Picking up straight from the end of Episode 8, we see the Watcher in action – with a great little montage of pulling together a team built from each of the heroes we’ve encountered in the previous episodes.

Except for Gamora – who comes from the one episode to have been bumped (to Season 2) because of Covid delays. Which is a shame as from the very short moments she gets it seems like it would have been a fun one involving her relationship with Thanos.

Still – getting the team together and seeing more of T’Challa Starlord is thrilling.

What’s interesting about these pick-up points for the Watcher’s Guardians of the Multiverse is we see the heroes a little after the end of each adventure. It was a little jarring for me to see that Killmonger had, somehow, already wrecked Wakanda but hey, there’s no need to retread old ground on the moral limits of the MCU.

I’d rather talk about two things from the episode – determinism and greed.

The first is pretty interesting. In episode 8, the Watcher fights Ultron within the story and cannot overcome him even if he also cannot be defeated by Ultron.

By the end of this episode there’s a sense that the Watcher, at the point he decided to ask Stephen Strange for help in Episode 8, may have exercised a power which Ultron could never hope to beat – foreknowledge. In a different way than the other Stephen Strange in Infinity War, there are several hints that the Watcher can see all things but from outside of them, and in seeing all could understand not just possibilities but inevitabilities.

He ‘chooses’ the team to defeat Ultron, but not to beat Ultron. Stephen Strange understands this at the very end and rolls with it, senses the futility of struggling – although he doesn’t really talk about it that way, it’s more he accepts the place he’s ended up. The show toys with giving Strange a redemption arc but, in a great move, shies away from it at the end – Stephen’s redemption is to stand his own watch for eternity and that feels fitting both as a punishment and his own private purgatorial process.

Back to the Watcher. The Watcher never comes out and says – I am this being of infinite knowing and all that implies, but you do get the sense that when he can’t beat Ultron within the story, he changes tactics and writes the story he wants to see told and that, inevitably, sees Ultron defeated.

The question here then is do any of the characters have free will? This is some deep physics and I’m actually pretty impressed with its implementation. I remember being shockingly disappointed with the nonsensical time travel plot in Endgame and reading that they’d talked to physicists to get it right. Reader: they did not get it right. Except, perhaps they did. Not in that film – it still doesn’t work. However, in the setting out of both Loki and what we’ve seen here in this series we have some deep threading of many-worlds theory with a side order of fundamental determinism via the interpretation of quantum mechanics which holds that all possible worlds exist on a kind of cosmic wavefunction with us experiencing just one of those possibilities at any one time. On that basis the cosmos remains deterministic even if, locally, we feel like we’re exercising free will. So, yes, this curmudgeon who loudly proclaims that Primer is the only film to get these ideas right, has to say that I’m even approaching satisfied with the underlying architecture of the world built here.

It’s an odd power though, right? Determinism as a super power, the power to tell a story, or arrange for it to happen and that there cannot be any escape. Ironically, Ultron didn’t even know how he’d been beaten – his eyes remained cast down on retaining the infinity stones and remaining inside the multiverse. It never crosses his mind there might be even more.

The Watcher, at the end, acts almost as a promise to us, the consumers of these stories, that he’ll act to protect them, to keep them safe. For us.

There’s a moment with the Watcher that bears thinking on a little more too – that the stories he sees are everything. Not quite lifeblood, because it remains clear he exists outside of these stories, but they are absolutely the thing he exists for; to Watch. In some ways he’s a surrogate for us, the audience, our narrator, our access point but also, very much, us. Without him perhaps these worlds don’t even exist just as without them, he would have no reason to Watch. It’s all quite meta but I think it goes a long way to helping make this entire run of What If? Satisfying, because it reminds us all that the creators of these stories are aware of their role in them, of their own limitations and of the boundaries we as the audience place around them. It’s a fascinating piece of subtextual messaging for us, the audience.

Now, before I disappear up my own metaphorical, let’s talk about greed.

Ultron and Killmonger both fail in their goals by episodes end because they reach an impasse where, driven be greed and uncritical need, they stall, perhaps permanently.

It is this which defeats Ultron and denies Killmonger the victory he wants.

There’s a lot here to unpack on Killmonger and his portrayal. Stories in many cultures warn us about the orphan and what they’ll try to achieve their ends. They’re frequently portrayed as morally evil and often come hand in hand with physical disfigurement. Killmonger is the perfect example of both (his own disfigurement literally a record of his moral evil). He is the orphan folk tales warn us about and although this is a tired trope it’s fresh here in that we have no real idea what he’s aiming for but he is driven in a way we recognise as brooking no negotiation or interference.

These stories forget that the orphan, by reaching adulthood alone and without resources have had to live in a way where everything could and would be taken away with no warning. That kind of life is terrifying because it is so precarious and it’s easy to see why orphans in folk history are so often a warning to everyone else and, as Mary Douglas would have it, socially contagious. Better to keep them at a distance so as to effectively quarantine their misfortune.

Against him comes Ultron who gives pretty speeches about evolution but in the end also goes on about having a purpose from which he can’t deviate. He too is driven by a need we recognise and shy away from. You could argue that Ultron is also an orphan of sorts, so two for two.

Neither of them recognise what family they have. Neither of them see others as anything but tools to making them secure. Both are looking for security. Killmonger for the security he lacked growing up, Ultron to make a shield around the universe. Both motives are twisted forms of hunger based upon a need for the security which only safe, supportive relationships provide. Their greed will be satisfied only be writing uncertainty out of the universe in which they live. Ironic given they are within stories which can only play out one way.

The centrality of story in these last two episodes has given a filter through which the rest of the series takes place. Each episode works on its own (up until episode 8), but seen through this filter we are given something new – a sense that the Watcher chose to show us these stories for a reason, and that was to ultimately give us, the audience, a lesson about stories themselves and what they can do.

Overall, a lot of fun with a lot to think about if you’re so minded.

Rating? 9 multiverses out of 10.

Stewart Hotston