Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, Review, TV | Tagged: devery jacobs, disney, Kiawentiio, Marvel Studios, Marvel's What If, mcu, Mohawk Nation

What If…? Season 2 Episode 6 Review: A Brave "New World" Order

What If...? S02E06 changes pace from working within its normal MCU wheelhouse to bring us a refreshing revisionist colonial story.

Marvel's largely played it safe, keeping to within their MCU wheelhouse of characters in various scenarios in the animated series What If …?. The sixth episode, "What If … Kahhori Reshaped the World?" offers a refreshing revisionist history that involves the tesseract as The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) takes the viewer to pre-colonial North America at the time when Spanish Conquistadors are in search of the Fountain of Youth. The story starts with Surtur destroying Asgard during Ragnarok, which sends the powerful artifact crashing to earth at a lake in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Several of the Mohawk tribe disappeared venturing too deep into the lake, making it forbidden territory. Things pick up when Kahhori (Devery Jacobs) and her brother Wáhta (Kiawentiio) find themselves fleeing from the Spanish as they make their way to the lake. While Wáhta is captured, Kahhori is sucked into the void located at the lake.

What If… Explores Refreshing Revisionist Colonialism

What we see is something that's long been overdue in the MCU as much as it's done a commendable job in the cultural and diverse representation of superheroes. I certainly never want to take away from anything Marvel and Disney have done for 15 years since the MCU is the most inclusive universe on screen. Like the series premiere episode that brought us Captain Carter, this turns out to be a wonderful origin story for something I hope gets expanded upon, perhaps in a future episode or project down the line. Jacobs, Kiawentiio, and Jeremy White (Atahraks) do a wonderful job playing off each other throughout the episode, and Gabriel Romero makes the most of his limited time as the episode's antagonist Rodrigo Alphonso Gonzolo. I'd be remiss that the episode went all out as far as working with the Mohawk Nation for its authentic portrayal of the culture and nuance, even down to natively speaking their language, not to mention the Spanish Conquistadors also speaking their native tongue.

Like the previous episode, the only major knock against it is how much the series is trying to squeeze something so expansive into a half-hour frame. Figure one of the biggest benefits of streaming is that it's not constricted by the conventions of normal TV. Let's hope we see them again for season three, and better yet, this serves as the backdoor pilot to a Kahhori spinoff series. Major rage-inducing side gripe here: While Benedict Cumberbatch is listed in the credits reprising his role as Doctor Strange, I don't feel he should be sharing top billing as the others to sell the episode, considering it's less than 10 seconds for what amounts to a glorified post-credits-type scene. That's like putting Charlize Theron's name in the main cast of 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. All season two episodes of Marvel's What If …? are available to stream on Disney+.

Marvel's What If...? Season 2 Episode 6 "What If...Kahhori Reshaped the World?"

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Review by Tom Chang

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9/10

Devery Jacobs, Kiawentiio, Jeremy White, and Gabriel Romero provide a welcome change of pace from the change of pace from the traditional MCU storytelling with its latest superhero origin story with Jacobs' Kahhori. Aside from the suprise that it took Marvel 15 years to tell a superhero story that centered on Indigineous People on screen, the only knock on it is that they tried to tell a vast expansive story within a 30-minute (episode clocks at 34 minutes) time frame. Here's hoping we get more from this from Marvel like the way they've been investing in Captain Carter.

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