All things seem to lead back to him.
Last time on What If…?, we
saw what a Western Shang-Chi would be like. In an 1860s universe, Shang-Chi is
hunting down the Hood, an outlaw that’s kidnapping Chinese immigrants,
including Shang-Chi’s sister Xialing, for nefarious purposes. He’s joined by
Kate Bishop, the best sharpshooter in the west, who is looking to take out the Hood
as well since he killed her parents and burned their homestead to the ground. They
get on the trail and find a boy at the sight of the most recent Hood raid named
Jun-Fan, who tells them his family and friends were put on a ‘ghost train’ that
pulled out into the desert, despite there being no tracks. They head out to cut
the train off at the pass and find the ghost train. They hop aboard and learn
it’s in actuality floating on repulsor tech stolen from Tony Stark. They find
the kidnapped victims on the train, zonked out and unresponsive. They meet the Hood’s
business partner, Sunny Burch, who is financing her attempt at a coup out in
the West. They’re brought to the Hood where the Hood offers to have Shang-Chi
join him or die. And Kate is hypnotized by Burch who also reveals that he was
the one that killed her parents. Shang-Chi knocks the Hood to the side during
the fight and learns he is in fact his sister Xialing, who had killed and
replaced the Hood some time ago. Shang-Chi is stunned, and she goes in for the
kill. They’re both saved by Jun-Fan, who rings the trains bell 10 times to
break them out of their trances. Kate frees herself and kills Burch’s men but
leaves him alive wanting him to suffer (dumb logic). Shang-Chi refuses to fit
Xialing and she goes in for the kill, but is shot by Kate. The siblings say
their goodbyes as Kate apologizes profusely. The two heroes see the immigrants returned
to their homes and ride off. Uatu the Watcher, meanwhile is confronted by 3
other Watchers, the Eminence, the Incarnate, and the Executioner. They’re here
to punish Uatu for breaking his Oath of non-interference, the most recent
trespass being saving Jun-Fan from being killed by being tossed from a speeding
train. He’s knocked aside as they capture him, causing some fragments of his
dimension to rain down. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
Ep 25: What If… The Watcher Disappeared?
We open on a squad of Nova Corps
members flying around some giant tentacles that are smacking them around one by
one. We see that this is the universe from season 2, where Nebula became a Nova
Corps member and is their current primes. Looks like she’s recruited Korg and
Groot since, as they follow her as she walks out and sees the tentacle monster
coming from a rip in reality. She orders the planet be evacuated but Korg says that
the creature ripped through the jump-point, so no one can go in or out. That’s
right before a gold ship flies in, making him look stupid. It’s carrying Captain
Peggy Carter. She radios into her team saying that she’s found HYDRA’s
Champion. Nebula is not super keen on mystery women and pulls a blaster on her,
but Carter tells her that they need to trust their team if they don’t want this
world destroyed. Her team is then revealed to be made up of herself, Byrdie the
Duck, Kahhori, and Ororo “Storm” Monroe who’s wielding Mjolnir for some reason.
… She totally can in basically all realities, by the way, I’m just wondering
how she got it this time. Storm blasts the HYDRA monster and the other three
rush it, Byrdie using magic wings and energy blasts, and Kahhori teleporting
herself and Carter around to run up tentacles. They combine their skills to
launch Carter at the creature, pass through its eyes and kill it. Nebula thanks
them for their help, just before the shards from Uatu’s dimension fall to her.
She keys in right away that he’s in trouble.
The usual opening sequence is
replaced by a much more smug sounding Watcher, the Eminence, who claims to be
the one that is preserving the sanctity of the Multiverse by watching the
Watchers, and judging us for not having the minds to comprehend multi-dimensional
space.
We’re given a brief history of
Captain Carter as viewed by the Eminence. He dubs her a ‘menace’ for working
with the Watcher and meddling with the Multiverse. The Eminence claims she’s
just a symptom of the disease that Uatu has become, and that his meddling has
led her to their doorstep. He points out that it’s a shame they can’t do
anything to stop her, cuz, ya know, oath of non-interference. The Eminence says
that their Oath allows them to protect their order, and if Carter comes looking
for him, they’ll stop her and see to it that he’s punished for all the things
he and his exiles have done.
We cut Carter’s team at their base,
Kahhori and Byrdie arguing over a foosball game. Carter tells Storm that she’s
finished scanning the fragment and learned that it’s a fragment of the fifth
dimension itself. She says that the last time a piece of that reality rained
down on the multiverse was when Infinity Ultron was rampaging. And she reasons that
the only reason Uatu hasn’t contacted her about it is because he can’t. She
says they need to head to the fifth dimension to figure out what happened to
him. Byrdie uses the fragments of the Fifth Dimension to upgrade one of their
pods so it can travel into the fifth dimension. They use the pod as a beacon to
lead their bigger ship upwards into the fifth dimension, or at least that was
the plan. The pod blows up just before they hit maximum power. Storm says that they
might need a God’s power.
She takes the second fragment and
Mjolnir to try to rip a portal open. She calls out to the All-Fathers and
All-Mothers of all realities to rip a hole open for her and them, slamming Mjolnir
down onto the fragment. It looks like it’s working, until the explosions occur
and knock everyone out. They lost their fragment so they’re down to one. Sidenote,
having Alison Sealy-Smith to do this Storm was brilliant casting, as she was always
doing those battle chants when using her powers in X-Men: TAS.
They’ve got one last shot to try to
figure this out. Tech and Magic couldn’t do it, so Kahhori suggests that there’s
only one other way to do it. She suggests finding and getting an Infinity
Ultron to burst through realities like the one Captain Carter fought did. They’ve
got an infinite number of Infinity Ultrons to pick from, as the infinite
variations that don’t hear Uatu and attack him just… slaughtered all life in
their universes and then just kind of sit there with nothing to do. Forever.
Byrdie offers to try to reprogram one if they can get their hands on him. Carter
is worried about potentially releasing a multiversal threat, but Storm points
out they’ve got reset charges they stole from the TVA. Since Infinity Ultron
will be alone in his universe, there’s no… ethical problems with just using one
of those to prune the whole universe if they fail. Carter agrees to the plan
then, they either get Infinity Ultron to open the door or go down swinging.
Later, Storm finds Carter up and
staring into space and asks if she’s nervous. Carter says she faced Infinity
Ultron before with immensely powerful allies and they just barely beat him. She
admits that she’s more worried about her friends getting killed against him, as
this new team is all she has after being set adrift from her universe. Storm
says that they’re strong and that someone has to do this. Carter agrees that someone
must.
We’re shown a montage of Infinity Ultron’s
rampage across dimensions, how he and his forces ravaged Earth, Asgard, Nova Prime,
and other worlds, facing off and defeating the Guardians of the Galaxy, Asgardians,
and Captain Marvel. It culminates in a dusty Ultron-Vision standing in
nothingness with a grim look on his face. Captain Carter appears behind him,
and he demands to know how she could exist. She introduces herself as Captain
Margaret Carter and she could use her help.
We cut to Byrdie getting a call
from her parents, Darcy and Howard the Duck, telling her to not ignore their multiversal
calls and to bring Darcy back some donuts from a universe where Carbs make you
lose weight. Byrdie then notes that the shard is missing a is one of their pods.
She rouses the others and their terrified to think she ran off on her own.
They warp to Peggy’s last location
and find her shattered shield lying on the asteroid. Infinity Ultron appears
and says she’s gone. The trio attack him, despite him asking them to wait. They
blast him from three directions until he gets too annoyed and then he uses the
Time Stone to freeze them in place. He says while he’s killed… everyone in his
home universe, he didn’t kill Peggy. He reveals another Watcher attacked them,
most likely the Executioner, who blasted Infinite Ultron aside and then fought Carter
until he could capture her. The others realize that Carter was on the right track
if this other Watcher wanted to stop her. Ultron says that the Watcher made a
miscalculation, assuming that this Ultron would kill the others on sight so he
wouldn’t have to interfere further. The Eons alone made Ultron realize that his
programming was flawed. He was programed to bring peace, he came to the
conclusion that since all life fights, the only way to bring it is to wipe out
life. But after millions of years alone in a blank, dead universe, he realized
a dead universe isn’t a peaceful one. He wants to make up at least a little for
what he’s done, so that means he needs to fight for life. He reveals that he
has the last shard, before destroying and absorbing it, saying they’ll need its
power for the fight to come. He ascends, seeing everything, and says it’s time
to save their friends. He enters their ship and uses his infinite power to
forcibly jump their ship to the fifth dimension.
This was a fine penultimate episode.
Peggy Carter’s team of Incursion stoppers is a good mix of characters, with
Hayley Atwell’s Carter, Devery Jacobs’ Kahhori, Alison Sealy-Smith’s Storm, and
Natasha Lyonne’s adult Byrdie working well together. It does bears repeating
that having Alison Sealy-Smith play Storm Goddess of Thunder is perfect casting
given her Storm’s love of shouting her attacks like magic spells. Plus, I just love
Alison Sealy-Smith, the best Storm. I liked how they came up with the plan to get
to the fifth dimension, and how Carter was the most apprehensive about it
because she’s the only one that fought Infinite Ultron before. There’s just
something about fighting a being that made life extinct that is hard to make
others understand how terrifying he is. Although, I personally called that
Ultron would have had a change of heart after millennia alone, because that’s the
“be careful what you wish for” trope is strong. Like, 90% of villains that achieve
their goals, kill the hero, and get to bask in their victory end up regretting
it. So it wasn’t a leap to guess Ultron spending thousands or millions of years
in a dead universe where he basically salted every scrap of land he could find
to keep life from ever sprouting again would maybe have wished he hadn’t done
that. I’m alone a lot, but even I get bored of just being with myself if it’s
for more than a few days or weeks. Ultron only uses the word “eons” to describe
how much time has passed, and at the low end that’s thousands of years. It’s
correct that he’ll never be able to make up for or undo what he’s done but I
like that he’s trying… although… he has the Infinity Stones. If he really wanted
to he could probably rewind time back to before he killed everything. Or use
the stones to just make life anew. They’re kind of the universe’s ultimate
cheat code if you can survive the power feedback loop. But there I go, thinking
too hard about this. So yeah, okay episode. Like every other episode I’ve talked
about this season if was too short to do the story it was telling justice, but
what are ya going to do? Next time, the conclusion of What If…? See you then,
and happy New Year!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119060406/
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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