What If...?

Doctor Strange in a variation on Wells’s "Time Machine" raises the bar of What If…? extremely high. Thanks to the participation of Cumberbatch, the character work is totally on a different level. Each of the episodes so far has finished in a very dark place, but here Bradley goes to absolute extremes. P.S.: Everybody is speculating over this Strange being Parker’s last stand, but I think it’ll be all a little more complicated than that. (08.09.2021)

Classic zombie twists and locations peppered with superheroes. And the team composition is very refreshing. Give us more Spidey! The Bucky vs Captain America fight is great, as is all the action in What If...? And setting it at the beginning of the Infinity War is seriously funny. Happy ending? of course not... (08.09.2021)

When a black guy kills a white, it’s all right... Killmonger was a hard guy in the movie already and here he gets going even better. His friendship with Stark and his arrival in Wakanda are good variations on familiar scenes, but even so, I think they could have squeezed more out of this. It seemed a bit unfinished to me. (15.09.2021)

Peace in our time... Ultron’s (Tony) vision, thanks to Thanos’s visit, stretching out across the whole universe, finally reveals the potential of the character. The creators of What If...? finally broke loose and are pushing back the borders of a universe. The whole series seems to be a prep for a big showdown that awaits us the next time. Hopefully they’ll come up with some kind of other message than mere carnage. (30.09.2021)

Sprint. Everything falls into place, but it’s like taking a high-speed train through a magnificent city, not able to get off and take it all in properly. Putting together the Guardians of the Multiverse, the conflict with Ultron and the final twist and the solution are wonderfully sketched out, but it’s a great shame that the last episode wasn’t half an hour longer. Also an episode with Stark on Saakar is sorely missing, even though aparently we can look forward to seeing him in season two. Even so, this has a whirlwind of ideas that are a pleasure to watch. (06.10.2021)

In the second season, the creators were not afraid to go off the rails. There interesting digressions that at the end lead to a total mayhem where almost everyone shows up. I liked the continuity of the final episodes. (30.12.2023)