f13.net

First trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9D0uUKJ5KI

Starts streaming August 11 on Disney+, new episodes Wednesday. 10 episodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_If...%3F_(TV_series)

2nd trailer really. I actually think the first one was better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iLVoEg9aLk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iLVoEg9aLk)

Yeah, this one almost seemed convoluted/too much.

Have we reached Marvel supersaturation yet? That said, I do prefer the cartoons.

No

Also god this looks like ass

So... meh.

I enjoyed the 30 minutes watching it, but sticks so closely to the plot and characterisation we already know that you don't learn anything new about anyone involved.

It's a decent story but felt rushed (imagine trying to cram 1 1/2 hr movie into 30 min; that's what the dialogue sounds like). Also it was really annoying how many callbacks to the dance bit in the original movie there were.

When the hydra stomper fell during the train scene i thought they were going to do a a Rogers = Winter Soldier thing, which would have actually been more interesting.

Years ago as far as I'm concerned.

What If? was always kind of a weird comic to begin with. In some ways, it was the real beginning of where Marvel had to reconcile their "our continuity is inviolable and consistent, unlike those guys over at DC" with "hey wait nobody's getting older in our comics and we can't really allow major changes to the status quo without losing value on our core IP". There had been a few alternate-reality things up to that point in Marvel comics--"Counter-Earth" created by the High Evolutionary, which let an alternative evil Reed Richards show up in the FF, and so on. But What If? created a durable story engine that eventually spread like a disease through all of Marvel's storytelling ("Patient Zero" was Claremont's storyline where future Kitty Pryde came back to stop the Brotherhood from killing Senator Kelly--that pretty much guaranteed an endless flood of alternative realities, time travel-branching points, etc.). The only way to tell stories that let time pass and characters really change was the story engine that What If? provided and now they're really stuck to it. I hope this doesn't signify that the MCU is going to get stuck in the same rut--one of its chief pleasures so far is that they've let characters die, age and move on without resetting.

Well.

That was kind of mediocre. At best.

It didn't even really get what the decision was that changed everything--it was the German double agent blowing shit up before the experiment. Also it was in another universe Tommy Lee Jones refusing likeness rights, that changed a lot of things. Also where the hell did the tentacle monster come from? Did the Red Skull accidentally summon his last browser tab or something?

The tesseract is the space stone, it can do shit like that i assume. I agree, this was a boring one to start with, gimme some real weird shit like the zombie stuff.

I can see the rumors of Captain Carter popping up later being possible/probable based on this episode.

We know really weird cross-continuity shit is going to happen in Spiderman, Captain Carter in Multiverse of Madness is like a 3 to Doc Ock's 7.

--Dave

Which one is America Chavez supposed to show up? I think you might see Captain Carter as a brief cameo. I would be surprised to see her or any What If? iteration for much longer.

Honestly I wish this hadn't been so unimaginatively glued to the plotline for Captain America. Why are all those guys captives in an ominous Hydra base if the Red Skull and Arnim Zola aren't there with the tesseract? Why the raid on the train when that was so specifically cued to the Hydra-superweapons plot line in the film? I mean, SHIT, they could have actually had Captain Carter punch Hitler (I know, I know, the main reason you don't want Nazis for real in your movies is German laws on depicting Nazis, but still).

Oh god yes.

But yeah, that's my 1 cent. Otherwise enjoy the show.


That villain would get me to watch. He could summon a swarm of 4chan neckbeards to, I dunno, try to seize the government or something. Nah. Too unrealistic.

MCU decided hydra is headed up by some interdimensional monster in AoS.


The guys running this have already said they plan to revisit captain Carter and that these episodes are canon within the multiverse that is explained in loki and Dr strange 2.

One of them even suggested he could see captain Carter making it to live action movies - though I'm sceptical of that.

They really decided Hydra was ruled by an actual, mythical hydra? :uhrr:

Superior Spider-Man is like a 11 to those (and I'm a fan of Peg Carter, but they wrapped that story up beautifully already). If only he weren't in Sony jail, it would be a great D+ show, enough good stuff for a mini-series or single season, a longer form 'movie'.

How about a Superior Spidey/Lady Deadpool Marvel Team-Up? :D Team-Up could actually be another nice property to develop, actually. Kind of bridge the current solo hero movies and the giant team movies, like a slightly more formalized and taergeted Falcon/Winter Soldier kinda thing.

Deadpool 3 would be hilarious as yet another multiversal romp--like, he only gets to the MCU at the very end and after he arrives he knows he isn't from there and will be constantly fourth-wall joking about it from that point on. Maybe even pay Warner Brothers for a quick scene of him trapped briefly in Green Lantern where he realizes that he just created a different timeline where Channing Tatum played Green Lantern and it was a huge hit.

More a kind of weird lovecraftian god. The monster was a 'champion of hydra' that would be completely reasonable for AoS season 3 hydra to have created.

No - it was Carter not returning to the booth.

That meant she spotted the bomb, the German guy pointed a gun at her, and Human Torch got out of the thingy to help, and then got shot.

Dr. Strange 2 supposedly.

Eh, it's still really the German agent changing his actions that makes the difference.

The best What Ifs in the comic were ones that really stayed tight to the premise. The very first one was terrific--Sue has an impulse to invite Spider-Man into the FF, the Fantastic Five succeed wildly in taking down Spider-Man's early baddies AND the FF's early baddies, but Sue starts to feel (for good reason) like a fifth wheel and when Namor puts the moves on her, she goes with it. It uses all the raw material of that era of Marvel but it's not afraid of the story ending up some place notably different. Or the one where Spider-Man stops the burglar, Ben Parker lives, and Peter becomes a morally vacuous Hollywood star who gets J. Jonah Jameson fired and turns JJJ's life into despair. This one had a fun focal point: Captain Carter! but it kept wanting to come back to the established story beats from the movie with very few changes (until Generic-Tentacle-God shows up).

The decision of Carter to stay in the room instead of watch it from the booth is what changed - she was close enough to see the German spy start his attack.

As for the tentacle monster, I assume it's either the monster from the anti-verse that the Guardians fought off in their comics (when Peter Quill and Nova got trapped in what is essentially a Cthulhu-verse) or its the monster that Hydra was trying to summon in the Agents of SHIELD series.

Yeah, they focused on that in the episode as being the point of divergence, but that's honestly them screwing up.  The major thing that changed that allowed her to become Captain Carter was the German guy blowing up the lab before they transformed Steve.  In this episode, absolutely nothing she did staying behind seems to have caused him to blow up the bomb earlier.  He didn't notice her or anything.  He just for some reason decided to blow it up early, unlike in the movie, and THAT is the big change.  It's either sloppy writing or sloppy editing.

Can't be the goobers from the Rift in the comics--that's a million miles from the MCU. Agents of SHIELD has faded entirely from my consciousness--HYDRA was trying to summon an Elder God/Shuma Gorath/Hentai Thing?

Except it is animation, where it's all writing and zero editing.

--Dave

The premise is Peggy got juiced.

So tbh it doesn't matter unless you go and watch them side by side.

This wasn't the reason it felt a bit flat.

One hopeful point is this did look like a fixable pilot. They needed to take more risks and work out what new viewpoint the story is giving us - but the whole thing was competently put together and entirely watchable.

My favorite What If? was What if the X-Men lost Inferno? Inferno was my first introduction to X-Men comics and the What If? for it was amazing.

To stay on topic, this was pretty good for a first episode, although I didn't quite understand why she was Captain Carter and not Captain America or Captain Britain. I guess she didn't get to do the USO stuff because her boss was a misogynist and thus never got the publicity that inspired the Captain America name?

Also, I suspect, because Captain Carter sounds cool.

I assumed she wasn't Captain Britain because that's a separate IP and you don't cross the streams.

That Disney now owns but hasn't formerly introduced into the MCU and this series probably isn't the best place to do it.

Fuck the haters, this was killer.

Yes. There was a sect of Hyrda that predated World War 2 by thousands of years that was trying to summon this thing. Hydra splintered somewhat on that point so that there were some more science-y branches and then this branch which was led by Powers Boothe.

I figured it would be good based on the nonsense here.

 :grin:

The art style worked well and whoever did the storyboarding/set shots composition needs a raise. Lots of frames were straight artwork.

It was very well produced and by no means bad.  Just also sort of....meh?  Kind of boring.  In the end was hoping for something more wild and original.  Hopefully get that with some of the other episodes.

I needed something short to watch while I was eating a torta.

Torta: 10/10
What If: 2/10, would not What If

2nd episode is out, and I'm not sure why they're going with another "What if character X ended up becoming hero Y?" episode. Also kind of surprised they did the Chadwick episode this early in the series instead of holding on to it for the finale or something.

That said, they really had fun with this one and I enjoyed the heck out of it.

May be related to the Avengers game dropping a Black Panther/Wakanda DLC yesterday?

This was great, RIP Chadwick.

More Yondu was cool. Thanos being comic relief - cool. Cosmo and Howard references again. Yeah that was fun.

It would be the other way around. The DLC was presumably scheduled to be released when this episode was released.

Edit: be

Pretty sure that game bombed anyways.

It did.

It's no X-Men Legends or Spider-Man, but it's a pretty solid game, maybe closest to Ultimate Alliance?

More likely they wanted to include it in the episodes released to reviewers for the Boseman goodwill.

Missing my Marvel Heroes hit of clicking on things until they die and leave behind more trousers.

Fuck, I miss that shit game.

Yeah me too, at least up until they fucked up all the movement powers.

Captain Carter was cool. This was epic.

Ok, I loved this one. It was fun and really got the premise, I think.

"Captain Genocide!"

I prefer the controller stuff to clicking (diablo sucks lol), but you definitely get trousersish lewtz that is actually interesting to swap in/out (unless you're a minmax type, maybe). You can get gear that adds status effects, enhances abilities, changes some abilities or stack effects to bolster builds. Not +1% type stuff, Thor just got pants (a belt) that has a 50% chance to proc explosion when damaged (knockback/stun) and a hammer grip that adds explosions to certain hammer throws, a willpower (health) proc on his chest piece.

Main downside seems to be recycled assets and level re-use. There's a decent small town level that I've run through at least ten times. The gameplay is fun and I don't mind the repetition too much, but the grind is real and having few options to grind on is ultimately going to kill it for me at some point. That said, I can still run through 3 more DLC of story content at this point, so it's still well worth it in the $20 range (I think I paid $15 and have 40 hours so far, so...).

Anyway, sorry for the digression I never do that!  :cthulu:

I really didn't like the idea of the second one but turns out it was great.

"Starlord" was Peter Quill's childhood nickname from before he got picked up by the Ravagers.  How did T'Challa end up with it?

UNSUBSCRIBED!

Well, unlike Quill, he is an actual Lord.  :p


And this was significantly better than the first episode.  Loved how how they kept ramming home just how much better the entire Galaxy is with T'Challa becoming Starlord rather than Quill.

Yeah, that was hilarious.

Finally saw the second episode. Fantastic episode. May watch the third in  a bit but I'm actually trying to sleep for once.

edit: couldn't sleep so finished ep 3. Really good episode. It borrows more moments from the films than the 2nd episode but IMO doesn't fall into the trap of the 1st.

Enjoyed number 3. What really stood out was how much better Lake Bell was as Black Widow.

Also, it didn't try to squeeze too much into run time of the show. Which both the previous episodes were guilty of.

I bought Lake Bell as BW more than Renner and Hiddleston as themselves. Whoever did Liv Tyler also did a good job.

This was good, but firmly between the first and second one.  Kind of fell into the trap of the first one of just trying to remind everybody of all the plot that happened in the past they probably forgot about, instead of doing anything particularly original.  Also, subject was sort of dark and a bit of a downer.  Still, good entertainment.

I didn't see it that way, this one deviated completely from expectations in like the first minute.

Err, every single plot point went to different movies in the mcu, showed how they started, then suddenly changed them.  There was very little original content separated from them redoing scenes from several movies but then having the avenger die suddenly.  Very little actual new content overal.

I liked the way they took the story with all this, mind you, and it helped flesh out Fury and some side characters better.  But I just feel these things are better when they pick a hero an do something totally different with them, instead of endless callbacks to previous movies.

I think part of the problem is that they're doing What If? when they've essentially got 22 stories to work with (or possibly less depending on how they're able to handle Spider-man's movies) and also can't introduce characters who haven't already appeared in the MCU.

Episode 3 was fine, although a fairly standard alternate reality trope in that you can get away with killing a bunch of characters off because it doesn't really matter.

Yeah, What If in the comics had thousands of storylines to work with. And sometimes they didn't even fucking bother with actual stories and did what DC would call "Imaginary Stories", like the wretched one where the FF became a butterfly, a giant brain, a dude with robot arms and I forget what the other one was.

Apparently they were going to do What if Spider-man turned into a spider? but they said it was pretty much going to end up too Cronenberg to be on D+ so they axed the idea.

Didn't stop Marvel itself from having Spider-Man kill Mary Jane in an alternative future with radioactive cum.

Anyhoo, I liked this one a lot. I don't think it had the problem of the first one--it referenced the movies without getting stuck to them. Also fun to see Ruffalo's likeness overwrite Norton's likeness...

This show is marking out a bunch of actors who it turns out are not great at voice work.

I think that's right, actually--I've been kind of surprised at how "is that actually that guy?" the voice work has been. Turns out you have to be good at it to do it, who would have thunk it?

In other news Coulson and I use the exact same password.  :why_so_serious:

(but seriously CA has always been my fave, going back as far as when the comic was called Captain America and the Falcon. IDC what people say.)

Captain America has also been one of my most favorite hero's in both comic and film, so you are not alone.

Just wish they'd done the hand off better.  I don't care that they gave it to Falcon/Mackie in principle, but that series was pretty rough in terms of plotting/writing/acting....

There was very obviously extensive editing done to change the plot due to current conditions.

Seriously?  Was this before or after Kevin Smith has Brodie discuss that very scenario, albeit with Superman and Lois Lane?

Edit: I'm saving this up to watch with my wife and I'm utterly meh about them killing Falcon but if they kill off Hawkeye I swear I'll be so grateful I'll go legit and subscribe to watch it. If they do a crossover and kill off his Green Arrow avatar I'll throw in some Hail Marys and a stint as the Mouse in Florida.

Benicio somehow forgot how he played the collector. He was TERRIBLE.

It may also be that some folks are just phoning it in.

The writing and acting is pretty awful at this point, and the clever bits aren't.

This would work better as an art book of the keyframes. Because there are some dope goddamned keyframes, this show looked great on the table, for sure.

Wow, and you thought Ep. 3 was dark ...

This one was ok taken on its own. Trying to reconcile it with the already convoluted rules of time travel and alternate timelines makes my head hurt though. Why is the death here an absolute point in time when we have a seen a timeline where it doesn't need to happen in order for Stephen to become Dr. Strange?

Yeah, once again, it's not playing entirely by the rules. What's the different choice here? The lesson I guess is that Stephen needed to be personally humbled by the damage to his hands in order to accept that he can't do everything--but then, that's why Mordo turns against him at the end of Dr. Strange, that he really doesn't accept that (nor, it turns out, did the Ancient One).

All I got is that maybe there's a difference between "parallel universes" and "alternate timelines". 

Or maybe what we saw at the end of that episode is what happens when a variant timeline gets "pruned" from the perspective of everyone else living in that timeline.   :ye_gods:

The interesting part for me was that messed up Strange survived.

It seemed entirely in line with the 'rules' as per avengers and for that matter Loki.

The rules are you can't materially change your past or everything will likely go to shit.

All the talk about absolute points is just Tilda Swinton's way of saying that.

The MCU has been pretty good about this.

The only time I noticed them breaking the rules is in endgame when Thanos goes to the future to get killed and is therefore not around to do the snap. But even that one you can just argue that Stark fixed it with the gauntlet.

There may have to be an explanation that "the multiverse" isn't a set of variant timelines but actual different universes where even the laws of physics can be different. Each universe can have multiple divergent timelines. ::shrug::

I'm fairly sure Disney have said these episodes are canon alternate timelines in the sense that Loki defined them.

What we saw in this episode is just what an irreversible paradox looks like from inside a variant timeline.

yo this show fuckin sucks lol

Ep 1: What if character x actually became superhero y.
Ep 2: What if character x actually became superhero y.
Ep 3: What if the Avengers died.
Ep 4: What if everybody died.
Ep 5: What if the Avengers and almost everybody died.

That wasn't great.

It's amazing how bad you have to fuck up to make me feel meh about a zombie apocalypse story.  But they did it.  The mad bastards.

I hated it. But I've always hated Marvel Zombies. I hated this worse.

My family folks liked it, for whatever that's worth (to my puzzlement, honestly).

If you hadn't seen all the things it kept referencing in really direct and unoriginal ways, it might have been more fun.

The only idea that seemed to have any real potential was the reverse wandavision. But that didn't have room to breathe and Vision's ultimate decision was ridiculous.

I'll be honest though Happy saying 'blam' made me chuckle.

Any talk of a cure when the zombies are clearly rotted corpses is just dumb.

Episodes 1 - 5: what if every single thing in the mcu revolved around a stark and what they did

Getting more of a What if... fuck hank pym? vibe myself.

yeah, I'm struggling to think of how any Starks were significant in any episodes after the first one.  Pym on the other hand seems disproportionately powerful/important compared to his role in the movies.  I guess they got a good deal on Michael Douglas and wanted to use him as much as possible?

I didn't hate it. As zombie movies go, it followed a formula, but the Wanda vs Hulk battle fell flat and I'm so sick of Spiderman being positioned as the posterboy of the MCU.

Pity they didn't go all Train to Busan or Snowchaser with it. Snowchaser style with Evans as a protagonist instead of the hero would have been a nice take.

I'm still enjoying the series.

I have never been a fan of the Marvel Zombies stuff - it was a cute idea for like a one-off poster, but not nearly enough of an idea for a mini-series or a full-on universe in the Marvel Multiverse. As a result, I was already inclined not to like this one and it did not disappoint. Over reliance on Zombie movie references, nothing really original done with super powers on zombies, or even any thought to weird things like "who keeps making explosive arrows for zombie Hawkeye?" The voice work continues to be extremely inconsistent - Spider-Man wasn't Tom Holland but Happy Hogan was Jon Favreau and if you'd asked me blind, I'd have said both of those things were the opposite of what they were.

"Blam" was kind of funny.

It's not that they're significant, so much as they're used as a hook or make a little decision here or there that tweaks the whole thing. They're the nail, and for whatever reason, Pym has been a hammer.

I made it through 2 episodes before I gave up.

I dig having Didney+ shows every week to look forward to, but crappy cartoons don't cut it for me. I was more hopeful for the Bad Batch, but then they put in a plucky goddamned kid. Goddamned Star Wars IP version of Eight is Enough for crissake.

Like a few of them, no. 6 made me think this might work better as arcs of a few episodes at a time.

From the mid-season trailer they put out yesterday I get the feeling some, if not all of these stories are going to intersect somehow.

Also the new episode is pretty bad.

It was kind of so-so to poor, yeah.

Part of the problem is that once again it doesn't follow the premise--a single choice made differently producing a different outcome.

They're basically doing What If? as DC-style "imaginary stories"--what if Superman had a threesome with Lana Lang and Lois Lane? What if Batman and the Joker got married? What if Gorilla Grodd was struck by the lightning that made the Flash but the Flash was also a gorilla?

That does kinda hit the nail on the head.  In a well-executed version of this show, you'd have that one different thing, but everything else that followed would feel consistent with the established world and characters and you'd be nodding along with it.

Instead everything just feels like someone's weird-ass fanfic.  The characters for the most part don't act like themselves.

Yeah, that's pretty much it--"hey killmonger fans who wanted him to win, here it is!"

This is all reaffirming my decision not to watch this, despite being a huge fan of the MCU. I'm hoping none of this shit shows up anywhere else, so I don't have to watch it to understand.

Finally got around to watching the latest show and it looks like I once again have the opposite reaction to most here.  :why_so_serious:

But seriously the only episode I hated was the zombie one. I didn't love the first one for the reasons I gave but the following episodes for the most part stayed away from those issues.

I was going to argue Khaldun's point (the show doesn't follow the premise) but no he's right. One would think more than one decision had to have been made for Strange and night nurse (can't remember her name) to still be together, for Hope to join SHIELD, etc. Even if it was one choice, that choice was never told nor shown in the MCU so it's cheating.

I would like for the show to be closer to the premise but at the same time maybe they didn't think they had enough material to do so.

I get the argument about material available but the thing about that "one decision that changes everything" premise is that it's a core principle of good storytelling/good drama. The focus in a story has to be on the person whose decisions will push a story one way or the other. If a story has the key decision taken off-stage and we never learn about it or see it, it's not a good story. Imagine Hamlet where he's already decided to kill Claudius but before the play starts and we never see what he went through to make that decision and so the play is just about him plotting to do it in the most dramatic way he can think of.

I don't really get why you guys think the decision thing is important to the premise.

They are all about a nexus event of some sort.

It doesn't really bother me whether it is a decision made by a person, or rolling a dice to decide who gets the pizza.

I sort of agree if they decision was part of the story telling there would be an opportunity to link it thematically with the outcome. But they aren't doing that and don't have time to do it in the half hour they've got.

Show is about the alternate histories, not about what made them.

But then if the show is about alternate histories then they almost don't go far enough with the premise because they feel the need to frequently call back to the movies.

But yeah, how they handle the premise is a minor point to me. Ultimately I just don't think the show is well-written.

That's the basic problem. To me the "two roads diverged in the wood" element is just a way to keep the writing on track, but ultimately it doesn't matter why the writing isn't good, it just mostly isn't.

It's like Marvel have never read Niall Ferguson. Don't they know there are rules about these sorts of things?

You know, in a multiverse, there's a universe where Niall Ferguson never existed and it's a better world. And another where he kept writing actual historical scholarship and that's even better still.

Yeah, OK.

At least this one didn't take itself seriously until possibly the very end. I got some decent chuckles out of it, but it's not like it needed to exist.

Could have been maybe 20 minutes shorter.

Best episode so far!

I liked the last one.

I enjoyed the series overall and the last episode.

Kind of fun in a "smash your toys together" sort of way, but really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The uneven performances don't help, but I do like Party Thor.

I was satisficed because I am a fan of mcu stuff, but once my brain settled...I really shouldn't watch this again.

Guys. Power levels in the MCU are not consistent. Nor are they in the comics.

Also, it's all make-believe, so it's a single hand-wave *solar flare weakens this guy*

Is it entertaining is my metric. Aside from some nicely composed panels, I was not entertained much here.

It came together in the last two episodes better than I expected. Up to then, it was random nonsense for zero stakes.

--Dave

Also, the team wasn’t chosen for their power levels or to physically go toe to toe with Ultron. Each of them did something to bring about the results the Watcher had foreseen.

I still think the show is horrendously written though.

Considering the current animated marvel tv shows are terribly kid centric and shang chi was utter garbage, id take a few more episodes of this for the popcorn value.

Shang Chi was great.

I'm sure I'll end up watching the next run of this just because. I can see reasons to be optimistic that lessons can be learned.