Summary
Marvel’s What If…? Season 3 hits its peak in Episode 5, with Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop going on a Wild West adventure.
Full disclosure: Episode 6 of Marvel’s What If…? Season 3, which teams Shang-Chi up with Kate Bishop in a Wild West setting, is my favorite of this run by quite a margin. It’s everything I want from a speculative anthology – a wildly out-there premise with a focus on underutilized characters – while also having the best action sequences, some real thematic meat on its bones, and essentially doubling as the Shang-Chi sequel we never got and, based on Marvel’s current impenetrable business strategy, never will.
“What If… 1872?” understands that everything is cooler in the Wild West, including its leading pair, Shang-Chi, a much-talked-about cowboy known as “The Ten Rings” who only fights hand-to-hand, and Hailee Steinfeld’s Hawkeye, a gunslinger with impeccable aim. They’re both on the trail of the Hood, a crime boss who is set to be the villain in the heavily delayed Ironheart series, which is fronted by Riri Williams, who was the subject of the previous episode in this anthology.
The Hood has enslaved the Chinese immigrants who headed to America to help build the West, carrying them around in a hovering train developed by Stark Industries – the Starks do get around, don’t they? – held in hypnotized sway by Walton Goggins’s Sonny Burch, reprising the role from Ant-Man and the Wasp. The Hood’s crimes caused Shang-Chi’s sister, Xu Xialing, to pursue him and subsequently disappear, and Hawkeye believes that the Hood was responsible for the deaths of her family.
Teaming up with a young boy named Jun-Fan, the heroes board the train and track down the Hood, who turns out to be Xu Xialing, who took the original villain’s powers after defeating him in order to “liberate the West”, but got a little too carried away with it. It turns out to be Sonny who killed Hawkeye’s parents, using their fortune to fund the Hood’s operations.
The excellent action sequences of What If…? Season 3, Episode 6 culminate in a one-on-one brawl between Shang-Chi and his sister that is really good by any standards, and is some of the best on-screen fisticuffs that the MCU has produced since… well, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
I like the tone here. It isn’t bracingly serious, but it’s nowhere near as wacky and out-there as, say, Darcy and Howard the Duck’s adventure, giving it a nice middle-ground feeling. I also like that it pays off the cliffhanger of the previous episode involving the Watcher, with The Eminence, The Executioner, and The Incarnate stepping in to apprehend Uatu following his too-frequent interventions in the natural order. But this episode very much works on its own terms, leaning into the Wild West aesthetic and the abilities of the characters to deliver something that performs exactly how you expect it might given the premise. And bonus points for at least acknowledging the pesky subject of racial dynamics during the time period.
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