What If: this very dark episode with Spider-Man that you will never see!
A Marvel episode inspired by… Sons of Man?
While season 2 of What If…? just ended on Disney+, we were treated to some very surprising alternative stories from the MCU. Like this episode Blade Runner around Nebula, designed as “a darker detective show“, tells showrunner AC Bradley in IGN. “It was funny – Matt Chauncey wrote this episode at the start of the pandemic and he called me one day and said he wanted to do a very dark story. So his first version of the Nebula episode was really dark. It even almost ended in tragedy. And then we lightened it.”
Bradley also wrote, during the pandemic, a sinister story for What ifwith Spider-Man at the center of the plot.
“We were at a time, during the pandemic, where we had the feeling that the world was coming to an end. There was no need to dig too deep. So writing season 2 became a kind of escape, a fun way to escape reality. But I still wrote an episode, which was very, very dark. I called it: Sons of Man with Spider Man… It will forever remain in a drawer !”
The story was inspired by the 2006 film Children of Men (based on the novel by PD James), this dystopian thriller set in 2027 in a world ruined by two decades of human infertility. Bradley doesn’t say exactly how Spider-Man would have been incorporated into this story, but obviously it was dark.
AC Bradley will no longer be showrunner for season 3 of What if…? but she wrote an episode – initially planned for season 2 then postponed – in which Bucky Barnes and Red Guardian (aka Alexei Shostakov) will team up: “I will say that the season 3 episode is probably my favorite episode I’ve ever written for Marvel. And not just because it features Alexei, who is named after my cat!”
