Summary
An action-packed episode reimagines The Winter Soldier with Peggy Carter behind the shield and works as a direct sequel to a couple of Season 1 episodes.
A mere 24 hours after Episode 4 of What If…? Season 2, which was in some ways a sequel to the first season, the Watcher has the gall to turn up in Episode 5, “What If… Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper?”, and say he’s not a fan of sequels but is willing to make an exception. You’re not sliding that one past me, mate!
Nevertheless, this is more of an explicit sequel, continuing a thread started in “What If… Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?” and continued in “What If… The Watcher Broke his Oath?”. Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell) has been fulfilling Steve’s role in the Battle of New York and a re-do of some scenes from The Winter Soldier, making BFFs with Natasha Romanoff (Lake Bell) and eventually arriving on a mysterious cargo ship that doesn’t contain a terrorist badly played by Georges St. Pierre but instead the HYDRA Stomper containing a brainwashed Steve Rogers (Josh Keaton).
What If…? Season 2 Episode 5 Recap
In this timeline, the HYDRA Stomper is fulfilling the role of the Winter Soldier – a mindless HYDRA killing machine responsible for some of the worst terror attacks in the previous decades and with a deeply personal connection to the current Captain. With Steve fulfilling these responsibilities now, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) has aged into the Secretary of State, though he isn’t used much outside of a sequence in which he puts his life on the line to protect Steve from a Widow-piloted S.H.I.E.L.D. jet while Peggy tries to talk him down.
So far, so Civil War, but things take a bit of a turn when Peggy is able to knock Steve out and Natasha takes the three of them to a remote Scottish island to run some tests. As it turns out, the suit is the only thing keeping Steve alive, since he was technically “killed” on a mission in Argentina while he and prime Bucky were taking out HYDRA bases. Steve’s brainwashing is the responsibility of the Red Room, where Peggy wants to go to figure out a course of action that might save him, but the location isn’t exactly common knowledge. Luckily, a suddenly un-brainwashed Steve wakes up and volunteers to take them there, which nobody finds remotely suspicious.
Where is the Red Room?
The Red Room is located in a former KGB training camp in Sokovia which has been built to resemble idyllic American suburbia, complete with white picket fences and creepy animatronics robotically repeating quintessentially American catchphrases. None of this makes a great deal of sense when you think about it, which you probably shouldn’t since it’s just a riff on that old trope of the Soviet Union training their sleeper cells to infiltrate the U.S., and the animatronics make for novel low-consequence action scene fodder.
Of course, it all kicks off when Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) — from Black Widow — arrives with a bunch of Widows and reveals that Steve has been playing double agent the whole time, luring Agent Carter to Sokovia so the Red Room can study her since she’s such a beacon of feminine empowerment. Cue Natasha taking on her “mother” and “sisters”, Peggy taking on Steve in the HYDRA Stomper, and a whole army of animatronics getting in the way.
Luckily, all those heart-to-hearts between Peggy and Steve earlier in the episode finally pay off, since Peggy is able to break his programming for just long enough that he decides to take down the Red Room in a heroic self-sacrifice, and Natasha hooks Milena onto his suit as he rockets into the air, solving that problem as well.
How does What If…? Season 2 Episode 5 end?
The episode ends with Peggy sure that Steve survived and determined to find him, though it also ends by dragging her kicking and screaming into what will presumably be the next episode.
In a little subversion of the usual climaxes in this series, the Watcher himself is even surprised to see Peggy dragged through a red-lit crack and into a new reality, where she’s greeted by both Nick Fury and Wanda Maximoff in suspiciously Elizabethan attire. It looks like we’re doing Marvel 1602.
What did you think of What If…? Season 2 Episode 5? Let us know in the comments.
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