‘What If…?’ S3 Episode 2 “What If Agatha Went To Hollywood” Review

What If…? Season 3’s second episode takes some visual liberties that takes the series to a new level creatively, but fails to provide a well written story. Read our “What If Agatha Went To Hollywood” review.

Day 2 of What If…?’s holiday season release of the show’s third season brings us a story combining Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), Hollywood and The Eternals (specifically Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo). The episode follows Agatha on her journey to power, as recently shown in the Agatha All Along television series, which brings her to Hollywood where she tries to harness the power of the Eternal being grown on the interior of the Earth. Eternal Kingo notices this and is charged with stopping her, but ends up falling under the sway of her influence before a bigger threat arises.

At this point, I am beginning to feel some fatigue with the onslaught of Agatha content us Marvel fans have been receiving over the past year. It was, however, a breath of fresh air seeing The Eternals get some much needed content even if underwritten and disregarding previous lore. While this episode addresses a previous issue in the prior where characters didn’t feel needed due to the lack of need for powers, the lack of MCU characters here (or lack of characters in general) bring a sense of tameness to the instalment. 

Visually, the show might just be at its worst here. With a bland and overly warm colour palette making the animation style look somehow even muddier, mixed with the already generic power set of The Eternals, this is What If…? at its worst. The usage of some period accurate cinema style aesthetics such as the intro and outro does make up for it thankfully, but even then it’s not enough to rescue from a visually distressing time. 

Some of the MCU characters that are included here, like Jarvis, Howard Stark, and Arishem, are all pretty one note and have no depth to their characters. Howard in particular feels like an insert to have an MCU character just because. His character has had nothing to do with filmmaking in the past and it feels like this episode may have been better suit in the future of the MCU, with Trevor (Ben Kingsley), Christine Everhart (Leslie Bibb), and Wonder Man (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) feeling like better alternatives to feature. That as it may be, this episode does stay true to its episode title and “What If?” concept, making yesterday’s episode look like a joke. In the end, I do prefer the first episode of the season over this one, but not by a large margin. 

“What If Agatha Went To Hollywood” struggles to justify its existence, especially relative to some of the better concepts in the series. With an ugly exterior and an unpolished interior, this episode probably was better off on the cutting room floor. 

What If…? season 3 episode 2 starred Jeffrey Wright as Uatu The Watcher, Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, and Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark. The show’s third episode, “What If… the Red Guardian stopped The Winter Soldier?”, hits Disney+ tomorrow at 12PM PST with episodes following daily at the same time, through December 29th. 

Thanks for reading this review of “What If Agatha Went To Hollywood”. For more, stay tuned here at Feature First.