In the 1970s, Marvel Comic launched a series called What If? which allowed their comics creators to take familiar characters but change something about their stories to see how they would react. What would have happened if a villain actually became a hero instead or someone other than the hero we knew would receive that hero’s powers? Each issue was a twenty-two page thought experiment that often deconstructed characters to reveal how their heroic tendencies will still come to the fore. More recently the folks at Marvel Studios have brought the concept to the Marvel Cinematic Universe with an animated adaption whose first season premiered in 2021 on Disney+. Starting today, Disney+ begins releasing the show’s second season, an episode a day through the rest of the year. And since there is no major changes in the creative staff, this new batch of nine episodes is on par as the first, for better or worse.
This new season once again puts a number of Marvel heroes and villains under the microscope, with a majority of the live action actors from the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming back to voice their characters. Heroes either find themselves in situations that echo ones the audience is already familiar with or sent down paths previously less traveled. But some episodes provide more of a sense of deja vu than others. The season opener, involving former villain-turned-Guardian of the Galaxy Nubula working for the intergalactic police force known as Nova Corps, owes a large visual debt to Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 film Blade Runner. The episode set to drop on Christmas eve is something of a resetting of Die Hard in Avengers Tower with an unlikely character in the Bruce Willis role. More egregiously though, another episode which has a wild car race as a central action set piece feels like it lifted wholesale a segment out of a similar race in the Wachowski’s Speed Racer.
Perhaps the best single installment is the one that barely includes any known Marvel characters at all. In it, a young 16th century Mohawk indian woman, Kahhori, receives powers thanks to an incident with far-reaching repercussions in a realm beyond Earth. The character is new to the Marvel, she has never appeared in any of the live action films or TV series or even in a Marvel comic book, but her tale and its theme are familiar. An ordinary person gets extraordinary abilities and then comes to a moral crisis as to whether to use them or not. It’s the classic Marvel trope of great power coming with great responsibility, just in a new setting. And it is that freshness that make the episode standout from the rest of the season.
Unfortunately, this second season of What If…? falls into the same trap that the first season does. While the first couple of episodes tell their own tales exploring their alternate possibilities, latter episodes begin to link up into a more on-going narrative. Portions of this larger story feel rehashed from various plot points previously examined in the first season of the show and just don’t back enough story weight here. The What If…? concept works best in an anthology format, exploring characters in bite-sized chunks and making it easier for more casual fans to digest. But trying to string the individual stories into a larger narrative feels like it undercuts the intent somewhat.
