‘What If… The World Lost It’s Mightiest Heroes?’

It’s been a hell of a week this week, who would have thought that giving a cat insulin injections could be so traumatic for all concerned…? Not me but I learned, oh did I learn… But anyway. What with everything, the fact that it was suddenly Wednesday totally escaped my attention until Twitter started to make noises about it being ‘What If…?’ time again. I feel like I’ve earned this one… 😉

As always, the title is a massive spoiler for what the story is about but what do you expect from a show like this? 😉 The good news though is that the title doesn’t give away too much more than that and there is a lot more going on here than you’d think. I’ll try not to give too much away then but I’m not making any promises at all so be warned before you keep reading, you might just want to give the show a quick watch before you read on. If you’re still here, let’s go shall we…?

It is a bad time to be one of Earth’s mightiest heroes… The Avengers haven’t even teamed up yet and already, someone is taking them down… permanently. Nick Fury is on the case but can he solve this murderous mystery before he becomes the next victim? And even if he does… Is the enemy of his enemy really a friend?

I think it was last week where I mentioned that what I really wanted out of the ‘What If…?’ series was at least one show where things didn’t turn out ok in the end. A story that wasn’t afraid to get a little dark in its storytelling. ‘What If… The World Lost It’s Mightiest Heroes?’ isn’t quite that story but it’s near enough that I’m happy with it. And maybe I just need to be a little more realistic about my expectations here. MCU movies are about hope and that things will get better if people work at it (simplistic but you know what I mean) so it will never be quite as dark as I want it to be. This is pretty close though.

On the face of it, what we have is a series of murder mysteries to be solved and I’m not going to lie, it won’t take much to put you on the right track. I wasn’t quite there though, I got the method but didn’t nail ‘whodunnit’. As with the other episodes though, it’s about so much more than that. I loved the sense of seeing these top drawer characters being taken out and the world gently going down a slightly darker path for it, almost without realising. It also gives Black Widow a lot more of a chance to shine in her own right although having a situation where the male avengers had to go before she could shine wasn’t cool, not at all. Oh well, Natasha Romanoff was awesome and I guess it’s never a bad thing to see that, even in a situation like this. I also liked the focus on how the Avengers were always an idea, before anything else, and you can’t kill an idea, you just change the roster a little bit. Without giving too much away, that made for a nice little twist at the end. So, a ‘regular sized murder mystery’ then but with some bigger themes underpinning it. That’s something that I’ve noticed in the show, there’s a tendency to show us that feelings and emotion can effect change just as much as something physical taking place. It all runs together and I think that’s really important.

And then Loki shows up and shows us that it’s all very well being in touch with our feelings but there’s nothing like an Asgardian god to really take the ‘What If…?’ and run with it. Paying Earth a visit can be for totally different reasons (and the great thing about the show is that it gives us moments like these, Loki’s new motivations given what has happened to Thor) but the outcome can still be the same, even if you have to take the ‘long way round’ to get there. I love the fact that there’s an Earth ruled by Loki, I’ll just bet that he doesn’t have a clue what to do with it now he has it. It’s always the way…

And then we leave this episode on a slightly hopeful note that reminds us why we all watch this stuff in the first place. A decent twist and the fact that someone will come along and put it right for us when it all goes wrong. Maybe Loki was right about us the whole time… ‘What If… The World Lost It’s Mightiest Heroes?’ doesn’t hit the heights of the ‘T’challa Episode’ but to be fair, nothing else probably will either. It’s a lot of fun though and after the last few days, that was just what I needed so a win all round.