There are still two more episodes left to drop of the meandering second season of Marvel’s What If on Disney+, but the machine rolls on and the studio has already released a clip from season 3, slated to drop sometime in 2024. In the new clip, Bucky (still in winter soldier mode), is partnered up with The Red Guardian on a mission in America. In the clip, they must deal with a road blockade and Bill Foster. It looks like we’ll be getting the voices for all three MCU actors: David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Laurence Fishburne. Check out the clip below.
The problem we’re having with What If is that it’s not a very good show, for reasons that are entirely Marvel/ Disney’s fault. It comes down to two main issues. First is the fact that they are trapping themselves entirely inside the story canon of the MCU. The second is that they have yet to figure out that not every story needs to have world-building in it.
The What If comic book, at its best, was a set of stand-alone stories that took singular ideas and explored them to a conclusion. They didn’t leave room open for world-building, they didn’t add tags at the end to connect things. They didn’t build towards climactic stories down the road. It didn’t matter if you were reading “What If The X-Men Died on Their First Mission,” “What if Daredevil Killed Kingpin?” “What If Uncle Ben lived instead of Aunt May,” or “What If The Fantastic Four Never Got Their Powers?” Every story felt small enough to be focused but big enough to be exciting. Here, everything just feels like it was produced with an eye towards how toyetic it might be and what it could mean for the larger MCU plot lines.
What seems to be one of the biggest blunders of the second season is the Kahhori episode. Kahhori is an interesting new hero who could actually be a fun hero to explore in Marvel Comics or the MCU, but they made the boneheaded move of introducing her in a What If? episode, essentially making her a throwaway character.