Summary
The 80s Avengers are good fun in an episode that has some logical woes and feels too close to the existing timeline to pull off this anthology’s trademark sense of novelty.
In my recap of Episode 1, I made a point of saying that I didn’t trust What If…?. I was talking about how it pretends to be entirely divorced from the established MCU canon but sometimes ends up not being, making it a more mandatory watch than you’d think. But Episode 2 of Season 2, “What If… Peter Quill Attacked the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?”, justified my suspicions for another reason. In it, the version of Peter Quill is a temperamental youngster, the Avengers team is a late-80s version comprising the parents of the usual suspects, and while Peter Quill does indeed attack them, he ultimately ends up coming around and saving the day from a bigger, more familiar threat.
That’s quite a lot of misdirection for a single title. I didn’t think I had trust issues, but this is getting silly.
What If...? Season 2 Episode 2 Recap
Anyway, here’s the idea this time. Yondu and the Ravagers picked up Peter Quill (Mace Montgomery Miskel) as usual, but in this universe, Yondu didn’t develop a conscience and handed the nipper off to his father, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell), who at this point has the same expansionist plan he showed off in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Peter, who is young, naïve, and alone, becomes the forefront of the scheme, imbued with Ego’s God-like powers and sent to soften up all the worlds Ego has seeded with his cosmic flora.
Who are the late-80s Avengers?
One of those worlds is Earth in 1988, where Peter’s pod crash-lands in front of Grand Central Station. A nascent S.H.I.E.L.D., still led by middle-aged Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Howard Stark (John Slattery), immediately recognizes the danger that blue-eyed Peter poses, so they set about establishing a super-team of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to take him down.
The team comprises parents and associates of more contemporary Avengers ensembles, including Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), a young Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), King T’Chaka (Atandwa Kani), and Dr. Wendy Lawson (Keri Tombazian). The Soviet Union even volunteers a representative despite the ongoing Cold War making things a little tense with the U.S., and that representative turns out to be the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), still very much in H.Y.D.R.A. programming mode but instantly recognizable to both Peggy and Howard as Bucky Barnes, which does make one wonder why it took Steve Rogers so long.
Too close to home
Full disclosure: I had totally forgotten that Bill Foster was a person who existed in this universe, and it also took a degree of effort to recall who Wendy Lawson was. Now, this is probably more my problem than the episode’s, but it does make me feel like this episode is perhaps a little too close to the official continuity to constitute a fun deviation from it. Aside from the fact we’d probably have heard about Peter Quill going on an interstellar genocidal rampage, almost everything that happens here could conceivably be part of the existing continuity and proceeds as if it is most of the time.
It’s a little weird, is all I’m saying.
The stages of grief
After some nicely animated action highlighting that none of the Avengers are a match for Peter, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) joins the fray to raise the stakes by revealing that Peter has already destroyed Asgard and Jotunheim. Peter is an existential threat to Earth itself, but Hank’s pre-teen daughter Hope (Madeline McGraw) insists he’s just a misunderstood kid like her, and breaks him out of captivity using Hank’s shrinking technology so he can return home to Missouri.
Hope is right, but it’s a stretch to justify Peter having demolished all the other realms and most of New York on the way here in that case. The Avengers need his celestial origins to bypass the cosmic protection around Ego’s seedling and render it harmless, so a decision must be made about whether to capture him, talk him around, or, if you’re the Winter Soldier, shoot him with a sniper rifle while he cries at this mother’s grave.
The timeframe for making this decision is accelerated by the arrival of Ego himself, who realizes something is amiss and heads down to Earth to activate the seedling personally. Peggy (in a tank), Thor, Foster, and T’Chaka fight back Ego’s army of sand monsters while Hank and Wendy try to get through to Peter before the Winter Soldier shoots him. As it turns out, relating to Peter on the level of a sad child works, and Howard is able to appeal to Bucky’s better nature and talk him out of shooting the kid dead.
In case it wasn’t obvious, this is all about grief. Peter is grieving for his mother, obviously; Hank is grieving the loss of his wife, so can relate to him on that level. With Bucky, it’s a little more complicated, since he’s grieving himself and the loss of his identity. But in all three situations, a problem shared is a problem halved. So, Peter feels suddenly stable enough to confront his father and stop him from destroying Earth, which he does by absorbing the seedling into himself and blasting his father’s corporeal form into nothingness.
How does What If…? Season 2 Episode 2 end?
The episode ends with Hope and Peter being given custody of Lawson’s cat, Goose, who you’ll recognize for obvious reasons, Thor leaving to battle the actual planet form of Ego as revenge for the destruction of Asgard, and Bucky leaving the Winter Soldier mantle and eyeliner behind to go his own way – a much more truncated version of how he broke his programming in the MCU proper, but nice nonetheless.
What did you think of What If…? Season 2 Episode 2? Let us know in the comments.
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