The What If? Marvel series on Disney + has been something that has captured the imaginations of thousands of people. It’s not hard to see why, the art is astounding. The artists and animators should get all the awards for their work on it. Ordinarily, this is sort of thing that would be right up my alley. I love alternate universes and remixes – it’s part of why fanfic will never lose its hold on me. I like the thought experiments and the results from extrapolating out the what if questions.
I wanted to love this series more than I did. I really did. Some of the episodes made me chuckle, some of them made frown, and some of them I really wondered what the actual hell the writers were trying to convey initially because I was pretty sure that it wasn’t what was shown in the final project. The voice actors were brilliant – their performances were stellar.
There was only one episode however that really got me engaged – everything else was just pleasant filler – entertaining to have on in the background while doing something else. The stories relied too much on our previous connections to the characters featured and our willingness to still accept the characterizations that came out of the MCU.
Maybe Season Two will be better, maybe it won’t. This series for me is going into the great ideas but not great execution pile that a lot of MCU projects seem to be hitting. I remember the MCU stories used to be good – I wish they’d go back to that.