****SPOILERS AHEAD****
No lie. This was THE episode I was waiting for. It didn’t disappoint. Much.
Welcome to my review/recap of Episode 5 of Marvel’s What IF…? series. Before I get into the meat of this review, I need to address that in the Starlord episode (Episode 2) where T’Challa was Starlord, I had written that it was Chadwick Boseman’s last role, but he was here as T’Challa once again (THANK YOU) so I was wrong.
So, Zombies. And Zombies in a new way, as the genesis event was Janet Van Dyne coming back from the Quantum Realm with a quantum disease. The episode was fast paced and like last week’s murder episode, we lost a lot of our favorites. The OG Avengers didn’t make it long, and one Banner arrived with news of Thanos, we lost even more.
Banner worked together with Okoye, Bucky (and yes twitter is obsessed with how hot cartoon Bucky is) Peter Parker, Hope Van Dyne (who just let Scott get eaten by her zombie dad?) and Kurt the smooth talking criminal from the Ant Man movies. I do love how they are trying to use some of the smaller MCU characters here and he was great comic relief. Until he died. We also got Paul Bettany back as Vision (yay!) but then he was a dumb-dumb and nearly got everyone killed (boo), but he had T’Challa and I am not going to lie, hearing that voice gave me chills. I still miss him so much.
The story had some great comedic moments; mostly from Doctor Strange’s cape and Peter Parker, but when Scott was found alive, as a head, his dark humor was maybe not appreciated by his comrades in arms, but definitely was appreciated by us viewers. All in all, it was a solid effort. Bucky gave us “Sorry pal, I guess it’s the end of the line.” when he had to kill his best friend, but then Bucky went and got killed too, and this leads me to what I didn’t like about this episode.
I’m honestly getting really sick of “killing all the favorite characters is how we stay edgy” as a plan for studios. Could you just once, let Bucky and Steve live, happy and together, as friends (or more). Did you have to kill Happy? Like, really, the lovable doof needed to die? I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but not every alternate universe has to be horrible right? Somewhere they’re all playing a game of soccer on the compound lawn, right? Right?
