WARNING: The following contains spoilers for What If...? Season 1, Episode 3, "What If... the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?," now streaming on Disney+.
The ease and speed with which Hank Pym could wipe out the core of the Avengers in What If…? Season 1, Episode 3, “What If… The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” is quite shocking. Through a combination of swift action and subterfuge, Pym takes each of them out one by one, sometimes in full view of Nick Fury or a potential ally with no one the wiser. He's able to do this despite the fact that they’re every bit Earth’s Mightiest Heroes that they were in the prime Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Pym accomplished it through his shrinking technology, but also by playing off of a single weakness that every one of his victims shared: excess hubris. All five, no matter how comparatively poorly they were faring, had absolute faith in their own abilities to stave off danger. That left them all isolated and vulnerable just when Pym was about to strike. In the prime MCU, most of these heroes were eventually humbled and emerged the better for it. In this What If…? episode, they never had the chance.
It starts with Tony Stark and the first visible point that this universe diverges from the prime MCU: the scene at the donut shop from Iron Man 2. Tony, nursing a hangover, has just had a public fight with Rhodey in front of a house full of partiers, only to watch his old friend fly off with a suit of his armor. He’s alone and without allies – even Pepper has turned her back on him – and is quite literally being poisoned by his arc reactor. Yet he still believes that he cannot be harmed, and while his condition may kill him, no assassin’s bullet can. He feels that way right up until the moment he slumps to the floor dead.
Next, Thor is struck down at a similar moment, just as he grasps at the hammer for which he is still unworthy. It’s perhaps his most hubristic moment in the entire franchise, but like Tony, it takes place when he is alone, bereft of friends and physically vulnerable. It doesn’t occur to him that his mortal form might be vulnerable or that it might come to harm if he breaks into a military base. Barton and Romanoff are both physically isolated as well. Barton is staggered at how he could “misfire” the way he did, while Black Widow faces her death confident that she’s going up against a comparatively normal combatant. Even the normally humble Bruce Banner is overconfident, telling Romanoff that he can’t die mere moments before he does.
Comic books have played with this notion many times before. DC’s JLA: Tower of Babel had Ra's al Ghul defeating every member of the Justice League using Batman’s secret plans to take them down, as well as recurring figures like Amanda Waller who has utterly destroyed swaggering superpowered beings despite having no unusual abilities of her own. Marvel adopts it even more often. Hubris plays an integral part in the origins of figures like Iron Man and Spider-Man, neither of whom entirely shake their overconfidence. Indeed, one of Spider-Man’s most famous storylines – Kraven’s Last Hunt – sees him shot and buried alive just because he can’t believe a “second-rater” like Kraven the Hunter could get the better of him.
Thankfully for this What If…? episode, hubris cuts both ways. Pym himself is so sure of himself that he can’t conceive of anyone getting ahead of him, while Loki’s overconfidence is clearly a ticking bomb with Fury hard at work building a new team. But their oversight is cut from the same cloth as the heroes, and unfortunately for them, it can’t be compensated for with a power or a gadget. As long as someone thinks they're invincible, they won’t bother preparing for the unexpected, and disaster could easily befall them.
It’s interesting to note that of the original six Avengers in the prime MCU, the only one who was spared Pym’s revenge in the episode was Steve Rogers, who stayed frozen in ice until after Pym was exposed. The original Captain America possessed none of the hubris or arrogance of his teammates, remaining the same humble soul he was before becoming a super soldier. His powers are comparatively minor in the face of Thor or the Hulk – or indeed, Captain Marvel – but he never stops looking at himself in the mirror and wondering if he could have done better. It’s a small thing, but also part of the X factor that made him the Avengers’ natural leader. As What If…? showed this week, a little humility can make all of the difference in the world.
To see Hank Pym exploit the Avengers' weakness, the third episode of What If...? is streaming now on Disney+.