Marvel’s ‘What If’ series kicks off two important aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – the introduction of Marvel Animation and the full exploration of the multiverse in this flailing multiverse saga.
The first two seasons gave us a glimpse into the real ‘What if’ scenarios with limited serialization so we felt like we were really exploring possibilities. So, I was surprised to hear that the series will die with multiverse saga, as I thought a non-committal canon series has so much potential to carry on in different ways, why would they kill the goose?
However, it happened that the goose was killed already in the production.
The third and last season of ‘What if’ was nothing but a glorified serial story pretending to be a bunch of non-serial stories. It negates the logic of the multiverse when it was supposed to be about the multiverse, and it negates it very own nature of isolated story exploration beyond the MCU canon.
The series gets more infuriating as it moves on. Yes, you remember their stories, but not for a good reason. The most obvious for me is I don’t need a repeat of the Howard the Duck story from that ill-fated cringey live action movie back in the days, when I had already grossed out as a kid. I love Kat Denning’s Darcy but not to a point of how they tried to tell the story in this season.
For me, even when you want to end a series, a series like ‘What if’ doesn’t need an end, for the whole premise of ‘What if’ is about unending possibilities. So, putting an “end” to an “unending” multitude of story does not make sense at all. Also, it limits the story telling to fitting into the box than thinking outside of the box.
The Shang-Chi episode was irrelevant, the Riri Williams episode does not make sense (seriously the Agents of SHIELD series told a much better story of this ‘possibility’ of result than ‘What if’), of course we have that grossing me out Howard the Duck episode, the unnecessary return of characters to tell us this is after all a ‘connected series’, and the focus on characters that are not supposed to be the focus at all.
Without spoiling other people’s fun, I don’t want to dive into the story too much, but I do not understand what went wrong with the creative team of ‘What if’ that they could kill a much-loved series in just a few episodes, turning their followers off completely.
Yes, I love certain characters and the portrayal of those characters in the series, but it does not mean that I need them to suddenly become the serial protagonist of the series when it is not about serial protagonists doing stuff in the multiverse. I was expecting the moving on of stories, with maybe occasional non-story impactful cameos of these characters to get a cool factor out of these stories.
The other thing I felt during the series was that it became nothing but glorified advertisement for projects in the multiverse saga, but further tearing the fabric apart instead of enriching it. It’s like a Doctor Strange spell went wrong in ‘Spiderman No Way Home’. There are characters that didn’t gel with us. Making a full episode of these characters just to jam them into our throat will just trigger regurgitation reaction from us. I don’t mind seeing these characters at all, as long as they have interesting and meaningful stories, and not glorified second attempts to market them to me. Pairing Kate Bishop (a character I liked) with Shang-chi does not make me care more about Shang-chi. Putting Darcy with Howard the Duck does not make me think there should be more stories to tell about Howard the Duck. I like both Eternals and Agatha All Along as separate projects, but putting them together in a non-sensical story does not make their stories more appealing.
To say that I was disappointed with the last season of the ‘What if’ series was an understatement. I don’t mind them ending it wanting to do something else, but this is not a way to end a series that is about ‘possibilities’, when you sniff out all the fires of possibility in almost every way you can.
