What’s better than combining our favorite Marvel characters with a zombie movie? That was the fun of the original Marvel Zombies series of comics. It furthered with Night of the Living Deadpool and now we have this episode of What If…?. Our story here is, what if the Avengers and our world were taken over by zombies? It starts off similarly to Avengers: Infinity War, but instead of Ebony Maw dealing our heroes a defeat, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and Wong defeat him easily. It just turns out that they’re zombies. Bruce Banner and Peter Parker are our highlighted characters here. It is disappointing that they couldn’t get Tom Holland for this role, but Hudson Thames fills in admirably. He doesn’t do much to separate himself from Holland’s performance, but it’s not distracting like the other fill-ins have been.

From there, we meet the rest of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes who have survived the outbreak: Sharon Carter, Okoye, Bucky Barnes, Hope Van Dyne, Kurt, and Happy Hogan. Luckily, these characters all have their original actors providing the voice-overs. The group finds a distress signal and has to move out on it. They find a train and lose some of their members in the process of getting the train running. From there, the real action of the episode begins.

Vision is secretly drawing people in to feed to Zombie Wanda. He’s found a cure for the virus involving the Mind Stone, but it has only worked on the head of Scott Lang (thankfully played by Paul Rudd). Bucky finds T’CHalla, injured, and missing a leg. Vision has a change of heart when Wanda breaks out of her captivity, and he sacrifices himself to give the Mind Stone to Peter.

The Closing Moments Are Simultaneously Awesome And Disappointing

If there was ever an episode of this show that needed to be longer, it was this one. Part of the fun of the Marvel Zombies series is seeing who survives and who doesn’t. We got a small scene showing how the Avengers were overrun by the zombie horde, but not for Doctor Strange or Wong or Wanda. It would have been interesting to see how three of the most powerful magic users in the Marvel Universe were overtaken. Also, the episode ends quite abruptly, but it does set up a cliffhanger. The group of Scott, Peter, and T’Challa all head to Wakanda; but Thanos arrived first with the Infinity Gauntlet and is a zombie.

The whole concept of the episode fits well with the themes and feel of the show. It just leaves you with more questions than answers, particularly about things like “how does Thanos with all but one Infinity Stone get overtaken by zombies?” The ending of the episode coming so fast hopefully leaves us with a finish or continuation of this story in season two.

Seeing Banner run out and basically beg the Hulk to come out was just as awesome as his moment in The Avengers. Seeing Hulk throw around zombies and even go toe-to-toe with Wanda was a real treat. That’s another thing where a second part to this episode should come in.

Marvel Going With The Dark And Depressing Is A Surprise

These last two episodes of What If…? have not ended on cheery notes. Whether that’s Doctor Strange losing everything or our group as the last bastion of humanity. It goes to show the risks and the potential of this show as a storytelling device for the MCU. Can you imagine the possibilities when the X-Men and other characters are introduced? As for this episode, it doesn’t rise above the heights of previous ones. That’s going to be increasingly difficult to do, because of the overall quality of the series as a whole.

This episode feels like it needed at least 15 minutes more. More scenes explaining how things turned out the way they did, and a less abrupt ending. Either way, it doesn’t take the episode down too much and it ends up being very fun to watch.

Watch all the episodes of What If…? on Disney+ right now!

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