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Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, Review, streaming, TV | Tagged: benedict cumberbatch, Bryan Andrews, devery jacobs, disney, Haylet Atwell, jeffrey wright, Marvel Studios, Marvel's What If, Review
What If …? Season 2 Finale Review: Super Strange Supreme Standoff
Marvel Studios' What If ...? closes out Season 2 with a bang as Captain Carter, Kahhori & Strange collide in an epic animated season finale.
Wrapping up the short stretch of consecutive releases on Disney+ is the season two finale of Marvel's What If …? with "What If…Strange Supreme Intervened?" taking two of the animated series' biggest characters in Hayley Atwell's Captain Carter and Benedict Cumberbatch's Strange Supreme, two characters that have no bearing on the proper MCU canon of Earth 616. The Peggy Carter variant was first seen in the series premiere "What If…Captain Carter Were the First Avenger," which saw her take the super soldier serum instead of Steve Rodgers. Cumberbatch's Strange Supreme made his debut in the series' fourth episode, "What If…Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?" which is one of the darkest in the MCU era. Their combined presence teased what was to come in the 2022 live-action sequel Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness which saw a separate Captain Carter variant that was part of the Illuminati trying to stop the Scarlet Witch's (Elizabeth Olsen) rage only to be cut down while Strange 616 ran into a darker variant corrupted by the Darkhold. You could say the build-up was coming to this inevitable conflict.
What If …? Three Fates Collide in Captain Carter, Kahhori, and Strange Supreme
The start of the episode picks up from the previous one, where Carter was in 1602 when the Strange Supreme takes her to his Sanctum Infinitum, revealing he's been capturing various "universe-killers" to atone for his past sins. He tries to enlist her help to try to capture an escaped variant who fled to a universe where Hydra used the Tesseract to destroy the world. After being sent on her way despite the warnings of The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), she meets with the series' newest hero Kahhori (Devery Jacobs), who reveals Strange's true nefarious intentions and plans to restore his universe he indirectly destroyed while trying to avert Christine Palmer's death.
What follows is a pretty epic sequence befitting any screen through its use of color and action in grand fashion, even to the point where the storytelling plays with the full wheelhouse they've established throughout its two seasons while still focusing on the core three characters on hand. I always thought it would have been more fascinating to go deeper dive into Strange's fall from grace rather than what was done with Olsen's Wanda Maximoff since she was never able to develop properly beyond the initial table scraps of MCU films to becoming the protagonist in Disney+'s WandaVision only to later becoming one of the universe's cruelest villains in the 2022's Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madess killing her 616-counterpart outright. Why have we met good and evil variants of Strange in What If… and MOM with powers, yet we don't get more Wanda variants with powers? Guess we'll never have THAT properly answered. If Marvel's What If …? insists on focusing on Carter and Kahhori this much, they really need to have their own spinoff(s). All episodes are available to stream on Disney+. Looking forward to what's to come for season three.
Marvel's What If ...?: Season 2 Episode 9: "What If...Strange Supreme Intervened?"
8/10
Hayley Atwell, Devery Jacobs, and Benedict Cumberbatch provide one excellent moment after another on Marvel Studios & Disney+'s Marvel's What If ...? For Atwell and Cumberbatch, they continuously show the amount of depth in the animated series we've barely scratched the surface on the live-action front. All three just need new MCU TV shows. Atwell already thrived on Agent Carter and her time as Captain Carter has invigorated her presence in the franchise unlike anything before. There's also a lot of promise in a Kahhori series as a historical superhero series. As far as Cumberbatch goes, I don't see why we couldn't scale on the live-action cinematic front if it meant Strange and his variants' stories can be told on TV.
Credits
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Bryan Andrews
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