Out of all its various TV and cinematic tributaries, the Marvel Cinematic Universe can only truly cut loose, canon-wise, in one place: Disney+’s animated What If…?. (Even if the first season of said show did eventually give in to the urge toward serialization that infects the entire project.) Mostly, though, the show is crazy countefactual fun—something still on firm display as Marvel rolled out the trailer for its second season earlier today.
Still featuring the voice of Jeffrey Wright as Uatu The Watcher, the trailer is, just like the first season’s, as much guessing game as anything else. Squinting a bit, we can tease out at least a few of the episode concepts buried in there—there’s something where Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster appears to have hijacked Earth’s mightiest heroes for a violent version of Mario Kart, for instance, and another that seems to follow a young Peter Quill as he awakens to his dad’s evil powers way earlier than he should have. That’s in addition to previously announced stories, like a follow-up to the first season’s Captain Peggy Carter episode, and another that will introduce a brand new character, Kahhori, a young Mohawk woman whose people become endangered when the Tesseract lands near them in pre-colonization New York. (The time period is reminiscent of Marvel’s old limited series Marvel 1602, although the episode was written and produced in close association with members of the Mohawk Nation.)
Elsewhere, the trailer riffs on Shang-Chi—with the title character’s parents seemingly facing off against Odin, of all people—and Wanda’s arc in Doctor Strange 2. (Also, another spooky version of Strange himself shows up, because this show can’t stay away from him, apparently.) Oh, also, they make some Die Hard jokes, with Kat Dennings and Jon Favreau joking around about building-under-siege movie titles in an episode that apparently asks “What happens if Avengers Tower gets invaded while the Avengers aren’t there?”
What If…? season 2 releases in December, releasing one episode per day starting on December 22.
