Summary
Marvel’s What If…? Season 3, Episode 5 benefits from a very bleak tone and a welcome focus on Riri Williams.
Right after Marvel’s What If…? Season 3 reached its lightest, silliest note, Episode 5, “What If… The Emergence Destroyed the Earth?”, flips things on their head by being exceptionally bleak. And that’s good! As I’ve repeatedly reiterated, this is an anthology series. There’s room for everything. Why not push the boundaries a little by depicting Riri Williams – a wildly underrepresented character who was mostly a plucky supporting figure in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – reaching the very extent of her will to live?
Oh, it’s also worth noting that the end of this episode introduces some very explicit serialization, but on a meta level, shaking the show’s entire framework. More on that below.
In the meantime, though, the general idea of this short is that the Eternals did not prevent the Emergence of Tiamut the Communicator – here we go again with callbacks to that terrible movie – and thus wrecked the Earth entirely. What we’re left with is a grim dystopia ruled over by Mysterio, of all people.
Mysterio took over Stark Industries and formed the Iron Legion to police an Iron Federation answerable to his chief enforcer, White Vision. Against that backdrop, Riri Williams is the last hope for salvation, but she’s doomed to fail over and over again as every attempt to topple Mysterio becomes more and more hopeless and, eventually, fatal.
In the attempt we witness in What If…? Season 3, Episode 5, Riri teams up with a resistance force including Okoye, Wong, and Valkyrie, and develops a new weapon to defeat White Vision. From there she can turn White Vision’s synthezoid body into a new suit to temporarily see through Mysterio’s illusions and fight back. However, she still isn’t able to defeat him.
Until… Uatu, the Watcher, intervenes. It’s not the first time, either. We had some pretty significant episodes in the previous season of this show based on what might happen when the Watcher breaks his oath. Since Uatu is being monitored by three other Watchers, the Eminence, the Incarnate, and the Executioner, who’re keeping an eye on his tendency to flout the rules of cosmic voyeurism, it’s likely that his meddling here will have some unforeseen ripple effects during the rest of the season.
I’m still mixed on the idea of overly serializing these episodes, but I suppose handling that through the framing device is one of the better ways of doing it. Other than that, though, this is a fine episode that goes a little further with the dark tone than the MCU is usually inclined to do, which is fine by me. The focus on Riri Williams is also welcome, and her allies here – aside, I suppose, from Wong, who crops up in everything – seem plucked from some of the lower rungs of Marvel’s B-tier characters. Again, this is fine. Good, even.
The same can be said about Mysterio as the villain and some of the bigger conceptual ideas that strike the right balance between feeling too “big” for live-action but not so outlandish as to feel like nonsense. There’s a coherent and surprisingly grim internal logic and coherence to this little story that works pretty well. Can’t argue with that.
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