What If...?: What If... the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?
December 26, 2024 9:09 PM - Season 3, Episode 5 - Subscribe

Depending on how you look at it, either we wouldn't have to worry about climate change or it would be way worse, I guess.

It's not just what's left of the Earth that's a mess here, folks. I can accept that the first episode of this season, with its kaiju and mecha, didn't grab me because I'm just not that into that stuff, but this whole episode just doesn't make any sense, starting with the idea that all the random Earth chunks floating around would still have a breathable atmosphere, or that anyone on Earth would survive Tiamut hatching, or that Quentin Beck (whom you might remember from the least popular Tom Holland Spider-Man movie, where Spidey beat him pretty easily once he figured out his deal) would end up becoming Emperor Doom of Rubbleworld, or Riri Williams turning White Vision into a super-suit by, uh, cannibalizing his corpse... jeez.

I get that they probably want to promote Riri for the upcoming Ironheart series, but that shouldn't be a very tough sell; it seems like her whole deal is "Tony Stark if he hadn't inherited not just a vast fortune but also an entire industrial complex from his equally-brilliant dad." What if all you ever had was a box of scraps? I'd watch that, and I hope that that's what Ironheart turns out to be. Even the bit where Uatu's fellow Watchers are tsk-tsking makes me wonder where they were at the end of the first season when he saved the whole Multiverse by putting together his Legion of Alternate Heroes. Maybe this was the last straw? I dunno. Jason Isaacs did one of the voices, so that's good; I've been hoping to see him again after his turn on Star Trek: Discovery, which also involved multiverse shenanigans.
posted by Halloween Jack (5 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Yeah, a thing about this show is that each episode is usually a premise that would require a 2-hour movie (or, heaven forfend, a 6-episode miniseries) to truly explore, so the episode needs to feel like the most important half hour plucked from that larger story. But in this case, as Halloween Jack says, glossing over how and why Mysterio would take over Stark Industries to create a loosely sketched dictatorship across an ill-defined segment of a fragmented world just raises too many questions. Like, this episode could have just been “What if Quentin Beck had taken control of Stark Industries after Tony Stark’s death?” and told basically the same story in a more sensical way, just without the apocalypse porn. But with this setup I’m distracted thinking “how do they have food” and “people are still going to their jobs?” And “well, what’s happening in the other 193 countries of the Earth” and “Mysterio is seriously hiring sculptors to make public statues of him?”
posted by ejs at 12:20 AM on December 27, 2024 [1 favorite]


Yeah, it took me a while to remember who he was. Good luck figuring that out if you hadn't seen the 3rd Spider-man film. In that movie, though, he had a whole team working for/with him. He was very much NOT the lone genius inventor, What happened to all his people?
Also, the setting bothered me, too. How do these people have gravity at all? Why are these resources being spent on ruling the world, rather than just survival? Actually, a story about survival after the cataclysm would've been a whole lot better, I think.
I'm guessing that the Watcher bit at the end is setting up stuff for a later episode.
posted by Spike Glee at 6:57 AM on December 27, 2024 [1 favorite]


Gravity isn't really a problem as long as the mass of the total system doesn't change too much and the surface people are somehow still living on is oriented opposite the center of mass of all the fragments. At least for the fragments that aren't "below the surface" of other fragments.

The lack of an atmosphere would be a much bigger problem (all the air would fall toward the center of the system post haste), and how you end up with a bunch of fragments that only have orbital angular momentum and zero rotational angular momentum is an unsolved problem but maybe the departing Eternal kindly took care of that on its way out of the system.

And then there's the whole somehow everything didn't get turned to molten rock from the massive amount of energy required to crack the Earth like an egg exploding in the microwave, but let's pretend that it was all magically reabsorbed in the enhatchenin so we're only stuck with the one problem.
posted by wierdo at 2:22 PM on December 31, 2024


To handwave at context, for things that only appeared once:
posted by Pronoiac at 9:56 AM on January 5 [1 favorite]


Don't remember who these people are, don't care, don't get what is going on here.

Also, I hate the name "Riri" because they constantly say it and can't stop saying it: RIRIRIRIRIRIRIRIRIRIRIRRIRIRIRIRIRIRIRRIRIRIRIRIRIRRI.

Also, what is the point of Watchers if they do fuckall? God forbid they do anything but watch everyone like it's a soap opera.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:12 PM on January 5


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