‘What If…? – Season 2’ Episode Nine Recap: “What If…Strange Supreme Intervened?”

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

Another season of What If…? has ended with another crossover event. This time around, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) recruits Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and introduces her to the Sanctum Infinitum, where he keeps the Multiverse’s biggest “Universe killers” trapped in a crystal-like contraption, the same that held him after he destroyed his own universe in an attempt to save Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) in the first season. 

Strange tells Carter she is the only one who can retrieve one of the last remaining “Universe killers,” trapped in a world where HYDRA successfully deployed their plan to destroy the world using the Tesseract. The Universe killer is Kahhori (Devery Jacobs), who immediately fights Captain Carter and tells her they can be allies because she is not the Universe killer…Strange is. 

Of course! Once again, I’m not prone to theories, but when he showed up out of nowhere at the end of episode 6, it was clear he had something on his mind and would use Kahhori (and now Carter) for his own personal gain. Once Kahhori learned of what Strange would do, she fled to another universe, hoping he wouldn’t hunt her down, but now had sent Carter to retrieve her back to him. 

Strange wants to recreate the world he destroyed using “The Forge,” a machine fed by the people he has captured so a universe can be created in his image, where he and Christine have a happy life. Strange believes Carter would understand his plight, as she has lost Steve Rogers (Josh Keaton) in more ways than she can imagine, just like Steve has personally lost Carter by being frozen in time and never had a chance to spend time with her. 

Strange attempts to trap and kill Kahhori so he can feed her to The Forge, but Carter starts to free a bunch of Strange’s prisoners, and an all-out Multiversal war ensues. And that’s when the episode started to lose me. I’ll say this: it was fun to see Hela (Cate Blanchett) control an army of Zombies to defeat Surtur (Clancy Brown), but the rest of the episode is an actual everything bagel of the best [and worst] of the MCU, and the results are appalling. 

At least it’s not as bad as the finale of Secret Invasion, which saw G’iah (Emilia Clarke) become the most powerful hero in the entire MCU, only for that specific piece of information to be completely ignored by the rest of the characters once Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) was killed. When Carter has the combined powers of Hela and Thor and wields the Infinity Stones. whilst Kahhori utilizes the Ten Rings to her advantage to subdue Stark, it at least makes sense in the “everything is possible” adage of Multiversal storytelling and the initial setup of What If…?, even if some of the cameos here are terribly eye-rolling. 

Consider the scene where Kahhori and Carter land in a room where Thanos (Josh Brolin) appears out of a portal, about to kill the two heroes, until he gets surprisingly snapped by Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who also has a pair of Infinity Stones and appears out of nowhere. He’s about to kill the two, but Kahhori takes him down as if he’s nothing. The kill was cool because Kahhori is an actually interesting superhero, but if this is what Marvel envisions Avengers: Secret Wars to be, a jangling key compilation of heroes and villains popping out of nowhere just to say “hello!” and disappear two seconds later, consider me uninterested. 

At least the animation is consistently stunning, and the final battle between Carter, Kahhori, and Strange is visually interesting compared to the CGI sludge Marvel has unfortunately popularized over the years. There’s actual thought and effort put into how director Bryan Andrews stages the action here, and it’s a much more potent battle than season one’s finale, which wanted to be an Avengers-like event but was anything but. In season two, there’s at least some form of effort in making the stakes feel cataclysmic and important, even if tropes are rehashed to death, such as Strange attempting to rewire Peggy’s origins in this world by recreating a scene from What If…?’s pilot episode. 

We know it’s an illusion, and, as such, the dramatic impact is fairly minimal, even if the visual style is a massive improvement over the first season. As a result, What If…? – Season 2’s final episode ends with a bit of a whimper, even if the season itself was much stronger than the first. If you’ve read any of my recaps here when the first season came out, you probably know I wasn’t that big on it, regardless of the consensus. I came out of What If…? – Season 2 hopeful for the future at Marvel Animation, which has already confirmed a third season on the way and a couple of exciting projects ahead, including Eyes of Wakanda, Marvel Zombies, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, and my most anticipated Marvel project of 2024, X-Men ‘97. Eat your heart out, Deadpool 3. 

All episodes of What If…? – Season 2 are now available to stream on Disney+.