‘What If…?’s restricted runtime has deprived us of the show’s true potential

What If…?’s third and final season is almost at an end, and I’ll admit, I’m sad to see it go. While the series has, more often than not, veered into “nobody asked for this territory,” it has allowed the Marvel Cinematic Universe to play around with and diversify its on-screen universe. For that, I’ll always be grateful.

What started as an anthology series turned into a sprawling, mostly interconnected Multiversal story, with some episodes more obviously important to the Watcher’s experiences than others. The Captain Carter and Strange Supreme episodes, for instance, brought everything together, while other installments, like “What If… Happy Hogan Saved Christmas?” were created for fun more than anything else. What they all have in common, however, is that every episode is only 30 minutes long.

This restricted run time has meant that the episodes mainly focus on the action rather than the characters themselves. It’s understandable, to a certain degree—after all, What If…? is about questioning what might have happened in another universe, not necessarily character development. And yet, I feel that the most interesting aspects of most episodes are the variants and their relationships with the other heroes, especially when they’re paired with characters they’re unlikely to meet in Marvel’s live-action continuity.

The various Avengers line-ups we’ve gotten throughout the show have been fantastic. Season 3’s opening episode, “What If… The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?” paired Sam Wilson with Bruce Banner and gave us an Avengers roster consisting of Sam, Bucky Barnes, Monica Rambeau, Shangi-Chi, Nakia, Red Guardian, Melina Vostkoff, and Moon Knight. What’s not to love? So many of these characters are under-utilized in the MCU, whether due to story needs or IRL scheduling issues. What If…? has been a way for them to interact anyway, and that’s fantastic.

Yet, the show’s 30-minute runtime hardly leaves enough room to dive into their motivations, hopes, fears, and personalities. These aren’t the characters we already know well from the MCU’s main timeline, and What If…? doesn’t give us enough time to understand them. I wanted to know more about Bruce and Sam’s friendship, yet we were only given a few brief and somewhat superficial scenes. There’s never enough depth.

What If…? isn’t the only Disney+ show to suffer from a shorter runtime. Many Marvel shows—the Star Wars shows and other Disney+ Originals like Percy Jackson have struggled with this issue, too—have a lot of episodes and story beats that could have benefited from even 10 extra minutes. I know budgets are an issue, but limiting the storytelling to just half an hour means there are always massive cuts, and the show has never reached its true potential. If it had a bit more time, it could focus not only on its wacky, out-of-the-box ideas but also on how our favorite heroes truly feel about the consequences of those ideas, rather than just how they react to them.

The Multiverse is more than plot twists and cameos; it should be about how those plot twists affect our favorite characters to their core. That’s what’s been missing from What If…? and the Multiverse Saga in general.