What If…? is at its best and worst in its most comedic episode

An ongoing problem throughout Marvel Studios’ animated multiverse show What If…? comes from the baffling way many of its episodes are framed. Each installment of the series has a “What If…” title, but those titles rarely get at the core of what a given episode is doing, or what might be engaging or thrilling about it. Season 2 was a particular low point in that regard, with even the best storylines hidden behind question titles seemingly designed to produce an apathetic shrug. Season 3 has the same problem, which comes to a head with what’s simultaneously the season’s best and worst episode: “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?”

It’s hard to imagine even the most dedicated Marvel fan caring about Howard the Duck’s marital status one way or the other. But it’s also bizarre to frame the episode that way, since that isn’t what it’s about at all. A more accurate title might be “What If… We Made an Episode of This Show Solely for the Most Dedicated Deep-Cut MCU Fans?” This episode is slight and silly almost to the point of stupidity. Like so much of the series, it doesn’t meaningfully interrogate anything that happened in the primary MCU timeline, or bring any insight to the Marvel Universe. It’s just a weird extended chase montage that feels closer to a Scooby-Doo episode than a Marvel movie.

But that gives the story and writing team a freedom they didn’t have with much of the rest of What If…? And it let them put together an episode that’s all fan service and manic comedy, with no stakes, rules, or meaningful boundaries. It’s a featherweight experience compared to nearly everything else in the show. It’s also a weirdly satisfying experience for obsessive MCU-heads, who’ll get to play the Rick Dalton pointing game in practically every shot, and nod along with the callbacks in every other line. In other words, it’s perfect for what What If…? could’ve been.

The premise requires the tiniest amount of previous What If…? knowledge, though it’s mostly covered in a quick recap in the episode itself. In the season 1 episode “What If… Thor Were an Only Child?”, Collector escapee and anthropomorphic duck Howard (Seth Green) idly suggests to Dr. Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings, from the various Thor movies) that they should go get half-price nachos together via a local happy-hour bar special. Smash-cut to the present, and they’re married and have just had their first child — which is, naturally, an egg.

That egg turns out to have been produced during the Cosmic Convergence, an event previously only of import to Thor: The Dark World. Because of the power the Convergence may have conveyed to the egg, a wide variety of MCU factions want to claim it, for purposes ranging from trivial (Grandmaster wants to eat it) to galaxy-threatening (Kaecilius, Mads Mikkelsen’s villain from Doctor Strange, wants to offer whatever’s in the egg as a host body to Dormammu, the “Cosmic Conqueror, the Destroyer of Worlds”).​​ Darcy and Howard seek help from other factions, from SHIELD boss Nick Fury to Loki, and the whole thing turns into a frantic planet-hopping McGuffin chase that also feels like an MCU trivia contest.

Throughout its three seasons, What If…? always operated along two separate tracks: grimdark and goofy. As with the MCU movies themselves, comedy bits sometimes pop up even in the straight-faced stories, and vice versa. But mostly, there’s a sharp and sometimes uneasy line between the show’s comedy and its attempt to pull off action on a scale (and with a level of Jack Kirby visual referencing) that live action can’t handle.

In the show’s first season, the gradual buildup from seemingly stand-alone speculative stories to a season-concluding crossover has a respectable dramatic weight. That season’s final episode, “What If… the Watcher Broke His Oath?”, is the only place where the show fully reaches its potential, by bringing seemingly unrelated threads together into a meaningful conflict. But seasons 2 and 3 struggle to pull off the same hat trick, and repeat too many of the first season’s beats. The gigantic combats get repetitive. The characters get less stage time and less development. (The X-Men’s Storm as Thor is a particular waste — a visual design and power set that doesn’t get a backstory or any meaningful character depth.)

But in season 3, the failure of the drama leaves more space for the comedy to land. In “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?”, misleading title and all, writers finally abandon the idea of building toward a big picture, and just go whole hog into comedy. It isn’t great or insightful humor — it’s lowest-common-denominator “Hey, I recognize that guy!” referential humor, as one character after another from some of the MCU’s least-loved movies pops up to demand the stage. And yet there’s a real escalating wit to the way the MCU’s familiar villainous power-grabs and the villains’ vast battalions of generic CG extras play into the story’s frantic escalation. By the end, Darcy and Howard are facing a The Hobbit-style battle of armies, as one half-forgotten MCU magical mob after another charges into the fray to try and grab their kid-to-be.

None of this will land with casual MCU fans who have no idea why it’s funny when Black Maw shows up, or when Malekith and Kaecilius yell at each other about who’s the darkest. Or why a space vacation’s excursion pitch for “couples’ cliff-diving on Vormir” is ironic and alarming. (Other laugh lines are a little more obvious, like Kaecilius telling Guardians of the Galaxy antihero Yondu, “Dormammu does not come to bargain.”)

The episode is directly aimed at the most in-the-know MCU completists. But chasing such a specific audience also lets the writers get as nerdy and narrow as they want — in stark contrast to some of the more dramatic What If…? episodes, which try to thread the needle of asking meaningful questions about departures for the MCU, while telling broad, familiar, easily accessible hero-versus-villains stories that don’t feel meaningfully different from the canon versions they overwrite.

In a season as well aligned and well assembled as What If…?’s first batch of episodes, “What If… Howard the Duck Got Hitched?” might just come across as inane, a grab-bag of references that barely connect with each other, a collection of sweepings from the bottom of the MCU toybox. But by this point in the series, with so many of the dramatic episodes looking so similar to each other, the full-force leap into comic escalation actually has a lot going for it. It’s self-indulgent, but that winds up feeling better than the rest of the season’s restraint. It’s a weird blend of continuity-bound, in the way it draws from so many different parts of the MCU über-narrative, and continuity-free, in that it imagines a weird world where a lady and a ducklike alien can make an egg-baby together, and have that baby become a cosmic singularity.

And if nothing else, this season 3 episode is daring in a way not enough of What If…? ever was. It isn’t the series at its best, but it’s certainly the series at its wildest, weirdest, and most go-for-broke. In a show that’s entirely about alternate narrative paths for familiar stories, it’s the episode that most displays an alternate path for What If…? It’s a peek into a version of the show where the creators aren’t trying so hard to produce a series of plausible, meaningful MCU mini-movies to add to the multiverse canon. With this one episode, the What If…? team takes full advantage of low-stakes thinking, animation’s ability to create unimagined new worlds, and a “What the hell, let’s do one for the fans” mentality, upending a sprawling franchise that creators mostly take a little more seriously than they need to.

What If…? is now streaming on Disney Plus.