Disney Plus
The idea of a multiverse or ‘alternate universe’ take on comic book tales is hardly anything new. It’s the sort of story that’s been utilized for many decades even if just as one-off ‘gag’ issues in the 60s. Marvel simply codified the concept in their ‘What If…?’ series that started back in 1977, but although the idea was always a cool one (like what if this hero was a villain or vice versa or what if a different character got certain superpowers instead), inevitably it always seemed to be the same thing.
At the end of each of those stories, usually it was far worse than the original comics and maybe even the entire universe was doomed. In general, it was often felt by readers and critics that it was simply a subtle way of hinting that the main continuity, the one we’ve been following, is the better and ‘correct’ one. Not the most interesting underlying point.
Thankfully Marvel’s new series What If…? doesn’t go down that path, at least so far. We start by hearing from the immortal cosmic being ‘The Watcher’, played by the highly impressive actor Jeffrey Wright. The Watcher knows and sees all universes as they happen, but he never interferes — no matter what. Of course in the comics there are always a few exceptions, but in general that’s usually true.
Our first episode of the season offers an alternate universe tale that has a pretty simple idea — what if, due to minor choices and circumstantial changes, Peggy Carter was forced to take the super serum instead of Steve Rogers? Here we get nearly all of the original actors playing their characters, with the notable exceptions of Steve (played by voice actor Josh Keaton, who amusingly played Ant-Man on the animated Avengers Assembled show instead of Steve) and Red Skull, who is once again played by talented impressionist actor Ross Marquand as he did in the Avengers movies.
Most of the voice-over is done pretty well, with the unfortunate exception of Howard Stark — Dominic Cooper is a pretty good actor, so I guess he’s probably just a bit unfamiliar with the voice-over world. Quite a few of these actors have done voice-over before, so they do a good job — even if it is a bit uncanny to hear someone do a different voice for Steve while talking to Peggy who sounds the same.
Disney Plus
The story otherwise has a very overall similar metastructure to the original Captain America movie, even if all of the details are muddled up. Here we have a reprise of the character Colonel Flynn (Bradley Whitford) from Agent Carter playing the military man here, most likely because they couldn’t get Tommy Lee Jones. But Whitford is a good performer, so it feels like he fits in pretty well.
Peggy becomes Captain Carter and kicks a lot of ‘arse’ by punching Nazis and throwing cars. The action is quite well choreographed, which in animation can be its own sort of trickiness. And although Steve remains his smaller self, because they are able to get the Tesseract early, he ends up flying in an early, powered up, ‘Iron Man’ style suit designed by Howard Stark. So we get a slow romance plot just like the original tale, and we get Peggy and Steve fighting to save the day in different ways.
The Red Skull uses some sort of inter-dimensional nonsense to summon a classic Cthulhu-style squid monster (the usual), and it all ends in the same old way, just backwards). Instead of Steve being frozen and missing, Peggy growing older, here it’s Peggy being stuck in another dimension and Steve growing older. But having Peggy as ‘Captain Carter’ isn’t the worst ending for this alternate universe, assuming we don’t see anymore of the idea (which I don’t know either way).
As Dr. Erskine said, the serum enhances what is within, and Steve in this episode makes it explicit that Peggy is strong outside and in. So maybe they’ll handle Loki and Hydra and Thanos better than Steve, or maybe just as well — it’s still ultimately the same sort of tragic outcome of Captain America, no more, no less.
This opening episode of the show was pretty fun, if not as interesting or impactful as the show gets in later episodes, but it’s a good starting off point — it seems very different but the underlying ideas are similar. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this version of Captain Carter, but who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised either way.
New episodes of What If…? stream Wednesdays on Disney Plus.
Share this post
