A.C. Bradley has been very open and honest when it comes to addressing concerns or bugbears fans may have with Marvel’s What If…?, which comes with the territory when you’re reinventing familiar stories that form part of a sprawling mythology audiences have invested thirteen years of their lives into.
The creator and lead writer of the Disney Plus series even revealed she’d gotten hate mail from folks upset at the way the first season handled Tony Stark, not to mention criticisms that parachuting an alternate version of Natasha Romanoff into a reality where she’d been killed lessened the stakes of her sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame.
In a new interview with Variety, Bradley explained where Natasha finds herself now that she’s been plucked from multiversal obscurity and given a purpose again, and where it could lead in Season 2 of What If…?.
“When it came to resolving Dystopian Natasha’s story, we realized that keeping her on that Ultron world was a fate worse than death. Everyone’s gone. And the Watcher, as he says to her, these stories have become everything to him. It didn’t come from a place of like, ‘Oh, what are we saying about Marvel and the MCU?’. It came from a place of, ‘What are we saying about the Watcher?’ He loves these characters. He loves these stories, these people, these heroes. He would never banish her back to a planet to basically starve to death by herself.”
It’s an easy get out of jail free card for What If…? to play, when it wasn’t explicitly stated that the universe Natasha ended up in was one where everything is hunky dory. After all, we’ve seen the end of the world occur more than once on the show already, without mentioning literal zombies, so the stakes may even be higher than they were before.
