Marvel’s first What If…? struggles a little with “so what”?

With Marvel letting it all ride on their big multiverse bet, staked first in WANDAVISION and doubled-down on in LOKI, WHAT IF…? offers the MCU an irresistibly broad canvas on which to work. With canon now being a matter of corporate whim, who knows whether what we’re about to be offered will have ramifications beyond the animated world and into the MCU proper? Strange, then, that the series launched with such timidity with WHAT IF… CAPTAIN CARTER WERE THE FIRST AVENGER?

Taking its jumping-off point from the scene some half an hour into 2011’s CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, this alt-tale – introduced by Uatu The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) – see Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) decide to stay in the laboratory instead of ascending to the booth as she does in the movie. Her presence thwarts the HYDRA sabotage but at the cost of a wounded Steve and the super-soldier experiment on the brink of failure until Peggy steps in to take the shots.

From there, in admittedly entertaining fashion, the story cleaves pretty close to the established narrative. There’s a wry nod to the future as the plucky but still weedy Steve Rogers still finds a way to smash some Nazis thanks to the tesseract-powered ironmongery of Howard Stark but despite shaking up the WWII-era snow globe of continuity, it ends with the flakes settling and overall course of events barely unaltered and ready for the Avengers to assemble.

Credit where credit is due, though, the animation is – as you’d expect from a subsidiary of the House of Mouse – first-rate and some of the action scenes are so good you’ll feel cheated that you don’t get to see Captain Carter kicking kraut butt in live-action. It’s amazing, too, that they got so many of the original voice cast back from the movie although Chris Evans is a notable absence, as is (more understandably) Tommy Lee Jones.

For deep cut comic book devotees, this remix is littered with Easter Eggs and references to comic book lore but for the more casual MCU fan, WHAT IF…CAPTAIN CARTER WERE THE FIRST AVENGER? is little more than an amuse-bouche, a tantalising taste of the potential of the series and it’s to be hoped that future episodes will have the courage to swing for the fences instead of bunting.

6/10