WARNING: The following contains spoilers for What If...? Season 1, Episode 6, "What If... Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?," streaming now on Disney+.
The latest What If…? episode, “What If… Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?” brought fans an unlikely team-up in the form of Princess Shuri and Pepper Potts. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is famous for their team-ups, with the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy the most prominent in fans' minds, but with an honorable mention for the Warriors Three and the Revengers. Team-ups between women, like Shuri and Pepper, however, are few and far between, mostly because of the disparate ratio of male to female characters. Their team-up in What If…?’s twist on Iron Man teases the all-female A-Force from the comics, a team that the MCU hasn’t delivered on -- or even promised to fans -- yet.
In “What If… Killmonger Rescued Tony Stark?,” Pepper and Shuri work together to stop Killmonger. Pepper is rightfully suspicious of him from the get-go, something she shares with Rhodey, and grows even more wary of him after Tony’s untimely death. Shuri, too, is wary of Killmonger from the start because he is an outsider and an American, and she does not trust her father's decision to let him plan their attack against the US military. Later, after Killmonger is made the new Black Panther, Shuri comes to Pepper with proof that he killed both Tony and T’Challa and offers her expertise in exposing the truth about Killmonger’s actions. This is when they agree to join forces.
Shuri and Pepper team up because of their common enemy, Killmonger, but it’s the fact that the men on both sides keep ignoring or overlooking the red flags in T'Challa and Tony's deaths that truly draws the two together. The Watcher implies that the two of them become heroes, picking up the mantles that Tony and T’Challa left -- something that might actually happen with Shuri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. This final scene from the episode could indicate that Marvel Studios is ready to make the push for an A-Force film and explore similar themes: the men of the movie ignoring or not understanding an impending threat, leaving it up to the women of the MCU to save the day.
The issue so far has been, of course, that most of the female characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe are scattered among mostly-male teams or have played second fiddle to male-led films in the franchise. It took ten years for a female character to headline an MCU film with Ant-Man and the Wasp, and eleven for a solo female hero film with Captain Marvel. The MCU has plenty of female characters that are already well-established and could easily fit together in a team, so all that’s left is an announcement that it will happen. Back in 2018, Nebula actress Karen Gillan offered to direct an all-female Avengers film, adding that all of the actresses in the franchise were game for it to happen.
Aside from the infamous final battle scene in Endgame -- that both Pepper and Shuri were featured in -- the female heroes of the MCU have not been seen working together in a large group to fight any aliens, androids, or wizards. And that scene has its limits -- while it was awesome to see the women of the MCU teaming up to take down Thanos, the moment didn’t feature the one woman who started it all: Natasha Romanoff. In hindsight, the scene feels more like a cheap way to cash in on “girlboss feminism” and less like a prelude to something more. Making an A-Force movie, however, would redeem this moment and actually give these women a chance to work together to take down the multiverse’s biggest bads.
The audience and cult success of all-female team-up films like Ocean's 8 and Birds of Prey are proof enough that an A-Force movie can, and would, work. For now, the Shuri-Pepper team-up from What If…? and the Captain Marvel sequel The Marvels, which will feature Carol Danvers, Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan teaming up, will have to satisfy the fans waiting for an A-Force movie to finally move forward.
To see what leads to Pepper Potts and Princess Shuri's team-up, episode 6 of What If...? is now streaming on Disney+, alongside the first five episodes of the series.