After an Infinity Stone-empowered Ultron marched across the multiverse last week, episode 9 -- the season finale -- of alternate reality Marvel Cinematic Universe animated series What If…? arrived on Disney Plus Wednesday. The deadly AI even beat up the all-seeing Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), revealing that the previously untouchable godlike being was vulnerable.
As some of you may have assumed, the Guardians of the Multiverse do indeed assemble to stop Tony Stark’s godlike, universe-slaying murder bot, with Doctor Strange helping to pull Ultron’s strings as the team’s de facto leader.
There’s a lot to enjoy in the episode, but it stops short of greatness through no fault of Marvel’s own. Due to pandemic-related constraints, the season is missing a pretty essential Gamora and Tony Stark-centric installment that helps set up the whole ‘Guardians of the Multiverse’ vibe in the finale. We will likely see it all play out in Season 2, but that might be quite a while away from hitting our screens.
Jeffrey Wright is our Watcher, Hayley Atwell is Peggy Carter/Captain Carter, Lake Bell (Harley Quinn) is Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Frank Grillo is Brock Rumlow/Crossbones, Georges St. Pierre is Georges Batroc (the Leaper), Chadwick Boseman is T’Challa/Star-Lord, Michael B. Jordan is Erik Killmonger, Chris Hemsworth is Thor, Benedict Cumberbatch is Doctor Strange, Toby Jones is Arnim Zola, Tom Hiddleston is Loki, Kurt Russell is Ego, Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury, Mick Wingert is Tony Stark/Iron Man, Ross Marquand is Ultron and Cynthia McWilliams (Bosch, Marvel Heroes) stands in for Zoe Saldana as Gamora.
The Watcher gathers a bunch of the heroes we've seen in previous episodes -- Captain Carter, Star-Lord T'Challa, Strange Supreme, Killmonger, Party Thor and Age of Ultron Black Widow -- for his anti-Ultron squad, plucking them from their universes at pivotal moments.
Captain Carter/Peggy (Hayley Atwell) apparently followed the same path Steve Rogers did in the mainline MCU, working as a SHIELD agent by the time Captain America: The Winter Soldier begins (shortly before Hydra is revealed to have corrupted SHIELD for decades).
I really loved seeing Captain Carter running the Lemurian Star mission with SHIELD! I feel a little robbed of seeing Peggy and Natasha’s banter in live action, as it felt like they had so much chemistry together. I did see Twitter explode with some mini slash fic after this episode began streaming, and if I were to, say, have a secret Captain Carter fan fiction blog that I regularly update, which of course I don’t and you shouldn’t try and find that because it absolutely doesn’t exist, then I could perhaps imagine some romantic stories for these two coming to life there, in that 100% imaginary and not real blog. Anyway, yes. Move over Steggy and Stucky, there’s a new MCU portmanteau in town: Pegasha. Nateggy? Eh, it’s a work in progress.
The finale also gave us one last Chadwick Boseman performance as T’Challa, and it was great to hear his voice here in a new little adventure with Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, even if he still couldn’t get through to him when the stakes were even higher.
The animation and design was top notch, and there were lots of little Easter eggs to enjoy from past episodes, including the zombie-vomiting portal and Strange producing countless Mjolnirs instead of the copies of himself we saw in Avengers: Endgame. We also got an Alexei mention from Peggy, and the return of The Little Arrow That Could. I’ll admit it’s a little hard to swallow ‘HYDRA to the rescue’ as an MCU concept, but needs must where the Devil drives.
I’m looking forward to checking out Season 2 of the show in the future, and possibly seeing the continuation of some of the Season 1 stories. But by the time these arrive, the implications of the Marvel multiverse will have hit the MCU in a major way through the likes of Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Hopefully, those won’t take any of the fun out of seeing alternate versions of the characters we’ve come to love.
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More mid-credits, but you get it. Peggy suggests she be returned to World War II as a reward (much like Steve Rogers went back in Avengers: Endgame), but the Watcher convinces her that she's needed in modern times. Back to the SHIELD vessel, her universe's Black Widow reveals that she's found a shipping container that'll interest Peggy.
Peering in, she sees the Hydra-Stomper armor. And there's apparently someone inside.
Presumably this is Steve Rogers, whom Peggy thought she'd left behind when she traveled to modern times after leaping into a time portal to fight Hydra's champion back in WWII (that's a complicated sentence).
It's unclear what the deal with Steve is -- it's possible he was captured by Hydra after WWII. If he aged normally, he'd be in his mid-90s by this point, but he may have been kept in cryogenic stasis (like Bucky Barnes). The Hydra-Stomper was initially powered by the Tesseract, which contained the Space Stone, so it's possible Hydra is harnessing residual energy from that.
Presumably, this plot point will be resolved in season 2.
