Evil Doctor Strange Does The Multiverse Of Madness’s Original Plan Right

Warning: Contains spoilers for Marvel’s What If…? episode 4.

With What If…? episode 4, “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?,” the show gave audiences its darkest episode yet, but the evil twist takes the story closer to the original horror plan for Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. While episode 3 saw the assassination of many of the original Avengers, the ending of the episode was focused on hope for the future. Unlike episode 3’s mystery genre tendencies, What If…? episode 4 fully embraced combining Doctor Strange with a horror feel and gave it a bleak ending.

The first Doctor Strange was written and directed by Scott Derrickson, who had previously worked on movies such as Sinister and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. While he was attached to work on the second movie, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, he eventually stepped down as both writer and director, instead working on a movie coming in 2022, The Black Phone. He stayed attached to the Doctor Strange sequel as an executive producer but the directorship passed to Sam Raimi (who directed the original Spider-Man trilogy with Tobey Maguire) and the role of writer went to Jade Halley Bartlett.

It seems that Scott Derrickson left Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness because he wanted to take the movie in a different direction than Kevin Feige and Marvel wanted. Given his history as a horror writer and director and the fact that he left to work on a horror movie where he wouldn’t have to compromise his plans, it seems likely that his vision for the second movie was a full-on horror film. What If…? episode 4 gave viewers a glimpse of what that would have looked like, as Strange is pitted against an evil Doctor Strange in a futile battle across timelines to try to save a portion of the multiverse. The episode encompassed plenty of horror aspects including Doctor Strange being stuck in a loop of watching the woman he loves die, his meddling with dark forces that lead to his spiritual and physical corruption by beings from other dimensions, and evil Strange’s triumph over the good Strange. The final horror element comes in the episodes ending with Doctor Strange realizing what he has done as he is trapped in a tiny reality and Doctor Strange is abandoned by the Watcher, the only being who might be able to save him.

This bleak downer of an episode would have been seemed unthinkable in the early days of the MCU. During Phase 1, the heroes reliably won and long-term casualties were rare. As time went on, the Marvel Cinematic Universe allowed itself to occasionally veer into some darker territory as it began to reckon with the consequences of the Avengers’ actions in Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. This culminated in Marvel committing to major characters being permanently written out of the future of the timeline, as with the deaths of Yondu, Tony Stark, and Natasha Romanoff. What If…? episode 4 highlights this change, but it is neither the beginning nor the end of this transition.

Marvel has been using its Disney+ TV shows to explore failure and darker topics within the MCU. WandaVision dealt with grief, and while he is likely to return as White Vision, Wanda ultimately couldn’t save Vision. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier took a hard look at social injustice and Sam Wilson’s efforts to save Karli Morgenthau were thwarted. Loki also dealt with its share of existential crisis and heartbreak, with the first episode being particularly emotional. The MCU will certainly continue to explore these darker issues, as evidenced by the planned Moon Knight series for 2022. However, Marvel clearly decided that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was not the place to do that but allowed the concept to be explored in What If…? instead.

Marvel’s What If…? releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.