Things get dark for Dr. Strange in Marvel’s ‘What If…’ series
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Spoilers ahead for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe up through Episode 4 of “What If…”
There’s a good reason why “The Twilight Zone” came on TV at night.
First, if it aired in the morning, the vast majority of the viewing public wouldn’t be around to watch it. But, second, Rod Serling’s anthology full of ironic twists, cruel turns, spooky occurrences and outright creepiness is much more effective at night.
William Shatner’s terror at seeing a creature on the wing of his mid-flight airplane is probably not nearly as scary when you can look out the window at the sunshine and wave to the mailman.
And so I feel kind of bad for people who couldn’t stop themselves from a day-time viewing of the fourth episode of Marvel’s “What If…” series, in which Dr. Stephen Strange goes full Darth Vader and succumbs to the Dark Side.
My main issue with Disney+ releasing new episodes so early in the day is that anyone with a 9-to-5 job basically has to avoid the entire Internet, lest they be spoiled by the legion of die-hards posting YouTube and website reviews before lunchtime even gets here.
But I think this latest episode would lose a lot of its effectiveness during the day. It’s essentially a love story told through the cruel lens of Lovecraftian horror.
The question posed by the episode’s title is “What If Dr. Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” When Strange crashes his car in this universe, rather than losing use of the hands that made him a gifted surgeon, he loses his girlfriend, Dr. Christine Palmer.
His search for answers still leads him to Kamar-Taj and the Ancient One, but it’s not to fix his hands. It’s to bring Christine back.
And hey, now he’s got the Time Stone hanging around his neck, right? Why not just give himself a do-over and get it right this time?
But he can’t.
No matter what he tries — driving more carefully, taking a different route, not picking Christine up at all — Strange can’t prevent her death, and eventually he learns that the moment is an absolute point in time, which cannot be altered.
For those of us who just got done watching the “Loki” series, that sounds a little odd. Honestly, once Strange was about three tries deep in his vain attempt to save Christine, I half-expected the Time Variance Authority to come stepping out on him.
But this moment is supposed to happen. The Ancient One explains this is the moment that pushed Stephen to become Dr. Strange. Without it, he wouldn’t have saved Earth from Dormammu or helped the Avengers defeat Thanos.
But here, old character traits once again cause problems, in the form of Strange’s hubris. He does some more mystical research and discovers that if he can absorb the power from enough other beings, he can perhaps alter an absolute point in time.
Cue an extra-creepy “soul-sucking” montage, where Strange starts with what appears to be a garden gnome and works his way up through ever-more-monstrous and dangerous beings, absorbing their power over centuries until he’s strong enough – and monstrous enough and dangerous enough – to try and bring Christine back.
But he can’t.
And that’s because The Ancient One has done a little timeline manipulation of her own, using dark magic to split Strange into two timelines that somehow co-exist in the same universe. So while Dark Dr. Strange is becoming an unholy abomination of a sorcerer, Regular Dr. Strange has accepted Christine’s death and moved on.
Or at least he would move on, if his reality didn’t start melting in front of his eyes. The Ancient One’s ghost stops by to let Strange know how she split him, and how he’s the only one powerful enough to stop himself.
But he can’t.
Dark Dr. Strange wins in a wizard duel, absorbs Regular Dr. Strange into himself, and finally brings Christine back to life – just in time for the entire universe to collapse on itself.
If you think there’s a whole lot going on here, you’re definitely right. And I haven’t even gotten to the part where Dr. Strange breaks the fourth wall and starts talking to the narrator of the series.
Strange begs The Watcher to intervene, but of course he won’t. Christine melts away with the rest of the universe, and only Dark Dr. Strange is left, inside some sort of mystical protective cocoon that doesn’t disappear into the void (not that Void).
Marvel officials have proclaimed that everything happening in the “What If…” series is technically MCU canon, so clearly Dark Dr. Strange will be back. In fact, if we take stock of what’s happened so far in this series, here’s what we’ve got: In one universe, Peggy Carter has become Captain Carter, and she just met modern-day Nick Fury after she traveled through time battling a tentacle monster that looks very, very, extremely similar to the one Dark Dr. Strange absorbed in this episode.
In another universe, T’Challa has become Star Lord, a sort of intergalactic Robin Hood figure who has just returned home to Wakanda for the first time.
In yet another, Nick Fury and Loki teamed up to figure out that Hank Pym was killing all of the Avengers on a misguided revenge mission, but then Loki took over Earth and Fury was just about to thaw out Captain America.
And now we have Dark Dr. Strange isolated somewhere outside the known universe.
There have been persistent rumors that this series will culminate in a sort of “Guardians of the Multiverse” team-up, which would be pretty interesting. Technically, no one in the series except The Watcher is even aware of the multiverse’s existence at this point, which makes me think The Watcher will eventually be forced to intervene.
But if he’s loathe to interfere with the destruction of an entire universe, what will it take for him to get involved?
So far, the only crossover character in the series has been the tentacle monster. What does that mean? I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. Perhaps, just like there are multiple versions of Nick Fury, there are also multiple versions of Giant Interdimensional Tentacle Monster.
What I do know is that this series has been very entertaining so far, and we haven’t even gotten to the zombie episode yet!
Marvel’s “What If…” debuts new episodes on Wednesdays, on Disney+.