing merry men and Loki riffing on his God of Stories persona by playing a pretentious Shakespearean actor much in the way that Matt Damon’s Asgardian actor portrayed him in two Thor films.

Yet while some aspects are predictably different, the episode does manage to keep some aspects of Gaiman’s original story intact. Despite his Robin Hood makeover, it turns out that Rogers is the dimension wrecking Forerunner just like he is in the comic and Nick Fury is still the scheming spy master, albeit with a greatly reduced role. However, elsewhere, the world is fair game to cram in as much period re-jigging to the MCU as is humanly possible. Be it the seventeenth century overhauling of all the iconic costumes (the Yellowjacket assassins look awesome), Jon Favreau’s ruthless overacting as King Thor’s subordinate who deals out flowery insults at the drop of a hat, or the reimagining of Bruce Banner as an iron mask wearing recluse who is desperately trying to keep his Hulk persona subdued, the episode is a lush landscape of witty world building par excellence.
However, even with all this raw imagination on display (even the Hulk uses “‘Thees” and “Thous” while rampaging), the most memorable moment comes fairly early that proves to be the most significant and it concerns Carter’s continuing and evolving relationship with the Watcher. Interrupting his usual, grave commentary with the revelation that she can actually hear him when he goes off on his latest enigmatic diatribe, there’s a genuine sense of kinship as he offers the supersoldier help on more than one occasion and you feel that his admiration only grows with every time she refuses him. On the flip side, Carter’s nature demands that she stay in this time of no plumbing and malnutrition and sorts out their problem even if it proves to be an impossible task and we even get an extension of the Peggy/Steve romance as the two are drawn to each other like they always are.

Some may complain about some glaring inconsistencies during episode, like why do some characters speak with ye olde english while other chat using a modern cadence with an American accent (Stark and Lang are the worst offenders) and how does a medieval Happy Hogan have the Freak powers his variant obtained during the Christmas episode, but What If…? has always favoured the fantastical over the factual and as we end with yet another last minute appearance of Strange Supreme which sets things up for the season finale (which, at the time of writing, I still have no idea what it’ll be about), you can’t help but wonder if it may lead to the show getting even weirder if it continues into a third season. Think of the show stepping up its style, Spider-Verse style, and feature episodes set in the Mangaverse, or a universe where everyone are Dinosaurs, or even an episode involving Throg: The Frog of Thunder? The endless possibilities that the Watcher hinted at have never felt so close.

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