Nice! So our villains so far are Ego and Loki vs our heroes Cap and Captain Marvel. I presume T'Challa comes back into play as well as Thanos.
Why on Earth would you assume that there's going to be any crossover between the various episodes of What If... ?
I think this show is showing alternate realities. This is an anthology series. I don't think the Star Lord T'Challa and Captain Carter exist in the Dead Avengers Universe.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Captain Carter and Captain America have different shields. That was a Captain America Shield.
Course, all they have to do is go "what if they could all crossover?" and you've got a what if of a what if, and then they can. They can layer what ifs. In the comics, they did one where Conan came to modern times, then they went back to that one, and changed the ending so that he could continue, and he met Captain America.
Gamora knew about Vormir when Thanos and Nebula didn't, so it's possible that either kid T'Challa was able to talk Thanos out of his original plans shortly after joining the Ravagers (plausible, Thanos had a soft spot for kids back then), or Gamora told Thanos about Vormir much earlier and got sacrificed much earlier, leaving Thanos heartbroken while still only having one stone, making him more open to letting T'Challa talk him out of his plans.
I get why a lot of you liked this episode so much. It didn't do much for me compared to the first two, and I am not sure why.
I think that What If? in the comics and probably in the series does play fast and loose with one change leading to the butterfly effect that changes everything. Skipping ahead to the third episode, for instance, there are a host of things that happened in that universe to get to the point of the What If? But in any case, T'Challa inspiring the Ravagers to be Robin Hoods could have butterfly effect on Thanos's doings well before he actually met Thanos. That could include everything up to which worlds he targeted for demi-mation, and how those on those worlds reacted to him. We're all just spitballing, both because some of the backstory in the main universe is unclear and same with the What If? version. We know in the main universe, Thanos had already formed the Black Order when he attacked Gamora's planet, or at least, Ebony Maw, because he tells Gamora's people to choose a side. We know in the What If Universe, two of Thanos's Black Order have signed up with the Collector and fight Thanos. They show no apparent recognition of him while doing so (and vice versa). Now that could mean a lot of things -- that this was the first time in this reality that Thanos met these people, which means that Thanos didn't destroy their worlds either, which in turn might mean that we have had Good Guy Thanos for quite a long time. Or it might mean that neither Good Guy Thanos or Proxima are the type to talk about their prior history (OG Thanos, though, absolutely would have.)
Anthology series are almost by nature going to have some hits and misses, and for me, episode 3 was one of the misses. 1. Too much joking. The notion of a bunch of people being murdered is a pretty serious thing and the stuff with the jokes about Thor being lavender-scented, and Coulson's password felt out of place to me. 2. A good murder mystery plants enough of the seeds so that the viewer/reader could have puzzled together what happened and why through what is shown. Maybe there were clues that would have shown at least some of that, but I don't think so. 3. Given the killer's motivation, his targets made little sense. Better to go directly after Fury and other SHIELD honchos than a bunch of people who had nothing to do with what got him upset and who may or may not have signed up for the Avengers anyway. I did enjoy having Black Widow be a more believable badass than she was in her movie, seeing Fury again and Loki. But I mostly was bleh.
I mean, I gradually figured out it would have to take nanotech for this shit to be happening, but 2008 MCU didn't have nanotech....but they did have Ant-Man.
You could have just as plausibly said it was Kaecillus (sp?) eliminating obstacles for Dormmamu or Black Panther's uncle taking out the colonizers' strongest weapons.
Personally I loved 3. It had all the elements of a classic What If? As most of those were dystopic takes on what would have happened if the heroes had failed. I didn't care for the first 2 because of the tone - they both were 'well, this would have been MUCH COOLER if' which tends to belittle the main characters involved. Talking the Mad Titan out of being the Mad Titan? As if asking Thanos nicely would have changed his plans. My eyes rolled so hard I nearly went into convulsions. 3 though had quite a bit going for it. A decent mystery, lots of action, a good understanding of marvel lore, good branches from a single change. If there are more like this it will become appointment television.
He was killing Fury's dream. Making people suffer is a plot trope in revenge stories since the fucking Bible.
The problem is that -- at least based on what we saw and the general demeanor of MCU Fury, it's not so much Fury's dream as a means to an end. Killing the Avengers didn't seem to affect Fury much at all (beyond maybe Natasha. I wouldn't even say he cared much about Clint dying). To make Fury suffer, it probably would have been more effective to kill actual SHIELD agents.
I will say this for 3, the graveside confrontation was cool as hell, even though it didn't take me long to sort out what Hank didn't know
Well!! That was a real mind-fuck of an episode. I think I might pick up a few Dr. Strange comics. It will be my first in almost 20 years.
Sorry to be a negative Ned, but there have to be spells that could raise the dead and avoid all the timey-wimey stuff. Also, it seems like the Ancient One and others probably should have been able to know what motivated Strange in the first place to study the mystical arts and nipped all this in the bud.
I was thinking that all the talk about wats-her-name's death being inevitable had 1 huge oversight... the actual Dr. Strange movie we got where Steven damaged his hands and she wasn't even in the car. Why couldn't he see that one? I kind of thought that's where this particular story would end. I still enjoyed this a great deal. I can't believe you guys aren't having more fun with this.
I have been enjoying the series a lot. I just think it plays fast and loose with its premise quite a bit is all. Taken in a vacuum, the "someone's killing the Avengers" was mostly fine. But as a "we're going to show you what happens if one decision is different" and as a murder mystery, it fell short IMO. In this latest episode, the notion of an "absolute point" seems to me to be fundamentally incompatible with the notion of there being a multiverse and an infinite prism of possibilities as the series states. It also seems to me that this episode gives the finger to the Endgame theory of time travel that you can't change your present by attempting to change your past. But maybe I'm wrong there.
Thanos was able to bring Vision back to life without destroying reality, seemingly by just reversing time in the immediate around his corpse. (You can see time still progressing normally for Wanda, who's not very far away.) Strange just needed to find her corpse and rewind it. I'd also propose the Rick and Morty-esque solution of finding another reality where he died and she didn't, and either moving there or taking her from it.
Yeah, I think the Ancient One and The Watchers were protecting the one good MCU timeline Dr. Strange from Evil Doctor Strange, and pulling out every trick to do it.
Yeah, but the end result of Thanos' rewind was still "Vision dies". Bringing him back and then leaving him alive longer than a few minutes might cause the same issues Strange ran into.
