Marvel’s What If Keeps Asking The Wrong Questions

Warning: The Following Contains SPOILERS for Marvel's What If...? Series.

Marvel’s What If…? has missed opportunities to address more compelling questions with their episode titles, misleading audiences and overlooking the alterations to the Sacred Timeline that could have a more profound impact on the MCU. Each episode of What If…? poses intriguing timeline alterations and creates endless universes different from the ones that audiences know. It was a highly anticipated addition to the Disney+ Marvel TV show lineup, particularly following the events of Loki and the expansion of the multiverse.

However, for some reason, the show seems to be avoiding the more significant questions that could be addressed, a practice that has begun to grate on fans, especially after its seventh episode. The MCU provides 25 movies and 13 years of content for What If…? to reimagine through infinite possibilities. With such a vast realm of major events and character development to choose from, some of the episodes seem to fall short of their potential simply because they ask the wrong question.

In a pattern that has become more evident as the series goes on, episodes tend to end with a cliffhanger that poses an even more intriguing question than that which drove the episode. Three episodes, in particular, episode 5, "What If... Zombies?!", episode 6, “What If... Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?”, and episode 7, “What If... Thor Were an Only Child?” fell victim to this occurrence. Since the nature of the show has made the episodes thus far unconnected, the cliffhanger questions will likely never be addressed by the show. This is only a problem because the cliffhangers have consistently introduced the What If…? questions that should have been the prime focus.

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In “What If… Zombies?!” fans were more intrigued by the brief appearance of Zombie Thanos at the end of the episode, which ended with no indication of how the remaining heroes might cure the virus or stop Zombie Thanos from retrieving the Mind Stone. In “What If… Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?” the title refers to the alteration that changed the course of the timeline but fails to ask the question that really matters. Since Killmonger murdered Tony shortly after the rescue, the significant question is ‘What if Killmonger became the Black Panther?’, a query which the episode leads up to without actually concluding. Finally, after repeated character deaths and increasingly dark topics, 'What If... Thor Were an Only Child?” was uncharacteristically light and silly. Until the end of the episode, that is. The appearance of Ultron in Vision’s body in the last seconds of the episode again posed a more interesting question that (so far) remains unaddressed: ‘What if Ultron got his Vision body?’ The show's trailer seemed to hint at an alternate Avengers lineup banding together at some point in the series, maybe to fight Ultron/Vision, marking the first time timelines bleed into the next episode.

Each of these episodes functions like the first episode in a longer story, which is left unresolved. Most likely, the cliffhangers were meant to make the audience “ponder the question of What If…?” on their own time. This could have been an effective plot device, but each episode follows its own query, and the unanswered cliffhanger questions seem to be the ones that frustrated fans really want answered.

The main issue with the questions of What If... ? is that the initial timeline alteration is posed as the focal question of each episode when it would be much more interesting to pose a question based on the consequences of that initial change. Since fans were more upset than intrigued by the brain-teaser cliffhangers, perhaps those secondary questions were the more potent ones, the ones more exciting to ponder. As it stands, Marvel's What If…? episode titles seem to have been baiting and switching fans, asking the wrong questions and leaving too much of the pondering to the end credits.

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Marvel's What If...? streams Wednesdays on Disney+.