Viewer Log: What if...? ep 9

To stop the Ultimate Ultron, you need a team.  

Last time on What if…?, we saw what would happen if Ultron had won. The evil Android was able to upload himself into the perfected body that in the main MCU would have become Vision. He dispatched the superpowered Avengers and then nuked the whole planet. Hawkeye and Black Widow survived and sought to defeat him. When Thanos came to take the Mind Stone, Ultron destroyed him, took the Infinity Stones, and then used their power to begin purging the universe of life. After destroying all the shown civilizations in the MCU, he… sensed Uatu. Natasha and Clint are able to find the way to stop Ultron in the KGB archive, the location of the last of Arnim Zola’s terminals. Ultron is able to shatter through reality and he and Uatu begin to fight. Clint and Natasha get Zola uploaded into a drone, but unfortunately, he can’t stop the Ultron as the Prime Ultron is currently between dimensions fighting Uatu. Clint sacrifices himself destroying a Dominion of Ultrons to help Natasha and Zola in an Ultron Drone escape. Uatu is beaten across multiple realities despite hitting back against Ultron hard as well. He ultimately escapes, teleporting into the final fragment of Strange Supreme’s reality to ask the dark wizard for help. Enough recap, let’s get to it.

 

Episode 9: What if the Watcher Broke his Oath

 

Think he's deliberately doing the Mufasa imagery?

We open on Captain Carter at the start of what would be Captain America: Winter Soldier, where Carter is leading a strike team to deal with Batroc the Leaper, who had hijacked the Lemurian Star, a mobile satellite launch platform. Natasha tries to help Carter form a social life, which Peggy is adamantly against as the mission begins. She leaps out of the plane and lands in the water by the ship and hops on board. She easily dispatches Batroc’s crew before going toe to toe with the leaper himself. The fight is interrupted when she sees Uatu appear in the sky. He decrees she has been chosen. We then cut to T’Challa-Star-Lord’s timeline, where Ego is on Earth siphoning the power from his son Peter Quill. T'Challa saves Quill and blows up Ego’s avatar before he’s summoned. We jump again to the interstellar forge where Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet was forged. It’s being melted down as a space Tony Stark and a Gamora with Thanos’ sword supervises, Tony beginning to pitch the idea of Ultron when Gamora is summoned. Another jump, and we’re in Wakanda. Shuri, Pepper and the Dora Milaje are racing through a ravaged city to depose the traitorous want-to-be Panther, Killmonger, when he is summoned. Party Thor is destroying Ultron drones in Vegas when he is also summoned.

 

All the summoned individuals find themselves in the pub where Sharon Carter, Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos all celebrated their first victory, regardless of timeline. Strange Supreme says that the façade was his idea, he read about it in her biography. Uatu arrives and explains the situation to the people he gathered. He’d wanted to find one true hero, but decided he needed a team to save all universes. He dubs them the Guardians of the Multiverse. Thor thinks he’s joking and tries to leave but is almost sucked into the void. They decide to listen to him.

 

Uatu explains the situation, that Ultron is a synthetic being that has become a cosmic being thanks to the power of the Infinity Stones. They think they can stop him if they’re able to separate him from the Stones. After getting Chinese food, Thor was feeling peckish, they start formulating a plan. The plan is to use Thor to gain Ultron’s attention, then take the stones and stick them in a device that Gamora brought, the Infinity Crusher. It’ll crush the Stones into subatomic particles. They suit up and Uatu transports them to the battle.

 

Pop that skull, T!

They set up based on a planet with a low enough score on the Kardashev Scale to avoid Ultron’s attention, meaning a zero. Look it up. Strange is holding up a barrier to help camouflage them. He, and Carter talk, and she learns that her lost love Steve Rogers was Captain America in his timeline. The thought of him with the enhanced physique clearly intrigues her. Killmonger opens the Ultron Skull they have and examine it. The team toasts the Guardians of the Multiverse, Thor throwing up a lightning bolt… which draws Ultron’s notice. As Thor put it, he warned them, he excels at attracting unwanted attention.  Strange’s cloak points to the rift that Ultron drops down from, Strange throws up protection spells on them all, and Killmonger and Gamora are transported to do their part. Thor tries to blast Ultron with lightning, but he blocks it, then crushes the mountain they’re standing on. The group gets back up, though and Ultron delivers one of his better lines, “Interesting. You people are usually much easier to kill.” Thor throws his hammer, Strange multiplying them so Ultron is stuck in a Mjolnir storm. Star-Lord takes Carter up, and she rams him with the shield before taking a shot at Ultron himself. He is tossed aside, but he was able to remove the Soul Stone. Strange blasts him with fire from three dragon heads to buy Carter and Star-Lord time to run. Ultron realizes his Soul Stone is gone when he tries to bring in reinforcements and knocks the fire back. Strange buries Ultron in Zombies to distract him and they escape through another portal. Ultron destroys the bulk of the zombies… but then get’s hit by a chaos blast from Scarlet Witch Zombie. Her power is enough to buy them a few more minutes in escaping. He destroys her and the damn planet.

 

Not the heroes we're used to but good all the same.

They arrive on Ultron’s original earth and prepare to load the Soul Stone into the Crusher, but then Natasha drives in and nabs it. She’s hostile to them at first, but Carter talks her down as while it’s not true in this dimension, she and Carter are “bff’s” in Carter’s. Ultron comes in, though, before they can use the Crusher and grabs her telekinetically. Thor disarms him and he drops the stone. Killmonger runs to grab it and tosses it back to them. Ultron regenerates his arm and starts blasting them. He has another good line here, “I can destroy galaxies with a thought. Why won’t you all die?!” and fires a blast wave intending to do that. But Strange eats the attack? I guess. The brawl begins again. Natasha and Carter throwing shields at him to slow him down until the others start attacking too. Mjolnir, sword slices, magic blasts and constant shield tosses keep him on his toes. He almost gets the Soul Stone, but Gamora slices him in two… but then he uses the time stone to rewind her killing blow, stopping them all and gets the Stone back. He almost puts it in place but Strange used his own Time Stone to negate his and grabs him with tentacles. Ultron breaks free and grows giant size. Strange unleashes his full demonic power to wrap him in tentacles then drop him to the ground. He and Thor blast Ultron with energy as Gamora gets the Stone. They bind Ultron magically and implant the Soul Stone in the crusher. It walks up to him and forcibly removes all the Infinity Stones and then self-destructs. They wonder if it’s over, but T’Challa says it doesn’t feel over. He's proven right when Ultron starts monologuing about how the multiverse works, and Gamora realizes that the Crusher was designed to work on her universe’s Infinity Stones, not this one’s. Damn it.

 

Solid distraction.

Ultron rises into the sky and blasts them with a ray of destructive energy. He realizes that Strange is the one behind the defensive magic and that if he kills him, they all fall. He hits them with a destructive wave, knocking Carter and Natasha back. Widow, though, lands right by her motorcycle, where the USB Arrow is waiting. She drives up to Cap and tells her that she has an idea but needs distance and a clear target. Ultron’s attack begins to break through Strange’s shields. Star-Lord is thrown back and pinned. Carter begins parkouring and Nat driving to their target. Strange’s power begins running out just as Carter runs up. Natasha drives off the building and fires the arrow. Carter jumps, grabs Ulton’s visor and pulls it back in time for the arrow to hit him squarely in the eye. As Nat said, it was for Clint, so maybe he helped her shot just a little. The virus uploads into Ultron just before Strange’s power was about to run out. Zola, when introduced into Ultron’s system, begins infecting it. He explains his objective is to end Ultron for ending HYDRA. The body shorts out and crashes into the ground.

 

Couldn't have happened to a nicer pair of guys.

The heroes get up. Killmonger gets in close and uses the Ultron Head he was tinkering with to steal Ultron’s armor and the Stones. Oh, no, who could have guessed the Eric would betray everyone (deadpan). Killmonger says that the Uatu owes them this, that he’ll use the Stones to fix their worlds. T’Challa tells him to hand them over, which he refuses. Killmonger blasts them all back and prepares to destroy them. Zola in Vision gets up and the two begin to fight over control of the stones. Strange realize that they were never meant to win, but to just separate the Stones from the body. Strange gathers his strength and then seals them in a prism and Uatu blasts them, trapping them. Uatu and Strange take them into Strange’s pocket dimension and he promises to make sure that pocket dimension remains stable. Uatu returns his Guardians to the pub and thanks them for their help. He returns his guardians to the exact moment they left as they walk out of the pub. Carter stays back, asking if maybe Uatu could return her home, to her happy ending, but he says their world needs its Captain. Left with Natasha, she starts freaking out about him just watching. She says that they’re just all stories to him, not real people. Uatu disagrees, saying that they are special to him. Natasha refuses to walk through the door, but Uatu revels it was more of a metaphor anyway. He takes them too… the Helicarrier as it’s under attack by Loki and his Asgardians. Yeah, this is the universe where the Avengers were all killed except Captain America. He, SHIELD and Captain Marvel are doing their best to hold Loki off. He explains that this world lost its Black Widow, and it needs her.  Natasha doesn’t hesitate, leaping into the fray and saving Fury’s life. She uses the staff on him, blanking his mind. Fury realizes she’s not his Natasha but has her spirit. We see all the heroes returning to their stories, T’Challa and Quill shooting at Ego’s forces, Gamora and Iron Man getting back to their business, and Thor and Jane hugging. Uatu muses about how across reality, everyone is just looking for their place in their world, and that he will always be watching and defending them.

 

Uatu watches you.

We get a mid-credit sequence of Natasha helping Carter out with Batroc. Obviously, Carter is overjoyed to see her friend again, which freaks Nat out just a bit. Nat takes her to what the pirates were after. Inside, they find the HYDRA stomper. Peggy is shocked by this, but then Natasha drops the bigger bombshell. There’s someone inside. Oh, that’s a real sweet way to end the episode.

 

This was a great finale. Sure, we had to ignore that Ultron’s Infinity Stones should have lost power when he took them out of his home universe, but this was cool enough of a concept for me to do so. Ultron at full power is able to hold off a hyper powered Dr. Strange and Thor with relative ease, which is insane to me. I liked seeing how this whole plan unfolded, and how it’s revealed how far ahead that Uatu was from everyone else in this fight. Hell, he brought along Killmonger specifically so he could betray them all and then beam struggle with Zola long enough for them to be captured. That’s cold blooded but awesome. Way to pick the worst Killmonger to use as your sacrifice piece, Uatu. I also loved how they ended up circling back to the one episode that they didn’t pull heroes from to drop Natasha off in. I even liked the acknowledgement that Strange Supreme isn’t exactly evil. Like, he obviously did the worst thing possible, but is still willing to be Zola and Killmonger’s jailer for… eternity. I wonder how they’ll explain him ditching that responsibility in Multiverse of Madness. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Gamora’s episode was planned for this season, but was cut due to Covid. I assume it’ll be in season 2 at some point. No use wasting an episode that is probably almost done just because her final reveal was already used. And I’ll close by repeating that ending on Carter getting the chance to see her Steve again was incredibly sweet way to end this. I overall did enjoy What if…? even if some episodes were way stronger than others. I will be watching season 2 for sure. Tomorrow, finally, will be my review of Spider-Man: No Way Home. I swear. 

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