After two darkity dark dark What If…?s, it’s a giant relief to get an episode that’s purely fun. In this week’s episode, Thor is fully the frat bro we met in his first movie, and he comes to Midgard to throw a planet-wide party.
Several days later, the party’s still jumping ’cause Frigga ain’t home, and things begin to go awry.
Summary
As the title suggests, the turning point in this episode is that Odin gives Loki back to the Frost Giants, and Thor grows up the spoiled only child of the First Family of Asgard. When Odin goes into his Odinsleep, and Frigga goes off to celebrate the Solstice with some of her sisters, Thor’s supposed to stay home and study. Instead he, Lady Sif and the Partiers Three head down to Midgard for the biggest Spring Break ever.
Meanwhile, Jane and Darcy are in the desert tracking a celestial anomaly! Jane’s been trying to get in touch with S.H.I.E.L.D. to warn them of an alien invasion, but no one’s willing to listen. She sees an unidentified glowing object streak across the sky, and then Thor and his buddies land in Las Vegas.
The Party begins.
Jane and Darcy drive to the Strip, and Jane attempts to warn Thor that his actions will cause terrible destruction across the Earth! But then… well, the two of them have that undeniable chemistry that turns them both into giggling schoolgirls, and soon she’s dancing with him instead of calling S.H.I.E.L.D. again.
Oops.
But this gives us an opportunity to bask in the MCU’s second greatest montage: Darcy and Howard the Duck go on a not-date for half-price Happy Hour nachos! Loki and the Ice Bros show up, to the delight of all! Nebula’s cleaning up out on the casino floor! The Grandmaster is DJing! Oh shit, Darcy and Howard got married by an Elvis impersonator! Thor and Jane got complementary tattoos! Man, this is the best night ev—
The blaring light of morning reveals a terrifying scene. Jane, Thor, Sif, all three Warriors, and for some reason Rocket Raccoon (???) are all flung across a hotel room in various states of hangover. Rocket’s in the sink. The phones all start ringing, and of course it’s S.H.I.E.L.D., but now Jane’s fully besotted and doesn’t want to turn him in. Maria Hill has to take charge because Fury was knocked unconscious when Korg ran past him to do a cannonball into the Bellagio fountain.
Jane tries to plead for diplomacy, but Hill skips all that and calls in Captain Marvel. What follows is basically a beautifully violent Looney Tunes cartoon. Carol and Thor knock the crap out of each other, punching each other from Paris into Stonehenge (it falls like dominoes), from the UK into the U.S. Southwest, fighting in the clouds over the Pacific. It’s adorable.
Eventually Carol gives up and returns to Hill to do a regroup. At Darcy’s suggestion, they concoct a plan to lure Thor to a barren area and nuke him, but they’re less enthusiastic about doing it in a Dakota.
Meanwhile the party continues! We see Thor’s buddies rolling the London Eye down the Thames, Surtur melts an arm off the Statue of Liberty, and the Ice Bros add icicle facial hair to Mount Rushmore. Thor’s just about to use the Sydney Opera House as a giant playground slide when Carol swoops in and drags him off.
Jane, with some help from Dr. Selvig, manages to transmit a message to Heimdall, who zaps her over to Frigga’s (lovely!) Solstice celebration. Jane hastily explains the situation to the Queen of Asgard while downing some of her wine, and Frigga appears before Thor to yell at him just as Hill’s about to deploy the nukes. Thor insists he’s only on Midgard for an educational field trip, but Frigga’s coming to check on him, and he better not be lying to her.
This leads to the MCU’s All-Time Greatest Montage, as Thor begs his friends to help him clean up the planet. A bunch of the jerks bail (never trust the Grandmaster!), but the ones who are left run around putting the St. Louis Arch the right way up, rebuilding Stonehenge, straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa (nooo!), and soldering the Statue of Liberty back together. It’s close, but by the time Frigga gets there the planet looks okay, and a group of Thor’s friends are sitting in a semicircle while he pretends to lecture them about Earth culture. If only Mjolnir wasn’t covered in Mardi Gras beads, he might’ve gotten away with it.
Captain Marvel returns with an iPad full of Earth info for him to study, and we end with him showing up to Jane’s trailer with flowers, asking if they can see each other again. Again, adorable! Even the Watcher says they’re going to live happily ever after!
But then…ULTRON APPEARS ON THE HORIZON! HE IS SPARKLING WITH INFINITY STONES!
Wait, what?
Commentary
Between this and the latest What We Do in the Shadows, I really want to hit a casino soon.
I love this episode because it hinges on such an interesting change to the timeline. After three episodes in a row of very dark stories, one that made the fridging of female character a fixed point in time, one that focused on flesh-eating ghouls, and one that saw the U.S. and Wakanda locked in war, this episode asks a very different type of question. What if Odin gave adorable li’l Baby Loki back to the Frost Giants, so he could grow up fully accepted in a loving family, and never developed his raging inferiority complex? What if Thor never had Loki to bounce off of, and was always simply the Prince of Asgard, where even his dearest friends were just a little bit inferior? Where despite Frigga’s best efforts, her son grew up to be spoiled, arrogant, and kind of oblivious? And how great is it to see a happy Loki??? Weird, sure, but great! He’s big and blue and just wants to have a good time—no double-crosses, no nefarious secret plot. Even when he ditches Thor in the end, he’s completely upfront about it, and he’s right: Frigga’s not his mother, why should he stay and clean up Thor’s mess?
I’m also pleased that even in this timeline, Thor is still a good person. There’s a reason Mjolnir answers his call, after all. Even when he’s being a dummy, he’s a sweet, good-natured dummy. And that basic fact allows this episode to be silly. Thor and Carol beating each other up is a superpowered version of Bug and Daffy yelling “Duck Season!” and “Rabbit Season!”—when Elmer Fudd’s gun goes off, there’s no permanent damage, and when Thor finally comes to his senses, it’s simple enough to stand Stonehenge back up and wash the graffiti off of all of Earth’s monuments.
The only element to this episode that’s a little deeper is that Thor and Jane are still a love-at-first-sight situation, which fills me with joy because, again, it would be so easy to make Thor a mean, shallow bro, and instead we see that he’s not feeding Jane a line to get her to lighten up, he’s not just stopping off in Vegas cause Midgard girls are easy—he loves her for her mind! He thinks she’s great! He agrees that she was right to narc on him, and he realizes that she only did it because she cares. And their tattoos! Her getting “Magic” for him, him getting “Science” for her, the two of them understanding that it’s the same thing, really? Ugh, it’s so cute I can’t stand it.
If I have one ding against the episode, though, I guess it’s that? That once again Hill has to be a sourpuss, Jane has to be responsible, Carol has to be even more responsible, Frigga has to cut her brunch short to Mom out—I would like to see girls having fun again instead of having to be the only adults on the planet. But honestly, I enjoyed this one so much, it’s a tiny ding? And hell, Nebula was having a fabulous time! At least there’s that.
Also, and let me be clear here: DARCY MARRIED HOWARD THE DUCK. I am a simple person, with simple needs, and that one tiny moment will make me happy for years.
Favorite Lines
- Thor, to Loki: “Loki I can’t believe you came, you are the absolute BEST!”
Loki, to Thor: “You’re my brother-from-another-mother, man! I mean that!”
Thor: “Brothers foreverrrrr.”
Loki: “Forev-aahhhh!”
Thor: “For. Ev. Er.”
- Thor, to Carol, during battle: “Not the hair!”
- Darcy, to her new husband: “Ugh, not now, Howard!”
- Thor, to Carol: “Smile a little!” (Oh, man, that is not the thing to say to Carol.)
- Brock Rumlow (Tordotcom favorite Frank Grillo): Aww, I never get to fire the nukes!”
- And, greatest of all, DJ Grandmaster to his adoring crowd: “Release the foam.”
Leah Schnelbach now has two new goals: 1. Party with Thor; 2. Marry Darcy. Come help them strategize on Twitter!
I assume the Rocket Raccoon cameo is a Hangover Easter Egg, since… Bradley Cooper.
I got no complaints. This was just a fun episode, one that the series did need. and realy, someone does have to be responsible, and hey, Carol DIDN’T need to try to help with the lie by getting him those resources. the job was done, thor was gonna be taken care of. She still helped out, because she knew she was the only real grow up( lets face it, Maria’s solution of DROP THE NUKES is not really responsible…even if it is siberia.) Also the fact that Uatu was “wait, WHAT” with ultron means that this is probably the time for him to interfere with the last episode of the season.
It is well worth noting that that wasn’t just Ultron, it was Ultron with Vision’s face. Ultravision?
This was a rather pointless bit of fluff that didn’t do much for me. The premise is rather implausible and thin. I mean, Thor already pretty much was an irresponsible, selfish jerk when we first met him in the main timeline. That was the whole point of the first movie, that he needed to learn responsibility. So how exactly did Loki not being his brother “change” him?
Also, how does Heimdall not know Thor and his gang are on Midgard? How did they even get there if Heimdall didn’t send them? And isn’t it an overreaction to call in Captain Marvel because of a party invasion? Why does it take so long for Frigga to get to Earth? How is Drax okay with attending a party with Thanos’s daughter? Not to mention apparently having no problem with figurative language? Also, how does the Vision exist if the Avengers were never formed and Thor never contributed to his creation? When does this even take place in the timeline?
This is all just too random and nonsensical. Good comedy is driven by believable characters who have empathetic and relatable motives even when their context and their actions are ridiculous. But the characterizations here made little sense. The characters didn’t react in ways that grew organically out of their personalities and goals, even their altered ones in the new timeline; they just did whatever arbitrary, out-of-character thing the writers thought would make a silly gag. It’s more What the…? than What If…?
The main virtue (aside from the Darcy snark, which we can always use more of) is that it got so many of the original actors to participate (even Clancy Brown!). Nice that Natalie Portman is among them, given how she was left out of the movies for a while. Although the character design and animation style totally failed to capture her beauty, and didn’t even resemble her that much.
Good grief, imagine this Thor’s face when he hears about Hela – he won’t have had decades of Loki to prepare him for the shock! (Wait a minute, now I’m imagining Giant Loki having an appallingly huge crush on Hela …).
@@.-@ ChristopherLBennett
I think the episode takes place rather late in the usual timeline, since we see Thanos’ glove with the Infinity Stones in Asgard when Thor and his gang are on their way to party.
This means that some of the stories that we know, namely the Guardians ones, happened, which is why we see Mantis in the crowd, and why Drax is okay with partying whith Nebula. We’re probably meant to infer that the Avengers Initiative happened without Thor. The only weird thing is that there is still a Midgard and an Ultron, I’ll admit it.
But it was probably meant to be just plain silly, so… I wouldn’t overthink it more than I already did.
People trying to overthink these need to lighten up a little. Most of these What Ifs are tongue in cheek and I found this genuinely hilarious for large parts.
Plus any opportunity to get Kat Dennings’ Darcy back on screen, even in animated form, after her triumphant return in Wandavision then I’m in.
I loved this one.
I cracked up at the national labelling gag.
@@.-@:
Thor: “You know, there is a Midgardian word for women like you: Party. Pooper.”
Yay for Darcy!
Nah, I gotta side with @@.-@ here – I mean, it was a fun palate cleanser after some of the darker episodes; one in which the universe seems to be a lighter, softer place, and it was kind a fun seeing the Grandmaster DJing (I can’t believe they got Jeff Goldblum hahaha) but I also was kind of like, wait, why is Valkyrie there? What’s her story now? What about Drax, or Mantis, or Korg or really any of them? Nebula mentions her father so presumably Thanos is still…somewhere, but where and doing what?
I appreciate what they were doing, it just didn’t really do it for me.
(And yeah, now that you think about it, this is another epsiode where the Serious Women have to clean up the mess. And as a long suffering mom, my heart hurt for Frigga having to cut her once a millennia trip short AGAIN, as she says).
Regarding Ultron with the infinity stones /.Ultravision, my guess is that he comes from another reality that we’ll see in the next episode, and is reality hopping, destroying organic life where he can find it.
Also, it says what if Thor was an only child, so does that mean Hela also never existed?
I can’t take credit for this, but somebody was joking that Dancing Zemo should have been present somewhere in the party scene. I mean, I suppose he would have had a much happier life given that Sokovia didn’t happen (although where Ultron comes from is anybody’s guess…).
Also we’ll probably see Uatu finally interfere as Ultron destroys his reality shows (get it?) and kind of form the Alternate Realities Avengers. Or at least I hope so. So finally we could see Captain Carter, Tchallalord and others fighting together.
@13: If this season is just a back door pilot for a non-traditional Exiles adaptation, I am absolutely on board.
@12/Lisamarie: “Also, it says what if Thor was an only child, so does that mean Hela also never existed?”
I don’t think we can take the titles too literally; they’re just meant to convey the general idea in a pithy way. The idea was that he was raised as an only child, without Loki’s presence to affect his upbringing, though I still don’t get the causal relationship to what we got… unless it’s just that the events of Thor never happened because Loki never betrayed Thor & Odin, so that Thor didn’t have the growth experience he had there and just became an even worse jerk over time.
my issue with this episode is that since the visual styling is identical in all the episodes, I am expecting similar mood/feel/gravitas in them as well. This was a fun, goofy kind of slapstick episode. I loved the clouds of dust in the desert and the names being visible on the globe when zoomed out. Almost a Wile E Coyote kind of feel to it.
But because it looked exactly the same as the more serious episodes, i had a hard time not seeing it the same as one of the others. All the character choices felt really out of place except for Darcy. Its like watching the Nolan Batman films and having the Schumacher bad guys show up.
So, I have perhaps put more thought into this than the creators intended, but some things that occurred to me:
1. Given that Odin returned Loki rather than just going “Hey, free baby!” in this timeline, (and given that the ice giants had apparently just misplaced him rather than actively abandoning him and were happy to have him back) it seems that relationships between Asgard and Jotunheim (and possibly in the interstellar community generally, given some of the folks we glimpse partying together) are significantly better than in OTL. That (including Asgard’s apparent reconciliation with Surtr… somehow) may go some ways towards explaining Thor’s radically different personality- he’s the immature prince of a prosperous and peaceful kingdom, not one perpetually bracing for a final apocalyptic war, so his immaturity manifests in parties and carousing, not going off on unauthorized punitive raiding parties.
2. Did I miss something? What happened to Fury?
3. I think this is our earliest Point of Divergence, given that Loki, and presumably Thor, are like a thousand years old.
4. I’ve come across some crack pairing for Darcy in my time on the interwebs, but Mrs. The Duck is a new one by me.
Fury got knocked out by Korg cannonballing in the fountain.
This was a fun episode, very well-paced, and it made great use of its running time. A parody, yes, but quite effective. Top three along with the Captain Carter and Killmonger ones.
I was completely waiting for Loki’s doublecross, I must admit, and I’m not convinced that the star that Jane said blew up up wasn’t his fault.
@2 – Steven: There are two episodes left.
@3 – Perene: Not Vision, but the body Ultron had made for himself. Same body, still Ultron.
@12 – Lisamarie: Lol, not having Zemo dancing there was a missed opportunity, yes.
@6: I think that “Thanos glove” is just the fake Infinity Gauntlet that Odin had for whatever reason, that we see Hela knock over in Ragnarok. So that was in there regardless of when/if Thanos actually had the real one and was collecting infinity stones. The fact that this takes place when Odin goes into his Odin sleep indicates that this takes place during the first Thor movie.
Don’t you know that Rocket is in the sink as a call back to “The Hangover”. You know, because Bradley Cooper voices Rocket. It can’t be a coincidence, that’s gotta be it! Lol
@17: Your thoughts mirror mine in turns of head cannon re point 1. In fact, I’d argue that this episode shows a clear cut case of the Watcher (and vis a vis the writers) set things up with a false premise: rather than Thor not having Loki around growing up, it appears to me the implication is that they were raised as intergalactic neighbors/friends instead of brothers, which changed their dynamic and relationship, but not the amount of influence they had on each other. They may in fact have influenced each other more: kids often get up things at their friend’s house that they couldn’t at home, and parents may be less apt to discipline a guest (especially a visiting prince).
It’s certainly a big departure from the last several, or even the first few (which even if they had some camp were still dramatic in scope). This one is purely meant as comedy front and center (the Looney Tunes comparison is very apt). But as a long-time alt hist afictionado, it’s also one of the few that really leans into the possibilities of “What if?” Which plays into @17’s point 3: the point of divergence is much longer ago than any of the others, allowing far more “butterflies” to fan their wings.
Many times alt hist is less “alternative” as “the same with a different character.” Captain Carter follows that mold: almost everything still happens exactly as we expect. A lot of alt history fiction falls in this realm, and it’s good thought experiment territory.
But rather rhyme history (as Mark Twain put it), what if things went in a different trajectory altogether? Even if it’s played for laughs and Thor does still meet Jane, this episode truly felt like it was departing as much as possible from the source to explore an entirely different reality. Your mileage may vary on how well that plays out character/storywise, but here we see a universe that we almost don’t recognize from the one we know, rather than simply dressed up in different clothes. It’s as if someone decided rather than telling another “What if Nazis won the war?” they decided to say “What if neither world war happened?” That would have a huge impact on our world and make it almost unimaginably different, possibly in ways we would find objectionable or irresponsible, but with ripple effects that make it difficult to conceive of this alternative 2021 as anything like our own.
It’s not my favorite episode and there are things purely on a story level that can be quibbled over, but I think the comedy allowed the showrunners to really let loose from any constraints of the Marvel world as we know it and picture something different.
I loved this episode. A great refresher after the dourness of the recent episodes. I also thought it looked better than the episodes up till now — maybe because the comedy meant they let the characters’ facial expressions get a bit more exaggerated and, well, animated, and so it came off way more lively and less stiff than the animation up til now.
–Andy
4: Christopher, Thor said that Midgard is a planet Heimdall doesn’t pay attention to. I don’t remember how they got to earth without him but this was a refreshingly fun episode after all the dark stories we had. I’m not going to think about this too much. What makes less sense is how the hell Odin convinced Laufey to take back Loki. Most parents who abandon a kid don’t change their minds. Especially when the message comes from a “liar and a thief” (Laufey’s words, not mine). Still you gotta love how Hemsworth and Hiddleston were having the time of their lives.
Now can they answer this question: What if Thor were a middle child (grew up with Hela)?
Between this and the latest What We Do in the Shadows, I really want to hit a casino soon.
DON’T! Spare your money. It’s addictive especially in Vegas
Aside from that great review :)