Hank Pym’s at it again this week. Responsible now for more apocalypses than anyone else so far in the MCU. At least this time his disaster was unintentional.

More importantly to me we get more of Chadwick Boseman.

It’s not too spoilery to talk about the zombies here – they were heavily trailed after all. The episode is set at the beginning of Infinity War and arrives alongside Bruce Banner crashing down in Dr Strange’s New York HQ.

Problem is Banner finds no one home and emerging onto the streets of New York doesn’t yield any better results.

From there we have a frantic chase as the surviving members of the Avengers and some of their allies try to find a cure and stay alive and uninfected.

The writing here is tight, not least the decision (missing in Ep 3) to explain to us why the events are occurring as they are. Peter Parker delivers some of his best work across every appearance to date in the MCU – not least a speech about hope in the face of despair which I found unexpectedly moving.

More than that though we see some nice references to other parts of the universe, broader zombie tropes and a neat reliance on the kind of lore than anyone remotely familiar with zombies as a genre will know without having to be told via lengthy exposition.

The action is well done and, for once, meaningful. In a show like this you can kill your darlings and such levels of threat add a sense of drama which is missing from nearly all the mainstream MCU movies (Shang-Chi being a notable exception to this). When you can’t kill your heroes, violence can become weightless and bland. What If? manages this perfectly – not giving us any hint of who might stay alive, if anyone, until the end. I found this aspect of the episode really satisfying and it left me wishing the larger entries into the universe were prepared to take more risks with who does and doesn’t make it to the end of a movie.

I’m not normally a fan of zombies – zombies are a trope about making those who you don’t know corrupt, about them being Other and therefore, by definition, dangerous and capable of destroying you. As a minority I’m often put in that position as a normal human being and hence I don’t find the portrayal of it on screen as particularly interesting (at best).

In this half hour episode, the sense of zombie as other is less present. Instead, the zombies are here as a blanket threat saying little about society at large (unlike say, Romero, Sang-ho Yeon or Garland) – more just standing in for the danger of the week superheroes face perpetually. This doesn’t make it less political (hey, superheroes as a genre are deeply conservative, right?) but in this specific instance it helped me focus on the adventure unfolding on the screen without leaving me enough time to start thinking too hard about whether it made sense or what it was trying to say.

Perhaps more than any of the episodes so far this one isn’t trying to say anything except look at how much fun we’re having and that’s OK.

What didn’t work for me was the ending. It felt like they ran out of runtime and so gave us an epilogue in place of a conclusion. Literally a single additional scene would have helped settle it better but instead we got a hasty cut and a strange sense that this world was screwed whatever happened. I was left shrugging my shoulders over the choice.

Verdict: Overall, it’s a fun episode full of smart cracks and references but despite its dramatic flair for adventure it’s both a something and nothing entry into the series.

Rating? 6 brains out of 10.

Stewart Hotston