Letting someone go off on their own just to keep the plot moving felt like a huge cop out. After What If spent a full minute of screentime on a Peter Parker vlog explaining the absolute basic rules of surviving against the walking dead (bites infect, headshots kill, they can smell you), it was enormously frustrating to have Bucky (Sebastian Stan) explore a pitch-black underground military installation alone, no questions asked. The tonal inconsistency ends up affecting how the whole episode unfolds, resulting in questionable character choices. It often feels like What If can’t decide whether or not to take the zombie apocalypse seriously or play it for laughs, and Episode 5 suffers from that lack of clarity. Marvel’s already joked about sticking “quantum” in front of concepts that they don’t want to bother explaining in Ant-Man and The Wasp (Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania coming soon), and we’re far enough past the point of diminishing returns that unexplained “quantum” stuff just feels like lazy writing. Janet was afflicted with a “quantum virus” which… turns everyone into zombies. Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) explains the zombie outbreak started after Hank Pym’s trip to the Quantum Realm, where only Hope’s mother Janet Van Dyne returned. On the other hand, we’ve got this episode, which spends nearly all its time focused on moving the surviving heroes from zombie encounter to zombie encounter as they try to develop a cure. It was full of supernatural spectacle, but everything that happened was rooted in Doctor Strange’s struggle with his grief, so it was emotionally engaging. Episode 5’s deficiencies come into clear focus when compared to last week’s best-yet episode.
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