YMMV / What If…? S1E4 "What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?"

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Some fans and even reviews took the episode to be a meta-narrative with a message about Stuffed into the Fridge being a lazy and offensive plot device, until it's literally presented here as the worst thing that can possibly happen in a story.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Strange Supreme simply able to hear the Watcher because of his newly absorbed power, or was Uatu trying to subtly warn Strange about the path he was on?
    • Seems to be the former option as of the end of the first season - when Infinity Ultron similarly senses the Watcher, Strange Supreme is the first on the list for Uatu to ask for help, implying that Uatu views him as a match for Ultron due to his similar ability to sense things outside of his home universe.
  • Uatu's refusal to save the universe when Strange winds up destroying it. Was he really adhering to his people's vow of non-interference or did he actually lack the power to save it to begin with? His words to Strange could be taken either way. Or does he possess such power but certain universal laws mean he would have failed, or done even worse damage, if he took action?
    • It's probably the second of those options. Uatu earlier implied that he would rather have this one universe be destroyed than save it and endanger other universes.
• Epileptic Trees: When the release of the first Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer shortly before this episode got a lot of fans saying Dr. Strange seemed somewhat out-of-character in his casual willingness to change time for Peter, it became a popular theory that it's actually the Strange from this episode. It was ultimately Jossed, however.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The episode was released two days before Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, due to the latter being delayed by the COVID-19 Pandemic. This coincidental release highlights a tragic parallel between this timeline's Strange and the villain of Shang-Chi, Wenwu, as both characters resort to dark power and are willing to risk the safety of their entire dimension to bring back a lost loved one.
  • This is further piled up on by the Sacred Timeline sequel: as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness shows, Strange's adventures in The Multiverse leads him to the tragic realization that as much as his love for Christine is a constant in many universes, none of those universes end up with them together.
• He Really Can Act:
  • While Benedict Cumberbatch had portrayed Doctor Strange well in previous MCU projects, this episode really allows him to tap into a range of emotions to really make viewers feel invested in Strange Supreme. His genuine desperation to save Christine and his subsequent fall into madness can be heard in his voice throughout the entire episode, and his cries of anguish and regret at the end made people truly feel for the poor doctor. Considering most of the MCU actors don't do much voice work (many thought Sebastian Stan in particular phoned in his lines in the first episode), Cumberbatch gave a surprisingly moving performance (though Cumberbatch does have experience with voice work both in film and on radio).
  • After spending time as a formidable but distant Character Narrator in the first three stories, Jeffrey Wright really brings out the human side of Uatu the Watcher in this episode. Namely, by showing genuine worry about Strange Supreme's actions, but sticking to his strict Alien Non-Interference Clause and harshly denouncing Stephen's actions before leaving him to his Fate Worse than Death by the end of the episode.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • The first act is highly reminiscent of Steins;Gate and The Time Machine (2002), with Stephen obsessively time travelling within the same brief period trying to save a single person, only for her to keep dying in various ways no matter what he does. Similarly, others state that Strange's actions are like that of Final Destination in him trying to cheat death but never actually getting there.
  • Reduced to its component, the plot can also be summarized as "Byronic Hero endures multiple time loops and centuries of isolation to save a loved one—whose rescue will fracture time". This also applies to the three-parter finale of Doctor Who Series 9 (comprised of "Face the Raven", "Heaven Sent" and "Hell Bent").
  • Elements of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse are also identifiable—what with Stephen's messing with the time-space continuum to recover/rescue Christine akin to Kingpin's own attempts at retrieving multiverse copies of his family. The Downer Ending here is a warning of what such efforts could end up as.
    • And again with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. In the backstory Miguel O'Hara, finding a universe where a version of him was Happily Married with a beloved daughter and died in a robbery, steps in and replaces his alternate self, only for that reality to collapse. He theorizes that Absolute Points or Nexus Events (or as he calls them, Canon Events) are mandatory occurrences that must happen to keep their realities alive, and sets up the Spider Society, a multiversal organization of Spider-People, to try to keep multiversal threats in check, send stray supervillains back to their own contexts, and insists on allowing the tragic beats that recur across variations of Spider-Man to happen. While he's not working off no data and the Spider Society sends tech and teams to try to stabilize a reality after one of these Canon Events was prevented and bad things started happening - it seems much easier to disrupt an Absolute Point than it was for Strange - the movie is more sympathetic towards Miles, who understandably does not agree that his family has to be allowed to die.
  • Fandom commentary has also noted that, thematically, Stephen's obsessive fear and attempt to rescue his beloved, even falling to the darker arts doing so (and ironically causing irreversible damage to everyone), is akin to Anakin Skywalker's fall to the Dark Side in Revenge of the Sith.
  • In terms of the motivation behind his actions, it could be argued that Strange Supreme is similar to Gabriel Agreste in Miraculous Ladybug. With him too trying to desperately bring back a loved one (albeit, not from complete death) by trying to seize a great power and in one episode of the series, "Cat Blanc", his desperation brought about the destruction of Paris and all the citizens living there, Except for the one who caused it, his corrupted son.
    • This particular episode itself is a "What If…?" style episode in its own way. It all begins with one simple decision and the particular events that follow are shown as an alternate timeline to the series continuity with events taking place differently. This timeline is then pruned in a sense as the mistake that began this reality was fixed, preventing the "Bad Future" from happening.
    • Finally, the titular villain of the episode, Cat Blanc (a turned evil and corrupted version of Adrien Agreste/Cat Noir) wants to achieve what his father tried to achieve and seize the greater power to rectify the destruction he caused. Unaware that there is a better way of fixing it. In a fit of anger, he even threatens to bring about his universe's end to get what he wants as well. Unlike Strange Supreme however, he is prevented from doing so.
• Strangled by the Red String: A common criticism of the episode is that Strange and Palmer's relationship seemingly came out of nowhere since they weren't an Official Couple in his solo movie (though they had dated in the past, and their relationship ended as Amicable Exes in said film), and she wasn't even mentioned in subsequent films. Some accept it and consider a fine example of economical storytelling, while others find it jarring and confusing.