Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for the first six episodes of Marvel’s What If…?
What If…? has been a fun ride thus far. It has a darker bent than the MCU proper, which allows episodes to spin off into fun, unexpected directions. However, the show also has trouble sticking the landing with these darker storylines. The first two episodes just kind of play it casual with the second episode hinting at a darker conclusion with the arrival of Ego, but then in episode three, despite killing off the Avengers, the show reverts to “but then we found some other heroes.” The only episode to really follow through on the darkness of its premise is episode four where Doctor Strange destroys the entire universe. But then in episodes five and six, the show tries to rebound from its darkness and the conclusion is abrupt. It’s a simple hand wave of “Everything will work out.”
It seems like the direction these episodes want to go is something more akin to Tales from the Crypt—a dark, ironic conclusion that explores the hubris of its protagonists. And yet the Disney/Marvel nature of the property forbids the storytellers from ever going in that direction, which is how you get awkward final scenes like from this week’s episode where Shuri and Pepper Potts make an accord that they will somehow stop Killmonger. And at that point, what was even the purpose of the episode? What is the “What If?” if it comes back around to the same conclusion of, “The bad guy was stopped by the good guys.”
Granted, What If…? only has a half-hour to try and cram an MCU’s worth of storytelling into its runtime, but that challenge shouldn’t prohibit the showrunners from finding a satisfying conclusion to these episodes. I’ve been surprised at how abrupt these episodes feel when they come to their closing credits. They’re bizarrely anti-climactic, especially for a show that’s looking to pride itself on outlandish premises. These are storylines that would never get to see the light of day as a mainstream Marvel movie, so why is it forced back into the box of a traditional Marvel story at the end? Maybe not everything will be alright. Sure, that’s dark and perhaps not fitting with what Disney+ wants to do, but they did it with Episode 4! They were allowed to go there, and so darker conclusions clearly aren’t off the table.
We’ve got four more episodes of What If…? this season, and personally I don’t necessarily need the episodes to be darker as much as I need them to have some kind of resolution and realize that these have to be self-contained stories. The MCU continues, but these stories won’t unless Marvel has these multiverses in their back pocket for future stories they plan to tell. But if the conceit of What If…? is for contained, fantastical stories, then Marvel can’t have it both ways where they plan to break the world only to haphazardly try and tape it back together in the closing minutes of an episode.