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What If...?

I have no excuse for why I haven't talked about this up until now. I watched each episode as it came out and it definitely left an impression. Now I have to sit here and try to think about how I felt a few weeks ago, but I will do my best.

Overall, I really enjoyed the show. It took me a while to get into the animation style, but after a while, I accepted it. What helped was having a strong voice acting cast. They included as many as the original actors as they could legally get. The most touching for me was hearing Chadwick Boseman reprise T'Challa a few more times. I felt those performances.

This show is in the tradition of the comics, with the twist being that it is focused on the movie properties. I get that because that is what people know and is the best hook for drawing people in. In the comics, it is a concept that allowed Marvel to take some wild swings at pivotal moments in their history. In this show, they cherry pick what they think are some big moments from the movies and go from there. I'll be honest, some of them don't make a lot of sense, but I like the story that comes after. For example, Yondu abducting T'Challa instead of Peter Quill. Not something you would have thought of, but the episode works. Sharon Carter being Captain America instead of Steve Rogers worked better in that vein, I feel. I could go on and on.

In the first few episodes, I felt they didn't take the concept far enough. Everything seemed to be tied up in a bow or ending on a kind of happy note. As they went along, they got darker and more real stakes appeared. The Doctor Strange one in particular. It culminated in a crossover of all the characters we met at the end in what was a satisfying finale.

Not every episode is a winner. Although kind of fun, I didn't really enjoy the episode about Thor where the premise is, what happens if he didn't have a brother (Loki). I liked they had the principal cast from the first movie, but that is where my enjoyment of it ends. It felt like it was positioned in the lineup as a palette cleanser after seeing so many episodes that got super dark. 

Like the other couple of Marvel shows, it became appointment television. Also, doling out one episode at a time is a way to sustain the excitement. If they all came out at once, I would have binged them in a weekend and promptly forgotten them by the week's end. This way you get to sit with each episode for bit.

If you have watched all or most of the movies, you can watch this show. I will warn you, since it is so heavily reliant on the movies, if you didn't see them, you will be lost as to why some of the episodes are important.

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