…in a world where Thanos didn’t turn out to be a genocidal dictator, he turns into the muscle for a team of wannabe Robin Hoods who can’t stop telling dad jokes. Nobody believes that Thanos is being serious here. And why would they? Its just a joke, and Thanos is playing along because its funny. He’s playing the straightman.
This is all elementary chaos theory at play. A butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia eventually causes tornadoes in Alabama. And in a multi-verse with billions of versions of Thanos you will get the occasional one who turns out to be a good guy.
And I loved this episode. I didn’t really enjoy either of the Guardian movies and hate Peter Quill and thought Black Panther was just okay. But I really enjoyed this. It took everything I didn’t like about those three movies and turned it into something I love.
Behind the scenes I think that the writer/director combo is the strongest yet IMHO for the Marvel TV shows, with AC Bradley (from Trollhunters: Tales of Arcadia) as Head Writer and Marvel veteran storyboard artist Bryan Andrews directing. I’m endlessly fascinated by what is going on behind the scenes in Marvel Phase 4. Each show alternates between male writer/female director or female writer/male director which really isn’t the norm in Hollywood: remember Game of Thrones famously only had one female director (who only directed four episodes, last episode was in Season 4) and two female writers who got part credit for 4 episodes, last one in 2013.
Marvel are doing much more than I ever expected them to do on this front, and it both seems like a long-term thing (as long as Feige stays in charge) and is something they aren’t using to ‘toot their own horn.’ They are just doing it, which I appreciate. It does mean though they have taken a punt on some relatively inexperienced talent. But I think that for the most part those punts have paid off, and I give them a bit of slack when they didn’t.
I have a good friend who is a sound engineer/editor for Skywalker Sound and who is the lead sound editor for the whole series (yes, believe it or not!).
Anyway, he’s been telling our friend group for months about how cool all this is, and how the sounds are crazy, and stuff, but he won’t tell us anything specific about the episodes. Apparently there are some super-violent fight scenes left to come, but that’s all I’ve managed to pry out of him.
…but this wasn’t a world “where Thanos didn’t turn out to be a genocidal dictator”. This was a world where Thanos was a genocidal dictator and was putting his plan to wipe out half the universe into action until Star Lord made with the Christ Power and talked him out of it.
…incorrect. We don’t know when Star Lord did his intervention, but Thanos’s relationship with Nebula suggests it probably happened well before any genocidal thoughts had started to turn into some sort of action.
In real life many of us have “turn left” moments. We could have turned left…but we turned right. And turning right changes the entire course of your life. I can count about five times that has happened to me.
I can imagine a young Star Lord talking to a disillusioned Thanos over a drink and it turning into an intellectual discussion that lasts for hours and ends up with Thanos going home in a slightly better mood. And when he wakes up the next morning, he just decides to do things slightly differently.
Think about this monologue from Craig Ferguson talking about Brittany Spears.
Craig talks about the day he decide to kill himself. He made a plan to jump off a bridge. But before he headed off to the bridge to jump to his death he decided to stop and have a drink at the pub…then promptly forgot he was going to kill himself.
In another world and in another time Ferguson would have taken that swan-dive off the Tower Bridge. But in this reality he didn’t do it, and the entire thing becomes a punchline for one of his jokes.
And It’s how I imagine it happened here. Thanos probably boasted to Star Lord about his plans, and they argued for hours. Then he went home, went to sleep, woke up and thought “yeah? Nah.” He didn’t do it. So he isn’t a genocidal dictator. Because he literally didn’t do any genocidal dictating.
But Star Lord won’t let him forget that conversation that night and brings it up as a punchline for a joke: to remind Thanos how easily it all could have different. Because that’s what friends do. There is nothing inherently funny about suicide, just as there isn’t anything funny about genocide. But when you find yourself in a dark place sometimes it only takes a conversation to get you out of it.
That’s the great thing about What If. You can imagine whatever backstory you want . They’ve only got 30 minutes to tell the story onscreen, but you can bet that the writers room have got whiteboards and organization charts plotting out exactly how Thanos got from Point A to Point B. I very much prefer it that the writers don’t try and connect the dots for us though. Just throw us in the deep-end: I’m good with that.
I doubt that this was rewritten much because of Boseman’s death. I mean, he was in it. It would be hard to turn it into a eulogy for a guy who hadn’t died yet. I think it was just part of the joke of switching these characters. T’Challa is the renaissance man who’s good at everything. Peter Quill is the fuckup who falls backwards into success. Put T’Challa in Peter Quill’s place, and he’s successful to a ridiculous degree - right up to the point where Ego eats the universe, because Peter didn’t have the relationship with Yondu and the Guardians to give him the skills and support he needed to beat his dad, and T’Challa doesn’t have the personal connection with Ego that pulls him into the situation and puts him in a position to stop him.
Yeah, I thought a lot of it did seem a bit over the top. Yondu went straight and became the best dad ever. The Collector went from “eccentric intergalactic hoarder” to “jacked supervillain”, apparently capable of defeating Thor, Captain America, and Hela. Without T’Challa around, apparently even Kilmonger chilled out.
Presumably no Gamora because T’Challa convinced Thanos, the “Reasonable Titan”, to stop decimating (bifurcating?) worlds before he came to her planet and “adopted” her. Also presumably, he adopted Nebula under better circumstances.
I know it’s sad that he died young, but people understand that Chadwick Boseman wasn’t ACTUALLY T’Challa / Black Panther IRL?
I just took this as an even more over-the-top goofy GotG and enjoyed it as such. I’m not going to try to read anything too deep into these “What If” episodes.
I liked the Easter eggs - T’Challa’s ship was now named “Mandela” instead of “Milano”, the weapon case included Cap’s shield & Mjolnir, etc.
I loved the T’Challa as Star Lord episode. Imagine Monty Python writing a Marvel comic. It’s zany absurdism. You got to love it for what it is.
While animation and the “what if” conceit gives a lot of room for creativity for the story-writers, the thirty-minute time limit is a real restriction. You can’t expect the depth of backstory we got from the twenty-some movies. You can’t expect much of any depth, without risking the pacing.
So in this timeline, T’Challa becomes Star Lord, but not Black Panther. Presumably someone else inherits it from T’Chaka. I can imagine them using something like this for the next Black Panther movie. What if the new timeline is T’Challa never became the Black Panther, but someone else?
Presumably when T’chaka passed it, it would be to Shuri (with a challenge from M’Baka?), and knowing that might not go well, he held onto the BP power for longer with the hope of finding T’Challa. I wonder if he also would have retrieved Killmonger from the US and raised him so he can have a male heir ready, just in case.
Thanos picked up Gamora while already decimating(?) planets when she was quite young. So T’Challa would have talked to Thanos sometime after that, right?
While I didn’t dislike the first two, this third one was what I was hoping the show would be like more than “What if character A took on character B’s life?” I mean, those are fine but I wanted to see MORE than just that. And boy, did this one deliver on that.
I would be amused if one of the What If… scenarios followed some weird behind-the-scenes plotline with minor MCU characters, and there is a twist ending in which the Watcher reveals it was the way things really played out, and only he was aware of it. Something like Luis from Ant-Man and Ned from Spider-Man unwittingly foil a plot by A.I.M. to take over the world.
They didn’t say exactly, only that she had died on a mission somewhere near Odessa. The “What if…” here is, apparently, “What if Hope Pym got recruited into Shield?”
Right. The Nexus event was Hope van Dyne joining S.H.I.E.L.D. and subsequently being killed on a mission two years previously. The Watcher never stated what the Nexus was (as he did in the previous two episodes) the better to serve the “whodunit’” nature of the plot.
. They’ve only got 30 minutes to tell the story onscreen, but you can bet that the writers room have got whiteboards and organization charts plotting out exactly how Thanos got from Point A to Point B. I very much prefer it that the writers don’t try and connect the dots for us though. Just throw us in the deep-end: I’m good with that.