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What If…? Left Us Asking, "Who Cares…?" The MCU at a Crossroads

After three seasons, What If...? has wrapped up its run. Here's how the animated series became a showcase for what's been ailing the MCU.

Now What If…?, possibly the most inessential of the MCU TV series and stories, has ended with its third season. That's probably a good thing because it encompasses everything that has gone wrong with MCU movies and TV series. It's not responsible for devaluing the MCU as a storytelling entity and a franchise, but all the symptoms are in it. Marvel Studio movies dominated pop culture and the box office for ten years before major missteps degraded their entire franchise.

What If… the Multiverse Kills The Whole MCU Franchise?

The MCU's biggest mistake was to introduce the multiverse and make it the core of its stories. That is a big problem. On the one hand, a multiverse offers new and different storytelling possibilities with the same characters. What if Shang-Chi was a cowboy kung fu avenger? What if Dr. Strange turned evil? What if the Marvel Universe was devoured by the zombie apocalypse, and every hero became a zombie? And so on and so forth. It can be fun. At heart, it's child's play to mash one's action figures together to make up any kind of story that takes your fancy. It feels like a perfect piece of corporate strategy, enabling a whole franchise to go on forever.

What If…? is as slickly and proficiently written and made as any Marvel project with character arcs and big climaxes. However, it's become the same old, same old. The Marvel style of occasional humour has now drowned out any seriousness. If everything's a joke, a wisecrack, then any crisis or world-threatening problem is only skin-deep. The general tone of the series and virtually all MCU projects now is overly glib, even outright smug to the point of obnoxiousness. And with the multiverse added, nothing matters anything. There are no real stakes. Not when there's always a better version of a character or their story out there if this one is bad. What if… you destroyed too many universes, and nobody came? The MCU made even that boring boring.

Nothing Matters Anymore When It's All a Joke

The biggest theme of Marvel stories, when they mattered, was the power of heroic sacrifice as the ultimate act of love. The culmination of that was Tony Stark's death at the climax of Avengers: Endgame. It was moving, it broke the audience's heart, and that was the key to a billion dollars at the box office. But most of all, it was earned. It was the build-up of about ten years of movies, shows, and story-creating characters worth caring about to earn that point. The introduction of a multiverse and What If …? threatens to undo that. But with endless wisecracking, sitcom cosmic plots, it goes from What If…? to Who Cares…? The morality tale of all superhero stories, of Good vs. Evil, becomes meaningless kitsch and corporate marketing, which is a point The Boys has been making when it pokes at the fundamental problem that the MCU has become.

The core lesson of MCU stories has gone from "work together to do good" to "make friends and then punch the bad guys into submission with overblown and weightless CGI." That's every MCU movie and TV show by now, and audiences are tired of it. We've reached the exhausted, decadent stage of the superhero genre where even the storytellers can't tell good from bad, right from wrong anymore. Superhero stories have always been anti-bullying fairytales, the dream of becoming strong enough to stand up to bullies, but it's become about bullying the bullies. MCU bad guys aren't malicious or evil, merely misguided in their belief that they're doing the right thing. "Our self-righteousness trumps your baddie self-righteousness" has become the MCU credo. What If …? does that in spades, in every single episode to mind-numbing tedium. Good vs. Evil has become a meaningless trope.

If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you like, and if you find joy in it, then that's great. No one should or can take that from you. The actors are perfectly fine, though they're directed to deliver one-note performances combining casual wisecracking and portentous declarations of power and determination. The MCU must course-correct to make the stories matter again. Hopefully, What…If? ending is a sign that this stage of the MCU is over. Please Let This Be the End of a Terrible Phase.

What If…? is streaming on Disney+.

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