Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for What If…? Season 3 Episode 6.
There’s a lot to love about Season 3 of What If…?, like the fact that it prioritizes newer MCU characters rather than the classics like Tony Stark and Steve Rogers and the fact that so many of the episodes have a heartfelt message at the center of them. But that said, if there’s one major downside to the final season, it’s that not enough of the episodes have really out-there premises. A lot of them use the current Marvel timeline as a jumping off point, rather than playing with the ideas of time and space along the lines of “What If…the Avengers Assembled in 1602.” However, Season 3, Episode 6 does put the characters in a new setting, and also correct some of the wrongs of previous Marvel stories with “What If…1872.” Saddle up, partners. We’re headed to the Old West.
Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop Take On the Old West in ‘What If…?’ Season 3 Episode 6
In the American desert in 1872, a church bell rings in an abandoned settlement. This isn’t the last hope of a desperate preacher hoping for a flock, especially because each of those rings is immediately proceeded by a gunshot. Inside the abandoned structure, we find out why. A member of John Walker’s (Wyatt Russell) posse fired at the bell, but lost count of how many shots he took. Walker shoots one final shot, bringing the number up to ten, exactly, as the legend says. What is this legend, you ask? Well, it’s said that ten rings will summon… well, the Ten Rings, Shang-Chi’s (Simu Liu) nickname in these parts. Sure enough, he arrives and Walker immediately begins threatening him. Bad guys would be so much more efficient without all the bluster. Luckily, Shang-Chi didn’t come alone, as Hawkeye, aka Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) appears at the back door, promising a demonstration of her shooting skills.
Shang-Chi tosses his hat in the air, partially as a distraction, and before it even has time to hit the ground, he and Hawkeye have taken out Walker and all his men. And the number of people he brought with him was not inconsiderable. In the end, Walker is the only one left alive, but luckily, he’s the only one they need. Shang-Chi asks him where they can find “The Hood,” the person who’s been ransacking construction sites to abduct the workers building the rail lines. Walker is dismissive at first, wondering why he should care about missing Chinese immigrants — which is a terrible thing to say regardless, but also a deeply stupid thing to say when there’s a Chinese man holding you by your collar after he and his associate just killed your entire posse. Walker realizes this and backtracks, saying the Hood is headed to Point Pegasus, but adds that Shang-Chi may not even need to go looking for the Hood, as rumor says the Hood is looking for him too.
The Watcher (Jeffrey Wright) takes us into his headquarters, and explains that out in the furthest parts of the multiverse, anything is possible. Things are less “What If” and more “What the Hell” — and with some of the examples he shows, where’s that season of this show? Why can’t I get an episode of The Avengers But Now They’re Pirates — but even then, things like injustice remain a constant. In the case of Shang-Chi’s universe, he explains, his sister Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang) left China in 1860 to escape her father’s tyranny, and headed to America, where she encountered a tyranny of a different sort. This was not a land of opportunity, but a land where immigrants are targets for other people’s fear of the unknown, stoked by the Hood, who used this penchant for bigotry to cement his power. See, this is what I mean when I say this show is not subtle. The Watcher says that Xialing was the only one who fought back — probably the only one who felt like she had a fighting chance — but then she too went missing, along with all of her neighbors. This is how Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop came to work together, with him being the only one actually looking for his sister, and her with her own score to settle with the Hood.
Shang-Chi and Kate make it to Point Pegasus, only to find it in ruins as well, and still smoldering. This is what the Hood does, according to Kate, whose family homestead received the same treatment. No trail to follow, and no survivors. Well, almost no survivors. The two of them are approached by Jun-Fan (Allen Deng), a local boy left behind when the Hood took everyone else. He says he tried to ring the bell to call them, but the Hood was too fast. He explains that they were around the fire listening to his father retell the Legend of Hawkeye and the Ten Rings when the Hood appeared out of nowhere, bringing a cold chill in the air, and taking everyone away on a Ghost Train. Jun-Fan says that the train headed out into the valley, which puzzles Shang-Chi as there’s no railroad track that way, but he promises Jun-Fan that they’ve got it from here. Jun-Fan insists on coming with them, and even demonstrates his martial arts skills to prove what a good asset he’d make. Shang-Chi is impressed, and there’s no time to argue anyway, not now that Kate has found a faint trail leading from the settlement into the desert.
Since the train has such a head start, they opt to take the stagecoach route through the mountains to head the train off at the pass. They arrive to find an empty valley, but appear to have made it just in time, as moments later, the Ghost Train appears around the corner, running despite the lack of track. They catch up to the train and hop on board, with Shang-Chi spotting the strange technology that allows the train to hover over the desert floor without a track. It also allows the train to sail clear over a canyon with a steep drop. This is great for efficient travel, but less great for our heroes, whose horses are left behind on the other side of the canyon. Once they’re clear, they make their way through the train, spotting an intense piece of technology that Shang-Chi speculates belongs to Tony Stark, and I speculate is helping run the train. Here’s my question: if he sees glowing blue tech and immediately thinks “Tony Stark,” why do the glowing blue lights under the train, powering it to drive, throw him off so much?
Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop Chase Ghosts From Their Past in ‘What If’ Season 3 Episode 6
They enter the next car and find it full of weapons. Enough of an arsenal to take on the whole wild West, all from various weapon manufacturers — Stark, Hammer, Cross — but the most shocking thing of all awaits them in the next car. Ostensibly, it’s a passenger car, but when they enter, they realize that all the passengers are seated perfectly upright, unblinking and motionless in their seats. Jun-Fan tears off looking for his father, while Shang-Chi and Kate speculate on what the Hood would want with so many people. They suppose he’s looking for an army, and this seems like a good place to start. Jun-Fan finds his dad, but is devastated to see that he won’t respond to him at all. To get to the bottom of this, Shang-Chi says they’ll have to talk directly to The Hood. Over in the next car, they don’t find the Hood, but they do find Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), with enough armed mercenaries to make Shang-Chi and Kate think twice about fighting back, especially when he sets two of the mercenaries to guard Jun-Fan.
Shang-Chi instead opts to try and get some information out of Burch regarding the whereabouts of the Hood and Xialing. Burch tells them he’s one of the investors in the future the Hood is looking to build, and tells them that this is a train of liberation, and that the people on the train have been conscripted to help fight for this bright new future. Shang-Chi points out that conscription and freedom are absolutely mutually exclusive concepts, and Burch knows it. Having had enough of this, Shang-Chi tells Jun-Fan to use one of his martial arts moves on his guards, which he does before running back to the safety of the other cars. Shang-Chi and Kate are then about to open up a can of whoop-ass on Burch and his mercenaries, but he stops them, saying that the Hood wants to see them just as much as they want to see him, and he’ll take them there if they agree to play nice. He directs them forward to another car, and as soon as they’re gone, orders the rest of his men to go kill Jun-Fan.
With his head start, Jun-Fan makes it to the top of the train before anyone catches up with him. The Watcher says that Jun-Fan was inspired by Shang-Chi’s example to become the hero of his own story, but that sometimes such stories meet with tragedy. In this case, it looks like two of Burch’s men are about to throw him off the top of the train when the Watcher breaks his oath again and intervenes, pushing the two assailants off the top of the train, and allowing Jun-Fan to finish out the ride lying flat on the roof as they pass through a tunnel. When they finally ome out on the other side, it’s to find a large building surrounded by torches, and Burch tells Shang-Chi that the Hood is inside. He lets him out to head towards the building but orders Kate at gunpoint to stay behind, as the Hood only wants to talk to Shang-Chi.
Shang-Chi heads towards the door alone, calling out for the Hood and demanding to know where his sister is. The Hood appears on the steps of the building and tells Shang-Chi that if he wants to find out what happened to his sister, then he should join up with him. Shang-Chi refuses, opting instead to beat the information out of the Hood, and the two come to blows as Kate and Burch watch from the train. The Hood more than holds his own against Shang-Chi, demonstrating some impressive martial arts moves. As soon as it looks like Shang-Chi could gain the upper hand, the Hood steps away, then vanishes entirely. He eventually reappears, and this disappearing and reappearing routine begins to factor into his fight with Shang-Chi. As the Hood vanishes, Burch pops open his pocket watch, ostensibly to check the time, but also to trigger the little tune his watch plays. A tune that starts making Kate very drowsy. Kate fights against the hypnotic music, which Burch refers to as “persuasion tech” he acquired in Russia, and Kate realizes this is how he hypnotized the workers.
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Outside the train, the Hood disappears again, after asking Shang-Chi to join him once more, which Shang-Chi refuses to do. He detects the Hood’s footsteps and tracks them through the snow, landing a well-placed punch which deactivates the Hood’s invisibility tech and knocks him backwards pushing the hood of his — or really, I should say, her — head. Yes, it turns out the Hood is actually Xialing, and it also turns out that Shang-Chi’s kick was so effective, it made a gorgeous shade of red lipstick appear on Xialing’s lips, where the Hood’s were cracked and dry. She tells him that when the Hood came for her, she defeated him and stole his power. She again asks her brother to join her to help her save the workers, but Shang-Chi still refuses, telling her that what she’s doing is not saving them, but harming them. As they fight, with Xialing now going in for the kill, she tells him that what she’s doing is saving them, because she’s turning them into an army that will ensure America becomes the land of opportunity that they were promised, instead of the bigoted nightmare they got.
Inside the train, because he can’t resist a taunt, Burch says that he was the one who killed Kate’s parents, not the Hood, and adds that he then used their money to fund the Hood’s project. With Kate hypnotized and rooted to the spot, he keeps adding to the taunts, saying that he enjoyed killing her parents, and will enjoy killing her too, particularly with her mother’s gun. Back outside, Jun-Fan watches the fight between Shang-Chi and Xialing, which has taken a turn for the worse where Shang-Chi is concerned. In an effort to rally his hero, Jun-Fan spots a bell nearby and rushes over to ring it as a way to motivate him. It works, but the action has several unintended effects, as it also snaps Kate and all the workers out of their hypnosis. Kate makes her way through the train, shooting all the mercenaries before they can get off a single shot. She settles for knocking out Burch, preferring to see him suffer rather than die.
Xialing demands that her brother fight her to the death, but Shang-Chi refuses to kill his sister and surrenders. He tells her she’s always been his hero, and that he loves her. She’s about to take another swing at him with her knife, but gunshots ring through the air and Xialing falls back, with Kate still standing there holding the gun. She realizes too late that the Hood was Shang-Chi’s sister, and wisely stays out of it as he hurries over to hold her while she dies, and the two make up before she succumbs. Kate apologizes profusely, but Shang-Chi only blames himself for her death. With the workers saved, they escort them back to their town, where Jun-Fan now has a legend of his own to share with them. Shang-Chi and Kate watch as he does, with Kate commenting that the kid has “iron fists,” suggesting that in this universe at least, Iron Fist is not a white guy who had a really meaningful, spiritually fulfilling gap year in Asia — yes, I know that’s not actually his backstory, but Jun-Fan is a better choice regardless.
Shang-Chi tells Kate he wants to continue Xialing’s mission of making America a fairer place for all who come, and asks her to join him. She does so gladly, and the two ride off into the sunset. See, this is the sort of romp I wish the season had more of — a single, self-contained adventure that doesn’t leave the problems of the world unchallenged, but also leans more into the sort of wild universes the first two seasons had more of. But if you thought this delightful Western romp was going to end on such a triumphant note, then you don’t know What If…? very well. Since the Watcher broke his oath yet again, the Eminence (Jason Isaacs) arrives to confront him, along with The Incarnate and the Executioner. They’re there to make him answer for the breaking of his Oath, and bind him, sending shards of his dimension flying out into space.
The first six episodes of What If…? are streaming now on Disney+.
Review
What If Season 3 Episode 6 is a delightful and topical Old West adventure that makes me long for what the season could have been.
- I love when What If turns in the genre fiction and familiar MCU elements have to be twisted to fit.
- Shang-Chi and Kate Bishop are an unlikely duo and I’d like to see more of them together.
