On the one hand, you’ve got a very enthusiastic Hayley Atwell, who revels in Peggy’s newfound power and conveys plenty of depth in her scenes with star-crossed lover Steve Rogers. But as any fan of animation will tell you, acting and voice acting are two very different things, so the quality of the performances is all over the place. One of the big draws of What If is that MCU actors are (mostly) expected to reprise their roles from the movies. That means that while there are seismic changes happening in the story’s real-time, there’s not so much change that the deviations are distracting for more casual viewers. Thirty minutes isn’t a lot of time to wrap your head around all the temporal tomfoolery inherent in an alt-history MCU story, so better to ease viewers in rather than pushing the limits right out of the gate. Erskine’s super soldier serum? The birth of Captain America is as fundamental to the MCU as Tony Stark’s kidnapping, so it’s a good setting to demonstrate the ripple effects the smallest change can have (not that Endgame didn’t do the same thing.) This first episode doesn’t go as far afield as future episodes promise to, but that’s a strength here. The showrunners chose a smart story to introduce viewers to What If’s conceit: how would history have been different if Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), not Steve Rogers (Josh Keaton), received Dr. What If’s premiere episode may delight in proving the only rules of the show are that there are no rules, but there are some cracks in the foundation that could hurt the series going forward. With Disney+’s new streaming anthology, years and years of canon, character development, and interconnected stories can be totally ignored in favor of pondering what MCU history would look like if things changed ever so slightly. For a cinematic universe as tightly plotted as the MCU, Marvel’s What If…? presents some pretty exciting possibilities.
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