Marvel’s What If…? finished its first season with its ninth episode, bringing everything together for one, big climactic finale. To defeat a multiversal threat in Infinity Ultron, our narrator Uatu the Watcher put together heroes from previous episodes to form the ultimate team. This team-up found a way to call back every one of the alternate worlds we’ve visited so far, whether it was the roster itself, a cameo from the Marvel Zombies, or an epilogue involving the world where the Avengers were murdered. When gathering soldiers against Ultron, Uatu stops at Nidavellir, where we see Gamora, Iron Man (in a rather funky suit of armor), and Eitri disposing of an empty Infinity Gauntlet. As Tony Stark starts going into the same kind of diatribe that created Ultron in the first place, Uatu reveals himself and identifies Gamora as the one who killed Thanos. Against Infinity Ultron, she brings to the table a special device created to annihilate the Infinity Stones called the Infinity Crusher. This phantom episode (presumably named something like “What If… Iron Man Landed on Sakaar?”) was not only supposed to happen during the first season, but it was one of the first episode concepts anyone figured out because Lego had released a set based on it! Known as “Tony Stark’s Sakaarian Iron Man,” the set included figures for Tony Stark, Valkyrie, and Uatu the Watcher. No details on the episode were mentioned on the box. The nexus point for this world was supposedly that after nuking the aliens at the end of Avengers, Iron Man wasn’t able to fall through the portal in time. Instead, he drifted through space until ending up on the planet Sakaar, where he had to use his genius mixed with the techno junk around him to survive. The real comedy is the way Uatu casually dismisses Stark. After so many episodes of Stark being killed, the Watcher understands that you can’t lose if you don’t play. So there’s your surviving Iron Man in the multiverse, getting benched. There’s no confirmation yet on when we’ll be getting What If…? Season 2, but at least we have some idea of what we can look forward to. Here’s hoping for an episode where Uatu meets Ant-Man’s friend Luis.
