This article contains spoilers for What If…? If you're not caught up yet, check out our spoiler-free review of What If...? Season 3.
There’s a moment towards the beginning of What If…? Season 3 Episode 6, “What If… 1872?” where The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) explains that we’re at the far reaches of the multiverse, where things get much weirder. “Think less ‘What if?’” he says, “And more ‘What the hell?’” That actually seems to be the ethos for the entirety of Season 3 of Marvel Animation’s What If…? – and frankly, it’s the place the show should have started with. Instead, the animated series is wrapping up its run, just as it found its groove.
First announced in 2019 in advance of the release of Avengers Endgame (though more importantly given it was announced on a Disney investors call, in advance of the release of Disney+), What If…? was meant to be a bold new expansion for Marvel, the first of its animated series to launch on the streaming service. It would explore alternate takes on the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). And in an at-the-time unprecedented move, would include the actors from the big screen, playing voices on the small screen. As one time Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb was fond of saying, it’s all connected… The MCU was one, big place whether you were watching TV or movies, live-action or animation.
Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what happened, on any front. Yes, actors ranging from Tom Hiddleston to Josh Brolin, to Chris Hemsworth and Mark Ruffalo reprised their roles on What If…? But plenty didn’t make it back for the animated series, replaced by excellent, veteran voice actors instead. And it also became clear after Season 1’s dark take on Doctor Strange exploring a multiverse of madness had absolutely nothing to do with the dark Doctor Strange who appeared on screen in, uh, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness that “it’s all connected” meant as much here in the Nü MCU as it did with Loeb’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Marvel’s Netflix series like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and that other one, whatever it was. Not The Punisher. The other one.
What If…? admirably tried to loop it back to the MCU proper at the end of Season 2 with a tag showing The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) and Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell) looking at the Loktree – aka, the multiversal tree Loki turned into/is holding together from the end of Loki Season 2. But as Season 3 picks up, that isn’t referred to in any real way. And in the entirety of this new season, the multiverse is instead visually shown as the prism The Watcher is watching through; not any of the other tree-like visual representations shown elsewhere in the MCU.
It’s particularly frustrating to see this given how slavishly What If…? has hewn to MCU storylines throughout the previous two seasons. While there have been variations, the series has mostly presented play-it-safe riffs on MCU movies. As much fun as Atwell seems to be having playing Captain Carter, the episodes she’s appeared in ranged from a nearly beat-by-beat recreation of Captain America: The First Avenger, to a mash-up between Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Black Widow. An episode with T’Challa becoming Star-Lord in Season 1 was mostly Guardians of the Galaxy. Even an episode that went off-script in Season 2, “What if… Happy Hogan Saved Christmas?” and didn’t riff off an MCU movie was still something else: Die Hard, in the MCU.
Perhaps more distressing is that most of the episodes didn’t function as an actual “what if” scenario. They’d start in one place, but then use that less as a series of dominos toppling a la the way the title is treated in Marvel Comics, and end in another place entirely that would instead head towards the plot of an MCU movie. “What If… Hela Found The Ten Rings?” for example, was less about the title question and more about throwing Hela into the plot of Shang-Chi. “What If… Iron Man Crashed Into The Grandmaster?” sent Tony Stark to Sakaar and then stuck him in a Fast and the Furious riff on Thor: Ragnarok.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with asking questions nobody had ever asked before, but there’s a middle ground between what the comics do – which is present those dominos falling from a simple twist on a storyline, to one with usually devastating consequences – and tweaking the scenario without presenting any new information.
Not to shift shows, universes, and even streaming services, but the final season of Star Trek Lower Decks aired a pointed episode about the issues with multiverse storytelling earlier this year. In the second to last episode of the series, "Fissure Quest," the show checked in with an alternate version of the show’s Boimler (Jack Quaid) who was piloting a starship manned by multiversal variants of various Star Trek characters… And it was driving him insane. Midway through the episode, while trying to figure out who is causing multiversal riffs, he shouts, “They're probably a hacky evil version of someone we all know. A reverse Picard or Borgified Kirk or [bleep] it, I don't know, human Worf. That’s all the multiverse is! Lazy, derivative remixes!” Later, he even notes, “The multiverse is just a rehash of stuff I already know.”
Despite his angry protestations, Boimler is presented with another possibility. A multiversal take on the multiverse, if you will, by an alternate version of Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard) from Star Trek: First Contact. Why is she exploring the multiverse? “To better understand ourselves,” she says. “It's fun to learn about aliens, but learning about humanity, that's something else.”
While that episode was only released two weeks before What If…? Season 3 premiered, the Marvel show has been very slowly coming around to that idea. The majority of What If…? episodes have straddled the line of “derivative remixes” (we won’t say lazy given the hundreds of people who have put enormous effort into making these animated episodes), it’s been clear the heart of the show is more in the ongoing story of The Watcher learning to love and appreciate humanity. And beyond that, the friendship between the cosmic being, and the down-to-earth Peggy Carter. Episodes devoid of nearly anything having to do with the MCU like "What If... Kahhori Reshaped the World?" introduced new ideas and characters without using pre-existing plots as a guideline.
And Season 3 goes off the rails almost entirely. While there’s still a cursory attempt to connect the show to the MCU, the dominos are less stacked back to back than ever before. The season premiere, "What If... the Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?" starts with the question we’ve all assuredly asked before, “What if Sam Wilson was running in Washington D.C. and bumped into Bruce Banner instead of Steve Rogers?” And naturally, that somehow ends up with the Voltron Avengers fighting a giant Kaiju Hulk. "What If... Agatha Went to Hollywood?" is based sort of on the plot of Eternals, but again is a threadbare excuse to take one musical character (Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness) and jam her together with another musical character (Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo).
"What If... the Red Guardian Stopped the Winter Soldier?" is a ridiculous road trip buddy comedy. "What If... 1872?," aka the one The Watcher calls “What the hell” is a Western with Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld). And "What If... Howard the Duck Got Hitched?" is one of the most unhinged episodes of TV streamed this year, featuring Howard the Duck (Seth Green) and Darcy (Kat Dennings) having an egg together that every forgotten villain in the MCU wants to either steal, eat, or both. The episode isn’t even a “what if” scenario, despite the title; it’s a sequel to Season 1’s Party Thor episode, which briefly introduced Howard and Darcy to each other during an intergalactic party in Vegas.
With the series wrapping up, it’s clear the folks behind What If…? went for broke this season, throwing every crazy idea at the wall because they may never get a chance to do any of these ideas ever again. They even end with The Watcher “nope”ing out of the whole premise of the show, forming his own Watcher Council and battling his uptight mentors in the final episodes of the season. He discovers what Boimler discovered, that it is far more interesting to learn about humanity, heroism, and what characters do when the chips are down, rather than simply rehash what we’ve seen before. He, like us, is tired of watching the same thing – over, and over, and over again.
Beyond that, What If…? Season 3 works hard to become a reclamation project for the refuse of the MCU. Sure, we’ve gotten promises that these things will come back – and some of them are already in the works. But we haven’t seen Shang-Chi since his self-titled movie. Kate Bishop popped up in an end-credits scene in The Marvels after appearing on Hawkeye, but that’s it. Eternals has been so ignored it’s a constant meme online about when the MCU will finally recognize that there’s a giant hand sticking out of the ocean. What If…? explores the events of that movie in not one, but two episodes in Season 3. The second time is to delve into the character of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a character who appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and then was spun off into a TV show that has been sitting on the shelf for years at this point (it’s finally scheduled to premiere some time in 2025).
What If…?, by the necessity of selling subscriptions to an at the time new streaming service and breaking through the relative stigma of watching animation, was sold on safety. Big stars, premises you know. But it mostly didn’t work. Here, at the end, the series has leaned into the weird, wild, and wonderful corners of the MCU. The what the hell, if you will… And just as it has found its place in the Marvel Universe, it’s done.
In fact, the season even ends with a montage of all the things we’ll likely never see on TV, barring a one-off What If…? special at some point in the future: Weapon X Thanos, Kingo Iron Man, Ms. Marvel Ant-Man, and many, many more. Things that could have explored exciting takes on Marvel characters in a way we’ve never seen before, one unique to animation. Instead, we’ll just have to ponder the question: what if?
