Summary
The best and boldest episode of What If…? Season 2 thus far introduces a brand-new hero with style and confidence.
The cool thing about the Marvel Universe is that there’s always more potential for telling stories in it that don’t feel like the typical Marvel stuff. A playful anthology series like What If…? is always going to be prone to leaning against established characters, ideas, and styles, and Season 2 has undeniably done so thus far. But Episode 6, “What If… Kahhori Reshaped the World?”, feels brand-new, and in many ways it is.
The titular Kahhori (Devery Jacobs) is a young Indigenous girl living in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, dreamed up specifically for this show but virtually guaranteed to crop up in other corners of the canon. Her origin is communicated almost exclusively in Mohawk, has a surprising amount of emotional heft, and highlights the importance of indigenous stories and characters in a global multimedia behemoth like Marvel.
What If…? Season 2 Episode 6 Recap
Outside of the usual intro and a last-second stinger, this episode could easily pass as something divorced from the rest of the MCU. The setup, explained to us as always by The Watcher, is that Asgard’s premature destruction during Ragnarok has relocated the Tesseract to pre-Columbian America. Broken into pieces, it infused a lake with Space Stone energy, creating a portal at the bottom of it leading to a superpower paradise.
Since then the lake has been folded into the legends of the indigenous people. Those who fall in never return. So, when Kahhori and her brother Wáhta (Kiawentiio) sneak out of their village and through an old battlefield to find it, they’re disappointed to discover a rather mundane-looking lake with a few ducks bobbing on its surface.
Sky World
Pursued by Spanish conquistadors, they eventually stumble on the real lake, humming with power and colored a tell-tale shade of blue. Shot by one of the conquistadors, Kahhori falls backward into the water and is dragged to the bottom, pulled through a portal that spits her out into a lush forest. The first man she meets, Atahraks (Jeremy White), identifies the place as Sky World and explains how, through living there, the people – all those who fell in and disappeared over the years – have developed magical powers and discovered ageless immortality.
Kahhori is interested to hear all this, but also a little worried about the claims that it’s impossible to leave since the Spanish are still rampaging through her village. As it turns out, their leader, Don Rodrigo Alphonso Gonzolo (Gabriel Romero), is after the lake itself, or the Fountain of Youth, as he calls it, on behalf of Queen Isabella of Spain (Carolina Ravassa). She wants to get out, the Spanish want to get in, and the Sky World residents have become extremely comfortable hunting jeweled fruit from the backs of giant plains animals and just generally living their best lives.
Naturally – this is a superhero origin story, after all – Kahhori takes to the Tesseract’s powers very easily, and can quickly jump higher and run faster than everyone else. While she enjoys showing off during the hunt, sprinting ahead of the herd and tipping one of the giant creatures upside down to shake its fruity loot loose, she’s brought crashing back down to reality by the sudden arrival of some conquistadors who fell into the lake.
She is the One
While Kahhori has little trouble stopping all of the men’s musket pellets like Neo in The Matrix, she’s immediately incensed by how the people of Sky World have abandoned their people to lounge around in the safety of their paradise. Their newfound powers aren’t being put to good use in defending their homeland. To make a point, she uses her powers to drag the portal out of the sky and bring it to ground level, where she lectures the entire tribe about their cowardice before disappearing through the portal and back to her village, the inhabitants of which have been chained up and led to boats so they can be transported to Spain as punishment for something that wasn’t even their fault in the first place.
Luckily, Kahhori has other ideas, tearing through swathes of conquistadors and their ships in blue-hued fury, and just when it looks like she might be overwhelmed, the rest of the Sky World tribe arrives to help. It’s a very lovely and powerful moment, this, their blue eyes dotting the tree line as Gonzolo looks on in horror, only to be trampled into the sand by the superpowered stampede.
How does What If…? Season 2 Episode 6 end?
Emboldened by her victory, Kahhori travels to Spain to make a rather clear point to Queen Isabella by levitating her in the air and smashing her throne to pieces. The implication is that she either leaves the indigenous people alone or faces a similar fate herself.
I was almost disappointed by the now-obligatory cameo cliffhanger, in which Strange Supreme arrives through a portal and tells Kahhori that he has spent rather a long time looking for her. Plucked from the specificity of her home and tribe, there’s a chance that Marvel will do their usual thing of boiling away all the interest and nuance from characters who have so much more to offer than just the specific color of their energy blast or whatever. But you never know.
Either way, this wasn’t just the boldest episode of the season thus far but also the best. It’ll be hard to top.
What did you think of What If…? Season 2 Episode 6? Let us know in the comments.
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