Spoilers follow for Episode 5 of Marvel’s What If…? For more, see our review of the previous episode of What If.
When you stream Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+’s website, you’ll notice episodes have titles like “What If… Captain Carter Were The First Avenger?” and “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” This week’s is simply: “What If… Zombies!?” Sure, it’s a jokey take on the naming convention the series has been using, but it’s also indicative of how much thought went into selling a zombie apocalypse that works in the MCU. Up to this point, What If has done pretty well at making each episode’s premise feel like a logical divergence from established history. But despite some entertaining action, Episode 5 shambles along, aimless and hungry for purpose as… as a… it’ll come to me…
Episode 5’s deficiencies come into clear focus when compared to last week’s best-yet episode. It was full of supernatural spectacle, but everything that happened was rooted in Doctor Strange’s struggle with his grief, so it was emotionally engaging. On the other hand, we’ve got this episode, which spends nearly all its time focused on moving the surviving heroes from zombie encounter to zombie encounter as they try to develop a cure. Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) explains the zombie outbreak started after Hank Pym’s trip to the Quantum Realm, where only Hope’s mother Janet Van Dyne returned. Janet was afflicted with a “quantum virus” which… turns everyone into zombies. Marvel’s already joked about sticking “quantum” in front of concepts that they don’t want to bother explaining in Ant-Man and The Wasp (Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania coming soon), and we’re far enough past the point of diminishing returns that unexplained “quantum” stuff just feels like lazy writing. It often feels like What If can’t decide whether or not to take the zombie apocalypse seriously or play it for laughs, and Episode 5 suffers from that lack of clarity.
The tonal inconsistency ends up affecting how the whole episode unfolds, resulting in questionable character choices. After What If spent a full minute of screentime on a Peter Parker vlog explaining the absolute basic rules of surviving against the walking dead (bites infect, headshots kill, they can smell you), it was enormously frustrating to have Bucky (Sebastian Stan) explore a pitch-black underground military installation alone, no questions asked. Letting someone go off on their own just to keep the plot moving felt like a huge cop out. Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) continuing to exclaim “blam, blam, blam” as he’s dragged to his death was a similarly distracting case of the episode ignoring its own reality in favor of fitting in just one more quip. The MCU: where the only thing more infectious than quantum zombie bites are snarky Starkian comments undermining anything serious going on.
The episode’s best moments come during a tense confrontation with Vision (Paul Bettany) at Camp Lehigh. It’s here that we get a sense of what a more focused, character-driven story could’ve delivered, as the usually-benevolent android has become corrupted by the zombie outbreak in his own way. His desire to cure the infected Wanda and his total disregard for the human cost of success was an interesting seed of an idea, but What If moves past it quickly in favor of letting Zombie Wanda’s chaos magic take center stage. What If’s action scenes continue to be its saving grace, and Episode 5 is no different… as long as you don’t think too hard about the zombified heroes still using their powers. There’s no word or phrase you could drop “quantum” in front of that’ll stop me from asking why a zombie Tony Stark is still able to pilot the most advanced flight suit on Earth, or how Doctor Strange, Wong, and Wanda can focus on casting spells and eating brains at the same time. All of the fights and action-heavy scenes are brutal, well-choreographed, and inventive, but only up to the point you’re willing to suspend the substantial amount of disbelief you’ll need to keep from asking questions deeper than “What If… Zombies!?”
Ironically enough, for having spent much of the season disappointed in it, the voice acting in Episode 5 is pretty good. Zombie-slaying veteran Danai Gurira is the obvious MVP as Okoye, whose dry wit and matter-of-fact attitude is a perfect fit for the dire circumstances. Any more time spent with the late Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa is welcome and, though unintentionally prescient, his proclamation that “death is not the end” was more poignant than anything that happened before or after. It was also a real surprise to have David Dastmalchian’s Kurt (Scott Lang’s hacker buddy) so embedded in the story, providing a lot of laughs as the obvious odd man out. It’s a reminder that What If has a lot of untapped potential in the MCU's minor, oft-forgotten characters, and hopefully we continue to see more familiar faces dropping in. I’ll keep holding my breath for a Justin Hammer/Flashdance mashup.
