What If... The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?

Hell is wrong with you people? Remember this isnt cannon?, its an alternate time line. Who doesn't want to see The Power Rangers, take on a over sized creature? With mass destruction. Yeah it did stress me out a bit but we got a mecha bot fighting an over sized monster with a genuinely decent story line. Get over yourselves.

Go ahead and look at the ratings for previous season. The lowest rated episode by far has been the "Party Thor" one from Season 1. That's well deserved, the episode was plain dumb. Every complaint you could have about a What If episode (cringe humor/dialog, wasted potential, boring concept, no plot, et c.) is at its worst there. Its rating? 6.4/10. On NO PLANET is this episode worse. There is no valid or logical justification for how this episode can have a lower score. Are the only people reviewing season 3 at this point just tired of the MCU and hate-watching it?

I enjoyed it well enough. It was a fun, action packed episode with our first look at what a post-Endgame Avengers team could look like and character interactions we haven't seen before and the return of Savage Hulk. That's what you'd want in a What If story.

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.

There really was so much working for this idea. The visuals were pretty amazing, the vast of characters were a grouping we've really never seen together, and we frankly have been starved for content this year, so anything short of a full blown Love & Thunder was going to be a hit.

But this fell flat, and it fell flat on what is arguably Marvel's greatest post-End Game weakness; dialog between characters.

With this much action and a massively compressed storyline, you really only had to wrote about 5 minutes of good, human conversation. Why is that so hard? The one-liners and schmaltz drowned out everything else. I really hope we get back on track with the rest of the season.

Godzilla+Pacific Rim/Transformers+ Power Rangers=What If... The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?

The latest entry in the MCU's alternate universe exploration arrives with high hopes, particularly for those eager to see Sam Wilson take on the mantle of Captain America. After all, the transition from Steve Rogers to Sam was one of the more powerful moments in the last few phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet, this pilot episode, intended to reintroduce Sam in his new role, feels like a missed opportunity. The episode remains stilted, disjointed, and underwhelming throughout its short runtime.

From the very beginning, it's apparent that the episode's primary objective is to solidify Sam Wilson's place as the new Captain America. With the "Red Hulk" storyline casting a long shadow, there's a certain urgency to the narrative that, unfortunately, leaves little room for nuance. The storytelling itself is uneven, rushing through key moments without allowing them the narrative to breathe.

There's a sense that the episode relies too heavily on the familiar tropes, with plot points unfolding predictably, almost mechanically. At no point does the episode reach for something truly original.

The real disappointment, however, is in the missed potential of the "What If" format. With so many rich stories to explore within the first three phases of the MCU, it feels strange to spend so much time on characters who have, in many cases, only been given a single film or series to develop. Perhaps the most intriguing alternate realities lie in the earlier days of the MCU, where the scope of possibility felt broader and more profound.

This episode, as the season opener, doesn't quite instill the sense of excitement we've come to expect from Season 3. Unless the show's subsequent episodes offer something interesting, I worry about the direction this season is headed. For now, it's hard not to feel that the series is treading water, rather than diving into new and compelling waters.