I wasn’t expecting the 35-minute Marvel cartoon to make me cry.
But this week’s What If…? is “What If… T’Challa Became Star-Lord?” and somehow, in the midst of some of the funniest scenes and riffs Marvel has ever done, it gave us a lovely meditation on the power of human will.
It also gave us T’Challa back for a half hour, so to be fair I should’ve expected the crying.
Summary
Star-Lord walks across Morag to retrieve the Power Stone, but there’s no Redman banger to be heard. When Korath intercepts the Ravager, he’s shocked and delighted to learn he’s facing off with none other than the intergalactically famous Star-Lord. As they fight, Korath asks his hero if he’s taking any new recruits. Star-Lord easily bests him, and decides to bring him along and make him a Ravager even though the crew is full-up. He liked his enthusiasm.
TWENTY YEARS AGO: Even though King T’Chaka keeps assuring his son that there is only danger and violence beyond Wakanda’s walls, young T’Challa yearns to explore. One day he’s playing when he accidentally pierces Wakanda’s shields, and ends up alone on the savannah—directly under a Ravager ship. Kraglin and Taserface bring the boy aboard, and Yondu decides to keep him even though he’s the wrong kid.
BACK IN NOW-TIMES: Yondu is the captain of his crew of Ravagers, but everyone acknowledges that T’Challa is the heart of the group. His unswerving dedication to doing the right thing has nudged the Ravagers to go straight, and they now act as a band of galactic Merry People, with T’Challa as their Robin Hood. They still rob and heist and do all that fun shit, but, as T’Challa says: “No treasure is worth as much as the good that can be done with it.”
I mean.
When the plot kicks in, and it’s a classic heist with a bunch of twists, double-crosses, and secret plans. The Ravager crew (which now includes an adorably fanboying Korath and a mostly-reformed Thanos) is recruited by Nebula (still dealing with PTSD from living with her dad before T’Challa helped him become a better person, er, Titan) to steal the Embers of Genesis from the Collector so they can distribute it to planets whose ecosystems are failing.
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Simple! But of course there are nested plans. Korath and Thanos provide a diversion to distract Ebony Maw and Proxima Midnight so Nebula and Yondu can smuggle T’Challa into the Collection to find the Embers. But Nebula is actually in league with the Collector, who wants to add a Terran to his Collection. But really Nebula and T’Challa are triple-crossing everyone so that the Collector will be so focused on T’Challa that Nebula can actually get the Embers.
But this plan gets slightly borked when T’Challa comes across a Wakandan ship in the Collection, finds a message from his father asking anyone in the universe for information on his son, and realizes that Wakanda was not destroyed in a war like Yondu told him. His father has never stopped looking for him, and his daddy’s a liar.
Fights ensue! Nebula saves Thanos by releasing some of the Embers, and the father and daughter begin to reconcile as enormous plants sprout across Knowhere. Yondu comes back to rescue T’Challa from the Collector, and the two use a move called “sticky fingers” to steal the device that gives the Collector control over his cases. With him safely locked up and powerless, they bid Carina goodbye and leave to rendezvous with Nebula. (The last we see of the Collector, Carina has released all of his prisoners, and he’s surrounded by some very angry former captives in a fun mirror of his brother’s fate in Ragnarok.)
T’Challa and Yondu retrieve the Wakandan ship and bring Cosmo along with them. Yondu apologizes for lying, but T’Challa admits that he wanted the life Yondu gave him. It’s complicated.
And then everyone goes back to Wakanda, T’Challa fudges the truth a little bit to make Yondu sound like less of um, a kidnapper, and T’Chaka throws a giant party. Nothing prepared me for the sight of Thanos attempting to chat up Okoye while Nebula squirms and mutters, “Dad!”
And then…we join Peter Quill, finishing up his shift at the Dairy Queen. Ego walks in and informs the young man he’s his long-lost father. THIS can’t end well.
Commentary
Let me start with the fact that where last week’s episode of What If…? was rousing and heroic, this one is funny. There were multiple moments when I had to pause to let myself laugh. From the opening scene, where Korath is awestruck by the great Star-Lord, and fights him with a GIANT GRIN on his face, I knew this was going to be fun.
But I didn’t know we were going to get Deadpan Thanos, who’s good now, but still trying to convince everyone his plan would have worked, and it totally isn’t genocide cause it’s random! Or happy, only-slightly-augmented Nebula, who calls T’Challa “Tcha-Tcha” and is trying to forgive her dad so they can have a relationship.
Or a scene with Howard the Duck!
Or Drax taking a selfie with T’Challa to send to his totally alive wife and child! Because T’Challa saved his planet!
Or Cosmo hitching a ride off Knowhere with Yondu and Star-Lord!
And to end it by checking in on Peter Quill as he mops up a Dairy Queen???
But I could just yell scenes at you for a while. What this episode does beautifully—maybe a bit better than last week’s—is re-contextualize themes we’ve already seen.
Yondu lied to young T’Challa, just as he did to young Peter Quill. In this case, he told his young charge/kidnapping victim that Wakanda had been destroyed in war because he loved the kid so much that didn’t want to give him back. And T’Challa is, correctly, FURIOUS with him for lying, and grief-stricken at the idea of his father and mother waiting back home, hoping for any word of their son.
But just as with Quill, there’s another layer to it: Yondu recognized that T’Challa was an explorer just like him, and he felt he owed it to the boy to show him the stars rather than consigning him back to life on only one planet. By bringing him along to space, he changed the course of this timeline for the better, as T’Challa went from planet to planet doing good, helping the oppressed fight oppressors, providing resources to dying planets, talking Thanos out of going after the Infinity Gauntlet—basically, being T’Challa.
This is morally grey at best!
But I loved that in their arguments about it, this very brief episode made room for T’Challa’s anger and Yondu’s guilt, before have T’Challa realize that Yondu was right about him. He did want to go exploring, and he’s become the person he is because of it. Where Yondu’s decision to keep Peter Quill is simply correct in retrospect—Ego’s a monster—here he stole a kid from a loving family, but also T’Challa loves his Ravager family. T’Challa made the universe better, planet by planet—but back on his home planet, his parents have mourned his disappearance for two decades. It’s a LOT.
But the episode is also mostly a blast? I love it when writers can weave so much nuance and complexity into something that is also just fun.
Which leads into the last thing I want to say, which is this: We all know that Chadwick Boseman was a treasure. He was an incredible actor and director. The way that he took on the symbolism of T’Challa, and the importance of that character to so many people, was actually heroic. Real-life heroic. He was also a brilliant comic actor who didn’t get to be funny in too many of his roles. So I want to say that this was especially moving, because here he gets to be heroic, loving T’Challa, who will do anything to help the underdog, but he also gets to be hilarious.
Finally, in the midst of all the MCU’s musings on fate, free will, determinism, alternate timelines, nature/nurture, can I just say how much I dig the fact that T’Challa’s sense of justice seems to be a fixed point in the multiverse?
Favorite Lines:
- The Watcher: “What you call destiny is just an equation—a product of variables.”
- Korath, repeatedly: “Classic Star-Lord!”
- Korath: “My boss, Ronan…super, super intense!”
- T’Challa to Yondu: No treasure is worth as much as the good that can be done with it.”
- T’Challa, on Nebula and Thanos: “It’s a long story. I’ve been trying to get them into counseling”
- Taserface, on T’Challa and Peter Quill being interchangeable: Sure! I don’t know! All humans look alike to me!
- Thanos: “T’Challa here taught me there was more than one way to re-allocate the Universe’s resources.”
T’Challa: “Sometimes the best weapon in your arsenal is just a good argument.”
Thanos: “I still assert my plan was not without its merits.”
Kraglin: “I’m pretty sure it’s still just genocide Big Guy.”
Thanos: “I’m pretty sure it’s efficient.” - Drax: “We should take another one. You look terrible. I look great.”
- Yondu: “We rob from rich and give to poor, just like that Earth folk hero of yours, Robin Leach.”
- Howard the Duck: “You know what they say: When you’re outta luck, always go duck!”
- T’Challa, to Yondu: “I was the one who told you I wanted to see the world. All you did was show me the universe.”
- Okoye to Thanos: “My friend, that sounds an awful lot like genocide.”
Thanos: “No, no, no… because its random (snaps fingers) and, I might add, efficient!”
Leah Schnelbach just wants to say that if Marvel makes a travel show about Howard the Duck barhopping across the Universe, they would watch the heck out of it. Come talk to them about free will vs. determinism on Twitter!
Much better than last week! Whereas last week was a recreation of the movie but with a different character, right away this episode swerves left with Korath fan-boying over Star Lord (a funny twist on the original version). And then we get a wholly original tale. The short run time still felt a little chaotic, which was my complaint last week, but it is a minor nitpick this week. Hopefully the rest of the episodes are just as original!
I thought Captain Carter was very good but I had a slight worry that they sometimes put the best one out first when doing these stand alone stories to hook you in so I half expected a dip in quality this week… boy was I wrong about that, I don’t think I have enjoyed an half hour of television as much in 2021.
Unlike last week there was not a bad voice performance anywhere to let the side down particular praise to Josh Brolin, Karen Gillan., Djimon Hounsou and of course Chadwick Boseman, what a massive relief for everyone that his final work is an absolute triumph.
And I defy anyone not to shed a tear at the on screen message at the end.
Of all the teased episodes, this is the one I looked forward to the least. The idea of T’Challa becoming Star Lord sounded boring and uninteresting.
And then the episode just kept on delivering and delivering. This is the kind of speculation that What If… should be, which was not represented in the first episode.
This was much better than I expected. Taking T’Challa away from Wakanda and sticking him into Guardians seemed like a really random idea and I couldn’t anticipate what the point would be, but it paid off really well. Instead of a bumbling loser “Star-Lord” who finds himself forced into an ill-fitting heroic role by circumstance, you have a true hero inhabiting the role from the get-go, and he’s able to do vastly more good with the power it gives him. And I’m glad that he was able to reconnect with Wakanda at the end.
And yes, it is an improvement on the first episode, not just rehashing the familiar beats with a different character, but really living up to the show’s professed premise that the ripples from one small variation can change everything. And it differs from what I gather was a common tendency of the What If…? comic to have the alternate timelines turn out much worse. This is a much more utopian universe, despite that cliffhanger at the end. (It just underlines how blinkered the TVA and He Who Remains were in their insistence on allowing only a single “Sacred Timeline” to exist. Seems to me they picked the wrong one.)
Korath was the real revelation here. I never imagined he could be such a fun character, and Djimon Hounsou showed an unexpected flair for comedy. It was also nice to see Carina given a second chance after she was so poorly served in the original version.
(By the way, I think Korath being a T’Challa fanboy is an inside joke, since Hounsou played T’Challa in a 2010 Black Panther motion comic.)
I am curious as to how T’Challa’s disappearanced changed things so much that both Cap’s shield and Mjolnir ended up in the Collector’s possession prior to 2014 (assuming the opening scene took place around the same time in both realities). It’s not like Wakanda had any notable interaction with the rest of the world back then. Or maybe it’s just that Thanos’s reform left a power vacuum that the Collector filled, and he attacked Earth and Asgard to obtain those trophies.
The idea that T’Challa talked Thanos out of his plan is interestingly plausible. Thanos was motivated by a desire to end scarcity and got too caught up in the wrong way of doing it. But T’Challa comes from a country that’s solved the kind of scarcity and poverty problems that plague the rest of the world, so it stands to reason that he could’ve shown Thanos a better option for distributing resources. And as we see, Thanos still isn’t entirely convinced his plan was wrong. The time might come when he decides to go ahead with it after all.
(Oof… sorry about the weird fonts. I copied and pasted from another board, and this forum does weird things with copied text sometimes.)
Do we know for sure that any episodes will get a follow up? I’ve seen a lot of chatter about it, but it could just be a thing that the show does: set up something for further speculation, then suggest it’s a story for another day. They don’t have to tell that story, just postulate the question for us to consider.
@5 – I think so. I heard chatter that Peggy’s story will be picked up in season 2.
@6: Right, but what I’m wondering is if the chatter is based on evidence, or if it’s an assumption based on how the ending is framed.
I have decided that Ravager Thanos is the galaxy’s most emphatic condom advocate.
Also, given that Chadwich Boseman is dead, it would be kind of hard to do a follow-up for the episode, unless it’s this season. They could recast him, but that’s kind of disrespectful. And just having him die offcamera, or retire, would get rid of the central character for the episode.
I’m pleased that this entry avoided the timeline problems of last week; a vice the comic original succumbed to often enough to annoy me. There should be only one divergence/nexus event in this sort of allohistorical romp, and making one as tiny as Yondu’s decision to delegate the kidnapping lead to such galactic-level alterations is hilarious.
What more can I say about this perfect little gem? Every last beat was flawless. And as a dog lover, seeing Cosmo find his forever home was a particular satisfaction. Good boy Cosmo, good boy.
I was not expecting to see Good!Thanos and that cracked me up; I kind of love that T’Challa just makes everywhere he is a better place.
@@.-@, so, what I was wondering is at what point Thanos reformed – for example, did he ever recruit Loki to try and steal the Tesseract and invade New York? Did the Avengers ever form at all? Did Loki just stay on Asgard? When/how did Hela make a resurgence? Did Odin die – again, it’s a little hard to pin down exactly when in the timeline all this is happening. All of those things could change the power vacuum/makeup as well.
And, who knows, maybe Ego recruiting Peter ends up having really awful consequences (implied by the voiceover…) .
I do think they maybe underplayed a little bit the fact that this kid was kidnapped and the absolute trauma that would be for his parents, and even for him as a kid, but it’s okay because Earth is boring and Yondu was going to give him a better life. Maybe I’m stretching it a bit but it seems a little too similar to what we’ve seen in history where rich/wealthy people are able to shadily adopt poorer kids to give them a better life (think black market adoption rings like Georgia Tan) without really grasping the trauma involved for everybody, to say nothing about how race is often a factor in such things. But I get that the tone of the story is not really intending to delve that deeply into these kind of things and so the conflict is resolved rather quickly and everybody generally means well, learns their lesson and gets along, yay. Very Full House-ish ;)
@8/Citrakayah: I don’t think recasting a role is disrespectful, at least not if it’s done after a fair interval. A character is not the actor. It’s something co-created by the actor, a product of their work, and thus part of their legacy. Carrying it forward seems like an act of respect to me. If an architect dies, it’s not disrespectful to keep living or working in their buildings. If anything, it would be more disrespectful to abandon them.
T’Challa, the character, is important to the MCU and meaningful to its audience in ways few other characters are. The actor’s performance is an important part of that, but it’s not the only thing about the character that’s special and influential. It would be a shame to eliminate that important character and erase all his impact because of what happened to the actor. I don’t think that would respect his legacy at all.
@10/Lisamarie: Since Nebula wasn’t as heavily cyborgified in this timeline, Thanos must’ve been reformed well before Guardians/2014 and thus presumably well before The Avengers. Also, the Collector having Mjolnir suggests that it was never enchanted by Odin with the “worthiness” charm (or the Collector wouldn’t have been able to lift it to hang it in the display case), so the events of Thor presumably happened differently.
Mr. Boseman did not originate T’Challa, the character existed long before him. The role should be recast after a suitable period of respect for the late actor who did sch a fine job. Though one rather pities any successor.
Re-watching this episode, I was struck by (accidental, I’m sure) parallels to a story line in Alan Moore’s comic series “Tom Strong”, in which a time splitting Maguffin created a timeline where the titular hero had a somewhat different ancestry. And while Tom STONE lacked some of his equivalent’s heroic attributes, (like augmented physical strength, just as alt-T’Challa had presumably never received the heart-shaped herb), he, like alt-T’Challa, had a noteworthy talent for converting enemies to allies, eventually resulting in a near-utopia. Sadly, that happy world contained the seeds of its own fall, in a thematic parallel to Lancelot and Guinevere. Hopefully, Ego’s grand plan aside, alt-T’Challa’s world will have a happier ending. Or maybe not. Or both. This is “What If”, after all.
A passing note on time-frames, since some posters broached the subject: Alt-T’Challa’s abduction took place in 1988, and the main body of the story twenty years later, so 2008.
I agree recasting T’Challa is not disrespectful. This does seem to be a current mood among some. I’ve had conversations at some cons with folks who think once an actor dies all their films should be retired, never to be seen again, because showing them is disrespectful to the dead. I cannot fathom this attitude. Unless you’re Judge Wilson (1776 reference, not historical) most people want to be remembered and their work, whatever it is, is a prime way of remembering them.
@10 they really gloss over the whole kidnapping thing.
I like how the episode doubled-down on how Thanos sounds like a philosophy undergrad who’s convinced he’s found the one solution to the world’s problem. Even if he’s realized their are logistical problems with his approach , he’s still convinced he’s right.
@15/noblehunter: I kind of got the impression that Yondu would have let T’Challa go if he’d asked for it, since he was the wrong target, but that T’Challa chose to go with him because of his yearning for adventure. Although in that case, neither one of them did right by T’Challa’s parents.
It’s not quite the best timeline, because somewhere along the way The Collector ended up with Korg’s hand/arm.
Hopefully he’s still alive and got a sweet new one (bro).
And we should all be thankful that we got as much of Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa as we did.
I loved last week’s Cap episode, but this one was even better, and wicked funny to boot. Chadwick Boseman was a delight in the more comedic version of the character. He will be missed.
One reviewer suggested that it would have been nice to actually see T’Challa’s awesome instead of just hearing about it. For example what was the argument that changed Thanos’ mind?
The main thing I was thinking all through this was “Wow, this is so Farscape.”
I’d always said since GotG first came out in 2014 that it if you ever wanted a Farscape movie, here you go. It’s basically the same story with the same characters and the same attitude, James Gunn has openly admitted he was heavily influenced, and I always assumed that casting Ben Browder in GotG2 was another implicit acknowledgment.
Then today when T’Challa said “It’s time to save the world – we have to rob a bank”, I was like, “So it’s still Farscape then.”
(Which is not a bad thing btw, Farscape is one of my favourite shows, so to see more of it is good.)
But yeah, the raid on the Collector’s museum was the Farscape season 2 “Liars Guns and Money” three-part finale almost to the letter. Although I will also say that only-slightly-enhanced Nebula looked like Seven of Nine mixed with Zhaan, and Cull Obsidian walloping Thanos with the big hammer reminded me of Buffy beating Glory at the end of S5.
And I remain very impressed by the number of actors they managed to get back in, sometimes even just for one line. I mean it’s probably a big pay check for that one line, and they get the publicity for it, but still, it’s impressive the sheer number.
@20/DS9Continuing: “And I remain very impressed by the number of actors they managed to get back in, sometimes even just for one line. I mean it’s probably a big pay check for that one line, and they get the publicity for it, but still, it’s impressive the sheer number.”
It’s possible that some of these actors are appearing in multiple episodes as various versions of their characters, so their single line in one episode might be recorded in the same session as a larger part in a different episode.
@21 Ayup. Bigger paydays, fun for the actors, and less problem rustling up bodies (voices) for production.
So I want to say that this was especially moving, because here he gets to be heroic, loving T’Challa, who will do anything to help the underdog, but he also gets to be hilarious.
And fashionable, like GODDAMN