The MCU Better Explains Why Iron Man’s Dream Was Always Doomed

Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Marvel's What If...? episode 6.

In Marvel's What If...? episode 6, viewers are reminded that Iron Man's dream to protect the world with an army of robots would never work — not even in alternate universes. In the MCU's main timeline, Tony Stark's genius intellect leads him to build increasingly powerful suits of armor that help him turn around his past as an arms dealer and save the world alongside the Avengers. What If...? episode 6 reveals that, even without the life-changing event that convinces him to become a superhero, Stark still ends up putting his brains and resources to good use and try to help the world, this time with a legion of vibranium robots.

With Stark scrapping his Iron Legion in Iron Man 3 and Ultron taking over his troops of AI-driven droids in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the main MCU timeline has left it very clear that Tony Stark's fate was to put his life on the line and confront the universe's most dangerous villains inside the Iron Man suit. Given the hypothetical nature of What If...?, it would be easy to picture a scenario where Tony Stark succeeds in building "a suit of armor around the world", but just like Stark's death, these plans seem destined to fail all throughout the multiverse.

Besides appearing to be as inevitable as Christine Palmer's death in What If...? episode 4, Iron Man's plans to create a robot army always owe their failure to the same variable. In Iron Man 3, Aldrich Killian orders the Extremis-powered Eric Savin to steal the Iron Patriot armor from James Rhodes. With only this armor, Killian manages to kidnap President Ellis and lure Tony Stark into almost witnessing the death of Pepper Potts. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, world saviors Tony Stark and Bruce Banner do everything they can to create an AI system whose only purpose is to maintain peace in the world; nevertheless, it gains sentience and refuses to cooperate, shifting its objective towards world domination.

Killmonger Gundam Army in What If Episode 6 and Ultron

Time and again, the MCU proves that the technology needed to craft a peacekeeping army will always fall into the wrong hands, even if the wrong hands are precisely those of the robots themselves or those of Iron Man's closest allies. Erik Killmonger is the reason Tony Stark doesn't get kidnapped and Obadiah Stane doesn't get the technology to build the Iron Monger in What If...? episode 6, but he brings Stark a darker fate when he steals his drones and kills him afterward. The inevitability of the situation doesn't only depend on somebody else seizing the technology, but also on how easy it is for the technology to change allegiances or be used against its creator.

Indeed, Iron Man's constant deaths and failures in Marvel's What If...? are a testament to the perfect sequence of events that were necessary for his numerous victories in the MCU's main timeline. It's true that Tony Stark had to realize that he would never be able to protect the world remotely, but he also had to do it at the right time. As the Watcher says "one moment, one choice, can ripple across space and time." In the case of Iron Man, his MCU journey was filled with these kinds of moments.

More: How Powerful Killmonger’s Gundam Army Are Compared To Stark's Iron Legion

Marvel's What If...? releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.