Watch of the Week : What If? Season 3
What If…?, the long-running Marvel comic book series, is one of the most fun titles in the company’s entire repertoire. Each issue places one of their characters in some new context, either by examining a different pivotal choice they could have made or by shifting them into another universe entirely. The streaming adaptation from Marvel Animation, now in its third season, continues this storytelling style with your favourite characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, delivering multiversal shenanigans with mixed—but mostly fun—results.
As with the comics, each episode takes heroes we already know and places them in a new situation and, as in previous seasons, the characters are (mostly) voiced by the actors that play them in the live-action movies and series, too. That means when Captain America shows up, it’s actually Anthony Mackie voicing him, and the same with The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Binary (Teyonah Parris), Shang-Chi (Simu Liu), Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac), Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), and even Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg). Each story is narrated and presided over by The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), an all-seeing cosmic being.
As with previous seasons of the show–and with any anthology series–your mileage with each episode may vary. In these particular episodes a connecting plot has yet to emerge, but this critic holds that as a good thing. These stories are at their most fun when they are a one-off, both self-contained and weird. In fact, if there is a complaint to be made about the show, it’s that it often doesn’t get weird enough, although episode four makes up for this a little bit by going completely overboard (in a good way).
Another small quibble is that some of this season’s episodes may be a bit unapproachable to the more casual fans of the franchise. One such episode has a prologue that is several minutes of Jeffrey Wright expositing a whole new universe before anyone else even has a chance to speak, which is a lot when each episode is less than half an hour long. Still, for those in the audience who are deep in the MCU lore, this series may well end up feeling like it was made specifically for them, showing them versions of characters they’ve wanted to see in styles and tones they’ve wanted to see Marvel try.
It’s hard to ignore that audiences are feeling a real sense of Marvel fatigue and multiversal fatigue as a whole. While this series is not likely to fix this for anyone, it is exactly the kind of thing that makes multiversal storytelling so potentially fun.
The bottom line here is that if you have liked What If…? to this point, you will definitely continue to do so. If you are a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, nothing here will turn you away, and you might even hope to see some of the versions of these characters again. If you’re not already a fan, this series may not be the best entry point, but luckily, there’s something to love for those of us who are.
Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.