Viewer Log: What if...? ep 4

What doesn't maim you makes you Stranger. Sorry, had to.

Let’s get back to the What If’s, shall we?

 

Last time on What If…?, we explored what would have happened if the Avengers, everyone except Cap, were killed. Iron Man was poisoned, the Hulk had his heart explode, Hawkeye accidentally killed Thor, and then died in his cell. Black Widow discovers what happened and warned Fury just as she was murdered as well. Turns out, in this universe, Hope van Dyne was KIA working for SHIELD, and her father, Hank Pym, was driven insane by her loss. He used the Yellowjacket suit to destroy Fury’s “pet project” before it could begin. With few options, Fury formed a Faustian bargain with Loki, acting King of Asgard. Loki took on Fury’s form and used his superior magic and experience to overwhelm Pym and see him arrested. He announced, though, that he wasn’t leaving and effectively took over the world in a single day. The episode ended with Fury being informed they found Captain America, and so there might still be hope for their universe. That’s enough recap. Let’s get to it, shall we?

 

Episode 4: What if… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands

 

This is a really cool poster.

After the Watchers opening speech, we open on Dr. Stephen Strange taking his friend and not-so-secret love interest Christine out as his date for his big award. The discuss his speech for his award for his big surgery, he races around a truck, barely dodges an on coming driver to only be hit from behind and crash hard. Christine is killed in the crash.

 

While the motivation for his seeking out Kamar-Taj and learning to be a sorcerer has been radically altered, he does find the ancient city and begin training. He eventually gets his hands on the Eye of Agamotto and experiments with Time Travel, only to be scolded by the Ancient One and Wong. He takes over for the Ancient One upon her death and forces Dormammu back. Memories of Christine continue to haunt him, thought. Wong finds Stephen up drinking a little and tries to subtly convince his friend to not do something reckless. Unfortunately, subtlety isn’t what Stephen needed and he uses the Eye of Agamotto to return to when he picked up Christine. He takes her out again, comes up to the truck, and tries to drive more slowly, but is unfortunately still re-ended, and Christine dies. Crap.

 

Stephen goes back again. He tries to take a different route but is T-Boned by a speeding truck on the new route. Crap. He tries to convince her to just have a night in, she insists they go. They go to the party, but Christine… dies? It’s real vague, but I guess she has a sudden heart attack or something. She drops, and he does another rewind. He takes her for Pizza, and someone comes in to rob the store, assumedly she is killed in the struggle. He rewinds time multiple times, but she is killed in car accident after car accident, he stands her up, but she’s killed in a freak explosion at her building, he goes back again and asks he why it keeps happening, she thinks he’s off and offers to drive, they get hit again, but despite being in the passenger seat, Stephen lives again. Damn, Reaper, why you after Christine this bad?  

Magic libraries are sooo cool.

 

After that last one, Stephen screams bloody murder in rage, and then the Ancient One arrives. She tries to help him with his grief, saying that Christine’s death is an Absolute Point in time, an inevitable thing that happens that sends Stephen on his path. … No one tell him about the timeline where she lives but he loses his hands. She tries to talk him out of trying to save her again, but he refuses to listen. He goes back again, telling her that she’ll have to find him firsts if she’s to stop him. She tries to blast him, but he teleports back in time. He asks a random man he meets in the forest to take him to the Lost Library of Cagliostro, which it turns out is just over the next rise. Stephen enters via sling ring portal and is almost immediately dropped to the bottom floor. He meets the man from outside again, and asks him to take Stephen to Cagliostro, the Sorcerer Supreme that knew how to break fixed points in time. No, this man is not Cagliostro, he’s O’Bengh, the Librarian. O’Bengh leads him to the library. Stephen vows to stay there as long as it takes to get what he wants. He finds the book incredibly quickly, only to discover that an Absolute Point in time needs an impossible amount of power to break. He learns a way to get this power, by absorbing the power of other beings. He summons a Cthulhu monster, tries to bargain with it, and gets thrown around. O’Bengh nurses him back to health and asks “she” is worth all this. He deduced Stephen’s motives as no person does this kind of thing for their own glory. Stephen says she is. O’Bengh advices him there’s a line between Devotion and Delusion. He warns that his mind can shatter if he keeps at this.

He's watching you.

 

Stephen does his ritual again, starting small this time. He summons and absorbs a gnome, steals a cape from a bug that he doesn’t absorb, then a demonic crow, dragon, a two headed goat, some Wendigo looking thing and a monstrous bat. Uatu, watching as his title implies, muses that he could stop Stephen, warn him he’s on the path to destruction, but won’t because the fate of one universe is not worth risking the safety of others. Besides, he doubts he’d listen. Stephen seems to sense Uatu, calling out to him, but gets no response. He continues to absorb energy for weeks it seems, until he gets back to and finally absorbs the Cthulhu monster. He goes to talk with O’Bengh, who is now a white-haired old man and dying. Yeah, turns out he was absorbing Monsters for centuries, not weeks. Stephen offers to extend O’Bengh’s life, but O’Bengh refuses, as he knows Death is a part of life. Stephen refuses to accept that, which O’Bengh had assumed but hoped the “other” Stephen would. Confused, O’Bengh explains that Stephen is only half a man, quite literally. We jump back to the night Stephen left, and we see another Stephen Strange electing to not go back in time. The next morning, he goes out to see his universe… melting. The Ancient One sends an astral projection of herself to warn Stephen about his other self. As it turns out, the Ancient One didn’t try to destroy Stephen when he went back to Cagliostro, she was truly using the power of the Dark Dimension to split Stephen in two. Two Stephens existing in one universe is obviously not great, but it’s better than one Stephen destroying everything without challenge. Which will definitely happen if he’s allowed to finish his work, the Ancient One is quite clear that if his other self is successful, it’ll destroy reality as they know it. So… no pressure.

 

From this point on, the Stephen Strange who didn’t try to break time is Stephen, the other is Strange Supreme. Get it? Got it? Good.

 

Stephen and Wong arm him with a powerful protection spell just before Strange Supreme pulls Stephen into a dark dimension. Stephen is trapped in a summoning circle as Strange Supreme walks up. There’s a pretty good visual as we see the various monsters he absorbed contorting out from his form in shadow as he walks up. Strange Supreme tries to convince his better self to join him. Stephen tries to tell him that he can’t justify saving her and dooming reality, but Strange Supreme tells him not to lie to him. Them? Him. He has a freak out as the entities he absorbed try to break free before returning to his speech. He grabs Stephen and takes him back to the crash. He explains their powers are diluted after they were split in two, but he thinks recombining with Stephen will give him the power to save her. Stephen tries to tell himself that this isn’t love, this is Stephen’s arrogance, his desire to fix things driven to insanity. Strange Supreme tries to absorb him, but Stephen’s protection holds.

 

Sacrificing reality for one person is moronic.

They battle, Strange Supreme showing off immense power in his attempt to absorb himself. Each of his spell’s releases or reveal an aspect to of the monsters he’s taken into himself. It’s visually very neat. He gets Stephen tied down and starts to break his defenses, but Stephen’s cloak stops Supreme Strange long enough for him to be freed. Stephen blasts Strange Supreme, seemingly turn him into a speck of light before he’s grabbed by shadow and pulled into a negative zone. In a hallucination, Strange Supreme tries to convince him to save Christine in her form, but Stephen sees through it. The two break free of Strange Supreme’s illusion, fall from the sky and crash into earth. Stephen’s shield fades, and Strange Supreme absorbs him. At full power, he uses the Eye of Agamotto to break the Absolute Point. The Eye and him are morphed into a monster of unspeakable horror, and he uses the power to return Christine to life. She wakes up and obviously freaks out when she sees broken reality and Stephen as a monster. The whole universe seems to be collapsing. Stephen Supreme uses his power to hold the collapse back and begs Uatu, who he can see clearly now, to fix this. He goes so far as to ask to be punished alone if Uatu would just save the universe. Uatu wants to fix it, and punish Strange Supreme, but he must hold to his oath. The Universe collapses, into a small patch of nothing in a crystal. Christine evaporates, leaving Stephen alone in a prison of his own making. As Stephen begs for forgiveness, Uatu muses that one person, one choice, can destroy the universe.

 

Time Travel paradoxes are always a tricky topic to explore. A lot of times the paradox gets too complicated, or the rules are ill defined, but I think this episode covered it well enough. It’s the classic causality paradox, Steven goes back in time to save Christine, but without her dying, how would he know to go back in time to save her? Normally you’d see this in a more grounded sci-fi story, but the fact the death is intrinsically tied to this version of Stephen Strange’s origin story covers the “why can’t magic fix this?” explanation. Benedict Cumberbatch kills it as both versions of Strange, glad he is one of the MCU actors that can voice act incredibly well. This episode and Cumberbatch’s performance honestly sells Stephen’s ego and desire to fix things, to control things better than the movie did. It might just be easier to sell a “I need to have control” story with a dead love interest than a mangling. Who knows? I would say my only complaint for the episode was that weird vague death in the middle. The one where she just dropped. Like, come on, guys, give us some dialogue clue as to what happened there. I can intuit she had a heart attack or stroke, but it is just faster to tell me. Seeing a… I guess more selfish Dr. Strange is a better term than evil, was odd but in a good way. I’m used to the arrogant but ultimately kind version of the man after he’s had his character growth. To see him make such a hard left turn into the dark arts to save the person he loved most was… just sad. The image of him alone in a prison of his own making was tragic, but fitting. I’d make a joke like “I’m sure we’ll never see him again,” but we have all seen the Multiverse of Madness trailer even if we haven’t finished this series yet. Next time, episode 5, Zombies!

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