Maxance Vincent
*Warning: the following article contains spoilers for episode two of What If…? – Season 2.*
It’s day two of What If…? – Season 2, and today we have an episode where the 1988 Avengers suit up to defeat a young Peter Quill (Mace Montgomery Miskel) as he was sent to Earth by his father Ego (Kurt Russell) to destroy the planet. Today’s world imagines Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker) taking Peter to his father instead of having a change of heart, as expressed in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the consequences are unfathomable.
Peter, through Ego’s mind-control, has destroyed all of the Nine Realms, including Asgard, which prompts Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to arrive on Earth and help stop Quill before he destroys one of the few remaining planets in the galaxy. But it proves more complicated than that, as Ego attempts to reach Quill to do his bidding before he decides to land on Missouri and do it himself.
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Howard Stark (John Slattery) assemble a team comprised of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), T’Chaka (Atandwa Kani), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Wendy Lawson (Keri Tombazian, replacing Annette Bening), and Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne). The episode then becomes a traditional Avengers story that, while entertaining, isn’t as unique as some of the best What If…? Stories told in this show.
I won’t lie: it’s great to see a story where Hank Pym is our Ant-Man and Bill Foster as Goliath. The banter between Douglas and Fishburne is highly entertaining, though one wishes there would be more of them in an episode that seems to go through the motions but doesn’t do much else beyond that.
One of the more interesting aspects of this episode – and the entire show – is how it repurposes key moments from the sacred MCU timeline into different variations. One of those moments involves Bucky Barnes (mind-controlled as The Winter Soldier) learning that he is not who he thinks he is as he is about to take Peter Quill down. The Winter Soldier has his own agenda, but Stark hijacks his communication and makes him realize who he truly is by stating that Steve Rogers wouldn’t have allowed his best friend to kill Peter. That puts him on a different path than he would’ve otherwise taken before the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
But another choice to repurpose a key moment from the MCU falls flat on its face, involving a young Quill finding out that Ego killed his mother. Some of the same lines are used, but the emotional impact is far less interesting than when James Gunn made it the central reveal of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2.
We can all remember when we were when Russell uttered the line, “It broke my heart to put that tumor in her head,” and heard the gasps from the audience in pure shock. The rest of the reveal was pretty damn effective too. While that specific line isn’t used in episode two of What If…? – Season 2, Quill finding out that Ego killed Meredith doesn’t hit as hard as director Bryan Andrews and writer Matthew Chauncey would’ve hoped.
Still, as a thirty-minute animated offering, What If…? – Season 2 entertains more than the first season did, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next story will be tomorrow. In fact, it’s a far more engaging approach to release one isolated episode a day instead of waiting for week-to-week because a show like this thrives on episodic storytelling instead of being beholden to a larger narrative. Of course, we know there will be a team-up for episode nine, but how that will come about remains unknown…
The second episode of What If…? – Season 2 is now available to stream on Disney+.
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