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According to Chris Snellgrove
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Marvel animated series What if…? provides the franchise’s most thorough exploration of the multiverse on paper by showing us stories from vastly different realities. While all three seasons of the show have been mostly entertaining, they increasingly highlight the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s biggest multiverse storytelling weakness. As Star Trek: The Lower Decks more recently, Marvel focuses on providing “lazy derivative remixes” and What if…? would have been stronger if its multiverse had better connections to existing movies and TV shows.
Now, some fair warning before we continue: we’re going to touch on major spoilers at the end Lower decks as well as the third and final season What if…?so read on at your own risk.
Star Trek calls the Multiverse
Last two episodes Lower decks it involved our Starfleet heroes exploring quantum rifts and eventually creating a sort of stable wormhole into other dimensions. Along the way, a Variant character, Captain Boimler, complained about the multiverse as a concept, saying they kept finding “lazy derivative remixes” of familiar characters rather than anything new. Frankly, it’s hard not to see how this sentiment is aimed Miraclewhose various films and shows (incl What if…?) seriously squandered the narrative potential of the multiverse.
Movies like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and even a loved one Spider-Man: No Way Home they mostly used the multiverse as an excuse to bring us either new versions of familiar characters (like Dr. Strange and Mr. Fantastic) or cameos from other films (like Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and other Sony-era Marvel villains). from Marvel What if…? the show was designed to be bigger by creating standalone stories set in its own multiverse. However, as huge fans of the original comic, we can’t help but feel that this show would be stronger if it had a stronger connection to the existing universe.
What Marvel’s Multiverse needs
If you don’t know, the original What if…? the comic was about exploring what would have happened if Marvel’s main event had gone differently, such as what would have happened if the Hulk had been killed Wolverine in one of their early battles. Some episodes of the show reflect this by imagining how different the MCU would be if, say, Ultron defeated Avengers or Odin never adopted Loki. But many more episodes of this show explore completely unusual possibilities, from T’Challa becoming Star-Lord or Agatha Harkness striving for great power and becoming a Hollywood star.
As Marvel fans, we’ve enjoyed some of these weirder ones What if…? stories, but Star Trek was right: eventually Disney it just keeps serving us lazy remixes of beloved characters, effectively wasting the idea of a multiverse. The show was meant to be more like a comic book, rooting its stories in an exploration of what would happen if the main MCU events unfolded differently. There would still be plenty of opportunity to create fun variants (I had to sell the action figures, after all), but audiences would be more invested in these “new” characters due to their connection to the cinematic universe we all know and love.
It’s possible that Marvel has already taken this advice to heart: What if…? is ending its third season and we will likely see the death (at least temporarily) of the multiverse after that Secret Wars. However, as fans who really want to see the franchise succeed, we will always be haunted by the one question we ask ourselves every time the headlines hit. Simply put, what if Marvel did a better job of this What if…? and the multiverse in general?
And if TVA could pull us into this reality, please do so immediately…we can only watch Deadpool & Wolverine every so often for our decent fix of multiversal storytelling.
