This review contains spoilers for episode 3 of What If...?.
The third episode of Marvel’s What If...? anthology series, titled “What If... The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?,” is the show’s first premise to not just replace one character with another character. After Peggy Carter took Steve Rogers’ place in Captain America: The First Avenger and T’Challa took Peter Quill’s place in Guardians of the Galaxy, the third What If...? installment explores the premise of a serial killer picking off Fury’s Avengers recruits.
Murder mystery is a new genre for the MCU, and “What If... The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” nails it. The fact that the killer has superpowers puts a fresh spin on the familiar Agatha Christie formula, while the script drops plenty of hints about their identity, allowing Marvel-savvy viewers to piece it together for themselves before the big reveal.
As with the last two episodes, the voices that sound a little off are somewhat distracting – especially when movie actors share scenes with voice actors imitating movie actors. Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Michael Douglas, and Clark Gregg all reprise their roles in “What If... The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?,” but not everybody from the movies came back. Actors like Lake Bell as Black Widow and Mick Wingert as Iron Man do a fine job with their roles, but it’ll never be the same as hearing the voices of familiar MCU cast members. Plus, it was a little confusing to have Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk in a reimagining of Edward Norton’s Hulk movie.
The most notable thing about “What If... The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” is that, unlike its predecessors, it isn’t just a shallow reworking of a single movie. Its premise deviates from three separate MCU movies (Thor, Iron Man 2, and The Incredible Hulk) and also mixes in an alternate Ant-Man timeline. It doesn’t just change one thing from one movie; it changes the entire MCU like this series has promised from the beginning.
Fury and Natasha’s dynamic is the hook from the offset. The episode opens with a scene from Iron Man 2 framed from Fury and Nat’s perspective as opposed to Tony’s. After Tony is unexpectedly killed and Nat is blamed, the episode sets up a “buddy cop” dynamic for the serial killer investigation. But then, Fury and Nat are separated and spend the rest of the episode apart. They occasionally call each other to provide updates, but that’s not the same as being at each other’s side the whole time. This episode was a great chance to examine their well-established friendship in more depth, but they scarcely interact after Nat is framed for Tony’s murder.
The revelation that Hank Pym is the killer is certainly unexpected. Nat’s fight with the killer makes it look like they’re invisible, so the twist that they’re actually just really small arrives as a nice surprise, and one that makes sense of the baffling murders from the episode’s early scenes. While Pym is known as a hero in the mainline universe, his motivations as a serial killer in this universe are understandable. In this timeline, he lost both his wife and daughter to dangerous S.H.I.E.L.D. missions, so it makes sense that he’d want to take down S.H.I.E.L.D. by any means necessary. Giving the unhinged murderer version of Hank Pym the villainous Yellowjacket armor as opposed to the heroic Ant-Man suit was a nice touch.
Condensed runtime has been a major problem for the half-hour What If…? episodes burdened with covering a movie’s worth of storylines. But this one, penned by head writer A.C. Bradley in collaboration with Matthew Chauncey, is surprisingly well-paced. It doesn’t race through its plot points like the last two episodes. Instead, Bradley and Chauncey’s script takes plenty of time to bask in the mystery surrounding the Avengers’ murders. The week-long structure moving from day to day cuts the script into neat sections to focus on each individual killing and the seemingly inexplicable circumstances surrounding them.
Loki suddenly ruling Earth was an unnecessary left turn after the killer reveal. He cuts a deal with Fury to find Thor’s killer together, then decides to take over the United Nations and puts himself in charge of the whole planet. All of this happens in just the last couple of minutes. The trickster god successfully crowning himself the King of Midgard seems like it should be its own episode, not a footnote at the end of a Nick Fury murder mystery.
Aside from its out-of-the-left-field King Loki twist, “What If... the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” is a promising sign for future What If…? episodes. Focusing on retooling one movie at a time was seriously limiting the show’s storytelling abilities. This one explored the ramifications that a big narrative change like killing off the Avengers would have on other concurrent storylines. Hopefully, these episodes will keep getting bigger, stranger, and wilder.