If Marvel’s What If…? can do anything, then why is it doing this?

polygon.com:

It is wildly frustrating how small the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s multiverse is.

Let me show you what I mean. Here are the episode titles for all seven episodes of What If...? season 2, the show about imagining all the possibilities present in the MCU multiverse, that have aired thus far:

What, pray tell, does any of that mean? Nebula joining the Nova Corps isn’t terribly exciting, because, well, the MCU Nova Corps are boring space cops, and this episode isn’t concerned with fleshing them out. Captain Carter fighting the Hydra Stomper? Beg your pardon? I like half of that sentence, I guess! Hela finding the Ten Rings? Props for finally pulling from Phase 4, but Hela was already bad news without the Ten Rings from Shang-Chi; this is not a huge twist.

Worse, these premises all obscure the cool stuff each episode is actually doing. Happy Hogan saving Christmas? That’s sneakily an Iron Man 2-era Die Hard spoof. Iron Man and the Grandmaster? That’s a Marvel-flavored Death Race/Ben-Hur pastiche. Kahhori reshaping the world? That one is supposed to be confounding, because it introduces a brand-new hero, the Mohawk woman Kahhori, who is empowered by the Tesseract in one universe and thrust into the wider multiverse by last season’s Strange Supreme. (Kahhori’s episode is also the only one to truly try anything new here, as opposed to mixing and matching things we’ve seen in MCU movies.)

What If...? didn’t start this way. While it had its problems — problems that remain consistent, like an animation style that is pretty great for people fighting and pretty horrid for people talking — there was a clarity to every episode’s proposed twist. Compare season 1’s first seven episode titles to the current lineup:

These are all