Posted in: Disney+, Kaitlyn Booth, Marvel, TV | Tagged: disney, disney plus, doctor strange, Marvel Studios, Review, tv, what if

What If…? Episode 4 Review: Good Story Undercut By Too Common Trope

What If…? episode four is the darkest episode of the series yet, which is saying something since the last episode killed off all of the original Avengers, but also sadly uses a tired and all too common trope to tell its story.

It seems that starting off with Captain Carter might have been a method for What If…? to set up some expectations that it was very much planning on kicking in the head by the time episodes three and four came around. Episode three was all about if the original Avengers got killed off, and this one explores what would have happened if Doctor Strange "lost his heart instead of his hands" or what would have happened if Christine died in the car accident. After being largely ignored by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even in the original Doctor Strange movie, it's nice to see a version of Christine that isn't there to just be a supporting player. You see her as a person, and you understand just how important she is to Stephen as he deals with the fallout of losing her. It's once again the story of grief and how it can corrupt you the same as WandaVision did.

However, the dead wife and girlfriend trope is one that is extremely tired. While it is nice to finally see Christine as a person, her death is less about the loss of the character herself and more about Stephen's reaction to it. Christine is an accomplished doctor and whole person whose entire existence in this episode is to die over and over and over again for the purposes of furthering the character arc of Stephen in this episode of What If…? It's an interesting concept to explore, even more so when you look at a character as self-centered as Stephen Strange, but there had to be some sort of way he could have lost his heart that didn't mean fridging yet another woman in a genre that invented the term fridging.

All of that being said, this is an episode that truly feels like it has some epic scope and could have easily been a full movie if it wanted to, but it also felt like a full story as well. While episodes like one felt like a rushed rewrite of an existing movie or two that felt like a piece of a larger whole, episode four is the first episode that feels like a complete story. It doesn't feel rushed or like we are missing massive pieces and it doesn't like we're only seeing part of a larger whole. There is a pretty definitive beginning, middle, and one hell of an ending to this episode of What If…?  It's a hard balance to have something with a scope this massive that still feels like it has a decent story told over ~40 minutes as compared to what could have easily been two hours.

Episode four of What If…? continues to show the promise of the series and the fact that they aren't taking the easy way out for these series. They are willing to let people fail, let people lose, and let people die in a way that shows that perhaps there are more risk-takers at Marvel than we thought. However, leaning into such a common and, frankly, boring trope undercut the rest of the story they were going for. There are so many insane and creative directions they could have gone with this episode of What If…? and the fact that they went with it undercuts the previously listed risks. This is animated; these are one-off stories, you can do anything you want, and the fact that Marvel isn't taking full advantage of that is a shame.

What If...? Episode 4

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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8/10

What If...? episode four is the darkest episode of the series yet, which is saying something since the last episode killed off all of the original Avengers, but also sadly uses a tired and all too common trope to tell its story. 

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