What If… It Sucked?

I want to note that I am all for big franchises taking even bigger swings on interesting ideas. It’s easy for corporate to try and tone down ideas, to pull everything inwards towards a house style that dulls and mutes and sands off the edges. A series taking a risk and doing something different can often feel like a highlight and inject fresh blood into an otherwise flagging series. Just look at the first Aquaman film in the DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe.. While not a classically good movie, it was big and broad and dumb and it did what other films in the series had failed: it brought the fun. That film went on to be a Billion dollar success for DC and could have pointed a way forward for the franchise… if audiences weren’t already tuning out on what DC was selling after that.

In that regard, then, I think Marvel making a show all about the Marvel Zombies continuity could be good. I think, in the right hands, free to pursue its own, weirdo desires, a Marvel Zombies show could be good. I liked many of the What If…? episodes that came out, especially those that went pretty gonzo with their ideas, and the “What If… Marvel Zombies?” episode was fun (if slight), so I think spinning that out and doing something more with the show could work in the right context. I mean, hell, the concept proved fruitful enough when it first showed up in Ultimate Fantastic Four that it led to six Marvel Zombies limited series, a one-shot comic, and even a crossover in the form of Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness.

So yes, in the right context this concept could prove quite fruitful. Unfortunately what we got as part of the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. is not at all the right context. Instead of a truly strange and delightfully gory adaptation of the original comics we get something that feels painfully bland, like it’s trying too hard to be an MCU product first and then inserting zombies in after simply for the sake of. And while I understand that Marvel makes MCU products, it would have been nice if the same company that could revive the old X-Men cartoon in glorious fashion could have found a bit more fidelity to the source material and find a way to make a Marvel Zombies show that was, you know, scary and fun.

The series opens on three survivors of the zombie apocalypse: Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel (voiced by Iman Vellani), Riri Williams / Ironheart (voiced by Dominique Thorne), and Kate Bishop / Hawkeye II (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld). They’ve been living outside of New York City for years, heading into town to scrounge for supplies (and avoid the arrows of the zombie Hawkeye that hunts them every time they do), but it’s when the heroines are in the city at the same time that a SHIELD Quinn Jet crashes into the street that their whole adventure truly kicks off. That jet had a dead body on it, and inside the body was a miniaturized tracking beacon that, if it could somehow get activated, would signal help from the Nova Corp. that could, in theory, save the planet from the zombie plague.

Riri knows what the probe could do, but she doesn’t have the tech to actually activate it. That requires the heroines to head off on a road trip to an abandoned SHIELD base to use the tech there. Except the base isn’t actually abandoned; it’s controlled by the remnants of the Black Widows, led by Melina Vostokoff (Kari Wahlgren, Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and Alexei Shostakov / Red Guardian (David Harbour). Gaining their trust is the first step. Defending against a coming zombie horde controlled by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), the Queen of the Dead, is the second task. And then the girls have to find a way into space because the beacon they have will only work up there. But when it comes to the fate of the planet, no risk is too great.

I’m not going to try and argue that the original Marvel Zombies comics were phenomenal works of comic art. They certainly had interesting illustrations, lots of gore, and a weirdo concept, but they were also B-grade trash in the best possible way. They understood how silly it was to mash zombies against Marvel superheroes, and they let the whole weirdo concept run as far as it could. That’s the energy that’s missing from Marvel Zombies, the miniseries: that “anything goes” mentality mixed with a healthy dose of focused action and gore. In comparison to the books, the television miniseries is a complete mess.

We won’t even bother detailing all the ways this series diverges from the comics, because, as we discussed over on the recent Blade article, Kevin Feige and his team seem adverse to making anything that feels “too comicbook-y”. The fact that this is a completely different story that has nothing to do with the comics aside from featuring zombies is to be expected. But that doesn’t absolve the show from also being boring, staid, and a complete mess from start to finish. Even taken as its own concept, the television Marvel Zombies just doesn’t work.

For starters (and this is mild spoilers for the first half of the first episode of the series), the show can’t even stick to its core setup. We’re given Kamala, Kate, and Riri and we’re told, effectively, “these three are going to stop the zombie apocalypse.” Except, that’s not the case because in the very first episode Kate is killed off in a stupid and futile way, taking away one of the only characters the series spent any time developing. Riri soon follows, leaving us alone with Kamala as she ends up finding, and then losing, traveling companions over and over again.

I understand a certain desire to let the bodies fly to garner shock value. That’s about the only reason I can come up with for why a series sets up three heroines as our protagonists and then immediately kills one of them. There’s the feeling like, “you never know who’s going to die,” but at the same time it also removes one of the few strong connections on the show. We’re shown that these three became best friends in the apocalypse. They have an easy, fun chemistry that really works. To immediately remove that from the show before the first episode is even over cuts out one of the strongest legs of the series, and the show struggles to find a way to recover from it for the rest of its run.

A big part of the problem is that the series never finds other companions that are as good a fit for Kamala to act as a companion for her during her journey. It certainly throws a lot of people at her, from Blade / Moon Knight (Todd Williams), Yelena, Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) and Katy Chen (Awkwafina), Scott Lang / Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and more, but none of those characters ever grow to feel like real people on the series. They barely get character development in the moments they have and then, when they inevitably die (because everyone eventually dies in a zombie apocalypse), it doesn’t resonate with them.

Let’s put it this way: if Kamala, Riri, and Kate made it to the end of the adventure together and then one or two of them dies, it becomes a noble sacrifice that means something because we went on the adventure together. But, if instead one random hero that only joined up one episode prior makes it to the end then dies, we don’t really care because we barely know them. They’re bodies, filler to take up space, while the show throws pretty light, special effects, and some (but not a lot) of gore around. It lacks the necessary punch that a truly noble sacrifice from a character we love would have had.

On top of that, the show doesn’t even try to develop the characters we do get. With few exceptions, the show relies mostly on what we know about the characters from the main MCU to fill in the shading on them here. This, of course, ignores the fact that this is a different continuity with its own story, rules, and variations of characters. It also ignores the fact that these are characters that have been living in the zombie apocalypse for five years (with the Plague coming around the same time that the Snap happened in the main universe) so, naturally, they’d be different characters even if they started at the same point five years prior. That’s a long time, with a lot of events, that would shape and change people. Marvel shorthands all that to the detriment of its characters and the series.

Certainly the fact that the series is only four episodes does it no favors. We did get one little episode in What If…? Season One, but the outbreak had already been raging by then so we didn’t have a lot of context. A full season (or at least eight episodes) showing the spread of the outbreak, how the world fell, and then pointing a way towards hope would have been better. But that would have required Marvel having faith in this concept, committing to a multi-season deal that could have gone all kinds of places in the pursuit of a long-form story. Instead, it’s clear that Marvel wanted to dump this and burn off the content on Disney+Disney's answer in the streaming service game, Disney+ features the studio's (nearly) full back catalog, plus new movies and shows from the likes of the MCU and Star Wars. as fast as possible so they could work on recalibrating the MCU for the future.

And you know what, I would have accepted all of that, all the bad storytelling and underdeveloped characters if the show could have at least given us what we came for: gory, over-the-top zombie action. Everything here, though, feels weirdly sanitized, as if Marvel both wanted a zombie show but didn’t understand how to do that while still fitting it into the MCU house style. The answer, of course, is not to. Like X-Men ‘97, this should have been allowed to be its own thing, to stand apart and go wherever the creators wanted. If this was their vision, it’s way too safe, to clean, to bland.

A Marvel Zombies adaptation could be good. Or, at the very least, it could be stupid and fun. This Marvel Zombies, though, is none of that. It's the safest, most corporate version of the event series you could get, with none of the luster, gore, or fun to be had. It’s a mess of a series, from start to finish, that could have been so much better. It’s tragic, really, because there’s so much fun that could be had here but the series never taps into that. Marvel Zombies is wasted potential, pure and simple, and it shows, once again, that Marvel really sucks at this whole television thing. It would have been better if this had just stayed as a single What If…? episode instead of becoming a full series.