The first episode of Marvel’s What If…? premiered this past Wednesday on Disney Plus, and it set out the show’s stall pretty neatly. For the most part, it was a relatively straightforward rehash of Captain America: The First Avenger, albeit with a couple of major substitutions.
Instead of scrawny Steve Rogers being given the super soldier serum, it was the already capable Peggy Carter, which in turn arguably made her Captain Carter more powerful than Chris Evans’ Captain America was in the corresponding movie. Steve still got his moment in the sun, though, after Howard Stark built him a hulking suit of mechanized armor that bore more than couple of similarities to what his son Tony would cook up 45 years down the line when he was captured in Afghanistan.
Several of The First Avenger‘s plot beats were adhered to, including the Red Skull hunting for the Tesseract in an attempt to turn the tide of World War II in favor of Hydra. When the good guys were investigating the mysterious artifact, a sneaky Easter Egg also teased what the future held for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which you can check out below.
For those of us who can’t speak Italian, the inscription underneath the Tesseract roughly translates to “don’t let the angry purple boy touch this”. That’s an understatement if ever we’ve heard one, when Thanos is a warlord traveling the breadth of the universe to try and hunt down the six Infinity Stones that give him the power to eliminate half of all living creatures with a single click of his fingers, but you’ve got to love how Marvel’s What If…? is packing hidden references in almost every frame that most people wouldn’t even notice.