What If? – Season 3

This is the final season of Marvel’s What If? animation series, and not before time because the creative team has clearly run out of steam. Where the series used to do interesting things with existing parts of the MCU, it has now been relegating largely to promoting forthcoming bad ideas (Thunderbolts) and past disasters (Eternals).

There’s an episode in which there is a legion of kaiju Hulks opposed by Avengers wearing giant mecha suits. Why?

There’s an episode in which Howard the Duck marries Darcy Lewis and everyone is trying to kidnap their egg. Why?

Kate Bishop and Shang Chi reimagined as wild west heroes? Scraping the barrel here, aren’t we?

The point is that, instead of taking the existing characters and timelines, and doing something slightly different with them, after the manner of an alternate history novel, they are now just picking genres from elsewhere and plonking a random selection of Marvel characters into them.

Given that this series appeared in the winter, it is a marvel (pun intended) that we did not get an episode in which the ghosts of X-Men past, present and future visit stingy old Erik Scrooge and persuade him to do more for poor, blind Scott Cratchit and his son, Tiny Charles, who can’t walk.

I haven’t seen the final two episodes. I’m not sure that I can be bothered.