Viewer! If you re watching this, it means it s been one whole year since Marvel s animated
anthology show What If first aired on Disney+. Well, maybe not exactly, I m not sure precisely
when this video ll come out yet, but more or less! And that means it s time to do what
this channel does best to offer a momentary distraction from the terrifyingly, maddeningly
quick passage of time by fixating on the ephemera of popular culture. So let s dig into What
If, and where the show stands, one year on. This video is going to be a fair bit shorter
than other, similar retrospectives I ve made, though, and that s because, as of now, my
channel s also one year old so I made a fair bit of What If content back when the show
was airing. Some of those videos, by modern Pillar of Garbage standards, are kinda aged
and a bit basic production-wise I mean, Jesus, just look at these thumbnails but a lot of
my thoughts on this show have already been shared, particularly in my What If tier list
video, which isn t a tier list so much as a fairly in-depth episode by episode review.
So if you re coming to this video after having seen my previous Disney+ anniversary retrospectives,
expecting a similar thing, honestly you re probably better off watching that one.
In this video we re going to focus more on the one year on part of the title. I want
to think about the status of this show, a year or so after it debuted, how valid some
of these prevailing opinions are, and maybe suggest an alternative viewpoint or two. I
guess the best place to start is the simple observation that, generally speaking, fan
opinions of this show seem to have cooled down in a big way. Now people didn t LOVE
the first episode to drop, even then, but in the following weeks, viewers in 2021 seemed
to really warm to What If? What you re seeing now are some of the original episode discussion
threads, for instance. Nowadays? Yeah, you d be hard-pressed to find discussion this
positive pretty much anywhere. And while 2022 has seen a lot of MCU TV negativity spring
up, it s not typically this consistent. For instance, on comic-book Twitter, you ll see
a thread claiming, say, Loki, or Moon Knight, was an utter failure in storytelling, and
then you ll scroll down and there ll be someone saying that same show is literally the best
thing they ve ever seen. I don t think I ve ever seen someone whose
favourite TV show hell, even whose favourite MCU Disney+ offering is What If. And I can
kinda see why. There are some pretty flimsy aspects of this project. Some of the most
common complaints concern the voice acting, and the art style. On that first point it
s maybe fun initially to hear someone like Sebastian Stan reprising their role for this,
but on rewatch, it isn t great. Some performances are really good, often from the actual voice
actors, but there s some decent stuff from the big movie stars too particularly the Chadwick
Boseman performances, which hit home extra hard for obvious reasons. So there is success
here, but it s inconsistent. It s similar with those art-style complaints. The standard,
almost cell-shaded looking CGI palette here is sometimes elevated, combined with hand-drawn
elements and in moments like this, this look works. It really does. But moments like these
are fairly few and far between. A lot of the time, this base style is too sleek, too devoid
of character, and maybe soul. It works as a canvas, upon which to build, it works really
well! I just wish they d have done a little more of that building.
I know I often tend to disagree with popular takes about projects like these, but there
s two more common critiques of What If and its legacy that I think have a lot of weight
behind them. First, Captain Carter. What if Peggy took the serum instead of Steve? Cool
idea Peggy was a great character. I don t *adore* the episode we got out of that premise,
it sticks a bit too close to the First Avenger to feel like a truly satisfying use of What
If? s potential, but sure, it was fun to see this character centre-stage and suited up.
But and no disrespect at all to Hayley Atwell, that s probably where this character should
have ended. Look, maybe we keep her Multiverse of Madness cameo that was pretty solid, she
felt like the Illuminati member with the most substance to her character, other than maybe
Professor X. But I m really not sure there s a need to continue the Captain Carter saga
in season 2, like they re doing, and I really don t love the idea of a Captain Carter solo
show, which, yeah, is rumoured to be in development. And the reason my feelings on this go past
indifference and into trepidation is because Sam s Captain America now. I really don t
think it s a great look on Marvel that they gave the cinematic mantle of Cap to an African-American
superhero 3 years ago, and have shown him precisely once since then, but seem to be
going full-steam ahead with so much Captain-America-esque content starring Peggy. I doubt there s any
real malice on Marvel s part here, but I m still not a massive fan the pattern that looks
to be developing. And Captain Carter shouldn t have appeared
in the season 1 finale, because there shouldn t have been a finale or at least a big, multiversal,
crossover-based finale. That s the other big What If take I think I agree with. This show
didn t need to be serialised, even loosely - it didn t need this massive, existential
threat to orient itself around. One year on, it s increasingly clear that this is a feature,
not a bug, that Marvel feels the need to write in seismic, catastrophic crises to all their
shows - except for Hawkeye, that is, but I guess that s the exception that proves the
rule. It s like they re worried they won t be able to retain audience attention without
some explosive flourish at the end of each show, when in reality the opposite is nearer
the truth, and the requisite big showdown at the end of What If feels even more bolted-on
than most. I don t even really dislike the last 2 episodes in themselves, and I quite
like this new take on Ultron, but it just feels like they re the clearest look at the
central ethos of the show revealing a project not content to be a fun addendum to the MCU,
a project which wants, or needs, to be more. And.. I m just not sure there s enough here
to be more. It s hard to care about these characters and
these worlds when half the episodes feel like they end 10 minutes too soon, but the finale
does want us to care. Honestly one route they could have taken here would have been to embrace
this lack of involvement, to dial down the emotional stakes and go for a Suicide Squad-type
disposability for these variants. That would have been a creative solution to the odd emotional
limbo the series creates where we kinda know these characters, and kinda care about their
survival, all the while knowing there s a literally infinite number of near-identical
beings just one universe hop away. But it didn t go down this route - and that s fine,
obviously, I m not criticising What If because it didn t do that thing I just imagined. That
would be silly! But I think areas like this speak to a real sense of unease within What
If. It feels uncomfortable being an anthology show, a bag of loose ends, when that s.. kinda
what it is. And that isn t a bad thing! Those What If comics were at their best when they
embraced their episodic, standalone nature each one was a brand new, if limited slate,
which picked a silly idea and singlemindedly pursued that idea, and that idea alone. This
show wasn t WandaVision, or Loki. It wasn t, and should never have been, its own story.
To use a gaming metaphor, it was more a DLC, or standalone expansion, than a triple A release
and you get the sense that it might have been a little more successful, a little more fondly
remembered, if it had remembered that more often. It's hard to blame the show too much
for this though because these distinctions didn t really exist in TV even 5 years ago.
This is something streaming has brought on and I think we re going to see it more and
more in the near future. Who s to say? I want to end with a Tweet I saw the other
day. What If was being compared to Harley Quinn, Invincible, and the 90s X-Men cartoon,
and I think this sort of mental equivalence is where a lot of the persisting negativity
around What If comes from. I don t think we should be holding What If up against the likes
of Invincible, or Harley Quinn, because it really isn t the same. It s not really an
original animated comic-book show it s an often fun, occasionally gripping slab of bonus
MCU content, a high-budget, slick production that picks up underused settings and character
pairings and imagines a world where they come together. At it s best, some of these imaginings
are dynamic. Seeing Loki and Nick Fury match wits with a deranged Hank Pym feels like grabbing
these characters, and smashing them into one another like conkers or beyblades. In moments
like these, there s almost a sense of postmodern vertigo it s dizzying to see just how much
newness, or faux-newness can be spun out of franchised nostalgia, to see this possibility
for endless, autonomous, free play between Ips and trademarks, and-
Sorry, I m getting carried away. The key point I want to make, though, is that there s stuff
to like here, there s interesting qualities to What If as long as you don t view it as
just a TV show like these others, if you take it for the weird little package that it is.
Honestly, I think we re best envisaging this show not as something like Spider-Man Freshman
Year or X Men 97, but as something like I Am Groot. A little thing, it s own thing.
It s not really our fault for trying to view it through a more standard lens Disney promoted
it as such, dropped it week by week, gave it the veneer of normalcy, and seemingly almost
managed to convince What If itself but it isn t WandaVision, or Invincible, and at its
best, it doesn t try to be. It s a bag of loose ends. It s What if. Sometimes, anyway.
That s the end of this mini-retrospective, though. There ll be a playlist of all the
other, longer ones I ve done for the MCU s Disney+ content onscreen at the video s end,
so check that out if you re new here. Otherwise, I d love to hear what you think of What If,
or of my take on it. But hey, thanks for watching, and shoutout to all my Patrons onscreen now,
especially Ian Fyfield and Kevin Douglas.