Recap / What If…? S2E7 "What If... Hela Found the Ten Rings?"

"What If... Hela Found the Ten Rings?"

Alternate take on: Thor, Thor: Ragnarok, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

"Rain: the miracle of nature that brings the sky down to Earth. But Wenwu was about to discover that someone far more intriguing had fallen from the heavens..."

— Uatu

In a universe where King Odin banishes his first-born daughter Hela to Earth, Hela ends up landing in China where she meets the immortal warlord Wenwu. As such, the banished Goddess of Death is captured by Wenwu and his criminal organization, the Ten Rings. Determined to find a way to get back home, Hela breaks out and journeys across China to return to Asgard. Amidst her travels, she finds a hidden Chinese village who exposes her to their way of life and values, challenging her bloodthirsty outlook on the universe.

"What If... Hela Found the Ten Rings?" contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Hela's flashback to her childhood shows that Odin drilled a militant and paranoid mindset into her from a young age, even shackling her dog in front of her to make a point, eventually turning her into a bloodthirsty conqueror he could no longer control.
• Accidental Marriage: Wenwu gives Hela a red dress to wear and then explains to her that the local women wear red dresses on their wedding day. She briefly thinks that he is trying to marry her but he was just teasing her and would not try to trick her like that.
• Action Dress Rip: Unlike most examples, it's not the skirt of Hela's hanfu dress that she has a problem with, but the oversized sleeves, which she rips off when it's time to fight.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Hela, unlike her Sacred Timeline counterpart, faces the humbling exile to Earth that Thor faced in the Sacred Timeline, growing from a bloodthirsty executioner to a liberator aiming to bring true peace to the cosmos.
  • Xu Wenwu is more genuine about using the powers of the Ten Rings to protect people rather than for conquest and glory, though that is maybe a result of Hela arriving before the point in time where the power of the Ten Rings had fully corrupted him in the Sacred Timeline.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Though it was alluded to in Ragnarok that Hela was a monster of Odin's own making, it is actually shown here just how much of an abusive parent Odin had been to her, in ways that presumably happened in the Sacred Timeline as well. The fact that she spends most of the episode Brought Down to Badass and forced to actually interact with people rather than immediately default to murder further humanizes her even before she undergoes her Heel–Face Turn.
• Adaptational Villainy: Enraged by his daughter's seeming demise and fearing the power of the Rings, the formerly reformed Odin returns to his old bloodthirsty conquering ways. Ironically, he ends up once again growing angry with Hela for defying him when she doesn't want to join him in his new campaign.
• Allohistorical Allusion:
  • The episode takes a few references from Thor's story, namely Thor and Thor: Ragnarok.
    • Like Thor in the Sacred Timeline, Hela is stripped of her powers and cast out from Asgard, with Odin giving a "The Reason You Suck" Speech which bears very similar words to the one spoken by his Sacred Timeline counterpart, up to casting Hela out "in the name of [his] father, and his father before".
    • Also like Sacred Timeline Thor, Hela tries to pick up her helmet but fails due to not being worthy, amidst a backdrop of rain, thunder and lightning.
    • Hela throws Mjölnir towards Odin, who grabs and crushes it with one hand, just like Hela destroying said hammer in the Sacred Timeline. The shots where Odin destroys the hammer are also very similar.
  • With the episode mainly taking place in China, references to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings pop up.
    • Hela meets Jiayi, who can fight and use the wind to help her and easily gets defeated by said warrior, just like Wenwu's first encounter with Ying Li. Jiayi also trains Hela in the Ta Lo fighting style and helps her come to terms with herself, similarly to what Ying Nan did with Shang-Chi in the movie.
    • The trees close in on Hela and her horse as the two venture to Ta Lo. Shang Chi and his team also encountered this same hazard while driving to Ta Lo.
• Alternate Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome: This variants of Hela and Xu Wenwu are able to bring peace to their entire universe, which includes preventing Thanos from wiping out half of the universe.
• Amazon Chaser: Wenwu's attraction to Hela quickly becomes obvious after he sees her beat down a number of his men. When she uses his attraction to bash his head into a table before escaping, he actually seems even more attracted to her.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: Hela briefly panics when Wenwu informs her that his choice to put her in what is traditionally wedding clothes might be indicative of his intent.
• And Then What?: Hela is constantly asked what she will do once she gets the Ten Rings, once she defeats Odin, and once she conquers the Nine Realms until she realizes what she wants is freedom.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Jiayi poses one to Hela: after she's defeated Wenwu, and taken the Ten Rings for herself, and avenged herself on her father, and conquered the universe, what then? This forces Hela to take a good hard look inside herself, and realize that what she's ultimately seeking is freedom from others' control, which in turn sets her on the path toward seeking the same freedom for others.
• Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: Downplayed. Wenwu invites Hela to dinner and asks her to wear a traditional red dress, which he notes is the color of a Chinese wedding dress. This is all presented as voluntary, but it's not clear how much of a choice she really has.
• Battle Couple: Hela and Wenwu team up to fight Odin in the climax, and though the episode is vague if they ever became romantically involved, it's certainly implied and Wenwu's interest in Hela is very clear.
• Battle in the Rain: Hela's fight with the Ten Rings happens in the rain.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Both Odin and Hela. He abandons his quest for peace after learning that the Ten Rings have the power to kill even a god, and becomes once again the ruthless, conquering tyrant he had previously set aside, while she goes from being a bloodthirsty killer to fighting for the freedom of all enslaved people.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: After witnessing a Ta Lo warrior making rose petals dance on the wind, Hela comments that she'd like to learn that power, but she thinks it would be better with knives, or fire, or knives that are on fire. She actually gets some fire knives during the final battle with Odin.
• Broad Strokes: While this episode does show Odin banishing Hela when their goals no longer align, it skips over Hela attempting a violent coup against Odin that slaughtered almost the entirety of the Valkyries. Here it's presented as a sudden decision made by Odin after a brief disagreement, likely to make the conflict seem not-so-one-sided.
• Brought Down to Badass: Despite not having her helmet and losing her power due to Odin stripping her away of both, Hela still proves to be an incredibly formidable hand-to-hand combatant capable of taking down groups of Ten Rings soldiers on her own. Wenwu has to personally intervene to stop her.
• The Cameo: Thanos and a young Gamora appear in the ending, with Thanos's conquest of Zen-Whoberi poised to be challenged by Hela and Wenwu's army.
• Canis Major: Fenris makes a cameo in a flashback as a puppy (who even then was almost as big as Hela was), then at the epilogue, reunited with Hela as her steed, galloping across the Rainbow Bridge to stop Thanos' invasion of Gamora's homeworld.
• Chekhov's Gag: Early in her training, Hela makes a remark about using the Ta Lo's powers to not manipulate flower petals, but instead fire, knives, or fire-knives. During the battle with Odin at the climax of the story, she spots a set of flaming knives on the ground, and uses them to attack Odin.
• Continuity Nod: As in "What If… T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?", Hela's helmet contains her powers, or at least acts as a medium into which they can be sealed.
• Crossover Couple: This episode shows the potential romance between Hela (Norse Goddess of Death and Princess of Asgard) and Wenwu (The Mandarin), the Big Bads of Thor: Ragnarok and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, who never met in the Sacred Timeline.
• De-power: Odin takes away all of Hela's powers and turns her into a mortal, including mortal blood. She doesn't lose her ability to fight, though.
• Dramatic Irony: Mid-battle, Odin declares that he should’ve imprisoned Hela instead of banishing her, the exact fate his Sacred Timeline counterpart inflicted on his Hela.
• Entertainingly Wrong: When Hela disappears from his view, Heimdall reports this fact and Wenwu's power to Odin, who concludes that Wenwu must have killed Hela and that the Ten Rings are a potential threat to Asgard. The reality is that Hela wound up in Ta Lo, another dimension where Heimdall couldn't see her, and the Rings, though powerful, prove little match for Odin's own might.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Hela's initial attempts to intimidate Wenwu fall flat when it takes her a minute to realize that she no longer has either her crown or her godly powers.
• Good Costume Switch: When Hela earns back her helm and powers near the end, her outfit becomes bright, dazzling white, in contrast to the black she wore previously.
• Graceful Loser: After being beaten by Hela, Odin admits that Hela's become better than he is and abdicates the throne of Asgard to her.
• Heel Realization:
  • When trained by Jiayi in Tao Lao, Hela finally realizes that her main purpose is freedom and to escape the men she thinks want to control them, setting her on her path to become a true heroine.
  • After his defeat, Odin acknowledges that Hela has not only become a better warrior than he is but a better person and peacefully abdicates the throne to her.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Odin's actions (him molding Hela into a warrior, conquering the Nine Realms, banishing Hela to Earth, invading China in the name of avenging Hela, etc.) all play a role, directly or indirectly, in his own downfall.
• Hourglass Plot: Much like Thor and Loki during their first film. At the beginning of the story, Odin aims to become a peacemaker while Hela wants to keep being a conqueror. Later on, Odin goes back to being a conqueror after finding out about the Ten Rings while Hela becomes a peacemaker due to the introspection she received training in Ta Lo.
• Humble Pie:
  • The whole episode teaches Hela to value life, going from a near-mindless killing machine to a fighter of oppression.
  • When Hela regains her powers and the power of the Odinforce through Gungnir, Odin relents and acknowledges that she has surpassed his expectations.
• Ignored Epiphany: Whatever realization Odin had that made him decide to put down the sword after his campaign to conquer the Nine Realms, assuming it wasn't part of his plan to start off with, reversed once news of Hela's disappearance reached his ears. After all, a change like that takes time to cement, and was by his own choice, rather than forced upon him.
• Implied Love Interest: Wenwu is clearly attracted to Hela after seeing her in battle, and is amazed by her when she regains her godly powers. Hela's stance towards him is more ambiguous since she initially considers him an enemy, but she does team up with him to defeat Odin and they build an empire together, so at the least they became friends and co-rulers. It's vague if their relationship remained platonic forever, but the possibility is definitely open that it didn't.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Hela has no problem understanding the hundun from Ta Lo, though she does a lot of Repeating So the Audience Can Hear.
• Ironic Echo: Odin admonishes Hela that a Goddess of Death should not be so callous to life before banishing her to Earth. At the climax, when he has her in a chokehold, he questions why she's standing against him. She repeats his words back to him, that a Goddess of Death should not be callous to life, this proves she's learned the mercy that he enchanted her crown to respond to, restoring her powers at the last moment.
• Irony: Odin banished Hela to Earth so that she could learn the value of mercy, making that a condition of regaining her crown and godly power. By the time she actually learns that lesson, however, he's forgotten it and is quickly defeated when Hela regains her old might.
• Light Is Good: Once Hela regains her helmet, her outfit is a shiny white, signifying her newfound peace and knowledge that the universe needs freedom.
• Love at First Punch: Wenwu was already smitten with Hela, but then he truly falls for her after she slams his head onto a table.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Odin claims that he came to Earth and challenged Wenwu to avenge Hela, but once Hela turns up alive, he refuses to let up; while genuinely upset at what he believed was his daughter's death, Odin's greater concern was that the Ten Rings were capable of killing an Asgardian, and he wanted to prevent that power from becoming a threat to him.
• Only the Chosen May Wield:
  • Much like how his Sacred Timeline counterpart did with Mjolnir, Odin puts a spell on Hela's helm that renders her unable to wield it until she earns it.
  • When Hela knocks Wenwu unconscious, she attempts to take the rings off of his arms to no avail.
• The Paranoiac: Odin's mindset regarding threats: even when Hela was a child and Fenris was only a puppy, Odin insisted on chaining him so he could never become a threat, and in the present, he has a similar response to learning of the Ten Rings, attacking Wenwu out of fear of the Rings' power.
• Parent with New Paramour: While she doesn't appear, Frigga has apparently become Odin's new girlfriend, and Hela does not care for her, even including Frigga on a list of enemies alongside Wenwu and Odin.
• Point of Divergence: The exact divergence point occurs during Odin and Hela's final argument, right after Odin tells Hela that they must know when to stop fighting. In the Sacred Timeline, Hela bluntly replied that she would refuse to do so, prompting Odin to forcibly disarm her via blasting her to Hel. In this episode's timeline, Hela's reply to Odin was instead an Armor-Piercing Question which called him out on how she was only an insatiable conqueror because of his parenting: this stirred Odin into neutralizing Hela by instead granting her the same kind of punishment and chance to better herself that his Sacred Timeline counterpart would give Thor millennia later, banishing her to Earth and stripping her power until she learns her lesson there.
• Pun: Hela makes a few puns at the hundun's expense at her inability to tell his face from his rear.^note While it is a variant of Morris, we're a few centuries before Trevor Slattery is born, and therefore he doesn't have the name Trevor would give him yet.
• Redemption Quest: Hela goes from being a bloodthirsty conqueror to a merciful peacemaker due to her training in Ta Lo allowing her to contemplate what she really wants. By the end of the episode, she's using her position as the new ruler of Asgard with the help of Wenwu and the Ten Rings to bring peace to the cosmos.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: When Hela changes into a stunning red dress to have dinner with Wenwu, he is struck by her beauty.
• Secret-Keeper: This episode retroactively reveals that the Sacred Timeline Frigga and Heimdall (and, by extension, their other variants) knew about Odin's past as a warmonger and Hela's existence but kept everyone, most notably Thor and Loki, in the dark about it.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Odin launches a campaign to invade Wenwu's domain to avenge Hela, and to pre-emptively protect Asgard from the Ten Rings because he saw them as a threat to his own power. In a Prophecy Twist, Odin's actions don't make the Ten Rings into a threat, but they do help push Hela's Character Development to the point she knows mercy, regains her helmet and powers, and therefore becomes a threat to his powers.
• So Proud of You: Odin to Hela after she defeats him, realizing that she has become not only a greater warrior than he is, but a better person as well. He humbly abdicates the throne of Asgard to her.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Hela is the first person who can understand Morris, likely for the same reason Thor can understand Groot.
• Summon to Hand: Odin is able to call back Gungnir whenever it's knocked from his hands, severely complicating Hela and Wenwu's efforts to relieve him of his most formidable weapon.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Jiayi is very reminiscent of Ying Li, who similarly helped Wenwu turn over a new leaf in the Sacred Timeline.
• Translation Convention: Hela first speaks to Wenwu in Chinese, but it immediately switches to English right after that with the implication that everyone is speaking Chinese.
• Underestimating Badassery: Inverted; Odin assumes that Wenwu killed Hela and is immediately fearful that the Ten Rings could slay an Asgardian... forgetting that he rendered Hela mortal; when he actually fights Wenwu, Odin clearly has the upper hand for the entire battle, and it's only with Hela's help that Wenwu even survives the fight. However, Wenwu is shown fending off scores of the garden variety Asgardians, so his worry is not entirely unfounded.
• Unholy Matrimony: Subverted. Xu Wenwu is clearly romantically interested in Hela and wants her to join him on his conquest. She refuses not-so-kindly. They later join forces, however, after her Heel–Face Turn, though it's left unsaid whether their relationship is romantic.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: A flashback shows that Hela used to be a Cheerful Child who loved to play with Fenris. Then Odin chained Fenris up under the belief that he would grow up to become a potential threat and drilled that paranoia into her.
• Villain Has a Point: At the beginning of the episode, Hela points out that Odin only raised her to be his One-Woman Army for a never-ending campaign of conquest, therefore her refusing to "give up the fight" is just as much of his fault, if not more so, then her's.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The time period Hela winds up in on Earth seems to be before Wenwu became a power-hungry warlord, as he seems to legitimately believe his army is bringing peace and security to the land. After Hela takes the throne of Asgard at the end, he even joins her in her quest to liberate other worlds from their oppressors.
• Where the Magic Went: Hela voices surprise that "such magic still [exists] on Midgard" when she finds Ta Lo, implying that it was more common during her time as Odin's war-chief before it became a Masquerade in modern times.
• Whoosh in Front of the Camera: The hundun does this before revealing itself to Hela.
• The Worf Effect: As in Thor: The Dark World, Heimdall's inability to see someone — in this case, Hela in Ta Lo — demonstrates the strong magical forces at work.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Hela plays up her defenseless states to throw off Wenwu's forces before going in for the attack.

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"There, on an ancient battlefield, a man and a woman, a mortal and a goddess, the Ten Rings and the armies of Asgard forged an alliance and built an empire. An empire that would span the cosmos. An empire not of conquerors, but of liberators. Liberators whose campaign across the universe would forever prove even the darkest of hearts can come to know peace."