‘What If…?’ Episode 1 Review — ‘What If… Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?’
The first Marvel Studios animated project, What If…?, debuted yesterday on Disney Plus, and we are here to talk about it!
Back in July 2019, Kevin Feige announced to the world that they were developing an animated What If…? series for Disney Plus, which would be based on the known else-world comic books from Marvel Comics. The classic way to describe the concept of the show is the very premise of this episode — imagine a reality where instead of Steve Rogers, it was Peggy Carter the one who took the super-soldier serum. Minor spoilers ahead (the basic story is similar to The First Avenger, although there are some new details introduced here that some audience members like myself were not privy to before watching the episode).
Going in, I had a list of high hopes for the show, and also a series of possible weak points I imagined for the series. And for better or worse, it met my expectations. For the most part, it works, and I hope they continue down this path. I love the idea of telling stories for the sake of telling an interesting story, not just because it ties into another story coming up, or a cross-over event, or whatever. This is something that DC can excel at with their current plans, and if Marvel wants to do the same, this is the perfect way to do it without confusing your audience and still keeping the bigger storytelling that is going on in the movies and the live-action shows.
Jeffrey Wright voices The Watcher, who introduces us to the concept of the show right off the bat, and that was a very clever way for the writer (A. C. Bradley, who did the best with what they gave him, by the way) to tell the audience: “don’t take this too seriously, just enjoy the ride.”
Peggy Carter (voiced by Hayley Atwell, who played the character in live-action) takes the front seat in this episode, as she plays the lead role of Captain Carter, the Captain America (Britain?) of another universe in which Steve Rogers (voiced by Josh Keaton, not Chris Evans) is seriously injured when he was about to take the serum, so Carter must step up and take it herself. The basic story bits are the same as the ones covered in Captain America: The First Avenger, although with a different protagonist and saving the differences — we don’t have Rogers going after Bucky in the suit, but rather him asking Peggy to do it.
Carter’s arc here is a combination of Steve Rogers in The First Avenger, and a (literally) powerful woman trying to have her say inside a society and an army that looks down on her, even as she is granted the powers of the gods. One of my concerns going in, and I’m afraid I was right, was that completely developing the characters in a 30-minute (actually less) story is very hard. Many times, the writer relies on the audience knowing who the characters are, instead of building them up. This is understandable given the circumstances (a limited amount of time, and the fact that we have already spent a lot of time with them in another universe), but it also limits the storytelling.
Peggy Carter is awesome in this episode, but besides her surroundings (I mean, the characters around her and the point where the story starts), there is not much that differentiates this character from, say, Diana Prince in the first Wonder Woman — in a sense, both stories featured a stronger and more powerful woman than the men around her in a war scenario, trying to show them that she can lead the charge when the higher-ups won’t believe her, but her friends (lower ranks) will.
Another one of my concerns is related to Steve Rogers, and I’m mixed about how the episode handled this aspect of the story. I should start by saying that this will be the most spoiler-filled aspect of the discussion, so you may skip down a few paragraphs if you haven’t checked it out yet. As I’ve said in the past, Steve Rogers is my favorite character in the MCU. He embodies everything that the movies want to convey; he is the ultimate moral compass of the Avengers and even the entire Marvel Universe. It is not Captain America, it is Steve Rogers. So, putting the genders aside, replacing his story arc with another character was something that worried me from the start.
This is not an easy argument to lay down, so I’ll do my best… In another world in which the original Infinity Saga was led by Captain Carter instead of Captain America, and the first episode of the What If…? series was What If Steve Rogers Became Captain America?, I might have the same argument in reverse, but for what this episode showed me, I don’t think I would be on board with the retelling of the Avengers movies from Carter’s perspective, as I don’t think they built a sufficiently strong and different character from Rogers to truly keep the story together. That may very well be because of the limited amount of time and that last scene with Hawkeye and Fury.
I might not have a case for it. But the purpose of the First Avenger movie was to build a character that would then be able to lead the Avengers, and you would buy it. The last scene of that movie made that clear. By having a similar scene here, you are refocusing the episode — it is no longer simply about having a story about Peggy Carter taking the serum and taking down Nazi Germany on her own, but rather the story of how she was able to become someone who would then lead the Avengers. And once again, if they showed that entire subsequent story, it is possible I would love it, and would buy into the character more and more, the same way Steve Rogers grew so much as a character in a post-Avengers era.
Going back to Steve in this episode, I am glad that they didn’t keep such an awesome character on the bench, and gave him something to do. They clearly state that he is the same character as the one from our MCU, but he just had a small incident that made him unable to take the serum. So it makes sense that he’d want to join the action. But this also makes me wonder — why didn’t they give Peggy Carter in The First Avenger the same arc they gave Steve here? Steve sort of becomes the first proto-Iron Man, but if they are stating that everything in this universe was exactly the same as in the MCU up until the moment Steve took the serum, that would mean that Stark had the capabilities of building that suit in The First Avenger. If that is the case, why didn’t he do it? Even without the Tesseract powering it, the final minutes of the episode state the suit does work long enough to cause some serious damage.
I understand the whole Perlmutter argument and the fact that Marvel at the time wasn’t ready for such a strong female co-star. But storywise, it makes you wonder. While trying to shine the spotlight on Peggy Carter, they also tried to not forget about Steve and give him something to do. On the one hand, I’m glad they did it and that such an awesome character got the respect he deserves. But on the other hand, if they wanted to reverse the gender roles, why didn’t they just do that? Trying to be female-focused, they sort of shot themselves in the foot, didn’t they? Maybe I’m reading too much into it, and I welcome any other takes.
What If…? will apparently get a second season, as Variety reported yesterday. They also mentioned that Marvel is developing multiple other animated projects for Disney Plus, some of which will interconnect with the movies. We’ll probably hear more from this in the upcoming months.
The next episode of What If…? will drop next Wednesday, and it looks like it will be the one focused on T’Challa (instead of Quill) being rescued by Yondu and his crew. We’ll be here to talk about it.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
