Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

A lot to enjoy as the season concludes with a great ending shot to leave fans wanting more

Spoiler Warning

The final three episodes of the second season of What If once again change up the theme to…well, heroes and villains is probably the best summation. And in the final analysis – maybe that’s been the theme all along.

What If…Hela found the Ten Rings?

So, I adored this episode – probably far more than I should given that on the face of it, this is very much a replay of the first Thor film with Hela in place of Thor, the location shifting from New Mexico to Asia, and Wenwu taking the combined place of Jane Foster and SHIELD.

Cate Blanchett clearly has a ball returning as Hela.  Her Hela is a fantastic combination of Thor’s military prowess and Loki’s sass.  Her redemption in learning the truth of her own self at Ta Lo and realising that her father has chained and controlled her all her life is great.  The episode gets that balance between pathos and humour just perfect for me and Hela’s dry and very often completely inappropriate wit is hilarious.

The fights throughout the episode are very well done and the animation is fantastic in the final fight with Odin, now the villain set against Hela and Wenwu as the heroes.  There are beautiful colours and fantastic shading which make the Ten Rings’ blue ethereal, the golden power of Odin’s Gungnir vibrant and the moment where Hela’s black/green outfit becomes white/silver just magical.

This episode plays like a movie in its own right despite its limited runtime. 

The inclusion of Ta Lo, Wenwu and the Ten Rings helps with that.  Shang-Chi was very much one of the few successes of Marvel’s Phase Four and the magic of that movie is repeated with this episode.  It means that the movie beats from the first Thor are different enough for this not to feel like a repeat, and Hela’s presence in Ta Lo is very different to Shang Chi’s for all there is the usual montage of ‘learning.’ 

That said, if I was being critical, Wenwu and the Ten Rings are very much bit players to Hela’s centre stage and compelling performance. That is something which is underlined by the fact that the characters are all voiced by other actors than those who appeared in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Still, it’s a minor quibble, and if I one other minor quibble, it’s that it is difficult to see why this episode appears here given the last two have been building to the finale.  Minor quibbles though in what on its own is a fantastic ‘what if’ story.

What If…the Avengers Assembled in 1602?

The first part of what ends up being a fairly disconnected finale picks up from episode 5 and has Captain Carter fighting to save a universe not her own.

The premise is based on the 1602 comic series which sees the Avengers set in 1602 and a ‘what if’ scenario.  I’ve never read the books so I can’t speak to where this episode is true to the series and where it differs.  But this on its own is a great story. The Elizabethan setting mixed up with the English legend of Robin Hood, a touch of the Three Musketeers, and a hint of Arthurian wizardry with the inclusion of Wanda is a great setting for the Avengers to assemble.

Setting up Thor as the misguided King who blames Carter for not saving the Queen (Hela) and his sidekick Sir Happy Hogan in a pseudo-Sheriff of Nottingham role as the villains is well done in the first act.  And boy, does Jon Favreau have fun playing that role.  In the same way Cate Blanchett ate up the scenery in the previous episode, Favreau just goes to town with the role.  I wonder how many of his insults in the final fight were improvised.

The romance of this Universe’s Peggy and Steve, both in their prime, is nicely woven into the story.  It’s heart-warming to see them connect and enjoy fighting with each other.  The fight in the tree-house where they share the shield is just very well choreographed and feels real.  The denouement with Steve being the Forerunner is heart-breaking as he is the one to send himself and the others out-of-time home when Peggy can’t bring herself to lose another Steve.

It is great to see so many of the Avengers included from Fury to Stark, from Rogers to Lang, from Banner to Bucky.  In fact, my only minor quibble of this episode is the absence of Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye.  Seriously.  In an episode which includes the legend of Robin Hood, the one Avenger with the bow and arrow is not included??  And Renner was involved with episode 3 so…a little bemused by his absence.

Anyway, a very minor quibble and the ending with Strange showing up does set-up the actual finale.

What If…Strange Supreme intervened?

The Doctor Strange/Strange Supreme episode of season one was widely agreed as one of the best, if not the best.  The tale of Strange losing his humanity as he tries to restore Christine to life was a compelling ‘what if.’  His redemption in becoming part of the Guardians of the Multiverse was a highlight of the finale and led to a lot of ultimately thwarted anticipation of seeing him appear in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse.

The sudden regression of Strange back to villain in this finale is a little left field and a weakness of the story.  If it had been foreshadowed a little in any of the other episodes, or if they wanted to keep the surprise reveal, if there had been a well-done flashback of his slide back into trying to bring Christine back to life once that was done, this story may have played better.

The surprise reveal of Strange as a villain is alright overall.  First presented as Carter’s friend picking her up from 1602 where she was stranded, the very fact that he sends her after Kahhori who we know is not a villain provides that hint that not all is well with him.  I have to say that the universe with Red Skull on Mount Rushmore is well rendered as an eerie and horror location where a villain may hang out.  Of course once Kahhori starts to explain things to Carter and Strange is revealed as up-to-no-good, things go quickly to the fighting from there.

The problem I have is that the episode then falls into one fight scene after another with little pause.  Indeed, the only pause is with the butterfly scene which takes us back to the powering-up of the Captain.  Unfortunately, most of us who love this genre can easily guess at the fake-out and having had the Peggy/Steve heart-strings tugged in the last episode, this attempt isn’t half as well-done.

Getting to the final battle, I’m not a fan of throw the whole kitchen sink at it and the constant power-ups were a little over-the-top.  There is a tenuous link with other episodes as people like Hela start to throw their heroic weapons at them, but it is a very, very thin thread.

Ultimately the end of the fight is anti-climatic for all Strange manages to literally wrestle his inner demon to make a sacrifice play and there is a huge explosion. The very last scene with Peggy and the Watcher in front of Yggdrasil and the link back to the ending of Loki season two is very, very well done and definitely evokes a sense of connection in a way that nothing in the MCU in Phase Four/Five has done since Spiderman No Way Home’s three Spiderman team-up.

Overall I found this a disappointing finale to what has been an otherwise very enjoyable season.

Season Two Thoughts

The majority of the stories in season two have been great. 

The voice acting and the return of so many original live actors to the parts they’ve made their own has been brilliant. Where others have had to step in they’ve done so with enough similarity to make the character feel the same while also delivering a great rendition of the character.  Yes, for sentimental reasons, it would be great to see Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson back too, but I can appreciate them not wanting to trigger a whole speculation on a live action return if they did.

The episodes have mainly nailed humour mixed with moments of true feels and danger that was the trademark of the early MCU movies.  For me the humour was pitched right, but I can appreciate that if someone watched these episodes in one sitting, taken as a whole it may feel a lot.

Yet while I’ve loved the individual stories, with the exception of the finale, I think the overall story construction of the season needed more work.  It is clear that the approach seems to have been for both season one and two that the stories needed to be able to stand-alone but have some kind of theme or thread which led to the finale.

What worked better in season one was that through-thread of each story presenting a hero/protagonist who ultimately went onto appear in the finale. This season two feels thematically all over the place, (although I think it was ultimately an examination of heroes seemingly becoming villains/villains seemingly becoming heroes), and the threads to the last episodes are incredibly tenuous.  Maybe this will correct itself in season three.

Additionally, I will say that season two has the same potential diversity over-correcting issue that plagued Phase Four overall.  Marvel did need to get a better mix of gender and ethnic representation in the MCU, and when it has done it well, it has done it very well (Shang-Chi being the obvious example).  It would also not be fair to say that the only reason why the MCU has sometimes swung and missed in Phase Four and into Phase Five is diversity over-correction.  Sometimes they’ve just produced a movie or TV show lacking in quality story-telling (Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania being that obvious example).

For this season of What If, mathematically, male heroes take lead in a third of the episodes (episodes 2, 3 and 4).  In all three of these episodes, they are generally counter-balanced in the story by strong female characters, but generally the whole ensemble of each cast usually leans male. Female heroes take lead in the rest.  Nebula is generally surrounded by a male ensemble, Kahhori’s side-kicks are all male, and Carter fights with an entirely male ensemble in 1602 bar the Scarlet Witch.  However, Carter’s own episode is very much a female hero team-up, the finale is very much a female hero team-up and quite honestly Hela dominates her episode with Wenwu and any other character is side-lined for the most part.

Is this a problem?  Personally, it’s not a problem for me because they’ve been great stories and, as a disabled woman of colour, I feel that is really what is important regardless of the diversity mathematics.  But again, I think in constructing a season getting an overall balance could be a valid aim and I can appreciate that if someone binge watches, there is a lot of girl power packed into this season, and it may feel unbalanced to some.     

In conclusion

I loved this season of What If.

It’s had me happily logging onto Disney first thing every day to watch the episode, eager to see the next story.  The finale wasn’t quite the slam dunk I’d hoped for, but that last linkage with Loki was beautifully done.

It feels like the MCU got some of its mojo back.  I’m excited for 2024 and for a third season of What If.