Marvel’s What If…? wrapped up its first season in style today with a thrilling crossover episode that brought back a variety of variants seen in previous weeks. There was Captain Carter from episode 1, Star-Lord T’Challa from episode 2, Doctor Strange Supreme from episode 4, Thanos-killing Gamora from… wait, what? Yes, one of the Watcher’s Guardians of the Multiverse was actually a hero we’ve never met before, even though it felt like we should’ve done. So what’s going on here?
Gamora’s introduction in the episode comes when the Watcher visits a universe where she and Iron Man, wearing a Sakaaran-flavored Hulkbuster armor, are handing Eitri an empty Infinity Gauntlet to destroy, which teases some tantalizing details about a lost adventure we’d love to see. Here’s the good news, though. We will see it, we just have to wait until season 2 gets here to do so.
Showrunner A.C. Bradley has explained that COVID-19 elongated production to such an extent that they had to push back one of the planned 10 episodes to meet the release date. The one sacrificed was a heavily comedic episode focusing on Tony Stark. We’ve known about this episode for a while thanks to the LEGO set based on it that has still come out despite its delay. The set confirms that Valkyrie will also appear in that story.
Our best guess is that the nexus event for this episode is: what if Tony ended up on Sakaar after he fell into the Chitauri’s sky portal in The Avengers? Apparently, the answer is that he would somehow team up with Gamora, and they would succeed in defeating Thanos. We look forward to seeing how that makes sense.
While it was disappointing not to get more of Sakaaran survivor Tony in the What If…? finale, at least we know we’ll be seeing him again in season 2. Not to mention that he actually managed to live through an episode of the show for once. That has to count as a win.