For proof, look no further than voice acting veteran Josh Keaton's take on Steve Rogers. A voice actor may have been able to give that character, and that dialogue, just enough nuance to help make the point. This all represents a gamble What If? is taking by preferring MCU vets to voice actors. Flynn’s casual sexism comes off as over-the-top, even for the time period, and undercuts crucial moments of thematic groundlaying for the rest of the episode. While there’s nothing egregiously wrong with Whitford’s performance, Flynn’s scenes with Peggy are really the only ones expressly written to hammer home the equality morality play that this first episode of What If presents. Agent Carter fans will be delighted to know that Bradley Whitford returns to reprise his role as John Flynn, and there’s no love lost between him and Peggy. Stan’s delivery borders on disinterested, Cooper’s on zaniness, and the tonal shifts happening based on who’s speaking in any given scene become distracting. Wright’s performance is delightfully Serlingesque and The Watcher’s oath to observe only and never interfere with cosmic proceedings presents an intriguing question to track through future episodes: what if The Watcher does get involved in how these stories play out?īut then, there’s MCU veterans like Sebastian Stan and Dominic Cooper, who seem unsure what they signed up for. Jeffrey Wright feels well-cast in his MCU debut as The Watcher, What If’s narrator.
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Likewise, it’s great to hear Ross Marquand get a crack at Red Skull before his gig as a disincorporated exposition ghost on Vormir. 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.
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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.