Summary
Marvel’s What If…? Season 3 comes to a close in Episode 8, an exciting multiversal ending rich with variants and possibilities.
I must confess to being extremely impressed by the Season 3 finale of Marvel’s What If…?. Given the relatively small canvas it had – it has run for three years, but this finale only plucks plot points and characters from a small handful of episodes – it’s amazing how much exciting action and surprising emotional resonance it manages to create. Episode 8, which is simply titled “What If… What If?” to reiterate a larger point we’ll get to in a moment, is a direct carry-on from the previous outing and a payoff to the ongoing Captain Carter arc, but it’s really the apotheosis of everything this show can and should be, conceptually.
It’s reminiscent – this in a bit of a whisper – of Endgame, which had a similar structure and hit similar notes. There’s the setup, established mainly in the previous episode, which pits our team of heroes against a seemingly undefeatable cosmic threat. There’s the meat, which is largely a giant smackdown full of fun powers and one-on-one brawls. There’s the heroic self-sacrifice. And then there’s the poignant ending with a nice message and an earnest sense of sentimentality.
In this case, our heroes remain the Guardians of the Multiverse, who have teamed up with a supercharged Infinity Ultron to rescue Captain Carter and Uatu from the Observational Plane, where they’re being held captive by the Watchers – The Eminence, The Incarnate, and The Executioner – for various crimes against continuity. This leads to an almost episode-long fight sequence as the Watchers battle against Uatu and the Guardians against the backdrop of a collapsing galaxy.
This would be cool enough, but things take a turn when Uatu has all of the Guardians take the Watcher’s Oath, imbuing them with even crazier powers. The animation and action choreography jump up a notch to symbolize this evolution, and the Watchers have to merge together Voltron-style – a throwback, intentional or otherwise, to the season premiere – to cope. Through their combined might, the Watchers plan to erase every variant of every hero from every universe, and we see a few of them being stripped away as the heroes toil under the cosmic weight.
But Captain Carter comes to the rescue. In a heroic self-sacrifice that evokes Tony Stark’s, she flings herself into the Watcherzord – a name which probably won’t catch on, to be honest – and saves the day, transporting her friends to the Strange Supreme universe where the Watchers’ powers are nullified. The Eminence survives, but is spared by Uatu so that he can study under him and learn to see rather than simply watch; it’s a neat inversion of the flashback that opens the finale when Uatu was the student learning the basics under the Eminence.
Of course, What If…? Season 3, Episode 8 features a brief funeral for Peggy, but the real resonance of this ending comes from Uatu’s closing narration, which is set to a parade of variants showing the innumerable possibilities of the MCU’s multiverse. Which, you know, was kind of the point of this show in the first place.
Long-time die-hard Marvel fans will have a field day with this episode too. It’s littered with callbacks and Easter Eggs that would take an entire article to list, but what it mostly represents is possibilities – not just versions of characters we haven’t seen, but tweaks to stories we think we know, ideas we haven’t had, and a multimedia storytelling initiative that has thoroughly lost it way perhaps not being entirely done for just yet.
