Marvel’s What If? Episodes 1 & 2 review
Credit to: Disney and Marvel StudiosThis was way cooler than I expected
Welcome back to The Wolf Den y’all! This time around, we’re taking a look at the first two episode of Marvel’s What If? For those of you who don’t know, this series explores the idea of… well, “What if?” For example, what if Peggy Carter was given the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers? What if there were zombies in the Marvel universe? What if instead of Peter Quill, it was T’Challa who became Star-Lord? Things like that. I wasn’t a huge fan of the idea in the beginning, but after taking a look at this series for two episodes now, I’m already hooked! I’m not super sure if this will be considered “canon” from a certain point of view, since the multiverse is a thing now, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Now, I’ll be a little more vague as I break down these episodes, because there’s so much dialogue, so these articles are gonna be a bit shorter just to break down all of the important dialogue and action beats. Now that we’re all done with that, let’s jump straight into this awesome series.
Episode 1: What if… Captain Carter Were the first Avenger?
So we start off with the usual Marvel Studios introduction, but this time, the logo turns into the same style of art as this series. Thought that was cool enough to point out. Anyways, we’re immediately introduced to a character named The Watcher, who narrates as we see moments from all throughout the Marvel cinematic universe, but drawn in the same style of animation as this series. He explains that only one single choice can branch out into infinite realities. This is interesting to think about, because in the Loki series, it’s explained that we’re all on the Sacred Timeline, where we all have to follow a specific story, I guess you could say. If you make the wrong choice, you could be grabbed up by the TVA for causing a branch in the timeline. If what The Watcher says here is to be considered as canon as well, then that’s something we’ll need to break down, but I’ll save that for the final thoughts. After the introduction, we travel to Earth, June, 1943, where The Watcher narrates and gives us a brief history lesson on the Nazis, who are spreading throughout Europe. We then cut to some friendly faces as The Watcher explains that the Allied armies banded to create a super soldier, which is when we see Steve Rogers being tested on. He shows us the story that we’re used to, which is how Steve received the serum, became Captain America, and sacrificed himself. But in another universe, we have Peggy. The next scene is just like how it plays out in Captain America: The First Avenger, but when Peggy is asked if she’d rather stay upstairs in the booth, she takes a look at Steve, and instead decides to stay with him. That one decision is what brings us into this brand new universe. Skipping ahead a bit, the same HYDRA spy goes through with bombing the lab, but this time, Steve tries to run after him, but is shot and is now of course injured. Peggy takes out the spy, but realizes that the experiment has to be finished before the project is lost. She decides to jump inside the “super soldier tube” as I call it, and she is the one to receive the serum. When the experiment is complete and the tube opens, we see a bigger, more muscular Peggy Carter. Steve, while still injured, is in shock, but seems to be in love with her even more. What a champ. We cut to Peggy getting blood drawn while getting scolded by Colonel Flynn, and if you don’t know him, he really is just some jerk with a badge. He bashes Peggy by saying she’s just a girl, which is a realistic response from someone in that time period. He leaves after saying women aren’t soldiers, that they might break a nail. Yikes. Jumping ahead a few scenes, we of course see the involvement of Red Skull and the Tesseract, but afterwards, we see Flynn, Howard Stark, and Peggy discussing HYDRA. Peggy volunteers herself, but Flynn is once again being a jerk. Flynn shuts them both down after saying he won’t risk his men over “a glorified battery”, which really got on my nerves, but I guess that means his character did his job.
Later on, we see Howard cheer Peggy up by giving her a shield he made for her, along with her costume. Immediately after, we get to see Peggy in action, taking out HYDRA soldiers left and right, literally lifting up cars with her shield and stopping a truck. This whole sequence is extremely badass, and we see Peggy use her shield a lot more often than our universe’s Cap. Their fighting styles are completely unique from one another, which I think is great, because Peggy is really shining as her own character here. She opens up the back of a truck where we see a frightened Arnim Zola, who looks adorable in this series, it’s really funny looking. We cut to Peggy slamming the Tesseract on Flynn’s desk, surprising him in the process. She basically tells him to promote her to “captain”, and Howard Stark takes the Tesseract to use it on a really cool spin on the Iron Man suit, a suit he calls the “HYDRA Stomper”. Neat. Anyways, let’s take a good leap from here as to not give away too much, but I will say that Captain Carter is a beast. I love the way she fights, I love her confidence, I just love the whole concept. She’s the same Peggy Carter we’re used to, just a whole lot faster and stronger. Bucky is featured in this series a bit, but this time around, he doesn’t fall off of the train, meaning he never loses his arm and becomes the Winter Soldier. Instead, it’s Steve who seems to sacrifice himself while in the HYDRA Stomper suit. We find out a while later that he was totally fine, but has been captured by HYDRA and was locked up in a castle with Red Skull and his men. It’s in this castle that we see Red Skull actually use the Tesseract. He uses it to open an interdimensional portal and summon some crazy tentacle monster that damn near kills everyone in the room. Peggy engages with the beast while Howard and Bucky find Steve and power on his HYDRA Stomper. Steve flies over to Peggy’s part of the castle, and tries to help fight the tentacle monster, but is knocked down. We see something super sad happen here. Peggy gets wrapped up in the monster’s tentacles when she tries to push it back into the portal, and successfully does so, but is sadly sent forward through time to the present day, never getting her dance with Steve. She sees Nick Fury and Hawkeye, who explain to her that the war ended 70 years ago. Heartbroken, but she says she’ll be okay since they won the war. We close out the episode as we listen to The Watcher explain that he sees all of these things transpire, but cannot and will not interfere. End of episode.
I gotta say, I love this episode. This was an amazing way to kick off this series, and it really changed how I initially felt about this series. Captain Carter was absolutely amazing, and while I already had interest in this episode, my expectations were completely blown out of the water. I really can’t think of how this episode could’ve been better, because in my opinion, this was perfect. I loved seeing Peggy and Steve fall in love in their own way, while giving Peggy the sad ending that Steve got in a new and unique way. I’m sure she sees Steve again, since Cap went back in time in Endgame to be with Peggy, so I’m sure she’ll wind up doing the exact same thing. What a phenomenal episode this was, it was truly fun to watch.
5 out of 5.
Episode 2: What if… T’challa Became a Star-Lord?
I just want to start off by saying rest in peace to Chadwick Boseman. While he was the Black Panther, he played so many other wonderful and interesting characters, and moved so many of us as an audience with his performances. We’ll always miss you. Respectfully moving on with the article. We start off with the same opener as before, with The Watcher’s narration and some cool visuals. We jump straight into a beautiful shot of the galaxy, with The Watcher telling us he sees worlds in all of the one hundred billion of points of light, and he sees their stories. We’re interrupted by a footstep, which causes the galaxy to ripple, as it’s actually just a puddle of water. We see our man Star-Lord, but the Star-Lord of this universe: T’Challa. I gotta say, even with the suit being almost exactly the same, it’s really good looking. I love the purple eyes in the helmet, and the overall Wakandan inspiration for this new outfit. We see T’Challa follow the same story as Peter Quill in the first Guardians of the Galaxy, where he goes to collect the Orb on Morag, which we know contains the Power Stone. He successfully retrieves it, but is stopped by the usual suspect, Korath the Pursuer and a couple of his Kree lackeys. In the universe, instead of Korath never hearing of the name Star-Lord, he actually interrupts T’Challa before he can explain who he is and is actually a huge fanboy. This scene was pretty funny. A little dragged out, but funny. When T’Challa deals with Korath and his men, he picks up the unconscious Korath to hire him as a Ravager. When he runs outside, he’s completely outnumbered by Kree forces, but when he informs them that a Ravager never flies solo… nothing happens. He says it again, and suddenly, a flying arrow pierces through all of the Kree, and flies back to its owner, Yondu. In this universe, Star-Lord and Yondu never split up. They’re still Ravagers, and they’re still really good friends. Jumping ahead a bit, we see the young T’Challa talking to his “baba” (father), King T’Chaka, who’s wearing his amazing version of the Black Panther suit. He explains to his son that even though he understands how badly he wants to explore the world, he must let him know that the rest of the world doesn’t understand their way of life, and all he’ll see is destruction and pain. Sad that in the real world, that would likely be true. Moving forward a good little bit, we see T’Challa and the Ravagers enter this club where they all share a few jokes and drinks. We learn from Korath that in this universe, T’Challa actually stopped Thanos, but suddenly… Thanos himself pops up. Korath is taken by surprise, but Thanos says, “I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong.” Um. Wow. It’s Thanos in a Ravager outfit. He’s being nice. T’Challa here has literally talked Thanos out of decimating half of the universe. He literally showed him a better way to fix the universe by talking to him. Props. Props to him. They actually use this as a running joke with Thanos throughout the episode when he tries to talk to people about this plan, trying to make them say that it was actually a good plan, but they all of course laugh it off. If only they knew what happened in our universe.
Moving ahead a bit, we see T’Challa at the bar talking to our old pal Drax, who forces T’Challa to take pictures with him so he can send it to his wife and daughter. This put a smile on my face, knowing they’re alive in this universe. We later see T’Challa be approached by Nebula… with hair. Wow. She’s just a nice blue girl with blonde hair and a cybernetic eye. Really cool to see her so friendly, so chill and laid back. She talks to him about a job where they need to go to The Collector and steal something called The Embers of Genesis, which is a type of cosmic dust that can terraform entire ecosystems. Now, in this universe, T’Challa turns the Ravagers into… well, they’re basically The Guardians of the Galaxy, since he’s pushed them to become a group of Robin Hoods essentially. Also, side note, in this universe, The Collector is a powerful intergalactic kingpin, which is a whole lot more different from what we’re used to. Jumping ahead a whooole lot (there’s a lot of filler in this episode), we see The Black Order, but they’re security for The Collector in this universe. We see T’Challa discover a Wakandan ship, we see Nebula double cross the Ravagers, which is actually a plan devised by both her and T’Challa to double cross The Collector (I know, it’s a little cliche), and we find out that Yondu actually lied to T’Challa about what happened to Wakanda. He told him that when he was young, he tried to return him, but Wakanda was destroyed from a war. We find this out when we see a hologram of the old King T’Chaka asking for help to find his lost son. Yondu explains he did it to protect him, but of course, T’Challa doesn’t want to hear that. Later on, we see T’Challa and Yondu take on The Collector, who is absolutely ripped here. We also get some insight into his collection, which includes Captain America’s shield, Mjolnir, Hela’s helmet, a Kronan’s arm (same species as Korg), and many other weapons. We also see Thanos taking on some of The Black Order, who almost kill him until Nebula shoots down one of them, and uses a few specs from The Embers of Genesis to literally terraform the other. Ouch. They make their way back on-board their ship, and we cut back to Yondu and T’Challa getting manhandled by The Collector. Of course the two eventually beat him by locking him in one of his own collection containers, and we see his personal assistant free all of his captives, unleashing them all on him. “Oh, karma.” Yondu and T’Challa make their way to the same Wakandan ship we saw previously, and they fly into the galaxy. Yondu tries to apologize for lying, but T’Challa already forgave him. Sweet. We see Yondu pull up a hologram on Earth, and as we zoom in on Africa, we see T’Challa and his Ravagers in Wakanda. With Thanos. That still freaks me out. We cut to T’Challa finally seeing his dad and mom again, and they embrace as the king cries. It really is sweet. We see Thanos talking to Okoye, explaining how his plan wasn’t genocide, Korath bragging to another guard how he and T’Challa are best friends, and how Yondu totally didn’t steal T’Challa by mistake for a job. T’Challa chimes in for him, saying he was lost, and Yondu found him. As if things couldn’t get better, we cut to a scene where we see a man jamming to some 80’s music on his Walkman, mopping the floor inside a DQ’s. It’s my absolute favorite MCU character, Peter Quill. He takes his headphones off when he notices someone behind him, letting him know they’re closed. When he turns to him, we see that it’s none other than Ego, here to reunite with his son and start his evil plan. Before the episode finally ends, we see a sweet memorial to Chadwick Boseman, and it made me so happy to see them pay their respects to him in his final project as T’Challa. “Dedicated to our friend, our inspiration, and our hero Chadwick Boseman.” End of episode.
I really enjoyed this episode, and it was great to hear Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa one last time. It was really interesting to see how much better this universe is faring because of T’Challa and his kindness, and it was also great to see Howard the Duck and Peter Quill as cameos. This episode was fun, but it did kind of fail a bit with the humor, which is my only gripe. They definitely tried too hard to make it funny, and it worked about half of the time. Other than that, this was a really great episode, and it was great to have T’Challa back. Definitely an episode you should go check out.
4 out of 5.
FInal Thoughts
If this series keeps this up, this is going to be yet another successful entry into the MCU. I love how creative this series is, how it plays around with this “What if” concept, how it drastically changes the story just because of one small change, all of that. I really can’t wait for the next episodes, and I really wonder how exactly this will tie in with these other Marvel projects. But what did you all think? Let me know on my Instagram and Twitter, and make sure you’re following those accounts to stay updated with the latest news and reviews on all the entertainment projects you love. That’s it from me! This has been The Wolf Den!
