Jumping off from where WHAT IF,,,THOR WERE AN ONLY CHILD? left us, WHAT IF…ULTRON WON? finally fulfils the epic promise of the series’ premise by giving us a big swing of a story that not only rewrites the established MCU continuity but also sets out to gather the disparate threads of WHAT IF…?’s first series.

WHAT IF…ULTRON WON? opens in a universe where the events of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON take a dramatic right turn when Ultron succeeds in creating his new body, Vision is never born and Thanos is disposed of with comical ease, granting Ultron not only the power of the mind stone but access to all of the infinity stones and upgrading his planetary mission statement to something more cosmic in scale.

The escalation is suitably intense yet it also makes it somewhat improbable that the only survivors of this universal Age Of Ultron would be Black Widow and Hawkeye, the two conspicuously non-powered members of the OG Avengers who open the story before we flashback to see how everything ended.

Indeed, it takes less than nine minutes of the episode’s runtime for the cosmic Ultron to reach the point of Hans Gruber’s apocryphal Alexander The Great quotation and realise that there are no more worlds to conquer. Until that is, he becomes aware of The Watcher.

Given the scale and scope of the story, it’s a shame that it’s another episode where the mix of original voice cast and (cheaper?) ringers undermine things. We’ve got Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Toby Jones as Arnim Zola but there’s no denying that James Spader would’ve added something really special to this episode (although Ross Marquand does a decent enough job).

With the luxury of a second part still to come, the episode finds time to revel in two parallel lines of spectacular comic book action: Cosmis Ultron vs The Watcher and Zola vs Ultron on Earth. There are the usual neat and subversive nods to existing and even future canon such as AVENGERS: ENDGAME and BLACK WIDOW to name but two, but the biggest tease for the epic to come is in The Watcher’s final refuge – taking us all the way back to WHAT IF…? Episode 4.

7/10