Marvel's "What If...?" (Episode 9)

Episode 9: “What if we tied the whole thing up with a big ole bow? And arrow?”

Sort of a part two this week that wraps up the Ultimate Ultron storyline from last week, and before I start with the bitching, let me say it wraps it up, as well as the whole first season, in a pretty satisfying way. All our favorites are back from their one-off episodes, so here’s Captain Britain only they call her Captain Carter because you don’t want to alienate the yanks, Party Thor, Killermongerer, Cthulhu Strange, Chadwick “Star Chad” Boseman, Post Apoc Widow and a new friend in the form of a Gamora who feels like her episode got cut from the season at the last minute, sorry babe. The zombies are even in there.

It’s basically one long fight scene, which gets a bit repetitive, here they are ducking behind a magical shield, ah here they are ducking behind a magical shield again, wait, what’s this, oho, they’re going to duck behind a magical shield this time. Lots of punching but then it's Marvel so I think you could have guessed. Ah, but it’s all good fun in a kind of hammy, cheesy way. Some of the twists don’t make a lick of sense, but then again neither does the whole concept of a robot who is so tough he just punches his way between dimensions.

There’s always been a bit of an RPG feel to the MCU in the way it has attempted to impose consistency and rules on the pull-whatever-out-of-our-asses world of comic book writing, and here we see the problem that arises in many long-running RPG worlds and campaigns: Power creep. The constant need to have this or that character be even biggerer and more badder and tougher than the last results in Ultimate Ultron, an invincible bad guy who is not merely the strongest thing in the universe, but the strongest thing in ANY universe EVER, thereby making him fairly useless as an antagonist because who could ever be a threat to that?

The workaround is, as usual, to have a good guy who ALSO just happens to be the strongest thing in the whole wide entire universe of universes times a zillion, what luck, so the two perfectly cancel each other out and the fight scenes can progress with the punching exactly as they do in every other single MCU movie. This was my gripe with the last episode, yes, I know, I am still on the "Resolving everything with punching" thing. OK. We’ll move on.

The writers have evidently learned the trick that audiences only remember the peak and the ending of any experience and nothing in between, because this episode is rescued from mere adequacy with a nice little series of vignettes promising happily ever afters for some of the more abused characters. Last-human-alive Widow gets a whole new universe to play in, Dr. Very Strange gets a job keeping a lid on a pocket universe, and Captain Carter goes back to what will evidently become a threesome with her, Widow and a resurrected Steve Rogers. Yowza. The sexual tension between Carter and Widow might be the best bit of this whole episode, nay, the whole season.

Q: Wouldn't it have been cool if, instead of the usual opening credits and intro monolog, they'd had Ultron take over the show and deliver the opening lines, had all the credits be "Producer: Albertron Davies" or "Director: Kevon Ultreige" by "Ultron Studios" y'know really play up the fact that this character has taken over the entire universe, huh, huh, wouldn't it?

A: No.

Q: So at the end, two forces are locked in eternal, perfectly balanced battle: An evil genius in an indestructible robot body versus … some guy with a chip on his shoulder?

A: Yes. Totally evenly matched.

Q: Enough about the individual episodes, what do we think about the series as a whole?

A: Limited by its obsession with resolving everything through punching. Yes, I am back on the punching things beef. Deal with it.

But yeah, a little unambitious, a little unimaginative, content to doodle and draw silly faces in the margins, gender or identity swap one character or have slightly different combinations of superheroes beat each other up, when it could do some interesting storytelling and use our familiarity with these characters to explore what makes them, us, anybody tick.

It won’t and as a result this series was at its most fun when it was at its least serious. Not everything has to have some deeper meaning, I guess.