‘What If…? – Season 2’ Episode Five Recap: “What If…Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper?”

Warning: the following article contains spoilers for episode five of What If…? – Season 2.

“I don’t do sequels,” says The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) at the beginning of What If…? – Season 2’s fifth episode. But he’s making an exception for Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell), whose adventure didn’t end with the first season of What If…?. She has become a key player in the Guardians of the Multiverse, and on the return to her timeline, has found out with Natasha Romanoff (Lake Bell) that Steve Rogers (Josh Keaton) is alive and well inside the HYDRA stomper. 

Like the series premiere of What If…? reinterpreted Captain America: The First Avenger, the fifth episode of What If…? – Season 2 sees director Bryan Andrews and writer A.C. Bradley riff on Captain America: The Winter Soldier. In this specific event, HYDRA has not infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. Rogers is controlled by Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) and the Red Room. However, he cannot leave his suit, or he will die. The HYDRA stomper is the only thing keeping him alive (and young, just like Captain Carter was frozen in time). 

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is still the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., while Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) is its Secretary of State. Since Alexander Pierce never became secretary, HYDRA was likely never able to infiltrate itself, as Barnes is the one who perished in the sacred timeline and became The Winter Soldier. Once again, these are small shifts, which have massive repercussions for how their personal timelines are shifted. 

Rogers immediately attacks Carter and Romanoff on the Lemurian Star and travels to the Triskelion in an attempt to kill Barnes. It doesn’t work, with Carter able to subdue Rogers before he kills his best friend. Andrews deftly captures the tight action of The Winter Soldier, with Laura Karpman’s effective score giving the right pace and rhythm for each action scene to be effective. The show has vastly improved its animation work and staging of action scenes, with the Triskelion attack being a particular highlight of this episode. It’s perhaps not as excitingly realized as in The Winter Soldier, but the animation is striking enough to feel real. 

The arrival to the Red Room is also one of the season’s best sequences so far, as Rogers, Romanoff, and Carter arrive on a KGB test site that was built to emulate a typical American town. The “people” in town spewing what the Russians think are dialogues that represent the American Way of Life is extremely terrifying, harkening back to Cold War-era political paranoïa. Funny how an animated Marvel show that most people have brushed off is more active in its exploration of political paranoïa than its Secret Invasion miniseries, which promised to examine the geopolitical implications of a Skrull invasion. 

The subsequent action scene between Carter/Rogers/Romanoff vs. Vostokoff and the Black Widows is also excellent, with Rogers finally breaking free of the Red Room’s brainwashing and killing Vostokoff by sacrificing himself into the Red Room, thereby destroying it. However, Carter is convinced that Rogers is alive and decides to go on a trip to find him. He may very well be alive if we follow the narrative arc of The Winter Soldier. Still, something happens suddenly that completely changes the direction this season has taken so far. 

While The Watcher can see (and hear) everything, even he is thwarted by what happened: a portal suddenly opens underneath Captain Carter, who falls on it and gets teleported to medieval times, where variants of Nick Fury and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) show up and tell each other that she can save their universe. Who knows what happens next because the screen cuts to black after Peggy screams, “Watcher!” but even he didn’t know this was going to happen, throwing his “overseeing” in shambles once again. Perhaps the next episode won’t tell what will happen next, but it will likely be the catalyst for the finale’s expected crossover event, which will likely be more epic in scale than season one’s.

The fifth episode of What If…? – Season 2 is now available to stream on Disney+.