Each week What If gets arguably more exciting, and that isn’t because the stories are necessarily getting better each week. They’re all pretty good, but where this show gets more and more exciting is the emerging connections to the greater MCU as a whole.
This Doctor Strange focussed episode showed what would happen if lost his love Christine instead of getting the damaged nerves in his hands as he did in the original movie.
Somehow, and we can perhaps best explain this as “reasons” Doctor Strange would still end up meeting the Ancient One and be in pretty much the same position as he would in the main timeline. Only differences being the Christine died and Strange’s hands were not effected. This means if he had wanted to he could have continued on as a surgeon – the loss of which is what lead him to the Ancient One originally.
I’m nit sure I’m on board with this and feel that this could have been corrected by finding another reason for Christine to have died after Strange already had become a superhero.
The plot here didn’t require Stephen Strange to still have his hands intact so would have made better sense if he hadn’t.
The plot is super reminiscent of H.G Wells the Time Machine where the time traveller repeatedly goes back to try to save the life of his loved one, but finds that no matter what happens, they cannot be saved.
This suggests that time follows a fate like system in the MCU, but both Avengers Endgame and Loki already seem to have contradicted this with time alternating antics and the concept of variant timelines.
Why did Strange trying to save Christine not result in the TVA (a time Variant Agency) not appearing to stop the changes in time?
Instead this episode introduces an ideal previously seen in things like Doctor Who where there are fixed points in time. This means that whilst certain events can change that there are some that cannot be changed.
Apparently Christine’s death is one of them, although this leads to the question of the timeline in the movies not having this same fixed point. So many questions this week!
Beyond this the biggest implications of this week tie into the rumours that Doctor Strange seen in the recently released Spider-Man Far From Home trailer is in fact not the same Doctor Strange as seen in the past movies and may be the evil Doctor Strange seen in this episode.
Strange decides to use dark magic and starts absorbing all kinds of alternate reality beings to gain power and it could be that Doctor Strange in the Spider-Man trailer is in fact Strange Supreme.
With a second appearance of the tentacled monster from the Captain Cater episode a few weeks back it’s clear that these episodes are connected and not just one off stories. As a bold prediction I think before the series is wrapped we will see this animated show transition into live action and show at least one sequence that confirms that the events of this series will carry over into the live action films.
Conclusion
This episode raised lots of questions and once again we learn that we can expected lots of twists and the unexpected going forward in the MCU. Seeing more evil variants of heroic characters in particular is a treat and we’re starting to see how the What If world is becoming increasingly connected and even the Watcher is getting involved as a character beyond that of just a narrator.
