After last week’s Thor focussed comedy romp, What If picks up on the dramatic ending we saw with Ultron/Vision emerging. Well for the first time in What If we get some continued storytelling between episodes and we see how this version of Ultron came to be.
A action packed start shows Black Widow and Hawkeye dodging loads of Ultron’s drones and we learn that where as the Avengers had captured the tech to make what would become Vision, Ultron here keeps control of it and occupies the Vision body. He kills most of the Avengers and with his Mind Stone in tact is met by Thanos.
As has been the order of the day for the What If series we see characters killed over and over but this one is a shock. Ultron in the Vision body cut cuts Thanos in half with the beam from the Mind Stone. Now is possession of all infinity stones Ultron becomes all powerful and bests even Captain Marvel in a fight that destroys the planet. Following this victory Ultron is soon able to become aware of the Watcher.
This is where all of the pieces of the What If series start to come together and The Watcher becomes a central character who steps away from just watching and on a mission to save the multiverse.
Clint and Natasha return to focus and continue as the central heroes here as the last two Avengers on Earth. It’s interesting that the TVA don’t appear throughout any of What If to deal with these variant time lines, so I guess this means that we are watching time spew out in different directions post the events of Loki.
Hawkeye sacrifices himself in a way that mirrors his and Natasha’s final moments together in End Game and instead of Natasha falling to her death, it is Hawkeye who falls, but does so to shoot and take out Ultron’s drones. Natasha escapes with a returning Toby Jones as Arnim Zola now in a Ultron drone body.
The Watcher is found by Ultron and they have epic battles across the multiverse. This is great in that each blow spirals us into a different dimension and we see lots of familiar faces from different universes.
It’s great in this show to have Jeffrey Wright take a bigger role and fingers are firmly crossed that he’ll appear in the live action word of the MCU soon.
The show clearly is a two parter and will continue next week as things end with The Watcher meeting with the twisted Dr Strange from a few weeks ago and admitting he needs his help. I really was expecting there to be a post credits tease of what is to come next, but alas one didn’t arrive.
Trailers for the show indicate that The Watcher and Strange will recruit many of the variant heroes we have seen over the series including Captain Carter, Spider-Man and if we’re lucky the head in a jar version of Ant-Man!
Conclusion
This was all action and huge stakes and was exactly what I could have hoped that this series What If would give us. It was great that Ultron has been brought back and now more of a threat then ever as he has up until this point been the used once and forgotten villain where clearly he has more potential just as Loki and Thanos have played much bigger roles.
This also gives another big run of the infinity stones being a big factor in the story telling. In the future they may play a part again but I’m sure these will quickly seem like a been there done that plot device. Unfortunately the whole multiverse aspect of the MCU now means that they can always come back up. This is both in terms of ‘oh no another villain ha the stones’ and ‘well why don’t the Avengers just go get some infinity stones?’ to solve any problem.
As it is this was possibly the best episode of What If yet, but as with any multipart storytelling, opinions on this may alter when we see what the payoff is. For now though this has certainly set the stage for a dramatic continuation and I cannot wait for the next instalment!
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