A Star-Lord or Prince of the Stars?
Last time on What if…? we saw what
would happen if Peggy Carter had stayed in the observation room during Project
Rebirth. She ended up taking Steve’s place and became Captain Carter. She was
able to take the Tesseract and Dr. Zola before HYDRA got to experiment with it.
This led to the invention of the HYDRA Stomper battle suit for Steve. Captain
Carter, HYDRA Stomper, and the Howling Commandos fought back against HYDRA.
During the attack on HYDRA’s train, Steve is seemingly killed in a trap. HYDRA
recovers the Tesseract and try to use it to pull a monster onto Earth to either
conquer it or destroy it. Carter and the Commandos attack HYDRA’s castle just
as they power up their device. The Commandos find the HYDRA Stomper and even
Steve Rogers, they free him, and he flies up to back up Carter. They force back
the Cthulhu monster that HYDRA tried to summon. Peggy, not seeing any other
option, personally forces the Cthulhu monster back through the Tesseract portal
and disappearing. Decades later, the Tesseract is powered up again and Captain
Carter returns, meeting Nick Fury and Hawkeye. She’s probably got to help them stop
Loki, that’s the Captain’s place in the cosmos. Enough recap let’s get to it.
Episode 2: What if… T’Challa became
a Star-Lord?
A very different group of Ravagers.
We open on the Watcher
pontificating about time, space, and everything again. He talks about how when
a normal person looks out at the galaxy they see infinite points of light,
while he sees all the stories that are on these worlds. He asks if one’s
destiny is determined by their nature or the nature of their world. We’re shown
Star Lord liberating the Power Stone from it’s holding on Morag, but this Star
Lord turns out to be T’Challa. He’s confronted by the same squad of goons that
Peter Quill was in the MCU timeline, but this time the lead guy, Korath,
fanboys out to him. Weird. He calls his men off, kneels to T’Challa. Korath
still must keep Star Lord from taking the sphere but pitches the idea of
quitting his job to work for Star Lord. T’Challa turns him down, but Korath
doesn’t seem too bummed as now he can fight Star Lord. They fight, but Star
Lord outpaces him until he tricks Korath into punching the containment field
and getting knocked out. He takes out the other guards and makes to escape… but
then decides he’s hired worse, so grabs Korath, too. He’s cornered by more
guards, but then calls in backup. After a comedic delay, Yandu whistles up his
attack needle and takes out the guards.
As they walk off, Yandu suggest
they make like the old days and try to sell the Power Stone to the highest
bidder, but T’Challa is dead set on using it to reignite another planet’s dying
star. This Star Lord is very much Space Robin Hood, I guess.
We jump back to Wakanda on Earth,
1988, where a young T’Challa is frustrated at living in his
metaphorical-but-not-as-much-as-one-might-think Ivory tower. He wants to see
the world, but his father is still dead set on keeping him safe. That night,
T’Challa is playing with a spear when he ventures outside of Wakanda’s
protective shield. A Ravager spacecraft found him and picked him up. Why? Because
in this What if…?, Yandu didn’t do the grab himself and instead left it to his
men. They just went to one of the biggest sources off extra-terrestrial energy
and grabbed the first human they saw. So, they nabbed the Prince of Wakanda
instead of the Son of Ego. Idiots. Yandu, not that bummed out about getting the
wrong kid, offers to show him the universe.
Drax happy is just so... weird.
Jump back to adult T’Challa, and
they land at a bar and have a celebratory drink. Korath is still geeking out a
bit and asks what they’re favorite adventure was. They apparently have robbed a
major intergalactic bank and punched a skrull while doing it, armed a
resistance force, that sort of thing. Korath then asks how they stopped Thanos
from whipping out half the universe. Thanos himself comes up and admits he’s a
big enough person to admit when he’s wrong and credits T’Challa with showing
him a better way. He still thinks his plan had merit but is fine with how
things turned out. T’Challa tries to pay for the drinks, but the Bartender,
Drax, won’t take his card. I guess this space bar is cash only. Weird. Drax
forces T’Challa to take a picture with him, and then Nebula joins them. Nebula
in this timeline has had a lot less work done on her body, it seems.
They have a drink. Nebula asks if
he’s shown the stone to her dad, which he hasn’t. He tries to get her to mend
the fence with her now gardening father, but apparently there’s still a lot of
anger there. She asks if he ever thought about going back to Earth, he says
there’s not much to go back to. He was told that Wakanda was destroyed while he
was away. Lost his home, so now he saves everyone else’s. She has a job for
him.
She wants him to gather the Embers
of Genesis, nutrient rich cosmic dust that can terraform planets at an
incredible rate. They want to get the Embers and start terraforming a bunch of
dead worlds to produce crops and end hunger in the known galaxy. They just need
to steal them from the Collector. Uh-oh. Yandu isn’t willing to risk their
lives dealing with the Collector as he’s as a damned sociopath. T’Challa goes
to Yandu and convinces his surrogate father to risk it.
They head to Knowhere to rob the
collector. Thanos reveals that the Black Order now works for the Collector and
run security for him and asks how they’ll get passed them. The plan is for
Nebula and Yandu to pose as sellers and offer the orb, but they’ll be smuggling
T’Challa into the station instead. Korath and Thanos start a riot outside and
draw them outside so they can get passed the security checkpoint. T’Challa will
then break away to search for the Embers.
Nebula and Yandu start the fake
deal with The Collector while T’Challa begin his search. He passes Cosmos the Space
Dog, Malekith the Accursed and Howard the Duck, all in storage. He asks Howard where
to find the Embers, and he gives T’Challa directions, but T’Challa frees him to
just show him the way.
Outside, Proxima Midnight hits the
Ravagers with a stunning pulse, realizes who they are and orders a lockdown.
Howard and T’Challa get separated when the lockdown starts, he ends up in a
hanger and finds a Wakandan ship that reacts to his Pater necklace. He
activates a message from his father, who never gave up on looking for him.
Nebula and the Collector arrive with a captive Yandu, Nebula revealing she had
a debt with the Collector and is using him for payment.
T’Challa, Yandu and the Ravagers
are put into lockup. T’Challa attacking Yandu for lying to him about Wakanda’s
destruction. Yandu says that he did it to protect him, that he was trying to
set T’Challa free from his past so he could be an explorer. Yandu tells him
that he was meant to be in space with his “family” but T’Challa rejects that
notion now, saying they were never his family. Which hurts Korath the most. Corvus
Glaive then arrives to bring him to the Collector.
I have questions about this collection...
T’Challa is put into a box for the
Collector. He claims that he captured T’Challa to be an art piece for a
specific space in his collection, but is now less impressed with T’Challa now
that he knows him to be just a normal man. T’Challa tries to give the Collector
a speech about how holding people against their will is bad, but the Collector
isn’t listening. He orders Ebony Maw to dissect T’Challa and scrap him for parts.
Nebula goes to speak with the
Ravagers, it looks like it’ll be a big confrontation, but then she turns and
shoots Corvus Glaive in the chest. She reveals this was all part of the real
plan, having told T’Challa right away the Collector wanted him. Nebula has
already gotten the Embers and are peparing to escape.
Meanwhile, T’Challa uses his
Vibranium necklace to break the cage, but Ebony Maw uses his telepathic powers
to grab him. But the pink assistant lady, Carina shoots Maw in the back,
freeing him. T’Challa runs but then is attacked by the Collector again. He
punches T’Challa with Korg’s severed fist, the monster, and then reveals his
extensive cybernetic augmentations. He shows off that he has not only the main Avengers
weapons, Cap’s Shield, Mjolnir, etc, but also Malakith’s knife, and Hela’s
helmet. He uses Hela’s blades to pin T’Challa against a wall. The Black Order
chases after the Ravagers. Thanos breaks of to fight his old minions, holding
his own against the lesser fighters but gets overwhelmed by Cull Obsidian and
Proxima Midnight.
Good Thanos is weird Thanos.
Yandu arrives and destroys the
helmet with hiss arrow. Then the Collector breaks it. Damn. Thanos gets beaten
into the ground, but Nebula arrives to even the odds. She drops some off the
Embers in Obsidians maw, killing him and starting to terraform Knowhere.
T’Challa and Yandu fight the Collector fist to fist. They settle on the ‘Sticky
Fingers” plan. It boils down to Yandu running up and grabbling with the
Collector, getting punched a bunch before being thrown aside. It’s then
revealed that Yandu stole the Collector’s remote, opens a prison cell for him,
and T’Challa tackles him into it. They leave the Collector in Carina’s hands. She
frees his collection and let them have their way with him. T’Challa and Yandu
escape in the Wakandan ship. They also grabbed Cosmos, which was nice. T’Challa
and Yandu make up, Yandu telling him that there isn’t a planet in the universe
where T’Challa doesn’t belong. They meet up with the Ravagers and travel to
Wakanda. T’Challa greets his family and introduce his space family. They all
have a nice time.
We then cut to an adult Peter Quill
cleaning a Dairy Queen, where Ego finds him. Crap. And that’s the end. Damn
you, Uatu.
Okay, I think this was a much more
interesting story than the last episode. We didn’t just see a slight rehashing of
Captain America: The First Avenger, we instead got a heist movie in space. All
my respect and admiration go to the late great Chadwick Boseman. I don’t think
I’d have guessed this was his first real bit off Voice Work if I didn’t know
it. I’d heard that he was close to obsessive in making his line reads as
perfect as he possibly could. He is amazing, The heist aspect was cool, too. It
is fairly paint by numbers plot, complete with double-to-triple cross and showdown
with the Collector’s collection, but it was still fun. I’d say the only
negative of this story is that it seems to suggest that the universe would have
been better off without Peter Quill’s Star-Lord. What? Thanos is good now,
countless worlds and people have been improved, Drax never lost his family,
Star-Lord T’Challa clearly has a better record than Star-Lord Peter. If they
can stop Ego from using Peter as a battery to take over the universe or
whatever his plan was, then he’ll have beaten Peter in everyway imaginable. I
wonder if we will get a part two of this story someday. It seemed like they
left it open for that, but obviously this episode was produced before Chadwick
Boseman’s untimely death. Not to say they couldn’t get a voice actor to assume
the role, Phil LaMarr could easily step into those big shoes, but I’m just not
sure it’ll be the same without him. But who knows, we’ll just have to wait and
see. Next time, episode 3. Have a good night, everyone.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60530816
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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