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Hello friends, today for our bonus content, I'm doing a review on the new series by Marvel out on Disney +, called "What If" This series goes through several episodes that give an alternative universe to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Today to start this series review, we start with Episode 1 titled "Captain Carter."
I don't want to give spoilers, but to do this, I have to give spoilers for both "Captain America: The First Avenger" and "What If: Captain Carter" because, well, this one has spoilers. Sorry friends!
So let me start with some critiques, and my primary one is the timeline of the episode, to me makes no sense compared to the canon timeline. What I mean by that is in "Captain America: The First Avenger" Red Skull takes the Tesseract in the opening sequence. The "What If" episode says that the only change to the timeline came when Peggy Carter chose the events of the transformation of Steve Rogers in the laboratory. That isn't making sense, given what happens in the episode requires Red Skull to take the Tesseract out of sequence.
Yes, I realize this is time nerd angst, and I get that. And I also realize, "So suspend your disbelief," and I'm trying to. If someone presents me with clear rules to a situation, I am all about upholding them. If the rules are not what was presented, then I get frustrated. This happens in books too, don't tell me one thing and show me another.
My subsequent criticism is why Howard Stark would invent the Iron man suit? Nothing in the canon of the MCU version of Howard Stark indicated that he had any desire to make a metal suit. I did see he was obsessed with flying technology, but not the suit. Just because someone invents something, and their parent also invented stuff, does not mean that the parent came up with the idea first. I have an autistic son. he comes up with all sorts of things based on stuff I told him. But that doesn't mean in my brain I ever thought up of his conclusion first. I feel this cheats a lot of the forethought put into the characters that were established, and again, remember, the premise is that only one choice was made, and then we can go off-kilter, not reinventing in whole cloth the brain patterns of a person into offspring they haven't had yet.
Aside from those quirks, the only other issue I had was how rapid it was. I understand it's a 30-minute show, so they had to do a lot with a bit of time, but it almost took away from some of the elements for me with the squeezed timeframe.
Now for what I liked about "What If: Captain Carter."
So firstly, I am pro Peggy Carter. I think she should have had a lot more love and support, and I wish that "Agent Carter" the series had been considered canon MCU. I know it's not, but that's a shame. So for this, I loved how they celebrated Peggy and how they celebrated her and Steve love each other despite whatever size or shape or whoever go the serum. It was wonderful.
My next favorite part of this show was showing what a pain in the butt it is for a woman to work in any misogynistic environment and be taken seriously. I am speaking from experience working in a misogynistic environment for over ten years. That whole "You're lucky you're even in the room" thing spoke volumes to me. I dislike that and mansplaining more than you can imagine. I was happy to see that element discussed and brought to the effort of how tough it would be for a Captain Carter in the '40s.
I loved the art direction and style. I thought it was beautifully and artistically put together. It felt comic accurate, and it looked comic accurate, the colors were well done and sharp and clean. I liked the lines and animation. I liked that there was a beautiful canvas to paint this story on. Whomever, the lead artist was, they are talented, in my opinion, especially with facial construction and adding micro-expressions to a drawing.
Overall this was a fun show. I'm not sure yet on my overall score of the series, but for this specific show, I'm giving "What If: Captain Carter" a score of 82/100, so that's a 4-star review. Let's see how the rest of this series pans out!
