The third and, for reasons I don't really understand, final season of what should be a seemingly ever running stream of ideas, "Marvel's What If.. " begins quite a different style of episode, though one riffing on a familiar science fiction trope.
Trying to rid himself of his Hulking side, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) submits himself to exposure to a massive amount of Gamma Radiation. Far from killing the Hulk it actually generates a huge gamma Kaiju, codenamed "Apex" which is capable of self-propagating an army of smaller monsters. They overwhelm the Avengers and kill off the first wave of heroes, but a secondary team step up and fight them back, with the Apex going into hiding. Ten years later Apex remerges, seeing defeat on their horizon, Captain America (Anthony Mackie) tries to find the reclusive Banner to assist them.
So, it's Kaiju's vs. The Avengers in Mech suits and in traditional "Mighty Morphin" / "Voltron" style the mech can combine to produce a giant robot, to fight the massive monsters. It's not too much more complicated than that, save for Banner's eventual role in proceedings. It uses the same slightly cel shaded look that the show has utilised since it's inception. The vocal performers are pretty much all the actors from the MCU save for Kari Wahlgren, who replaces Rachel Weisz as Melina Vostokoff and Brittany Adebumola who replaces Lupita Nyong'o as Nakia. It's nice to see some of the characters we've not seen represented in the show before, such as Moon Knight appearing here - and voiced by Oscar Isaac.
It's different to many of the previous episodes which have often stemmed from a moment in the MCU going in the opposite way than it did in that Universe - this feels more like a completely new version of everything, which is fine - but again begs the question of why a show with seemingly infinite variety is ending after just 26 episodes.
