So we’re finally at the end of What If…?, the MCU’s go-to show to keep this whole Multiverse thing ticking over until Marvel figures out how to wrap everything up. It’s been a show that featured both limitless imagination and frustrating limitations that’s literally taken us through dozens of realities, but yet never actually managed to affect the actual movies as a whole. We’ve seen Tony Stark on Sakaar, we’ve seen Spider-Man fight zombies and we’ve even seen Howard The Duck have a kid with Darcy, and yet for all of it’s infinite probabilities, Kang, the TVA and Loki the God of Stories have somehow barely been addressed.
With a suitably epic showdown on the horizon as the Watcher is judged for his crimes, can What If…? use its gifts to bring everything all together, or will this battle against the Watcher’s kind suffer from a surprisingly lack of vision. Watch this space, mortals, What If…? is about to give a definitive answer.
In an attempt to rescue the Watcher who is being held accountable for repeatedly breaking his sacred oath, Captain Carter seemingly sacrificed herself by getting herself captured in order to lure her teammates, Storm, Byrdie and Kahhori to the one being who can lead them into the fifth dimension – Infinity Ultron. Meanwhile, we rejoin the imprisoned Watcher and Carter as the Eminence delivers the laundry list of grievances that have all led then to this moment. But after hearing the names of all he has aided and interfered in (including Stephen Strange, Riri Williams and… Madisynn for some reason), the Watchers’ trial comes to a screeching halt when Ultron and the Guardians Of The Multiverse crash the party and while the rehabilitated A.I. delivers the necessary sacrifice needed for our heroes to escape, they have precious little time to come up with a solution before the Eminence and his bald-headed compadres come after them once more.
However, just when a idea manages to present itself, the Eminence manages to thwart their getaway to the universe that Strange Supreme created from scratch at the expense of his soul and the battle is joined. Energy waves clash, bodies are hurled this way and that and even after the Watcher manage to level up his would-be saviours by getting them to take the Watchers’ oath, the Eminence, the Executioner and the Incarnate also give themselves a power boost that could potentially erase every trace and every variant of our heroes from the entire Multiverse.
It soon becomes apparent that it’s going to take a good old sacrifice to win the day, but who will step up and save their friends and what lessons can the Watcher teach his peers to start getting them to see things his way?
If you were to agree that the Watcher was the central character of What If…? all along, then this final episode should suit you just fine. After all, we get a flashback showing us back when he first took the Watcher’s oath, we see him imploring his case against the being who once believed in him the most and he even gets to embrace his own name once again as he triumphantly reclaims his identity and announces himself as Uatu. However, anyone who prefers What If…? to defiantly remain an anthology show might find the climactic episode of dedicating an entire episode of The Twilight Zone in order to give Rod Serling an origin story. Now don’t get me wrong – if any character was screaming out for some backstory, it’s Jeffrey Wright’s consistently excellent portrayal of the cosmic snoop, but once again it feels like the episode doesn’t quite know how to best spend utilise its time. All the Watcher stuff is interesting and the struggle that Uatu has had keeping his personal emotions out of witnessing an endless number of tragedies, cataclysms and downers is the exact thing that has caused him to rebel. Additionally, the brief time we spend in the fifth dimension gives us juicy looks at yet another race of rules-obsessed beings and more than anything else, Uatu deserves to make his live action debut at some point before all this Multiverse lark still has a point.
However, despite literally having all of infinity at their finger tips, the showrunners curiously pull back from teeing up a humongous finish and instead spend the bulk of the episode featuring a near endless brawl between god-like beings that features more Kirby crackle in a single episode than the entire MCU has managed to utilise thus far. It’s big, it’s brash and it features a cosmic powered headbutt that shatters a planet, but the show has given us absurdly powered hogpiles before, especially during the Ultron vs the Guardians Of The Multiverse battle from the first season. There’s some cool moves at play here (Carter pulls off some neat shit with her cosmically powered shield) and lots of energy blasts but…. it’s just a fight with bells and whistles attached and it’s being staged by a bunch of characters that most of whom had only been introduced an episode ago. The stakes are huge, yet the scope is bizarrely small as, with all of the Multiverse to play with, all we get are eight powerful beings throwing glowy hands on a barren moon.
Where are the trips into familiar universes?
Where are the moments where all the characters we’ve been introduced to come tumbling into play like Endgame times ten? If you could include almost every forgotten MCU villain in the Howard and Darcy episode, do you mean to tell me you suddenly couldn’t do that here? Even arguments that the show had technically already pulled that trick doesn’t hold much water when it’s also pulled off Multiversal donnybrooks all the damn time and it feels that in plotting it’s big finish, What If…? for once weirdly set its aperture way too narrow.
There’s also a problem with the characters. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with all-female teams; but even though Byrdie is fun and all and it’s truly badass to have Storm in the mix, when you have an entire universe of beloved characters at had, it’s a little strange they didn’t use some more familiar faces. Like I said, it’s not even a “girl” thing; would it have killed them to throw in a Captain Marvel variant, Super Nova Nebula or even the Scarlet Witch seeing as the whole point of the show was to twist the familiar.
Still, even though the episode reeks of wasted potential, it still works well if you’re OK with the limited pieces the episode chooses to play with. The fight may be overlong and stuffed with choreography and glowing zappy zaps (the Watcher has some sick Kung Fu reflexes, by the way), but it’s still pretty cool when taken on its own terms.
However, when you consider the true scale of what the Multiverse holds, it’s just a little annoying that the one show chosen to explore it to its fullest decided to hold back at the final hurdle. Way back at the start of the show, the Watcher’s rumbling tones invited us to ponder What If…?, but it shouldn’t have us,wondering the same when we wonder what the finale might have been…
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