Summary
What If…? Season 3’s two-part finale begins in Episode 7, the beginnings of a fun rescue mission with some surprising cameos.
Well, this is annoying. Here I am always moaning about Marvel’s What If…? becoming too serialized, and Episode 7, the first half of Season 3’s two-part finale, ends up being really great despite being by far the most serialized that the show has been thus far. There are payoffs here not just for some of the meta threads established in this season, but also for events from both prior seasons, and it all fits together rather neatly as a great lead-in for what will surely be an eventful and exciting final episode.
It’s annoying, then, but it’s pretty cool all the same. Things pick up from the end of the previous episode when the Watcher was captured by his contemporaries The Eminence, The Executioner, and The Incarnate. The Eminence even takes over narration duties, adding insult to injury.
Luckily Uatu being snatched causes shards of the Observational Plane to land right next to Captain Carter, who is still leading a team of multiversal protectors tasked with keeping the natural order in check. The opening sequence is an introduction to her new squad that takes place in the reality where Nebula became Nova Prime but also sees the team taking on one of those interdimensional squid monsters from Season 1 just because.
Carter’s new team includes Kahori, whose introduction was a real Season 2 stand-out, Storm from X-Men – though a proper Goddess of Thunder version, with Mjolnir and everything – and Byrdie the Duck, the daughter of Darcy and Howard.
Carter naturally wants to rescue The Watcher, but that means accessing the fifth dimension, which is easier said than done. Various attempts – which include retrofitting the shards and using Storm’s godly powers – fail, and the last hope becomes a variant of Infinity Ultron who discovered that the only way to truly create peace is to wipe out every living thing. Yikes.
This Infinity Ultron has spent eons totally alone, so he’s quietly pleased to see Peggy and is dismayed when she’s snatched by The Eminence. He goes to see the others – who all attack him, assuming he has harmed Peggy himself – and explains the mistake he made in assuming that peace was simply the absence of conflict. Having doomed himself to eons spent totally alone, he realizes that Peggy and The Watcher must be saved, and he supercharges himself using the final shard to give the rest of the team access to the Observational Plane. Just in time for the finale!
Needless to say, What If…? Season 3, Episode 7 rules, which is strange because it shouldn’t. Based on all the things that annoy me about this show – explicit serialization, reliance on the same characters, and so on, and so forth – nothing about “What If… The Watcher Disappeared?” should work. And yet it does, on just about every level, from the action to the animation to the choice of team.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how all this pans out in the finale, and I am especially excited to see some of these characters in live-action. Natasha Lyonne, who voices Byrdie here, is set to star in Fantastic Four: First Steps in an as-yet undisclosed role. Will it be this one? Maybe. Lahori has got to crop up somewhere too, right? If it isn’t going to go completely speculative, then this, I think, is the best use of What If…?’s time, giving us reasons to be genuinely invested in the MCU again. Hopefully, it sticks the landing.
