Review: Marvel What If…? “What If… Peter Quill Attacked Earth’s Mightiest Heroes?

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In a timeline where Yondu gave Peter Quill right to Ego the Living Planet right away, Peter returns to Earth with Ego’s power, altering SHIELD. Howard Stark and Peggy Carter begin to assemble the mightiest heroes of the time: Hank Pym/Ant-Man, Bill Foster/Goliath, Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier, King T’Chaka/Black Panther, and Wendy Lawson/Mar-Vell. Joined by a vengeful Thor, the assembled…Pre-vengers try to stop this wayward son, but it’s Hank’s young daughter Hope who helps them to understand that all Peter wants is to go home. Ego arrives on Earth, so Peter helps them beat him back, but the team commits to getting him at his source, and Peter is adopted by Hank.

OUR TAKE

As mentioned with the previous episode, a thing I found myself interested in seeing with some of last season’s episodes is how the Avengers roster would be shifted if the changes of each episodes’ timeline had stuck. We didn’t get to see that in Ep 3 where all the original Avengers (sans Steve) were assassinated, or the episode where Killmonger killed Tony, which weren’t the point of those episodes but still felt like a missed opportunity. Here, we finally get to see that by simply moving up the time the Avengers would first be showing up. I hesitate to call them Golden Age since it’s the 80’s, not the 40’s, but it’s basically made up of all the people who probably would be picked from back then. A semi-retired Hank Pym gets to be an active Ant-Man, Lawrence Fishburne gets to put on a blue and white version as Goliath, Bucky gets defrosted and even talks to Howard (instead of mercing him a few years later as planned), T’Challa’s father gets in on the action (heck, I don’t think T’Challa ever got to be a proper Avenger in the main timeline), and Mar-Vell is actually Captain Marvel! What a concept!

But it’s not just about putting together a fanservice 80’s team, as we also get to see kid Hope bond with kid Peter Quill, something we never would’ve seen in the proper timeline, which is honestly pretty cute and provides the heart of the story. It also kinda offsets the one real issue that keeps this episode from being a 10/10, which is that this team of heroes doesn’t get much chance to really stretch their legs, personality-wise. Part of that is very likely due to this being a half-hour episode and the limitations there, and they certainly do what they can to differentiate Hank and Bucky from everyone else using their established personalities, but everyone else feels kinda samey. I’m sure if this was a multi-part story or even maybe a 90 minute movie, we’d probably have more time to give them all something to do, but alas. Regardless, I still had a LOT of fun with this scenario, and if a metric of quality for these What-Ifs is making me want to see more of this timeline, this one definitely succeeded. We’re setting the bar high for the rest of the season, which I’m quite thrilled to see do more from here.