Review: Marvel’s What If…? “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In a timeline where Thor was an only child and had a massive rager, Howard the Duck and Darcy get married and have a child, an egg, whose strange birth circumstances draw the worst forces in the universe to it.

OUR TAKE

Happy fourth night of What If-ukkah! Make sure to light the fourth candle on your Marv-enorah and eat your Iron Latkes, and don’t forget to play a game of Spin the Deadpool Dreidel! We officially hit the halfway point of our eight day marathon of What If, and this time we’re just going duck wild with an unexpected sequel to a previous episode. We’ve had follow ups to other stories, as the first season had characters from each of the timelines shown come together as the Guardians of the Multiverse in the finale and then followed that up in the second season finale by bringing back Captain Carter and Strange Supreme. But only Carter got a full fledged sequel to her story through doing her version of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and she was in the very first episode so it would make sense to give her that treatment first. This time though, we’re continuing in the timeline where Thor was an only child with more of a spin-off than sequel, instead focusing on the hinted at romance between this world’s version of Howard the Duck and Darcy from the Thor movies and Wandavision.

Bit of an odd choice out of all of those stories in Season 1, but I guess most of them couldn’t really BE followed up on. Carter already got hers, Star Lord T’Challa is scrapped since they refuse to do more since Boseman’s death, Strange and his world are gone, Zombies is already getting a spin-off, Killmonger is still imprisoned (which is a shame since his was my fave from that season), and the Black Widow from the Ultron episodes is now in the “all the Avengers are dead” universe, so maybe THAT one could have been done? Either way, this is what we got and to sum up my thoughts about that, it’s plenty of fun seeing all of these minor movie villains get an appearance and pile on one another, but in the end this all just feels like empty calories. Maybe it’s because Darcy and Howard have only really ever been supporting characters in previous appearances, so they don’t feel built to carry a story on their own like the other protagonists of these stories that are all based on central characters. It kinda feels like between this, the mecha episode, and the one that premiered last night, that they’re just throwing stuff at the wall since it’s the last season. Hopefully that’s not the case but we’ve only got a few more days to know for sure! It would really be a shame for this last season to be the least good but I’ll try to keep my hopes up just enough until all’s said and done.