What If...? has been an interesting experience, to say the least. The alternate scenarios shown to fans have been an exhilarating ride to witness week by week.
With those stories came new heroes, such as Hayley Atwell's Captain Carter or a successful Killmonger—even a Doctor Strange whose arrogance ended his entire universe. All of those episodes let fans truly get to know these new faces, but sadly, viewers were only able to spend 20-30 minutes with them.
So will fans ever see them pop up again? Well, as of the latest episode, The Watcher had his plate full trying to fend back Infinity Ultron, a being who has the ability to do quite a lot of harm to the multiverse.
It seems that it might be about time for The Watcher to break his oath and gather around a group of talented individuals who could help overthrow the murder bot.
Superheroes Returning in the What If...? Finale
What If...? director Bryan Andrews sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss the show's impending finale.
He teased that the finale "goes places you don't expect" and that "craziness ensues:"
"It goes places you don't expect... I know people are starting to get a sensation that things are building to something — and they are. And craziness ensues."
For the season's final installment, The Watcher will finally break his oath in order to stop this multiversal threat that is Infinity Ultron. To do this, the ancient alien being will be reaching out to heroes that audiences were previously introduced to.
The creatives behind the show asked themselves "wouldn't it be great to see them again in the finale?" The choice to bring back Captain Carter, Strange Supreme, Party Thor, and Killmonger "liberated [them] to make the endings [of individual episodes] a little bit darker and bigger:"
"We will pop into and re-meet some of our heroes from the previous episodes, including the lovely Captain Carter [Hayley Atwell], Strange Supreme, Party Thor [Chris Hemsworth], and even Killmonger [Michael B. Jordan]... early on in the first season, like day one talking about it, there was this notion of we're creating all these great heroes, but we only get to sit with them for 20 or 30 minutes. Wouldn't it be great to see them again in the finale? And then once that decision was made, it liberated me to make the endings a little bit darker and bigger, knowing that we can give some sort of resolution in the finale."
Most of the show's episodes don't get a resolution by the time the credits roll. However, for the finale, Andrews confirmed that "there is a level of buttoning up with a certain degree of things that we get into with a certain storyline:"
"There's a degree of resolution where it feels like all the stuff that's been percolating across the episodes, the adventure that we bring you into for the ending, ends, to a certain degree... all these universes, when we're done with our episode, those universes continue. It's an ongoing cinematic universe; there is stuff that happens yet to come that maybe we will see and maybe we will not see. But we don't necessarily want to have it all tied up in a perfect bow. There is a level of buttoning up with a certain degree of things that we get into with a certain storyline."
Multiverse Heroes Assemble
It's no surprise that previously met characters will be returning to the show's finale. After all, footage of their team-up hasn't been the best-kept secret and made it into nearly all of the promotional footage—even a car commercial.
Secret or not, it's going to be exciting to witness all of these new faces coming together to face off against Infinity Ultron. How in the world will they beat him? Surely, if The Watcher is having trouble, a group of mismatched people isn't going to be much more help.
But clearly, these new Guardians of the Multiverse are going to do much more than one may expect. Based on previously seen footage, somebody from each episode will be showing up. The only episodes that don't seem to have a representative are the Hank Pym murder mystery and the zombie apocalypse—though, given that virus and all, that one's probably for the best.
The Season 1 finale of What If...? will stream exclusively on Disney+ on Wednesday, October 6, 2021.
