Summary
Marvel’s What If…? delivers a fine Christmas gift in Season 3, Episode 4, a truly demented outing with a lovely message.
This is more like it, I’d say. Only in the previous episode of Marvel’s What If…? Season 3, I was moaning that things weren’t weird and experimental enough. Episode 4, “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?”, plays out like a dare to come up with the weirdest MCU premise possible and then contort it into even stranger shapes as it goes. There’s a laundry list of unexpected cameos, at least one joke that prompted me to ask if they can get away with that on Disney+, and some head-scratching underlying plot elements that spin the continuity into dizzy mayhem. It even made my partner cry!
This is also part of one of What If…?’s internal mini-continuities, namely the one from the first season episode where Thor grew up as a party-hard only child and Loki remained among the Frost Giants. It’s within one of those trademark parties that the kernel of a truly bonkers idea germinates. What if Darcy Lewis met Howard the Duck over nachos, and they not only got into a relationship but had a child who happened to be born on a date with cosmic significance?
Darcy giving birth to an egg is close to a concept some of Marvel’s… let’s say odder fans would come up with, which I suppose is a good thing. There’s just absolutely no way this could exist anywhere else in the broader MCU, which is entirely the point of What If…?, as I’ve been repeating near-constantly.
“What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched” uses a string of cosmic cameos to move its story along, which is a fun gimmick. First up is the Grandmaster, who invites Darcy, Howard, and their baby egg to his swanky cruise ship for a free luxury cruise that turns out to be a ruse. He’s actually trying to eat the baby egg for brunch, which is the first indication that the egg is the thing everyone’s after (and is also a surprisingly dark turn for the MCU.)
It’s Nick Fury and Coulson who explain to Darcy and Howard that their baby was born on the day of the Convergence and thus is an extremely attractive prospect to anyone in the cosmos who fancies a bit of untapped supernatural power. This includes Yondu and the Ravagers, who have been hired to steal it, and Kaecilius, who wants to use the kid as a host for Dormammu.
Darcy and Howard try to take shelter on Jotunheim, which Loki is turning into a ski resort. The icy planet becomes the setting for a ridiculous wide-scale smackdown between S.H.I.E.L.D., Kaecilius and his zealots, Zeus, the Grandmaster, the Ravagers, Malekith and the Dark Elves – does anyone even remember Thor: The Dark World? – and eventually even Thanos and the Black Order.
There’s a pleasing sense of nutty chaos to What If…? Season 3, Episode 4 that I hope comes through in the paragraph above. All these varied characters chasing Darcy and Howard around is a bit of a trip even before the egg hatches and reveals a cosmically-powerful baby ushered into the world by a karaoke rendition of Kiss’s “I Was Made For Lovin’ You”, since at this point why not?
Darcy and Howard’s baby wiping out all of these villains – only Fury, Coulson, Loki, and some of the Frost Giants survive – is in service to a larger point about parenting. After seeing how far Darcy and Howard are willing to go to protect their child, Fury decides that such a powerful being will be perfectly safe in the loving arms of its parents. After all, parents are the greatest heroes of all (this is the bit my partner cried at.)
Merry Christmas!
