What if? #7: Party Thor?

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a The Ticketmaster

I had another title in mind for this post, but it would have spoiled the best joke in this week's episode, and we've been hearing about "Party Thor" ever since the Zombies episode, so it would also be more likely to get interest and circulation than my first choice.
And speaking of interest, I didn't think this was a very interesting episode, so I may deviate from format this week. If you haven't seen the episode, or any that came before it, you can binge to your heart's content (and figure out for yourself just what the Hel a Party Thor even is) on the Disney+ app.
Also, check out my coverage of the first six episodes at the following links:

Episode 1: "What If Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?"

Episode 2: "What If T'Challa Became A Star Lord?"

Episode 3: "What If the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?"

Episode 4: "What If Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead Of His Hands?"

Episode 5: "What If Zombies?"

Episode 6: "What If Killmonger Saved Tony Stark?"

Quick Aside: I have been re-watching the MCU so I can finally see everything I missed between Infinity War and WandaVision, and it only recently occurred to me that Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home (as they are Sony partnerships, and not strictly MCU properties) are not listed on Disney+ as part of Phase 3 of the MCU. Homecoming and all five previous franchise efforts are available on Hulu (but only with the Live TV add-on, which pushes your Hulu subscription to over sixty dollars a month. Yeah...nope), and Far From Home is available to rent or own on VUDU (which pissed off FandangoNOW subscribers by absorbing the service and costing members their entire paid for film collections, so NO to that as well). I have the physical copies, but because I was too lazy to get out of bed and load up a DVD, I sought the "any way you can" method, with quality results. Some of my opinions on Homecoming stand (Flash Thompson is a weak bullying presence, "MJ" is fan-bait, Ned is as out of character as he is out of shape, Peter is a fanboying screw-up, Betty Brant is a wasted character, the villains are amazing), but I didn't give the hero as much credit for his resourcefulness as he deserved the first time around, I didn't dunk on some of the child actor-acting as hard as I should have, and I appreciated Civil War far more on a second viewing.

Okay, back to business. A slightly Variant breakdown of What If...? Episode Seven begins after the image.

The Premise: "What If Thor Were An Only Child?" Again with the obscure verb agreement, Marvel? Anyway, the whole setup begins with Odin deciding not to invite the cosmic irony that came out of adopting Loki as a peacekeeping measure with Jotunheim (which led to Loki seeking vengeance for Odin's secrecy and prima facia racist favoritism by orchestrating two wars with Asgard and attempting to enslave the Earth with Thanos' Chiutari army). As a result of not having an evil step-brother to temper his own mischievous ways (by being D.B. Cooper, for instance) and spur him to humility and heroic greatness, Thor is a boistrous, hard-partying, self-important douchebag...who is somehow still worthy of Mjolnir. When he comes to Earth (this is around the time of the Odinsleep from the first Thor), he brings Sif, the Warriors Three, and a speculator's treasure trove of alien guests, including Skrulls, Contraxians (the yellow aliens from GOTG2--not to be confused with the Sovereign, who are the gold aliens from GOTG2, who were also invited), Jotun (including a Frost Giant version of Loki), Surtur, Korg, the Grandmaster, Drax, Howard the Duck, a cybernetic Nebula, Rocket Don't Call Him A Raccoon, Yondu, various Sakaaran gladiators, Mantis, a few Asguards, and...Topaz? More on her later, but when that many aliens Bifrost their way to Earth, Jane Foster, Darcy, Maria Hill, and Phil Coulson take notice. Thinking it is an alien invasion force because Thor's last party disintegrated a meteor, Jane and Darcy try a diplomatic approach while S.H.I.E.L.D. gets Captain Marvel involved via Fury's pager (which he used in the Infinity War post-credits scene). Action and hijinks ensue to the detriment of many Midgardian historical sites.

The Cast: Featured voices from previous episodes return as cameos, while actors and characters new to What If...? include Taika Waititi as Korg, Jeff Goldblum as Grandmaster, Natalie Portman as a more authoritative (but still smitten) Jane Foster, Kat Dennings as Darcy, Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, Rachel House as Topaz, and an underutilized Clancy Brown (Lex Luthor from Superman: TAS) as Surtur. Other voices include the unknown Josette Eales replacing Rene Russo as Frigga and Max Mittelman (the dub voice of Saitama, the One Punch Man himself) replacing Josh Dallas and Zachary Levi as Fandral.

The Animation: Standard fare for the series, so it doesn't bear repeating on how it works or doesn't work on a situational basis. Read my past posts at the links above (and watch the series!) for your own enrichment. The exceptions to this rule are as follows: the Captain Marvel/Thor fight is a blast (several, actually), and as this episode was released out of order, the Watcher is less visible here. And he blinks! More on that in another section, but let's talk about the underutilized character in the room.

About Topaz: This is the first deviation from my usual formula. Topaz is a character whom I had forgotten was in Thor: Ragnarok until a shallow internet dive reminded me. In Ragnarok, she was little more than a straight-woman comic relief sidekick to Jeff Goldblum's Grandmaster, serving only to deliver a few deadpan lines and hold his big, melty stick (STOP IT!). In the comics, Topaz was a warrior-queen from an Amazonian planet/dimension in Malibu Comics' Ultraforce series (of which there was a short-lived animated series made to compete with X-Men in the 90s. I am sad there wasn't more of the cartoon, but when you're up against X-Men, Power Rangers, and Batman, fate is in the ratings). She's basically a man-hating amalgamation of DC characters like Wonder Woman and Maxima, but more Marvel-adjacent and with the Liefeldian 90s-O-Meter set to Walking Muscle With Pouches. At some point, Marvel absorbed Malibu Comics and made an attempt to integrate the Ultraforce characters into their own canon, using Dane Whitman/Black Knight (played by Kit Harrington in next year's Eternals movie) as a crossover character and introducing a "before the beginning and beyond all" villainess who was written at the time to be the singularity that created the Infinity Stones, and, as most evil/cosmically indifferent beings do, this new threat sought to reclaim the Stones into herself and return the multiverse to its pre-existence state of nothingness. This plot point lasted as long as all high-concept headaches in corporate need of retroactive continuity last, and Ultraforce mostly faded from the public consciousness. But with Ragnarok, Topaz, Queen of the She-Ra Man-Haters' Club, was suddenly a thing again. That I forgot about. Again. Until I found out she was going to be part of What If...? Then my speculator's brain went multiversally mad with hype over what her potential role in events might be. Until this episode dropped and she was just a background extra with barely any audible lines. She's a twice-interdimensional, multiversal warrior queen who took part in a battle with the comic book origin of the most powerful MacGuffins in all of Marvel's reality, and all the writers do with her here is have her stand around, grunting and eating cake. Shame! Waste and shame!

What Changed: We've already established that Only Child Thor is a douchebag. He's such a Chad in the negative sense that he's being picked off of turn-of-the-century election ballots as we speak. But that doesn't keep him from charming the pants off of Jane (literally, as it turns out). While Thor is showing Jane how to Ride the Lightning and leaving her Thunderstruck (music references!), Darcy learns what happens when you're out of luck.

Always go "Duck"

This is that joke I was talking about at the beginning of this post. I have inserted my obligatory Simpsons meme, and Darcy married Howard the Duck in Vegas, with Maybe-Ego Elvis as the minister. Surtur broke the Statue of Liberty while trying to cop a feel, Frost Giant Loki looks awesome and gave Mount Rushmore ice-beards, Thor played dominoes with Stonehenge to piss off Captain Marvel, the St. Louis Arch was inverted and turned into a giant slingshot, Thor accidentally Superman III'd the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Korg probably murdered Nick Fury while trying to cannonball into the fountains at the MGM Grand. Plus, after wrapping it all up like the "party while the parents are away" episode of every sitcom ever (Jane calls Frigga to put a stop to Thor's party, only to find him pretending to teach his guests about Earth culture, until Mjolnir flies in, looking like the male entertainment at a stripper's bachelorette party in a Banksie painting of Mardi Gras, breaking the deception, which leads to almost no consequences for Thor), Ultron shows up out of nowhere, covered in Infinity Stones and sporting Vision's face. But why? I know it's the twenty-fifth letter of the alphabet, but why? And as the Watcher himself put it at the end: "Wait, what?"

The Implications: First and most importantly, this is what Darcy would have looked like in the 80s:

Lea Thompson as Beverly Switzer
in Howard the Duck (1986)

Could this episode be a prequel to the Howard the Duck movie?

But also, Nick Fury is probably dead, Party Thor can use Mjolnir (hinting that Odin probably never engraved it with the Worthiness enchantment, except that it still weighs down Captain Marvel at one point here, which creates all kinds of inconsistencies because of Mjolnir's natural weight, like Thor being stronger than Captain Marvel and the Hulk), there are probably no Avengers (or they're dead), Loki (as Thor's Brotun from a mother Jotun) feels no familial obligation to Thor, Thor never infused Vision's body with Mjolnir's lightning, Ragnarok might still happen because Surtur is alive, Thanos is probably dead because UltroVision has all of the Infinity Stones, and the Watcher does not see all.

The Implications (Uatu Edition): Usually, Uatu the Watcher points out the Nexus Point of a given episode, and reacts to its ending like that friend you have who binges a show without you and then makes bets with you on what will happen ("See? What did I tell you? Huh? Shouldn't have done that! Shit ending and everyone's doomed!"). But in this episode, we see him blink for the first time, showing that he is not as all-seeing as he originally presents himself. And on a timeless scale like his, a blink can be filled with a lot, which partially explains why his usual end-of-episode monologue is interrupted, and he is as surprised by UltroVision's sudden appearance as is the Party Prince. With regard to episode order, this was intended to air before Marvel Zombies (speaking of which, the only other time Uatu showed any kind of personality or emotion prior to "Wait, what?" was his audibly cringey "this happened" line at the beginning of Zombies) and Killmonger, so we don't see the Watcher in as much of his Jack O' Lantern glory as those episodes. Perhaps, after engaging with Baron Strange and being caught off-guard by UltroVision, he made the executive decision to start becoming more visible and (if the trailers have been any indication) interfering in events. But I don't think true episode order reflects chronological order. Why is this?

The Implications (UltroVision Edition): I originally had two theories about where UltroVision came from, and they both hinged on the assumption that he was from the Party Thor continuity. My first thought was that Tony Stark started work on the Iron Legion in response to the perceived "alien invasion," and so developed Ultron on an accelerated timetable relative to the Sacred MCU. The problem with this is that, without the canon version of Loki, the Mind Stone would have never made its way to Earth, and Tony wouldn't have come into possession of it to use as a basis for Ultron's AI. He might have tried to upgrade JARVIS without it (to lead the Iron Legion), and so created an instance of JARVIS with flawed reasoning that became a sort of Ultron-like consciousness, but it isn't likely. The other possibility is that Thor's Earth-rager lasted six to eight movies' woth of continuity, and he didn't discover any leadership or heroism qualities until the time of Age Of Ultron, The logistics of this possibility are stupidly improbable. Which brings us to episode order versus chronological order in What If...? I think the most likely possibility is that UltroVision is the Vision from the Zombies reality. Yes, that Vision killed himself when he gave the Mind Stone to Banner, but who's to say that, while studying the Mind Stone and battling mental instability in close proximity to Zola's mainframe, Vision didn't learn to copy his consciousness into another vessel? Or that Zombie Wanda didn't reconstitute him with her chaos magic? Or that the survivors were successful in Wakanda, but with the Mind Stone broadcast having unintended consequences? There was an Ultron VS Marvel Zombies comic during the last Secret Wars/Battleworld/Spider-Verse mega-event, so maybe in the What If...? show, the broadcast that was meant to cure the Quantum Virus distributed Vision's consciousness throughout the world's technology instead (which would explain why UltroVision can inhabit his main body and his drones all at once), giving him the opportunity to overpower Zombie Thanos and take the Stones for himself, which his newly twisted psyche would use to try to cure Wanda, but he gets overwhelmed by having all six Stones in his body and becomes a supervillain?

The Verdict: Not the most cohesive or interesting episode, but it had a pretty impressive fight sequence, good humor, plenty of references, and at least tried to explore what Thor and Loki would be like if they hadn't been raised together. But Topaz had wasted potential, the plot was heavily padded and formulaic, and the ending felt tacked on for the sake of shock value. The best parts were Frost Giant Loki, the Thor/Marvel fight, and Darcy marrying Howard the Duck.

Much like the Watcher, I blinked, and forgot to include the Verdict section on first release. But that has since been remedied by the team of Variants that I have assembled in my head.

Stay tuned for more Marvelous content! I have been

Ticketmaster the Watcher,

Cannot interfere,

Must not interfere

(Unless it's with my own work),

So come with me and ponder the question:

Out If?

Goodnight.