WHAT IF’s season finale is a continuation from EP 8, which I admit I had not watched until I noticed this about a minute into EP 9. As you may have seen me mention in previous reviews, I’ve been pretty ho-hum on a lot of these episodes and just straight disliked others. But I remained hopeful the series could finish strong. For those who enjoyed EP 8, this should be at least a 😊 for you, but it was mostly torture for me.
If you’re reading this review, I’ll make the educated guess that you’ve at least seen EP 8 WHAT IF…ULTRON WON?, which obviously Mike and I disagree on. So you know that Ultron becomes an even more evil villain than Thanos. A world where Ultron won just isn’t that interesting to me because, well…Ultron wasn’t an interesting villain in the MCU. AVENGERS AGE OF ULTRON was a bore of a story that treated Black Widow terribly, and frankly, his defeat at the end of that was a good thing. Perhaps the show’s creators thought of this as a way to give Ultron a better story? Or what if…we had just left him dead?
Here in the finale, the Watcher travels the multi-verse, grabbing many of the Avengers we’ve seen throughout the season to take on the villain. From there, we get what feels like a regurgitation of END GAME but with the Avengers B squad and Ultron in place of Thanos. And I LOVED ENDGAME and will defend it to my grave, but the reasons I loved it was in that story, not this one. I’m not invested in these alternative versions of the Avengers, and I don’t care whether they live or die. Ok, maybe except for bro-Thor because at least he seems to be the only one having fun here.
Disney+ has already announced it’s coming back for another season, but unless they’re going to lean heavily into some really silly and campy situations (vampires, anyone?), what if….they didn’t?
Season 1 of WHAT IF…? Is now streaming in its entirety on Disney+.
