Hogan Reviews

I really enjoyed the first season of What If…? but I saw so few people talking about it that I didn’t think a second season was too likely, but here we are! (and with a third confirmed as well for that matter) Season 2 had plenty of fun stories with the same level of surprising actors actually coming back to continue their roles, plus a very loose adaptation of the 1602 comics and an episode introducing an entirely new character to the MCU canon (even if it is in another universe…) Let’s take a look.

The first season had a subtle build up to a big team pay off where as Season 2 is more stand-alone, with the exception of the finale, but given the concept of the show that makes more sense really. Episode 1 has a timeline where Nebula (Karen Gillian) joined the Nova Corps and Ronan successfully killed Thanos and took control of his army, leading to Xandar being locked down and turning into pretty much a one-to-one copy of the Bladerunner universe. It was fun though, with Nebula narrating her noir-like investigation into Yondu’s death (voiced by Michael Rooker while he was alive!) with the help of the likes of Groot, Korg (Taika Waititi) and Howard the Duck (Seth Green). The second episode has Peter Quill actually taken to Ego (Kurt Russell) and ending up returning to Earth still as a child and threaten its very existence, leading to an 80s version of the Avengers forming with Hank Pym’s Ant Man (Michael Douglas), Giant Man (Laurence Fishburne), the T’Chaka Black Panther (Atandwa Kani), Captain Mar-Vell (Keri Tombazian, sadly…) and the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), plus later a younger Thor (Chris Hemsworth). It was a fun “let’s look at the MCU timeline and see who was actually active at the time” thing, and in the end a young Hope Van Dyne bonds with Quill and manages to convince him to turn on his Dad.

There’s being “a bit naughty” and then there’s this!

Episode 3 was a fun Die Hard parody where Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) ends up having to crawl around the Avengers Tower after it’s taken over by Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) on Christmas Eve. It also involves Happy accidentally injecting himself with Hulk blood and transforming into a purple Hulk monster, plus an Avengers cameo at the end featuring the likes of Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and others not voiced by their original counterparts I’ll get to in later episodes… including the next one! Episode 4 is the hold-over from Season 1 that we briefly glimpsed in the finale that sees Tony Stark (Mick Wingert doing his best Downey impression) not make it back to New York after destroying the Chitauri ship and instead entering a vortex and ending up on Sakaar. There he meets and eventually decides to overthrow the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) which happens via an over-the-top death race featuring Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and Gamora (Cynthia McWilliams instead, but Josh Brolin does voice Thanos briefly!) Episode 5 is less a fun What If? and more a sequel to a fun What If? as we return to the “Captain Carter” universe where Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) became a super-soldier instead of Steve Rogers, but they both fell in love still anyway. Here in the present day Peggy deals with a Winter Solider that is actually Rogers in the “Hydra Stomper” armour and involves the Red Room stuff from the Black Widow film as well (Black Widow voiced by Lake Bell and Rogers by Josh Keaton, but again they do a perfectly fine job). At the end Carter is pulled into a 1600s universe and meets that world’s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen)…

This screenshot is actually from Episode 7, but hey ho… I’ll put it here to better break up the text!

Episode 6 is one that came out of no where as its again not a What If? but instead just a new story in a different timeline. Set during the Spanish invasion of the “New World” (or Americas) it focuses on Kahhori (Devery Jacobs) a young native girl from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (thank you copy and paste!) who ends up gaining superpowers from the cracked tesseract that in this universe was sent to Earth and landed in her lands when Ragnarok happened early. It’s almost entirely spoken in each country’s native tongue with subtitles, which made for a really interesting half hour as I’d never really heard, um, Haudenosaunnese(?) let alone heard it frequently in conversation. It also ends on a cliffhanger as Doctor Strange Supreme (Benedict Cumberbatch) from the previous season’s finale appears in the very last moments. Episode 7 is good fun as it has Hela (Cate Blanchett) take on Thor’s role and get sent to Earth with her powers locked by an incantation placed on her crown, the difference being the year and part of the world as its medieval China and she encounters the future Mandarin Xu Wenwu (Feodor Chin) and his ten rings. This actually leads to Hela heading to Ta Lo and learning the peaceful ways of combat from Jiayi (Lauren Tom) so it was good to see some Shang Chi continuity involved. It ends with a reformed Hela and Xu Wenwu defeating a furious Odin (voiced by Jeff Bergman, I’m afraid. Idris Elba does voice Heimdall in a few scenes though!)

I’ll leave the final episode for the Spoiler section but Episode 8 touches on the classic 1602 comics as Captain Carter pitches in to help the 1602 Avengers when their world is on the verge of being destroyed via an incursion. Despite our narrator The Watcher (Jefferey Wright) trying to convince her that some universes just blink out of existence and there’s nothing she can do she tries anyway. It involves an arrogant King Thor (with comedy prince Loki, voiced by Tom Hiddleston), a Robin Hood version of Steve Rogers and the Scott Lang Ant-Man (Paul Rudd). It’s a good laugh, honestly, even if it barely resembled the actual comic. After assisting the world (by losing Steve Rogers again…) Captain Carter heads back to her own world, but is met by Strange Supreme on the way back…

Once again the animation is a weird 3D/2D CG hybrid thing but it’s really sleek and bright and generally does the trick for me. The voice cast is obviously outstanding and generally each story got a few chuckles or wry smiles from me.

Overall Thoughts:

I can only imagine the eye-rolling comments Kahhori’s story would’ve gotten had it been a film or live action show… *shudder*

What If…? Season 2 was another fun series of 20-odd minute short stories full of weird and wonderful rethinks of MCU characters, once again surprisingly voiced by their actual actors/actresses for the most part. While I didn’t like the finale much the other eight episodes more than made up for it so overall it was a really good time in front of the TV over Christmas / New Years (yes I’m a little late getting this review up, but hey-ho… you should be used to that by now!)

Episode 9 is sadly the weakest in my eyes as it undoes the great work done in Season 1 with Doctor Strange Supreme, where he wiped out his own universe in his attempts to bring back his lost love but found a new role in watching over two would-be universe destroyers in his little realm. Here though Strange Supreme has now been collecting universe destroyers (fine) and completely innocent powerful people (oh…) in order to, yes, bring back his lost love AGAIN (plus his universe). I really enjoyed the bittersweet punishment ending to the character in Season 1 and this just tramples all over it.

The re-insane Strange Supreme makes a grand entrance.

As the episode gets rolling Captain Carter teams with Kahhori, who is one of the innocent powerful people Strange was trying to sacrifice, in order to stop him. It involves Carter getting powered up via the Infinity Stones and a big final battle that in end sees Strange sacrifice his own powerful being to successfully resurrect his universe and lover, even though he won’t be alive to see it. So a different bittersweet ending for the character, but I honestly preferred the original “endless penance” one myself…