The Best Episode of Marvel’s What If Season 2 Started Very Differently

This article contains spoilers for season 2 of Marvel’s What If…?

Season 2 of Marvel’s What If…? is full of great episodes, from Nebula’s film noir mystery on Xandar to Hela’s well-earned redemption arc. But there’s one episode that stands above the rest and introduces a new powerful hero into the MCU.

What If…Kahhori Reshaped the World? tells the story of Kahhori (Devery Jacobs) and her tribe, who live in a world where the Tesseract crash-landed on Earth in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Tesseract resides in a lake, which transports those who enter its waters to another realm full of harmony and unimaginable power. Kahhori is transported there while running from the Spanish colonizers who seek to take her homeland. Kahhori convinces the now-immortal members of this realm to travel back home with her to stop the invasion and protect their people.

It’s an emotional story that gives the Mohawk people of this world a chance at a brighter future free from the grip of colonizers, but the episode didn’t start out this way. According to the head writer and showrunner for What If…? A.C. Bradley via IGN, early conversations for the series involved doing an episode that “wasn’t anchored around a character, but an MCU artifact.” Bradley reveals that “There were conversations of doing like a The Red Violin episode seeing the Tesseract history over 2000 years. Then for season 2, we talked about what if the Vibranium meteor landed somewhere else? And so we combined those two ideas.”

The Red Violin is a film spanning four centuries and five countries that tells the story of a red violin and its various owners throughout history. While it would certainly be interesting to see a version of this story told with the Tesseract or another MCU artifact, Kahhori’s story is much more powerful. We’ve already kind of seen the Tesseract be passed around throughout history in the MCU from Hydra to Mar-Vell to S.H.I.E.L.D. to Thanos. This is only across a few decades rather than centuries or millennia, but it’s still not too terribly different.

A “Red Violin” episode of What If…? still has plenty of potential to be interesting, but when you compare that idea to what we ended up with, it’s easy to see why the writers changed direction. According to Bradley, she and the writers were so set on telling this story with the intention and heart it deserves that Kahhori Reshaped the World was written in collaboration with a dozen experts on the Mohawk people and their language.

Bradley hopes that Kahhori will continue to make her mark on the MCU, saying “My hope is that she is not a one off character. I believe that’s also the hope of many of the people on the production. We fell in love with her. We fell in love with the Mohawk community and we hope she lives a long, beautiful, butt-kicking life.”

Now that we’ve seen her go toe-to-toe with Supreme Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and hold her own alongside an Infinity Stone-powered Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell), Kahhori has proven that she’s one of the most powerful heroes in the multiverse. She’s an important voice for Indigenous people in this world, and hopefully season 2 of What If…? isn’t the last we’ll see of her.