‘What If…? – Season 2’ Episode Six Recap: “What If…Kahhori Reshaped the World?”

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

In episode six of its second season, What If…? gives audiences the potential of a new universe with characters made specifically for this series. Today’s world imagines a universe where Surtur (Clancy Brown) attacks Asgard and successfully unleashes Ragnarok when the Tesseract is still in Odin’s (Jeff Bergman) possession and crash-lands in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which becomes the land of the Mohawk tribespeople in 15th century pre-colonial America. 

The Tesseract turns into a lake filled with energy, to which the villagers hide from the rest of the Tribe, as some of its members are sucked into the water, never to return. The episode specifically follows Kahhori (Devery Jacobs) and her brother Wahta (Kiawentiio), hunted by Spanish conquistadors looking for a so-called Fountain of Youth. Conquistador Rodrigo Alphonso Gonzolo (Gabriel Romero) ransacks Kahhori’s village and kidnaps her tribe as they are hunting for the Fountain. 

During a chase scene, Kahhori gets shot and plunges into the Fountain of Youth, which teleports her to another world. Her bullet wound is magically healed, and she is welcomed by Atahraks (Jeremy White), who tells Kahhori she is in the “Sky World,” where many Mohawks landed after exploring the Tesseract-laden waters. The Sky World gave them all powers and, by extension, made them immortal, including Kahhori, who begins to hone in her Tesseract energy, hoping to leave and save her brother and the rest of the tribe who have been kidnapped by conquistadors. 

The rest of the episode is a classic MCU origin story, where Kahhori learns to use her powers to free the trapped Mohawks in the Sky World, leading them to victory against the conquistadors attempting to colonize their lands. Great attention to detail has been made in its representation of Indigenous people in the episode, which is entirely spoken in Mohawk (with the only exception being Jeffrey Wright’s English-language narration as The Watcher). It’s been a while since, in a piece of media, Indigenous culture was celebrated, and its Native characters were heroes and not victims of white men abusing them, like in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which lacked a Native insight for the story to feel more urgent in the eyes of the film.

In What If…? – Season 2, director Bryan Andrews and writer Ryan Little ensure Kahhori will reclaim her land and lead her tribe to victory, finally giving Indigenous people the heroic narrative they deserve in film and television. There has been a shift in how media represents Indigenous people on a mainstream lens with the arrival of Reservation Dogs on FX. What If…? – Season 2 continues that trend alongside Echo, helmed by Indigenous creatives, and will focus on the character’s Choctaw connections with a mostly Native cast. 

However, many filmmakers have been telling important Indigenous stories on the screen that have been largely ignored by the masses, including the work of Alanis Obomsawin, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, Zacharias Kunuk, and the late Jeff Barnaby, to name a few. There’s a desire for What If…? – Season 2 to hopefully be a gateway for viewers to seek out other Indigenous stories, perhaps starting with Reservation Dogs, which also stars Devery Jacobs (who is also slated to play a different character in Echo). 

As Kahhori, Jacobs gives the right emotional notes to the character that audiences are prone to attach themselves to her. It also helps that it’s the most stunning episode of the entire series thus far, with more attention to detail given on its representation of Kahhori’s powers and action scenes compared to what we’ve previously seen. The action scenes are strikingly realized, showing how powerful Kahhori is, even if the overall storyline has been done countless times in superhero pieces of media already. However, it’s still an impressive – and impassioned – piece of work that has never been realized on screen…until now. 

The episode ends on a rather sour note, with Dr. Strange Supreme (Benedict Cumberbatch) showing up out of nowhere to congratulate Kahhori on achieving world peace, snarkily stating that he’s curious to see how long it lasts and that he’s been looking for her for a long time. How often has that end tag been done to death in superhero films and TV shows? It’s not a very original way to end your episode, but I’m curious about how the filmmakers will evolve Strange Supreme’s arc from the first season to now. Perhaps staying alone for many years (if not centuries) led him on a darker path than before…time can only tell what he has been up to. 

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