Marvel is having a great time with their projects. The end of this year will probably mark as some of the best projects from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But that’s not all as they have experienced equally great success with their shows. The shows started coming out earlier this year on the Disney Plus streaming service. These shows are supposed to be canon and that makes sense considering they are live-action except for the What If…? series. The latter is the only animated series as a part of the MCU. This animated series is not taking things lightly and taking the opportunity of being animated to complete liberty. The series has some major details present in it which might actually be major references to major events. Here’s a look at why Hawkeye had a robotic arm in episode 8 of What If…?.
What If…? Episode 8
The penultimate episode, “What If… Ultron Won?” took us through a world where Ultron was successfully able to get his organic body which otherwise would have become Vision. The previous episodes also explored such alternate possibilities wherein we got to explore events that were alike the events of MCU and yet with tiny differences. The interesting bit came along when we came to discover how these tiny differences affected the entire story. This time around we got an episode that was quite different from the others. The episode had to pick on some of the most interesting details in the show that wouldn’t have been possible without the narrative itself.
Here, we see Ultron, one of Tony Stark’s biggest failures fulfilling his desire of getting rid of the entirety of mankind as a solution to a better world. It basically follows the premise of Avengers: Age of Ultron except for the fact that here Ultron is successful every step of the way. After accomplishing his goals on Earth he ups the ante by going across the Universe. He ends up destroying life on multiple planets and at the same time defeating heroes we have seen in MCU through the years. He was successful in doing this due to his possession of the Infinity Stones in a rather simple manner which clearly indicated the simplicity with which Thanos could have been defeated. But he doesn’t stop as he plans to go ahead and wreak his havoc across the multiverse, which also goes to explain his sudden appearance at the end of What If…? Episode 7.
Hawkeye’s Arm
But that’s not all as we discover that two of our Avengers have survived on Earth and are planning to defeat Ultron in any way possible. Black Widow and Hawkeye are trying really hard to find solutions for defeating Ultron. But an essential detail passes through us at the very start where we get to see Hawkeye having a robotic arm. Fans of the franchise will clearly remember that this was something that was possessed by Bucky and not Clint.
Reason Behind The Robotic Arm
Even though this plays out like a tiny detail we do see Hawkeye getting used to his robotic arm. The episode didn’t give out any explanation regarding this throughout its run. Now we can say that since the episode is based around the plot of Avengers: Age of Ultron, the story till Ultron’s win could be similar for the episode. The movie had opened with a sequence of the Avengers raiding a Hydra base in Sokovia. There we got to see Hawkeye getting injured in the torso. What if (pun intended) this gash was instead a serious injury in his arm.
This could thus be the very event that led to the alternate universe of the episode. They probably weren’t able to use Helen Cho’s regeneration tech to repair this injury and thus his limb had to be cut off entirely. Tony Stark might have helped him and gotten him a robotic arm so that he didn’t have to stop. This mechanical arm must have been the only thing that kept him going along. While this might not be the proper explanation, it is certain that this is an essential detail otherwise Marvel won’t have brought it up. We won’t get to see him appear in the finale because he sacrificed himself for the sake of saving Black Widow.
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