Marvel’s What If? Season Finale Will Bring Resolution

Marvel’s What If…? is coming to the end of season 1, and a lot of fans have one big question still looming: Is there going to be a point to all this? What If…? has spent its run taking fans into alternate dimensions of the Marvel Multiverse, for standalone stories about how the lives of heroes and villains – or key moments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – can be radically altered by even minor differences in choice or circumstance. However, there’s been little to no evidence that these stories will converge, at least not until the most recent episode of the show. 

In What If…? Episode 8, we got the dark story of “What If… Ultron Won?”. That alternate timeline saw Ultron win the battle of Avengers: Age of Ultron by successfully merging with The Vision and unlocking the power of the Mind Stone to conquer Earth. When Thanos came to Earth to collect the Mind Stone, Ultron murdered him in an instant and seized the power of the Infinity Stones for himself. With the Infinity Stones, Ultron conquered the entire galaxy, and eventually set sights on the multiverse by breaching the realm of The Watcher and doing battle with the cosmic being. What If…? Episode 8 ended with The Watcher having recruit an unlikely ally: Doctor Strange Supreme, the sole survivor of a dark, doomed reality (from Episode 4). 

Well, if Marvel fans are still wondering, What If…? director Bryan Andrews makes it clear to EW that the Episode 9 finale will see The Watcher finally bring the various episodic stories we’ve seen together: 

“There’s a degree of resolution where it feels like all the stuff that’s been percolating across the episodes, the adventure that we bring you into for the ending, ends, to a certain degree,” Andrews teases. 

Writer A.C. Bradley added: “We will pop into and re-meet some of our heroes from the previous episodes, including the lovely Captain Carter [Hayley Atwell], Strange Supreme, Party Thor [Chris Hemsworth], and even Killmonger [Michael B. Jordan].”

If you followed the making of Marvel’s What If…? during production, then this culmination of the season 1 storyline should be no surprise. Early leaks of Marvel merchandising revealed that this team would be taking shape, and even gave them a name: The Guardians of the Multiverse. All we really needed to know was what threat would require The Watcher to break his oath and gather these people together. Ultron is clearly that threat, and now all that remains is the obligatory big Marvel battle to finish things off. 

Interestingly enough, as A.C.  Braley further reveals, it was the notion of this team-up of heroes from across the episodes of What If…? that actually spurred the creators to go a bit darker with the individual character stories we saw during the season: 

“Early on in the first season, like day one talking about it, there was this notion of we’re creating all these great heroes, but we only get to sit with them for 20 or 30 minutes. Wouldn’t it be great to see them again in the finale? And then once that decision was made, it liberated me to make the endings a little bit darker and bigger, knowing that we can give some sort of resolution in the finale.”

Marvel’s What If…? streams on Disney+.