TV #62 of 2023:
What If…?, season 2
Not nearly as impressive as the first year, which was a neat concept for a show but already had some issues in the execution that are worsened here. I swear, I’d feel so much more favorable towards this series if it truly were the anthology that it’s pitched as: just a sequence of kooky standalone hypotheticals untethered to the prime continuity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And some episodes still deliver on that! I love the one where a young Mohawk woman Kahhori — the first MCU superhero not based on a preexisting comic book character, apparently — inherits the power of the Tesseract and stops European colonialism in its tracks. Elsewhere this season, casting Happy Hogan as the star in a Die Hard pastiche (against Justin Hammer trying to take over the Avengers tower) is another fun outing that lightly bends its familiar elements well.
But a full third of these episodes follow Captain Carter, a returning heroine from the year before. Don’t get me wrong — I like Peggy Carter a lot, and it’s great that Hayley Atwell continues to voice the role. But the premise of What If…? shouldn’t feature this much of a recurring cast, and it’s sort of wild that she’s who Disney has decided to cement as our primary protagonist here, given how they canceled the much better live-action Agent Carter series back in 2016. (Seriously, Kevin Feige, you and Atwell both seem to love this character. It’s not too late to bring back her original show for a belated third season on Disney+!) It’s also frustrating how Marvel is telling two different stories about the multiverse / branching timelines practically back-to-back right now — the second season of Loki ended about a-month-and-a-half before this one began — and they neither reference one another nor even seem to be operating under the same set of basic worldbuilding rules.
One episode in this batch, “What if… the Avengers Assembled in 1602?,” takes a pretty obvious inspiration from Neil Gaiman’s comic run Marvel: 1602, to somewhat mixed effect. I definitely appreciate the adaptation choice to have a certain figure be an amnesiac, rather than the more problematic version on the page, but almost nothing else of the plot or Gaiman’s clever character reinventions (or scathing critique of contemporary American power) has been retained either. In fact, by pitching the ‘what if’ as two distant eras unexpectedly merging together, rather than heroes being born so far ahead of schedule, the show writers lazily avoid having to come up with as many inventive historical variations. They can, for instance, just give Ant-Man his usual suit powers rather than finding a way to actually fit him into the 17th century setting.
And that’s this program in a nutshell, unfortunately. The components are there for a stronger product than we’re currently getting, and the specific drive to wrap everything in a larger, universe-threatening plot results in eventual endless scenes of action-figure laser blasts with minimal personality or thought behind them. It’s not all bad, but it’s far from the showcase for off-the-wall franchise material and explorations of divergent fates that it once seemed it could be.
[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, and gore.]
★★★☆☆
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