The fourth episode of Marvel’s intriguing and increasingly impressive animated series adheres closely to the show’s template – looking at some key moment from the MCU movies we’ve enjoyed over the last decade or so and putting a new, alternative spin on that event and what could have happened if things had been slightly different and indeed have happened in some Multiverse alternative – dials back on the high concept and spectacle of the first three episodes to deliver something a little more heartfelt and through-provoking and ultimately rather dark and bleak.
Here we meet Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch gamely voicing the part he’s hade his own in the MCU) who is involved in a car crash which, in this reality, kills his beloved Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) leaving him bereft. He plunges into despair and travels the world looking for solace and eventually finds himself learning familiar skills for unfamiliar reasons at Kan Taj. He learns of the Eye of Agamotto’s power of time manipulation but both Wong (Benedict Wong) and The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) warn him against misusing its power and putting the fabric of reality at risk. But eventually Strange can bear his grief no more and he uses the Eye to turn back time in an attempt to save Christine’s life. But it is not to be. He tries again and again but Christine dies in every version of the past that he recreates. The Ancient One explains that her death is “an absolute point” in time (not unlike Doctor Who’s convenient and immutable “fixed points in Time”) that cannot be reversed but, undeterred, Strange turns to the powers of the Dark Dimension to enable him to subvert this “absolute point”…but he is unaware that The Ancient One has taken steps to intercede by splitting the timeline in two, creating a Strange who becomes increasingly determined and deranged and another where Strange accepts Christine’s death. And so the battle for the future of all reality is just beginning…
This is a rather beautiful and tragic episode of a series that many Marvel fans might regard as disposable because of its nature as a piece of animation. But what we have here is an exploration of grief and the extremes it can drive us to as potent as WandaVision but with, in the end, more terrible consequences. Once again the animation is extraordinarily detailed and nuanced – this really isn’t kid’s Saturday morning stuff – and the show again demonstrates its worth by the sheer wealth of vocal talent it attracts, with four of the main players from the original Doctor Strange film reprising their roles here. We probably need to pause for a second just to take in the fact that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton are here voicing animated characters and delivering performances as powerful and impassioned as they delivered in live-action – no mean feat considering that a lot of their dialogue has a whiff of the melodramatic tongue-in-cheek hokum about it. Yet somehow they elevate this comic book stuff into full-blooded, immersive drama that makes the audience care about what’s happening to the point that it’s easy to forget that this is a cartoon at all. The stakes are high, the emotions are real and tangible and the drama is in many ways as gripping and powerful as anything we’ve seen in the MCU thus far. The beauty of What If…? is that we’ve seen these characters as living, breathing real people on film and it isn’t such an enormous leap of faith and imagination to accept these four-colour versions as exactly the same characters, just placed into even more extreme situations by virtue of their existence in the Multiverse, a concept which becomes less worryingly impenetrable with each episode.
The end of this episode is dark and brutal, a reminder that in these stories the good guys don’t always get their way and that in the world of What If…? the equilibrium is rarely reset and that literally anything can happen in the Multiverse. Richly imaginative television made with care and passion that’s almost tangible, What If…? is shaping up to be at least the equal of its three live-action TV Marvel forebears this year and possibly even the best yet. What a time to be a Marvel fan.
New episodes of Marvel Studios’ WHAT IF…? premiere on Disney+ each Wednesday. For our previous episode reviews, see below…
