“Sons are indeed a heritage from the Lord, offspring, a reward.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As the old saying goes, a broken clock is still right twice a day. For the better part of a generation, Disney has been one of, if not the, primary entertainment-producing companies in the world. But in recent years, they seem to have forgotten that they are in the business of making money, not pushing a particular cultural agenda. As a result, they haven’t been making money quite like they once were. But for all of their cultural tone-deafness, there are some signs they are starting to turn a corner and remember that one of their primary audiences is families. One of the latest such signs came in the recently completed and final season of What If?…

Marvel’s animated series, What If?… premiered three years ago to great acclaim. I gladly count myself among its biggest fans. Besides the fact that it was animated and I still love cartoons, the storytelling was excellent. Playing on the concept of the multiverse, each episode asked what if this had happened at a critical Marvel storyline juncture instead of that. The episodes all explored these alternatives and apparently disparate possible realities through the eyes of The Watcher, a cosmically powdered being whose sacred oath is to observe the events of the multiverse without passion or involvement. And it was all done with nearly all of the original live action actors voicing their animated versions.

By the end of the season, though, a uniquely and supremely powerful foe threatened all reality including The Watcher himself. As a result, he put together a kind of Avengers team of characters from each of the episodes of the season to band together and neutralize the threat.

The second season followed much the same storyline, with several of the same characters and a few new ones. The series has basically been a chance for Marvel to shine a brighter spotlight on second tier characters who never really got their moment in the sun. Interestingly, at least two of the characters were so popular they made it into a live action movie (Dr. Strange 2) after being introduced in animation.

The third season, like the second premiered this past Christmas as a series of eight episodes released on eight successive days. I haven’t quite finished the whole season, but I’m close.

Unlike the first two seasons, the third season has not been so well received. Critics have mostly been happy, but actual fans (you know, the ones it was ostensibly made for) have mostly panned it. With six of the eight episodes under my belt so far, I understand that reaction. While each episode has been pretty good on the whole, and while there is a clearly developing storyline that will ultimately connect all of the episodes and will even be a culmination of the previous two seasons, none of the new characters has been sufficiently compelling to really hold my interest. As a case in point, we’re three or four days now past the release of the final episode, and I haven’t watched them all yet.

There have been two other things eating at me about this season so far. The first is that the stories they told in the first season were mostly the result of changing one small thing in an already well-known MCU narrative. The second season started to branch out more, but in ways that involved already established characters within the show. The third season has drifted further in the direction of the second, but without the mooring of those characters. I know at least two of them will be brought back, but it just hasn’t been enough. The conclusion right now feels like it hasn’t been earned and I haven’t even seen it.

The other thing is that the episodes have taken a turn toward silliness instead of the more grounded feel of the first season which it maintained in spite of telling some pretty far out there stories (like Marvel Zombies which will eventually get it’s own single-series run). A perfect case in point is the episode that actually caught my eye.

Episode number four asks “What if…Howard the Duck Got Hitched?” Now, to even begin to explain just the title would take more time than you’re probably willing to give me at this point, so I’ll skip to the point as fast as I can without leaving you completely clueless. Essentially, a Marvel character named Howard the Duck, known mostly just to fans and from a really bad 1980s movie, but who was introduced to the MCU via a couple of cameos in the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, gets married to Darcy Lewis, who is Jane Foster’s best friend in the Thor movies, helped figure out what Wanda was doing in Wandavision, and who has appeared in the previous couple of seasons of What If?…, and the two somehow make an egg together. They met and fell in love over coffee at a Vegas raver Party Thor threw in the first season. I didn’t even begin to let myself think of all the things wrong with that sentence.

The episode is about how the entire rest of the MCU including SHIELD, Dormammu and his evil followers, Zeus (voiced by Russell Crowe) and the force of Olympus, and Maleketh and his dark elves, all want to get their hands on Howard and Darcy’s egg because its creation during the Convergence (see: Thor 2) somehow imbued the baby with incredible power. Except for the Grandmaster (voiced by Jeff Goldblum) who just wants to eat it. Oh, and Loki appears (voiced by Tom Hiddleston) as a friendly frost giant who apparently was never given to Odin and raised as Thor’s adopted brother. Like I said: silliness. In fact, if the whole thing starts at a silliness level of 10 (out of 10), it finishes at about a 78. All the while, Mr. and Mrs. The Duck are working through all of the struggles and anxieties new parents have before the arrival of their precious little one.

Now that I surely have you wondering (if I even still have you at all) what exactly about all of this caught my eye, the answer is The Watcher’s final reflection on the story. Just before the credits roll, and as the new parents put their previous little blue-haired, feathery-armed, apparently infinitely powerful little one to be, The Watcher observers, “Even in an endless universe, there’s no place like home. And parents are the greatest heroes of all.”

I should add one little note here: this was the episode released on Christmas Day.

And while I could perhaps take offense that Marvel would release such an absolutely absurd episode on the day for celebrating the birth of Jesus, I’m inclined more in another direction. Think about it like this. On Christmas Day, Marvel gave us a story about two anxious new parents facing an incredible adventure to bring their special little one into the world for the first time. And while they did everything they could, facing off against forces vastly more powerful than they were, in the end, it was their baby who saved them. I don’t know about you, but that sounds about right to me. Change the skin on the story, and it wouldn’t look so different from the birth narratives of Luke and Matthew.

In the same vein, while I could quibble a bit with the theological accuracy of the final line from The Watcher, in a day when birthrates are generally plummeting around the globe, creating present challenges and setting up a host of potential future tragedies, an encouragement to parents and a celebration of having babies is an awfully good thing. Especially on Christmas Day.

Wokeness about ruined Marvel and Disney both. But a broken clock is still right twice a day. And maybe…just maybe, there are still some folks interested in telling good stories haunting the halls of both sets of offices. That’s worth cheering. We need more good stories…and storytellers who recognize that their best stories are always echoes of the greatest story ever told. Just like this one was. Happy Friday.