Ryan Shoots First: What If… the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes? (S1 Ep3)

I think this week’s episode so far has been my favorite. Until now the What if premise has been fun to see some isolated events but this week really took those formative moments from phase 1 of the MCU and flipped them all about. Jumping from one movie to the other and containing a lot of call backs. The actual What if moment if diversion is somewhat part of the mystery of the episode so I will not spoil it in this section but it represents a fairly minor thing that on paper doesn’t seem to be a connecting tissue to the plot of the episode that someone is murdering Avengers. Again the voice cast does an excellent job if mixing actors reprising their roles and new actors filling the roles in. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes to get a good guess which means they are doing a pretty good job. This episode was my favorite so far though as I feel it presented the most interesting story beyond the novelty of the “What if” flip. The actual story was interesting and dynamic as it crossed the various stories and made you think who could be doing these acts. I did figure out who the killer was at a certain point but I was still off on the motivation until the end. I like the idea of more subtle changes having a butterfly effect across the MCU as much as the big drastic changes like we saw last week. 

The animation itself continues to impress and does a good job of capturing likenesses to the characters we have grown attached to on screen over the last 10+ years. It has a style but doesn’t seem to be too much outside of the established theatrical MCU style. This also was a story I was unaware about which was fun, a lot of the other episodes we have seen clips or posters kinda giving away the plot but this one I was not expecting. 

SPOILER ZONE

I really enjoyed this episode as I mentioned above, It really sells the delicate nature of the timeline. As the real question seemed to be What if Nick Fury recruited Hope Van Dyne on paper you would never equate that to all the Avengers being murdered and Loki saving the earth… only to conquer it. Something as simple as one person being recruited can topple the whole Jenga tower. With Zombies coming and other big differences I enjoyed this more subtle change where everyone still looked and felt like we remember and the familiarity made it more impactful. Seeing the MCU embrace The Incredible Hulk picture was a nice change and I guess we have an answer to could Ant Man have killed Thanos by going up his butt… evidence would point to yes…yes he could have. 

Observations 

• Well that’s quite a twist to start 
• Between this and Abomination coming back, cool to see Marvel acknowledge the Ed Norton Hulk movie a bit more. 
• My favorite game with this show is “is it the actual voice or just an impersonation” 
• I miss Coulson in the MCU
• This is low key a better Black Widow movie 
• I love the shots of the watcher just… watchin’ 
• Hulk got Wonka’d
• This has been a fun episode intertwining all these movies in ways live action would be a big undertaking. Great use of the medium. 
• Wow I thought the killer was hank but I didn’t figure the what it was simply what if Fury recruited Hope 
• That’s a wild few days.