Summary
“What If… Agatha Went to Hollywood?” delivers some (very) large-scale action and feels enjoyably broad in its concept. The riffs on old-fashioned moviemaking don’t always land, but it’s a fun aesthetic and tone for the short.
I thought I had safely forgotten all about The Eternals and the MCU was right there with me, but Episode 2 of What If…? Season 3, “What If… Agatha Went to Hollywood?”, reinvigorates that godforsaken movie and some of its concepts by pairing Agatha Harkness – very much Marvel’s flavor of the month after Agatha All Along – with Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo.
This is also a riff on Hollywood’s Golden Age and throws a few jabs in the direction of auteur moviemaking, which would ordinarily be fine with me but is probably a bit rich coming from the MCU, of all things. Anyway, here’s the general idea.
Agatha is starring in a movie directed by Howard Stark and his second AD Edwin Jarvis – both voiced by their live-action counterparts, Dominic Cooper and James D’Arcy – that is really a front for a very elaborate scheme to transform herself into the most powerful being in the universe. If you recall, Agatha’s power is stealing the powers of others, and she has already done that with all of the other Eternals. Kingo is the last one she needs to siphon the power of Tiamut, the Celestial buried in the Earth’s core.
Because Kingo is a self-serving Bollywood actor lured by the promise of a three-picture deal, he falls for Agatha’s sales pitch that she’s really trying to save the universe and totally plans to release all of the other Eternals that she has drained. When he switches to her side, Arishem the Judge – the Prime Celestial – comes to destroy Earth and get the situation under control.
Agatha and Howard Stark in Marvel’s What If…? | Image via Disney+
The centerpiece of the episode is undoubtedly a giant-size punch-up between Agatha and Arishem, which is on a scale that even Hulk’s Gamma Beasts versus the Mech Avengers pales in comparison to. It does look really good, to be fair, and it’s another fun flexing of the What If…? concept since this would undoubtedly look pants in live-action and be prohibitively expensive to produce.
The “twist” of What If…? Season 3, Episode 2, if you want to call it that, is that even after acquiring all of this cosmic power, Agatha is lured into abandoning it by Kingo so they can form a new Hollywood acting duo and be endlessly adored by fans. The “joke” is that they’re both just arrogant and needy and moviemaking is a better avenue to satisfy those urges than power is, since power also carries too much responsibility. And that’s kind of reinforced in a way by a sequel tease, the suggestion being that other Celestials will come to avenge Arishem.
I, for one, hope this isn’t literal, since the last thing we need is a sequel to The Eternals, and I reckon this season of What If…? would benefit from avoiding any overt nods to internal continuity. Just leave it alone, please.
All told this is another very serviceable episode of the anthology that feels just right in terms of its unsuitability for live-action. It’s broad enough conceptually that it could never exist anywhere else, and I like my episodes of What If…? to feel that way. That’s the entire point, after all, and present-day Marvel tends to miss the point more often than not. Maybe we’re getting somewhere.
