[7.1/10] Pick an ending, am I right? First it’s having to remove the soul stone from Mega-Ultron. Then it’s removing all the stones. Then it’s getting them in the infinity smasher. Then it’s using Hawkeye’s Zola arrow on Ultron. Then it’s Zola and Killmonger having an uber showdown. Then it’s Cosmic Dr. Strange trapping them in a pocket universe. Then it’s The Watcher having planned it all this way from the beginning.
It’s a little exhausting, making it feel like we didn’t really build to any of this, but rather, it just happened by fiat. The best you can say is that The Watcher picked these folks knowing the progression and so saw the parts they would play, but it’s not especially clear how and why this was the necessary path or that these were the necessary people to walk it.
(As an aside, why Gamora? I know there was one episode of What If? that didn’t get made because of COVID and other timing constraints. Was it hers?)
Still, some of the interactions are fun. Thor-as-Sterling-Archer is still a hoot, and his happy-go-lucky dopeyness around the other “Guardians of the Multiverse” made me laugh. I also loved the bond between Captain Carter and Black Widow. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the MCU’s better films, and I wouldn’t want to trade it, but this finale definitely made me want to see more adventures of Peggy and Natasha as a team.
And there’s some solid emotional stuff here. Cosmic Strange getting a little redemption after his early mishap is a nice beat. The stinger with Captain Carter getting to see her lost love again much as Steve did is a nice touch too. And I like Black Widow returning to the Avengers-less timeline from episode 3, finding a new home and place to belong, with that being the abiding moral of the series. The overall themes and character beats work well.
It’s just the big climactic battle -- which in fairness, is most of the episode -- that falls flat for me. There’s some cool visual moments, mostly in the way of Cosmic Dr. Strange channeling the dark forces with some multicolored splendor and turns into a tentacle monster. For the most part, though, it’s just a bunch of undifferentiated fireworks and fisticuffs without even the imaginative fun of The Watcher and Ultron’s smash-tour through the multiverse. It wasn’t bad by any means, but nothing we haven’t seen before, without any new twists or wrinkles to set it apart despite the advantages of working in an animated medium.
Overall, I still enjoyed What If? quite a bit as an entertaining lark. The anthology format is a good one for a comic book universe, and several of the remixes were inventive and clever. It’s just the attempt to put them all together, and leave several of the stories unfinished so that they could be concluded in the grand finale, that I’d count as a misfire.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-10-06T22:43:17Z
[7.1/10] Pick an ending, am I right? First it’s having to remove the soul stone from Mega-Ultron. Then it’s removing all the stones. Then it’s getting them in the infinity smasher. Then it’s using Hawkeye’s Zola arrow on Ultron. Then it’s Zola and Killmonger having an uber showdown. Then it’s Cosmic Dr. Strange trapping them in a pocket universe. Then it’s The Watcher having planned it all this way from the beginning.
It’s a little exhausting, making it feel like we didn’t really build to any of this, but rather, it just happened by fiat. The best you can say is that The Watcher picked these folks knowing the progression and so saw the parts they would play, but it’s not especially clear how and why this was the necessary path or that these were the necessary people to walk it.
(As an aside, why Gamora? I know there was one episode of What If? that didn’t get made because of COVID and other timing constraints. Was it hers?)
Still, some of the interactions are fun. Thor-as-Sterling-Archer is still a hoot, and his happy-go-lucky dopeyness around the other “Guardians of the Multiverse” made me laugh. I also loved the bond between Captain Carter and Black Widow. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the MCU’s better films, and I wouldn’t want to trade it, but this finale definitely made me want to see more adventures of Peggy and Natasha as a team.
And there’s some solid emotional stuff here. Cosmic Strange getting a little redemption after his early mishap is a nice beat. The stinger with Captain Carter getting to see her lost love again much as Steve did is a nice touch too. And I like Black Widow returning to the Avengers-less timeline from episode 3, finding a new home and place to belong, with that being the abiding moral of the series. The overall themes and character beats work well.
It’s just the big climactic battle -- which in fairness, is most of the episode -- that falls flat for me. There’s some cool visual moments, mostly in the way of Cosmic Dr. Strange channeling the dark forces with some multicolored splendor and turns into a tentacle monster. For the most part, though, it’s just a bunch of undifferentiated fireworks and fisticuffs without even the imaginative fun of The Watcher and Ultron’s smash-tour through the multiverse. It wasn’t bad by any means, but nothing we haven’t seen before, without any new twists or wrinkles to set it apart despite the advantages of working in an animated medium.
Overall, I still enjoyed What If? quite a bit as an entertaining lark. The anthology format is a good one for a comic book universe, and several of the remixes were inventive and clever. It’s just the attempt to put them all together, and leave several of the stories unfinished so that they could be concluded in the grand finale, that I’d count as a misfire.