Hogan Reviews

Several months late to the party on this one but for whatever reason I kept falling out of this season of the show and taking long breaks before I felt like continuing it. It’s a shame because I do like how they use several of the more obscure characters from the latter end of the MCU in the show but the stories themselves are often a bit.. meh. They become less “What If?” and more “Here are some characters in a zany adventure”, which is fine but not really why I liked the other two seasons. Well, either way, let’s finally take a look so I’m once again caught up on the MCU reviews!

Episode 1 is the perfect example of what I was talking about in the opening paragraph as it features the Sam Wilson Captain America (Anthony Mackie), The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and  a bunch of other MCU heroes (including Oscar Isaac returning as Moon Knight!) having to fight gamma monsters in giant mechs. That’s a lot of What If-ing to get that reality… It ends with Hulk, who at this point had sheltered himself away from humanity as the gamma monsters were indirectly his fault, using a gamma bomb to become a Godzilla-like kaiju and takedown and subdue the other monsters before being talked down by Cap, who reminds the creature of their friendship. Episode 2 features Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) and Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani) doing battle in 1920s Hollywood, including a long dance number ruined somewhat by the animation not being able to keep up with Bollywood dance moves, and a showdown with an Eternal that sees Agatha gain giant Eternal powers. It was fine, Kingo was the only real highlight of The Eternals and Agatha is always good for a laugh, but again, not so much a What If…? as much as a bit of a laugh.

The Mech Avengers taking flight. They combine into one giant mech later, which is always fun at least…

Episode 3 has David Harbour’s Red Guardian get in the way of the Winter Solider (Sebastian Stan) and his assassination of the Starks, which leads to a showdown with Obadiah Stane (Kiff VandenHeuvel, so no Jeff Bridges I’m afraid!) and a large scale shootout with the Red Room and SHIELD, as well as some Hydra conspiracy. This episode was more like it, a key moment in the timeline altered to make a lot of other stuff happen, the only issue is Red Guardian himself, whose “comrade” Russian accent and over-the-top line delivery grated by the end of the episode. Episode 4 is then on the opposite end of the scale as it features Howard the Duck (Seth Green) getting married to gag human character Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and the two having a child in the form of an egg that then get chased after by a whole slew of returning MCU villains due to its potential power. It was pretty bad, I have to say, though did feature Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) interacting again, which is always fun, plus Tom Hiddleston and Chris Hemsworth appear as Loki and Thor and also show their usual flare for comedic timing. Shame the rest of the episode didn’t live up the cast list!

Shang-Chi gets ready to fight some outlaws in an episode I talk about underneath this picture. Consider this foreshadowing, I guess?

Episode 5 had an interesting setting in that it was on an Earth where the “Emergence” of the Celestial actually happened and Earth was split apart into various floating landmasses in space, complete with some fun visuals. The actual plot however focused on currently uninteresting Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) who did nothing to make me think she can carry her own series, fighting against Mysterio (Alejandro Saab, so no Jake Gyllenhaal) who had taken over Stark Industries and the Iron Man drones. So not very exciting. Episode 6 is just “What If… we take a couple of characters and pop them in a Western?” as Shang Chi (Simu Liu) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) track down and defeat some Western-ised versions of other MCU characters. It was… fine and had some fun martial arts scenes at least but this was where the show really jumped from “What If?” to “Elseworld comic spin-offs”, which do sometimes produce fun stuff, but this still felt… off here.

In these last two episodes The Watcher himself (still voiced by Jeffrey Wright if you’re wondering) directly interferes with things to create a more positive outcome, leading to a trio of other Watchers deciding to take direct action and put a stop to his meddling and execute him for “breaking his oath”, which leads to the big finale.

Overall Thoughts:

The other Watchers appear, but who watches the Watchers who watch the Watcher?

What If…? Season 3 has one or two good ideas but is mostly a collection of “fun and zany” stories that are less What If…? and more “fun for the sake of it” but sadly a lot of them weren’t actually all that fun. The over-the-top fighting finale has some fun eye candy but overall I have to say Season 3 felt like one step too far, like they’d ran out of good What Ifs but continued anyway. Not the best note to go out on, but hey-ho.

In the final two episodes the previously mentioned trio of Watchers (the leader of which is voiced by Jason Isaacs!) capture The Watcher, who reveals his comic-accurate name of Uatu, but luckily for him word ends up reaching a group of multi-dimensional heroes consisting of the Captain Carter version of Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), Kahhori from that fun Season 2 episode (voiced by Devery Jacobs), Byrdie, the grown up version of Howard the Duck and Darcy’s child (voiced by Natasha Lyonne) and a version of Storm who is wielding Mjolnir, voiced of course by Alison Sealy-Smith, which was a great touch and really rammed home that now they have the Fantastic Four and X-Men licenses back how great a Season 4 of What If…? could be, but oh well! The group try to find the Watcher HQ and end up recruiting a version of Ultron (voiced, like in Season 1, by Ross Marquand doing a spot-on James Spader impression) who absorbed the Infinity Stones and destroyed his universe, ending up alone for eons and learning the error of his ways due to it.

“Storm, Goddess of Thunder” is definitely the highlight of the Season.

“Infinity Ultron” ends up getting them to the Watcher HQ and eventually a battle ensues, including the heroes getting a Watcher power up to take the fight to the Watchers on even terms and then the Watchers themselves fighting back by joining powers and firing a beam that will wipe out all versions of each character from every reality. Captain Carter manages to fight through it and ends up tackling the Watchers into the Universe that Doctor Strange had become one with at the end of Season 2, allowing the sentient Strange Universe to rob the Watchers of their powers. The trio are left to powerlessly watch over this specific universe, a job Uatu hopes will teach them a lesson in perspective. After a bit of mourning the death of Carter (she didn’t survive the universe-tackling beam explosion, which is a fun sentence to type!) he returns to his job of Watcher and we get some teases of other What Ifs including more X-Men based ones that will never happen. Ah well…