It’s hard to believe we’ve come to yet another end of yet another Marvel Disney+ series. Between WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki, these shows have all been bittersweet. They give fans something to look forward to each week, knowing that at some point, it all has to end. And though What If…? was one of the longer series to debut on Disney+, these last nine weeks have seemed to fly by.
As always, the following contains spoilers for the finale of What If…? so if you haven’t watched it yet, I suggest you do so first.
The final episode, titled “What If… The Watcher Broke His Oath?” opens in a scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier but standing in for Steve Rogers is Captain Carter. She is leading SHIELD to infiltrate Batroc the Leaper aboard the tanker ship. But just as Carter confronts Batroc, The Watcher appears and tells her she has been chosen.
We then follow the Watcher as he plucks familiar faces from their timestream to put together his own superhero team. Star-Lord T’Challa, Party Bro Thor, Killmonger, and one face we’ve yet to meet; Gamora, “survivor of Sakaar, destroyer of Thanos.” Alongside Dark Doctor Strange, the Watcher tasks the team with stopping Ultron and dubs them the Guardians of the Multiverse.
Much of the episode is a knockdown brawl between the Guardians and Ultron. They plan to snatch the Soul Stone from Ultron and use it to power Gamora’s Stone crusher to destroy the other stones. They use their unique skills to overpower Ultron, with Doctor Strange casting a protection spell around each team member, and Captain Carter and Gamora using their fighting prowess to keep Ultron off balance.
The real key to the plan, though, is Star-Lord, whom they rely on to steal the stone. They allow Star-Lord an opening to get close to Ultron, and though he’s repelled quickly, his deft hands free the Soul Stone from Ultron’s control.
They escape to another world, but just as they’re about to hand off the stone to Gamora, it gets intercepted by another survivor: Black Widow. This is the Black Widow of Ultron’s world, the one who had to watch Hawkeye sacrifice himself, and who failed to stop the android who ascended to Godhood. Captain Carter convinces Widow that they’re friends, and Widow joins the ragtag team to stop Ultron.
After some more fighting, Gamora gets the Soul Stone and fires up the Stone Crusher, which, along with some magical help from Doctor Strange, eats up the stones like an overly complicated lawnmower. But what no one realized was that each dimension is different, meaning each stone is different, so the crusher that was designed to destroy the Infinity Stones on Gamora’s world doesn’t work on Ultron.
Some more battling ensues, and Black Widow spots Hawkeye’s arrow that contains the Arnim Zola program (as we saw in the previous episode). She uses Captain Carter as a distraction and fires the arrow into Ultron’s eye. The program downloads itself, and Zola is able to overpower the Ultron programming and take control of the body.
As Ultron lays defeated, Killmonger steps up and takes control of the stones. He absorbs Ultron’s armor and tries to convince the rest of the team to use the stones to right things within their universes. The rest of the team can’t get on board with Killmonger’s plan to change the flow of the universe, and as he decides to set off on his own, Ultron, controlled by Arnim Zola, gets up to reclaim the stones.
As the pair battle for control of the stones, Strange realizes his role on the team and traps them in a pocket dimension, similar to the one he himself was trapped in after his world died. The Watcher entrusts him to keep the dimension safe, which he agrees to do since he has all the time in the world.
The Watcher then sends the rest of the team home to the moment they were taken from their timeline. Captain Carter shows some hesitation, asking the Watcher if she deserves a happy ending for a change. The Watcher convinces her that the time she’s returning to needs her. She reluctantly agrees.
Which leaves only Black Widow. Without a world to return to, the Watcher brings her to a new reality, one that lost its own Black Widow. And also, one of the What If…? episodes we haven’t revisited. We’re back in episode 3, and Loki is attacking a S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Widow overpowers Loki and takes his scepter, saving Nick Fury in the process. Fury recognizes that this Widow isn’t his Widow, but he accepts her, nonetheless.
But wait! Though What If…? mostly flouted the tradition of mid-credits scenes, we finally get one in the finale. In it, Captain Carter reunites with her Black Widow aboard the tanker. Widow tells Carter she knows what the Batroc and the pirates were after. She leads Carter to a storage room where Carter is shocked to find the Hydra Stomper armor. Widow then tells her that someone is still inside it, and we’re pleased to see that Captain Carter actually does get her happy ending.
Though the early episodes of What If…? led audiences to believe each of the episodes of the series would be disparate, the finale proved that wasn’t the case. Each episode was carefully crafted to introduce us to the members of the Guardians of the Multiverse, showing us their motivations, the use of their abilities, and proving how they’d be an asset to the team. This was a bit of a surprise at the end because the What If…? comic books never tied together so neatly, if even at all. So to see the long game that Marvel played with this series, and defying a lot of expectations in doing so, was a treat. Even seeing a revisit of the Zombie universe was great, though I wished zombie Wanda got more screen time than she did.
I also loved the changes to Captain Carter’s uniform. The writers assumed that the time passage would have affected Carter just as it did Steve Rogers, so they changed her uniform to be similar to Steve’s in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. They desaturated the reds and made it more monochrome, and it looks great. Now I’m really hoping the rumors of future Captain Carter projects come to fruition.
The only downside to the episode is how it treated Gamora as a side plot. She was the only member of the Guardians of the Multiverse who didn’t receive her own episode in the series, and that was a bit of a disappointment. She’s introduced alongside Tony Stark in Hulkbuster armor, melting down the Infinity Gauntlet with the help of Eitri, the dwarf who created the gauntlet and Stormbreaker in Avengers: Infinity War. Just based on this setup alone, a full Gamora episode would have been amazing, and I would have liked to know her character before the finale.
What If…? has been a fun ride while it lasted. Though I’d always been looking forward to the series ever since it was announced, I’m more than pleased with the direction they took it and how it ended. And knowing that this was Chadwick Boseman’s final performance in the MCU is heart-wrenching, but I was glad to see his happy ending, fighting alongside Peter Quill on Earth with a smile on his face. The only disappointment now is having to wait almost a month and a half for the next Marvel show on Disney+. I’ll see you all back here on November 24 when Hawkeye starts!