What If? Season 3 Episode 1-4 Early Review

The MCU’s first foray into animation, What If? is now coming to an end after three seasons. Breaking from its film and other television counterparts, the medium of animation has allowed the writers can use the series’ multiversal setting to craft stories using preexisting characters and putting a different twist on them as they are put in range of situations and genres. An anthology series that has always been all about its exploration of alternate scenarios or ideas over its roughly 30-minute episodes, they may not always hit the target. However, hitting more often than not, it still delivers decent entertainment. Featuring stunning animation and a voice cast led by the indomitable Jeffrey Wright and most of the original live action MCU cast once again returning to voice their animated counterparts, including Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha, Oscar Isaac’s Moon Knight, and Simu Liu’s Shang-Chi. The final season so far (based on the first 4 episodes that were given to press prior to the premiere) is set up as a greatest hits of sorts, offering up a series of wacky adventures among more serious stories while setting up another serialized storyline.

Without giving too much away, the format of the series remains the same as The Watcher continues to do his thing, presiding over the multiverse and narrating stories taking place within it. From a battle between Mech Avengers and the Hulk, Agatha Harkness going to Hollywood as part as one of her next schemes, a buddy comedy between the Red Guardian and the Winter Soldier, and an intergalactic adventure involving two unlikely characters, the season offers up a little bit of everything. Mostly one-off episodes, some are admittedly out there but those episodes are also the best so far.

In terms of the first four episodes, the aforementioned Mech Avengers will undoubtedly remind viewers of the various mechs of Japanese anime but when contrast with the crux of the story being Bruce Banner’s issues with perception and self-doubt, they come off as overly silly. Meanwhile, Agatha is entertaining whatever she does and this time is no different. Going to Hollywood to give her the kind of platform she needed to enact her latest plan, a figure from a widely-forgotten part of the MCU returns to only find themselves roped into that plan whose ramifications are not done being felt. Taking a wacky, but entertaining, turn, what occurs between the Red Guardian and the Winter Soldier essentially amounts to a classic buddy comedy with plenty of nods to classic films from the 1980s and 1990s. In what is sure to be the most divisive of the first four, a story that technically isn’t rooted in the MCU in any way, sees Howard the Duck and Darcy Lewis get married before stumbling across the galaxy in an adventure that includes perhaps the most characters in an episode. What will be divisive is the humor, which won’t be for everyone, and will inevitably be too much for some.

On the technical side, the level of animation is as high as ever as viewers can expect much of the same. Both the characters and the environments have not lost a beat and retain their brightness and sharpness in the midst of the powers being used and the destruction they create. Be it lots of characters on screen at once, or big action sequences, it holds up well. In the end, the thing that holds What If? together is its voice acting and here, once again hold it together. Boasting a strong overall cast, one would be remissed to not mention Kathryn Hahn who continues to ride that Agatha wave while the dynamics of David Harbour and Sebastian Stan as The Red Guardian and the Winter Soldier, and Seth Green and Kat Dennings as Howard the Duck and Darcy Lewis, provide plenty of entertainment.

Four episodes in, it’s obviously unclear where the season will ultimately go so it’s too soon to judge it as a whole but as far as these episodes are concerned, they deliver a wild and wacky ride though a path like that may not be the most sustainable.

still courtesy of Marvel

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.