What If…? Season 1 (2021) Review
7/10
A being who watches every timeline and has sworn never to intervene narrates a series of single changed decisions and what they cost. A different person takes the serum. A different person survives a car crash. A different person picks up the hammer.
The 7 is for the freedom the format buys. Nothing carries forward, so every episode can arrive at a terrible outcome and stop there. That’s a thing no serialized franchise entry has been allowed to do in fifteen years.
The season-long thread that ties the last two episodes together is the weakest part and the least necessary. An anthology didn’t need a plot, and attaching one is the volume era’s instinct applied to a format that was already working.
What If…? gave me more pleasure than most of the live action Marvel output around it, because it’s allowed to be cruel to its heroes and mean it. For seven episodes I had no idea who would survive, and that feeling is rare in this franchise. The finale lost me, and that’s where the missing points went.
The Format Is the Argument
Each episode takes a single decision from a film everybody has seen, changes it, and follows the consequences without any obligation to protect anybody.
That structure removes the one constraint that flattens franchise storytelling. In a connected series, a protagonist can’t die, a world can’t end and a relationship can’t fail permanently, because a later project needs them. Here every episode is disposable. That means anything can happen in it.
The result is a season where characters the audience has known for a decade are killed casually, lose completely, or become the thing they spent films opposing. None of it is undone, because nothing follows. Jeffrey Wright’s Watcher is the mechanism that permits it. A narrator who has sworn not to intervene can describe a catastrophe and decline to fix it, and his refusal is stated in the first episode so the audience knows help isn’t coming.
Wright plays him with a detachment that’s not quite indifference. There’s something in the delivery that suggests a being who has watched this many times and has opinions he’s not permitted to act on. That makes the eventual breaking of the vow a real event even in a finale that otherwise mishandles it.
An anthology trades continuity for freedom and the trade is usually worth making. Each piece can take a risk that would be unrecoverable in a serial, because nothing carries forward and nothing has to be protected.
What replaces continuity is a governing question. Every episode here asks what one changed decision does downstream, and that question is the through line. That’s why the season coheres without a plot.
For a story collection the equivalent is a preoccupation. A reader should finish and be able to name what you keep circling, even though no two pieces share a character or a setting.
The Doctor Strange Episode
A man loses somebody in a car accident instead of losing the use of his hands, refuses the loss, and spends centuries acquiring enough power to undo it. The method is the horror. He consumes other beings to absorb what they are, growing larger and less recognizable across a sequence that compresses hundreds of years, while a version of himself who accepted the loss argues with him and fails.
What he achieves is the point. He succeeds, briefly, and the universe collapses because the event he removed was fixed, and the episode ends with him alone in a void holding the person he saved for the instant before everything ceases.
Nothing in a Marvel film has been permitted to end that way. There’s no reversal, no lesson applied elsewhere, and no consolation. The Watcher declines to help, states his reason, and the episode stops.
The sequence works because of its design. As he absorbs more, the model becomes less stable, limbs multiply and the animation style itself degrades, so the audience watches a character stop being drawable. That’s a thing only animation can do and the episode uses it exactly once.
The Strange episode is the reason this season sits as high as a 7 for me. That last image of him alone in the void, holding the person he tried to save, is as bleak as anything Marvel has put its name on, and I was stunned somebody signed off on it.
The Other Strong Ones
Peggy Carter taking the serum is the season opener and it does the necessary job of establishing that these aren’t jokes. The premise is a substitution and the episode follows it seriously through a war and an ending that strands her. The Killmonger episode is the season’s cleverest piece of writing. He’s not given powers or a tragic reframing, he’s simply allowed to be as capable as the films implied, and he manipulates two organizations into destroying each other while never once lying about what he wants.
The zombie episode is the one people remember and it’s the most conventional. It’s an outbreak story with familiar faces, executed well, and its pleasure is recognition instead of invention. It’s fun, and it’s the episode I think about least. Killmonger’s is the one that stays with me.
Thor as an only child, raised without Loki, produces a party across the whole planet and is the season’s only light episode. It works because the change is small and domestic, and because the season needed one entry where the consequence of a different decision is that somebody is happier.
The Ultron episode is the one that should have closed the season. A machine that gets the stones, wins completely, and then notices the Watcher observing him. That’s the only time the series threatens its own narrator, and those are an alarming twenty minutes. Then the season spends every bit of it as setup for a team finale nobody watching the series had asked for, and that’s where my patience ran out. It’s the single structural error the whole season makes, and it arrives in the last two episodes.
A premise-driven piece needs a consequence that couldn’t have been predicted from the premise. Killmonger being competent is the premise. Killmonger being able to do all of that without lying is the thing the episode discovers. Vary the tone deliberately across a collection. A sequence of uniformly dark pieces flattens as surely as a sequence of light ones, and the party episode exists so the void episode has something to be measured against. The weakest entries are the ones where the change is the whole idea. If your answer to what happens next is contained entirely in the setup, you’ve written a premise instead of a story.
The Animation Divides People
The style uses cel-shaded models with heavy line work, designed to resemble a comic panel in motion, and it’s the most common complaint about the series. The criticism is fair in one respect. Faces are stiff, likenesses are approximate, and the performances rely almost entirely on the voice work because the models can’t carry a subtle expression. The stiffness costs less than most people claim, because the voices do the acting and the voices are good.
What it buys is scale. A void containing a collapsing universe, a planet-wide party, an army of the dead in a city, all delivered at a cost no live action production could approach. That’s the entire reason the format can attempt these premises at all.
Most of the original cast returned to voice their parts. That counts for more than the animation does. Hearing the actual performers deliver alternate versions of people they played for a decade makes the substitutions work. Chadwick Boseman recorded his episodes before his death and they were among his last performances. The Star-Lord episode, in which T’Challa is taken instead of Quill and improves every situation he enters, plays differently now and the series had no way to anticipate that.
Where It Goes Wrong
The last two episodes assemble characters from earlier entries into a team and give the season a plot. That’s the one thing an anthology exists to avoid.
The impulse is understandable and it undoes the format’s advantage. Once these characters are recruited into an ongoing story, the episodes they came from stop being self-contained, and the endings that had been permanent become setup. It also produces the season’s weakest writing. A group of people who have never met assemble, agree on a plan, and defeat a threat in forty minutes. That’s exactly the structure the anthology had been avoiding for seven episodes.
The 7 survives because the first seven episodes are what the season is. The finale is a franchise reasserting itself on a format that was working fine without it, and the damage is contained to the last eighty minutes.
Resist the urge to connect your collection at the end. The reader who enjoyed each piece separately doesn’t need them joined, and joining them retroactively converts complete works into installments.
The pressure to do it’s commercial instead of artistic. A connected finale promises a future product, and a self-contained collection promises nothing except itself. That’s a harder thing to sell and a better thing to have made.
If you do connect them, do it through theme instead of plot. A recurring image, a repeated situation or an argument the pieces have with each other keeps each one whole while still building something larger.
Should you watch What If…? Season 1?
Yes, and watch the Doctor Strange episode even if you watch nothing else.
This is the one Marvel format where an ending can be permanent, and the season uses that permission about five times before deciding it wants to be a serial after all. That reversal is why I stop at 7. The best episodes here are as daring as anything the studio has made, and I resent the finale for dragging them back into the machine.
