If you have watched What If Season 2 Episode 5, then you might be wondering why Scarlet Witch pulled Captain Carter into a different universe and that too in some different timeline. I think that this timeline is 1602 because Marvel is trying to connect some of this season’s episodes
Maybe this is the same episode where we got the “What If… The Avengers Assembled in 1602?” episode because we also saw Nick Fury standing beside Scarlet Witch. Or maybe it is the “What If… Kahhori Reshaped the World?” episode where at the end of this episode, Khhori was going against the Queen of their Nation. And Scarlet Witch also said that she wanted to save the queen.
I have more such theories, so let’s talk about them all as to “What Does Scarlet Witch Want From Captain Carter?”.
Plot Explained
Black Widow takes them to one of her secret hideouts in St Kilda, Scotland, on an island. It might be a reference then going to Scotland during Avengers Infinity War, but they were in a different town during that movie.
Natasha pours them a vodka, making a Russian drinking cheer, also foreshadowing the Black Widow movie storyline with Melina and the other Black Widows coming later. She also suggests using Iron Man in his stark tech to devise a way to get Steve Rogers out of his suit. Maybe Bruce Banner using his gamma experiments in serums to keep Steve Rogers alive. Implying that they might turn him into like a version of the Steve Rogers Hulk to keep him alive.
Captain Carter, unfortunately, says no, we don’t need another version of the Hulk. They literally just did that during episode three during the What If Happy Hogan’s Save Christmas episode, where he takes some of the Hulk’s gamma serum and becomes a purple version of the Hulk.
When she says, unplugging it and plugging it back in that’s just a reference to people’s routers in real life. Like if your Internet is slow or it’s not working, unplug it, then try plugging it back in and you’re in and it’ll probably be fine.
Captain Carter then makes a Star Wars Empire Strikes Back reference, saying that he’ll get stuck in prison, frozen in Carbonite, revealing that she has seen the Star Wars movies. Black Widow makes a joke about her being a super nerd.
Black Widow also made a similar type of joke during the Captain America Winter Soldier movie about Steve Rogers being kind of nerdy, and not doing really fun stuff on the weekends. Even though in reality watching Star Wars movies is actually a lot of fun.
Captain Carter is the one who decides to try and track down the red room and look for answers there. Josh Keaton then voices Steve Rogers again, like he gets his first actual speaking lines in the episode. He’s the voice of the spectacular Spider-Man that most people remember, who is now canon to the Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse movies. Technically, that also makes him canon to the MCU, too, because they crossed over MCU moments in that movie.
Arriving Into A Crazy Town
They reveal Malina’s new Black Widow training facility is inside Sokovia like it used to be a Russian facility that the military ran in the Black Widows just took over. A lot of you also probably picked up on the vibes here.
It’s basically meant to be kind of like a version of Westview from the Wandavision series, like a quintessential mid-century town gazebo and all. The funny thing about this is this actually based on real life. During the Cold War, people in other countries, like Russia for example, would create towns like this to train their troops.
They make a John Cougar Mellencamp reference and Captain Carter reveals that Hawkeye taught her all about Dad Rock. She also references the multiverse creature that she fought getting sucked into the portal during season one.
Then basically they imply here that the Hydra stomper Steve Rogers is stalling for time so Malina can arrive with the black widows in their aerial red room base.
They play Captain America in Peggy Carter’s theme music. Again, it’s the same music they played at the end of Avengers Endgame when they reunited like at the very end of the movie. It was meant to be the same song that was playing for the two of them during the original Captain America First Avenger movie.
Malina’s Plan
They get attacked by all the Black Widow training dummies shooting the widow stingers at them. And Captain Carter smokes so many of these like it’s an ocean of widow stingers before she goes down.
There are a couple of minor changes that they make to history in this episode with the Red Room just in general. Black Widow claims that she grew up on the air base. But in the MCU, Dreykov didn’t create that until 2008, right after the Budapest operation where she tried and failed to kill him. But I think in the context of this universe, the aerial base, is created much earlier in the timeline.
Malina returns and as I said, it is Rachel Weisz who is coming back to voice the character again and they brought back all the Black Widows from the Black Widow movie, these are all the same basic people.
In this reality, she has meant to have taken over the Red Room after Dreykov was killed by Natasha, and she’s wearing an upgraded Black Widow power suit that gives her way more enhanced strength, speed, and durability. Her whole gambit was to gain control of Captain Carter, conditioned her so that she had somebody inside the Avengers who she could control and thus control the Avengers.
That’s basically the plot of the Black Widow movie and that was what Dreykov was trying to do with Natasha. Like getting her under his control to reprogram her so he could control the Avengers ultimately. Basically, the rest of the episode plays out like the end of the Black Widow movie.
Taking Down The Red Room
Captain Carter winds up winning Steve over by laying his shield down, breaking his programming briefly long enough for him to sacrifice himself kamikaze, destroying the red room as they destroyed it at the end of the Black Widow movie with it Crash into the ground.
It is implied that Melina was killed when Black Widow attaches her to his last ride there. But at the end of the episode, Captain Carter also reveals probably survived that final explosion and he’s just out there somewhere. This is also a callback to the end of the Winter Soldier movie and Captain America Civil War, where Cap was still looking for Bucky, who was alive out there in the wild.
This is meant to be the end of the Black Widow program in the red room in this universe. So it’s implied that either they’ll track down these of the Black Widows and help deprogram or some of them probably became mercenaries working for other operations around the world.
Ending Explained
We get the Watcher in the background watching everything go down during the ending. Then Captain Carter, after a time jump, steals one of Iron Man’s cars inside their version of the Avengers tower, claiming that Steve Rogers is still alive and she’s going to go look for him, Black Widow says she’ll join her.
But just as that’s happening, Watcher starts to narrate again from inside the room. We get a bit of an end-credit tag scene with her getting sucked through another multiverse portal to the Marvel 1602 universe.
It’s basically set up for the Marvel 1602 episode, like the last couple of episodes. It’s basically Scarlet Witch using her chaos magic to pull her across the multiverse. She’s with that universe’s version of Nick Fury. And when they reference “Saving their Queen”, that’s supposed to be a version of Cate Blanchett playing another version of Hela but it’s Queen Hela.
It is meant to be kind of a meta Easter egg because, in real life, Cate Blanchett also played a version of Queen Elizabeth The First, and Queen Elizabeth’s reign ended around 1602. That was when King James was beginning to take the throne.
But I think the idea is that in this version of what if things have gone completely bonkers in that 1602 reality with a bunch of different characters getting sucked into this amalgam universe.
Something is happening in this universe that necessitates Scarlet Witch putting together this multiverse team. In the context of the episode, Scarlet Witch is dressed in that old-timey 1600s garb.
Fun fact, Merlin Camelot, Excalibur, King Arthur, and all that stuff is cannon into the MCU. That’s where the ebony blade that the Black Knight Kit Harington’s character uses originally came from it was created by Merlin.
