What If? #2: Star-Panther?

Welcome back, my tenacious Ticktholders!

The topic of today's post is not the greatest episode of What If...? in the world; it's just trying to be a tribute. Marvel couldn't remember the greatest What If...?  in the world, so they tried to make a trib-yooooot! *five minutes of Jack Black noises!*

Umm.., sorry about that.... Actually, no, I'm not. My manic, pop-referential tangents are hilariously disturbing, and I get to crack myself up, even if no one else comes along for the ride. And strangely enough, a hilariously disturbing (but mostly disturbing) kidnapping is what kicks off this week's episode.

You've probably guessed by now that I don't think very highly of the second episode of What If...?, and I'll get into the reasons why in just a bit.

First, if you don't want to get spoiled, go watch it for reference or enjoyment before you read any further. New episodes drop every Wednesday on Disney+, and there are supposed to be ten of them in total, so I'll be doing this for the next two months.

Second, I've been hearing lately that asking for clicks to your content in your content is the surest way to not get clicks on your content. So I won't be doing the social media buttons/comments thing anymore. They're nice to have, but I don't have many and I'm starting to see my numbers go down, and it's slowly making me lose faith in what I love to do, so no more click-begging from your friendly Bloggerhood Ticktmaster, Animeister, or any of my other blogging Variants from now on.

And third, the breakdown begins after the image, so strap in and get your whistle-spear ready. Ravagers Forever!

The Premise: "What If T'Challa Became A Star Lord?" Uatu (Jeffrey Wright) gives his usual introductory narration, slightly altered to ponder the ages-old question of nature versus nurture. In this version of events, Yondu delegates the 1988 abduction of Peter Quill to Kraglin and Taserface

Inserting obligatory Simpsons/MCU meme here....

who pick up on the Vibranium mound in Wakanda instead of Ego's Celestial implants, and so kidnap a restless T'Challa in Peter's place. Yondu is frantically cross at them--at first--for grabbing the wrong Earthling (which they did because, in a Universal scaling of racism, "all humans look alike"). But rather than, oh, I don't know...scanning the planet for Celestial energy so they can snatch Peter, too, thereby getting him away from the influence of his planet-assimilating, small-g-god father, drawing the attention of the potential Guardians, the Kree, and the Nova Corps, and ultimately giving him the patchwork family influences that would help him later resist and defeat Ego, thereby saving Earth from becoming part of Ego's consciousness? Nope. Rather than that, Yondu has the attention span of a hummingbird with ADHD, and just leaves with T'Challa because the boy says he's tired of Wakanda's sheltered ways and he wants to be an explorer. Points for going with the dark implications that the comics series was known for, but it was achieved through a poorly-written copout, and it had my brain screaming for the entire episode--except for when it was screaming about other things, which I will talk about later. For now, let's see who's doing the voices, shall we?

The Returning Cast: Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa / Star Lord (the first of four versions of the character that we will see in the series, and the last instances of him portraying the character before his passing nearly a year ago), Michael Rooker as Yondu, Sean Gunn (brother of GotG director James Gunn) as Kraglin, Chris Sullivan as Taserface (wait,...you mean Toby from This Is Us? He's Taserface? Then I have to do another one...).

I have spent way too much time on what little of the cast list I have typed out so far, so here's the rest of them, copied and pasted from Wikipedia (with some editing because I'm not a total slouch): Kurt Russell as Ego, Karen Gillan (Netflix's underwhelming Gunpowder Milkshake, review coming soon) as Nebula, Djimon Hounsou as Korath the Pursuer (the guy that says "who?" at the beginning of Guardians Vol.1), John Kani as T'Chaka, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Josh Brolin as Thanos, Benicio del Toro as The Collector, Seth Green as Howard the Duck, Ophelia Lovibond as Carina, Carrie Coon as Proxima Midnight, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Ebony Maw

Replacement Voice Cast: Voice acting legend Fred Tasciatore lends his talents to Drax the Destroyer (honoring Dave Bautista's portrayal, albeit briefly) and Corvus Glave (taking over for Michael James Shaw), and fellow voice actor Brian T. Delaney briefly fills Chris Pratt's shoes as Peter Quill.

Once again, the sheer amount of returning star power, just to do voice work (and many of them for just a few lines) is impressive, and the line deliveries mostly work.

The Animation: The Waking Life-meets-Max Fleischer 3D style is back, and done a bit better where dialogue scenes are concerned. The nightmare fuel factor is all but gone this time around, though the Disneyfied face-pulling persists, as it (mostly) rightly should. I kept picturing Thanos as Gaston for some reason. I've done all I can in the meme department for now, so Photoshop that one yourselves, thank you very much. The action is less, but still well done, and the "establishing shots" are as impressive as they were before. So what's different?

What Changed: The obvious thing is that T'Challa is Star Lord. He's still wearing his trademark Vibranium necklace, but now dresses in a high-collar, black, purple, and gold, leather jacket and has a Star Lord helmet. His ship (which looks like the Milano, but has a T'Challa paintjob and is instead called the Mandela, in reference to both the former South African Prime Minister and the eponymous, false memory/multiverse theory that came out of his supposed death in prison in the 80s). But unlike the Peter Quill version, T'Challa's Star Lord is a famous hero who used Robin Hood-like tactics to fix the socioeconomic problems of numerous planets, talked Thanos out of the Snap by teaching him economics or something, saved Drax's homeworld from the Kree invasion, and is trying to get Nebula (who is more biological in this Universe, sporting a sexy, blonde, femme fatale hairdo that fits perfectly with the animation style and the retro-futuristic world of the Guardians films) into family therapy with Thanos. Speaking of Thanos, he abandoned his plan and his dictatorial ways to join the Ravagers (though he still thinks his plan would have been efficient--more on that later). Filling the power vacuum left in his absence? A muscular version of The Collector, who now uses the Black Order (Proxima, Corvus, Black Dwarf, and Ebony Maw) as security for his collection on Knowhere. After stealing the Orb (Power Stone) and subduing a fanboying Korath and his minions, T'Challa, Yondu, Kraglin, Tobyface, and Korath meet up with Thanos and Nebula at Drax's bar to plan a heist: stealing the Embers of Genesis (cosmic energy seeds that do what they sound like they would do) from The Collector so they can revive dying planets with them. Under the pretense of offering the Power Stone to him, the Ravager crew then create a distraction so T'Challa can search for the Embers. In the meantime, he frees Howard the Duck (who is worthless as a tour guide) and Cosmo the Spacedog, finds a Wakandan spaceship with a message from his father and four Dora Milaje mannequins inside, and fights off the Black Order. Heist movie twists ensue that involve the characters you might expect (and The Collector's red-skinned assistant, Carina), and after an Easter egg-filled fight with The Collector, the Ravagers unleash some of the Embers on Knowhere, killing the remaining members of the Black Order, and leaving The Collector's fate in the hands of his former prisoners. All of them. So, not a happy ending for the villain here. With their mission complete, T'Challa decides to return home to introduce his families to one another...where Thanos begins discussing the merits of genocide with African royalty. And they chose this episode as a "fitting tribute" (as some are calling it) to Chadwick Boseman? I mean, yeah, they basically made T'Challa the Universal embodiment of Falcon's "Do Better" speech from the finale of his series, given all of the ludicrous bullshit he apparently fixed just by redistributing wealth on an intergalactic level and talking to people for the past thirty-three years. Oh, yeah. Super-easy. And super-sarcastic. That's the second stupidest fucking thing I ever heard, especially considering what I'm going to rage about in the Verdict and Implications sections in a few moments. And it ends with Ego showing up at the Dairy Queen where Peter is mopping the floor, to see if he can spend some quality time with dear, old Dad. Glowy eyes, MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!! The end.

The Verdict: Stupidly simplistic writing, a more radical deviation from the norm with a dark level of implication that adheres to the comics in a way that the Captain Carter episode did not, better facial dialogue animations, a predictable heist sequence, the villain getting his comeuppance, massive voice talent, plenty of references and Easter eggs for the fans, and a touching family reunion for our stupshitfuckedly perfect hero. It was entertaining enough that I could almost excuse its flaws. But then Thanos had to open his mouth in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the episode's biggest, most infuriating flaw came rolling out like he was a drunk, racist uncle telling inappropriate stories at Thanksgiving, if your uncle was a giant, purple Adolf Hitler. I don't usually like it when people compare a person they don't like to Hitler, or they compare something mildly offensive or inconvenient to the Holocaust. Neither does anybody else, in my experience. But in a matter of seconds, it is made abundantly clear that (a) Thanos is defending the efficiency of his genocide plan to African royalty, and (b) this is presented to the audience as a joke.

It should also be noted from a technicality standpoint that not only is searching the entire Universe for six pieces of cosmic jewelry (one of which he can only obtain by developing feelings for someone and then killing them on a specific planet) while fighting off no less than three dozen superheroes so he can RNG the non-existence of half of all life in the Universe is literally the farthest thing from efficient, but it isn't genocide, either, because genocide is not random and its intent is to completely eradicate a targeted group that has something (typically nationality, belief, or ethnicity) in common. But what the fuck, Marvel? What the cosmic fuck made you think that making light of an established villain defending the efficiency of mass murder to the most oppressed ethnic group in American history, in a tribute episode to the actor behind your only representative main character from that group, was a good idea? Fuck your fucked-up brains, you rich, insensitive little prick-shits! You're lucky I still have a column to finish because otherwise I'd cancel your tone-deaf asses right now! I have to move on to the dark implications of this episode before I loose what's left of my mental and emotional shit, okay?

The Implications: Not only is the Earth probably doomed to become one of the countless, giant, terraformed heads of Ego because everyone was written to just suddenly not care about rescuing Peter Quill from his father anymore, The Collector's collection hints that he might be powerful enough in this timeline to have killed four of the Dora Milaje, Malekith (the Svartalf king from Thor: The Dark World), Captain America, Korg (the rock guy from Ragnarok), Thor, and Hela (from whom he also got the Necrosword, a.k.a. All-Black, which was forged by Knull, the symbiote god, as an anti-Celestial weapon--the same weapon that decapitated the body of Knowhere, and might soon be weilded by Tom Hardy's Venom and/or Christian Bale as Gor the God-Butcher in Let There Be Carnage and Thor: Love & Thunder, respectively). Moreover, it is possible that, following exposure to the Embers of Genesis, Knowhere could regenerate its body, triggering a Celestial war between it and Ego. Whether this is a better or worse outcome than Knowhere and Ego joining forces, I cannot begin to fathom because I am neither high enough nor nerd enough to speculate further. Just know that in this timeline, there are no Avengers, no Guardians of the Galaxy, no hope for any planets, star systems, or alien "gods" that are unfortunate to suffer the wrath of two rampaging Celestials, and Marvel's writers are even less intelligent and culturally sensitive than usual. All is lost.

My caffeine-fueled righteous indignation has crashed and burned with glorious purpose, so stay tuned for my lack of social integrity as I review another episode next week. Goodnight?

Ticketwatcher,

Out.