What if, 'Thor' - Sep 22

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life, sometimes, can be… weird: earlier this week I have encountered a real life rat in the broad daylight, and it was a big one: about the size of a small groundhog, (aka a woodchuck), and just as massive. Some sources of mine claim that it was a male rat, (a Norway rat, for classification’s sake), since the females of the species are smaller and slimmer than the males are, but that is redundant; the point is that I saw a real live rat, in broad daylight, and that isn’t something that has happened to me before, not ever, and probably won’t happen to me again either, (not in a long while, anyhow), and this sort of thing makes life rather tolerable to live, at least some of the times… Where were we?

My rat-related rant aside, this week’s episode of ‘What if?’ was the comedy episode; in it, we got to meet Thor who did not grow up alongside Loki, as the latter was returned to Laufey in this particular universe. Fair enough, an AU is an AU, and it does not have to be relatable to the main timeline either, but where does it leave us?

…Well, with variant Ultrons up the proverbial wazoos, if you want to be literal, but also – in the finishing stretch; let me elaborate. So far, ‘What if?’ was a rather restrained show for a cartoon: it took a single premise and ran with it – sometimes wildly, sometimes not so much, but always within the framework laid down by the mainline Disney/MCU, meaning that this season of ‘What if?’ is about the Avengers and no one else, though, admittedly, this ‘limited’ cast was big enough for the episodes – so far – each to have a different set of main characters; secondary characters are a different story, but they’re secondary for a reason… what else?

…A crossover episode, or rather episodes, as the odds of ‘What if?’ S1 ending on a double-episode finale are good, plus it would give the showrunners of ‘What if?’ to show the audiences how the MCU multiverse can handle this sort of an emergency without the TVA, (cough, ‘Loki’, cough), fixing it prematurely, but now we may have multidimensional Avengers assembling, so yay, here we go! What is left?

Nothing, I must admit. ‘What if?’ has begun on a mixed note: a tame job that pretends to be wild, and it remains as such; there are no Agents, (because AoS evolved into a hot mess), no InHumans, (because that show was insipidly bad so now its’ core concept was probably reworked in the ‘Eternals’ movie, cough), no Defends or X-Men or Fantastic Four because of copyright issues, no outsiders period. Fair enough and so far ‘What if?’ does deliver what it has intended to deliver – an entertaining pageant and a spectacle. That is not bad, but by now, seven episodes into the S1 – we are almost at a season’s finale, people! – the aforementioned people are getting rather tired of ‘What if?’, especially with such new gems as ‘Hawkeye’ and ‘Hit-Monkey’ are appearing on the horizon, to say nothing of the Eternals and what not. People are getting tired of ‘What if?’ for the moment, the show is losing steam, and I, for one, was, and am, and will be, more interested in the wild/feral Norway rat that I’ve encountered earlier this week than about the show, (at the moment), but that’s just me. I have been known to be weird after all.

Therefore, for now, this is it. See you all soon, instead!