Marvel’s What If…? positions Doctor Strange as Phase 4 Headliner
The mystic arts take a Gothic horror turn in Episode 4.
The Short Take:
A high concept episode that proves What if…? came to PLAY. Major implications for the larger MCU. (Is Doctor Strange the new Iron Man?)
Image Credit: Screenrant
The Long Take:
[SPOILERS: You don’t have the Eye of Agamotto and can’t go back to the moment before you kept reading this review. I’m zooming out to talk about nearly all of Phase 4 so far. There will be spoilers for Shang-Chi, but I will try to renew the warning in those places in case you want to skip around them.]
Buckle up, folks. Because this show just revved into overdrive. When I and others criticized the premiere for playing it safe compared to subsequent episodes, I wondered, as the Ringerverse podcast did, if the rationale was to start slowly, easing viewers into the concept with an only slightly different story to then work towards a richer, more complex scenario later. Peggy taking the serum instead of Steve is fairly straightforward, Yondu kidnapping T’Challa instead of Peter Quill is wackier, but still easy to follow. Episode 3 broached a more drastic alternate universe with the idea of a timeline being cut down before it even starts; it was all about the absence of the Avengers we know. Baby steps.
Now, with episode 4, we not only get a different Steven Strange than we’ve had in the films, but he tries to do his own “what if” by traveling back in time to save his fellow surgeon and partner from a fatal car accident. There are a million micro what-ifs that all end with Christine’s death, even if the circumstances of that death are different. And THEN, the Ancient One, in an attempt to stop Strange from destroying all space and time, splits his timeline in half so there is basically a good Doctor Strange and an evil Doctor Strange in the same universe. The hope is that the former will defeat the latter before he irreparably alters the entire universe — which is, remember, alreadyan alternate universe — thus dissolving everyone in it out of existence.
As it unfolded, this plot really made my brain tingle. This is why I would want to get into the multiverse game — to contemplate the nature of our reality. I’m really interested to see how the rules of time and space might link up with what we saw in Loki through the TVA. What’s the relationship between absolute points in time and nexus events, and do both of them exist in a post-TVA multiverse? They kind of seem like opposite ends of a spectrum to me because a nexus event is a natural branching of a timeline whereas an absolute point is where all timelines might converge.
Because it digs into these messy questions of how time and dimensions work, this episode, more so than its predecessors, has the most direct implications for the wider MCU. While I’m not expecting the events we see here to carry over into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, slated for March 2022, or Spider-Man: No Way Home, which releases in theaters this December, I do think that this episode heralds what will be the focal point of Phase 4: Doctor Strange.
This episode of What If….? sets a precedent for an alternate Doctor Strange. And, more importantly, it sets a precedent for a Doctor Strange who is willing to abuse his powers and tamper with reality. I had suspected this already, but now I think that it is almost certainly not “our” Doctor Strange in the Spider-Man: No Way Hometrailer, winking at Peter and generally being cavalier about the fragility of the universe. It has to be a variant, like the misguided, gaunt demon Doctor Strange hellbent on reversing death in this What If…? (Really strong Anakin Skywalker vibes here, by the way. Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?)
[Shang-Chi spoiler here!]
Pair this with how often Wong shows up and how involved he seems to be in what might otherwise be called Avengers business in Shang-Chi, and now have three very Doctor Strange-heavy data points. Oh, and I would also throw into the mix, WandaVision, which ends with Scarlet Witch learning the Darkhold, with the Doctor Strange theme music lurking in the background. All this makes me think that the MCU has slyly pivoted so that Doctor Strange can step into the role previously occupied by Iron Man. Benedict Cumberbatch is the highest profile (and arguably most talented) actor that the MCU has left, so refocusing our lens on him makes sense. I’m not saying he’s about to go lead the new Avengers, because that doesn’t seem like his style. But I suspect he will be the glue that holds all our other heroes together.
Once my mind stops reeling from all the possible connections to other shows and films I’ve seen, I can say that this episode, in isolation, really worked for me, especially in the back half. The start was a little slow just because the repetition of Evil Strange’s attempts to change the events leading up to Christine’s death didn’t develop either character very much. I get why it’s necessary as a plot device, and there is a certain amount of heartbreak in seeing him try and fail over and over again. But I would have gotten the same point with fewer iterations.
The expedition to the Library of Cagliostro,l and subsequent Strange v. Strange match-up, on the other hand, was fun to watch, mostly because, over the course of the episode, Evil Strange morphs into this eldritch amalgamation of all the souls he’s consumed in his quest for more power. The creepiness and tragedy of this transformation introduces tones and shades into the MCU that I’ve never seen before. And as a fan of all things Gothic, it pleases me. The more Lovecraftian, the better!
Between this and Shang-Chi, which [SPOILER] also feature soul-sucking, by the way, I’m ready for a more magical, mystical MCU.