After a particularly brutal year for the brand, Marvel manages to end 2023 on a last-minute positive note with the animated series “What If…?” The series continues to surprise and even disarm the viewer with the unexpected. Just when you think it’s content to provide simply entertaining fan-service-y alternative multiverse stories of your favorite with a twist— and it surely can do that too— it turns and deepens leveraging the freedom of the inventive, imagined what-if presentation to tell darker, richer versions of Marvel Cinematic Universe tales, often with a meaningfully tragic bent that really compel.
