Ryan Shoots First: What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands? (S1 Ep4)

This week in the Marvel What If…? world we take a look at Doctor Strange. Where last week the focus spread across multiple heroes and movies this week we focus squarely on Doctor Strange. The question this week poses if instead of losing his hands he instead lost the love of his life. How that would drive him down a similar path that we saw but continue to eat away at him and lead to his downfall?

This episode had some amazing visual effects as Strange wandered into deep waters of various mythological universal beings and realities. Animation again was a perfect vehicle to show this type of story with some visuals bordering on almost looking like they were taken from an anime episode. Giant explosions of energy and colors flying in all directions. This episode also serves as a deep dive into the motivations and character of Doctor Strange himself. He is still very much arrogant and vulnerable and even the Strange we have in the MCU proper could have easily gone down this same path with just that one change. It’s whats been annoying about fans reactions to him in the new Spiderman No Way Home trailer. People saying it is out of character for him to do something so reckless. My response is have you seen any of what Doctor Strange has done? He has the arrogance of Tony but without learning his lesson. He takes chances and punches way above his weight class and it gets him into trouble as we see in this alternate timeline. The episode serves as a great character study for someone who seems to be extremely integral to the future of the MCU with him heavily featured in the Multiverse arch going on. 

SPOILER ZONE

Not too much else to focus on in the spoiler area besides we have been seeing the watcher more and more each episode. Episode 1 he was only in the beginning, with each week he has been shown more and more until this week he actually has interacted with out characters but not intervened. Given how his character in the comics shares the same rules but intervenes all the time I would say it is only a matter of time before he steps in. 

It was crazy and different to actually see our heroes lose with such a finality as we did in this episode. I mean an entire universe is just gone, erased from the multiversal map. That is pretty huge and not something you see often even though it is an alternate timeline. Performances were ok this episode. Some of the times Strange was showing grief came off a little cheap and not really believable from the voice actor and it seemed like Christine’s character was not attempting to recreate Rachel McAdams from the movie. As I mentioned above though the visuals of the monsters and especially the monster Strange would become in the end was very cool as were the effects of the universe melting out of existence. 

Observations 

• Cumber bumble looking good in animation 
• That really doesn’t look like Rachel McAdams 
• Dang that’s heavy 
• The rain on the window shadows on the faces is very cool 
• It’s like Doctor Strange and the Final Destination 
• This is doing a lot to disprove all the people complaining about Doc in the new Spider-Man trailer. Yes he would do that. 
• Is this the same tentacle monster from episode 1?
• So we’ve established Gnomes are a thing in the MCu 
• Mephisto? 
• Cloak fight!!! 
• First time seeing the characters interact with the watcher. 
• Damn that one was an L for our heroes.