FADE IN:

EXT. THE MULTIVERSE

JEFFREY WRIGHT is a cosmic SPACE CLOUD.

JEFFREY WRIGHT

All right then, now that Kang the Expositor died and his corpse shat out a multiverse, we get to finally do some of those fun What If stories! Where small changes to the narrative butterfly out into new, wildly divergent story paths, creating fascinating alternate realities where the very characters and settings are completely changed!

(pause)

Or, if we’re being lazy about it, we can just say “How about if THAT character had that OTHER character’s backstory”. You know what, fuck it, that sounds way easier, let’s just do that!

INT. ARMY LAB, 1943

HAYLEY ATWELL and a bunch of other GAWKERS look on as NOT CHRIS EVANS is about to be subjected to FREAKISH MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS by DOMINIC COOPER and STANLEY TUCCI.

JEFFREY WRIGHT (V.O.)

Except this time instead of watching from the gallery, Hayley decided to stay downstairs with all the experimental radiation for some reason. It was this small choice that would alter this reality forever!

(pause)

Also the Hydra infiltrator stayed downstairs this time too, I guess. And so did a bunch of other people so the Hydra guy didn’t look incredibly obviously suspicious. Plus he explodes everything before the experiment instead of afterwards. Okay fine, we kinda had to tweak all kinds of shit for this version of the story to happen, just roll with it please.

The HYDRA AGENT explodes the EXPERIMENT and shoots STANLEY!

STANLEY TUCCI

Scheisse! Did they really bring Stanley Tucci back just to say one line then die again?

(dies again)

DOMINIC COOPER

Crap, Not Chris is too injured to do the procedure now, and it can’t wait because our super serum has a shelf life of five minutes or something! Who could take his place?

HAYLEY ATWELL

I’ll do it! Even though our entire goal today was not to create one super soldier, but to test a procedure which we now can never reproduce, I’ll still risk my life for an experiment which is now technically pointless!

She jumps into the CHAMBER and gets zapped with the SERUM and RADIATION. She emerges as an AMAZONIAN MUSCLE LADY.

HAYLEY ATWELL

Behold! No longer a mere elite highly-trained agent with martial arts and supreme markswoman skills, now I’ve also got big biceps! Yeah it doesn’t really have the same kick as when the little asthmatic guy did it.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Hooray, you did it! I’m so happy, while lying ten feet from my close friend Stanley’s freshly bullet-riddled corpse!

BRADLEY WHITFORD

Well I’m not! The US military wanted an army of super soldiers, not one freak of nature! Sorry, clearly Tommy Lee Jones was unavailable.

HAYLEY ATWELL

Wait a minute, aren’t you that character from the Agent Carter Marvel One-Shot? The One-Shot that's completely irreconcilable with the later Agent Carter TV series?

BRADLEY WHITFORD

Yeah. I guess the One-Shot wins and gets to be canon, then.

HAYLEY ATWELL

But the series had James Darcy as Jarvis, who also appeared in Avengers: Endgame...

BRADLEY WHITFORD

Oh right. Uh well, I guess they’re both canon, but the One-Shot is an alternate timeline. But a different alternate timeline to THIS alternate timeline, because it also had a Steve Rogers Captain America, and of course neither of those are the timeline you end up in when time-traveling Cap comes back and oh God we’re really barreling towards this franchise’s inevitable crisis and reboot, aren’t we.

(sighs)

Anyway the point is fuck off, girls have too much cooties to be super soldiers!

HAYLEY ATWELL

Fucking 1940s America, where nobody thought women were capable of great things.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Don’t worry Hayley, I believe in you!

DOMINIC COOPER

I’ll make you a fancy shield so you can fight Hydra, you powerful person I respect!

HAYLEY ATWELL

Oh, apparently I live in a 1940s America were exactly one mean old jerk didn’t think women were capable of great things. That’s much nicer!

DOMINIC COOPER

You should go retrieve the Tesseract, because Red Skull just grabbed it, which we know about somehow even though in the movie we didn’t!

(hands her shield and clothes)

And for some reason, GOD knows why, I think you should do it while wearing a goofy outfit that they designed as a potential USO costume for you that you never used or even saw before.

HAYLEY ATWELL

(examines costume)

They wanted me to perform USO shows while wearing the British flag?

DOMINIC COOPER

I know, right? You would’ve been crucified.

EXT. BERLIN

HAYLEY goes into action and starts BEATING UP HYDRA SOLDIERS.

HAYLEY ATWELL

(random action beat)

VIBRANIUM, MEET CRANIUM!

(random action beat)

More like FAIL Hydra!

(random action beat)

Maybe if we weren’t rushing through the entire plot of a two-hour movie in thirty minutes we could do scenes that were more satisfying than just bite-sized action nuggets interspersed with lame one-liners. Oh well.

(random action beat)

She finds TOBY JONES carrying the TESSERACT and hauls them BOTH back to BRADLEY.

BRADLEY WHITFORD

Fine then, you can go fight the off-brand Nazis then. You’re promoted from intelligence agent to army captain, which is not how ranks work.

HAYLEY ATWELL

Sweet! Now I suppose you can call me... CAPTAIN BRITAIN!

(intern hurries over and whispers in her ear)

Oh of bloody COURSE Marvel already has a Captain Britain. Fine, let’s go with Captain Atwell just to be really boring.

EXT. ITALY

HAYLEY goes to rescue SEBASTIAN STAN, NEAL McDONOUGH and OTHERS from a HYDRA BASE.

HAYLEY ATWELL

That’s right, the exact same “Save Bucky and the Howling Commandos” mission from the movie! What a wild and inventive new timeline we've created here to be sure.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

(flying in)

Well here’s a slight new wrinkle! Check it out, Dominic made me some Tesseract-powered armor so we could stuff a bonus “What if Steve Rogers were Iron Man” into this thing!

HAYLEY ATWELL

I’m sorry, are you saying that Dominic got his hands on a fucking Infinity Stone, and the only use he could think of for it was to make a single suit of robot armor?

NOT CHRIS EVANS

What else was he supposed to do, pour Tesseract energy into a bunch of batteries and use them to power a whole fleet of unstoppable weaponry? It’s not as though Toby did that exact thing in the movie or anything!

They save STAN and the COMMANDOS and then go on a MONTAGE where they beat up an endless stream of HYDRA SOLDIERS with a bunch more RANDOM ACTION BEATS.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Hey, we make a great team, don’t we? Me with my imperviousness to bullets and explosions and being able to fly and punch through buildings and laser tanks in half, you with your apparently more impressive ability to whack guys in the face with a big frisbee. You’re like my perfect dance partner!

(nudges her)

Eh? Eh?

HAYLEY ATWELL

Ugh, are we still going on about that dance thing? Look it was cute at first, but it’s been ten years of coy dance references. I honestly thought we retired this bit in Endgame.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Well we don’t exactly have a huge wealth of relationship stuff to call back to. Basically we talked about dancing like twice, kissed once, then I got turned into an ice cube and that’s our whole epic love story.

HAYLEY ATWELL

True, I guess most of the heavy lifting was done by our on-screen chemistry, and we can’t exactly access that anymore now that I’m a cartoon and you’re a second-rate vocal impression. Let’s just jump to the next action scene.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Lemme guess - the exact same mountain train scene from the movie, with some of the same shots and everything?

HAYLEY ATWELL

You’re getting the hang of this!

EXT. THE ALPS

HAYLEY, NOT CHRIS, as well as STAN and the HOWLING COMMANDOS who don’t seem especially ESSENTIAL in any mission led by a SUPERHUMAN SUPERSPY and a guy wearing a TANK as a SUIT, go to infiltrate the TRAIN like in the MOVIE. But then it turns out this time the TRAIN is a TRAP full of BOMBS, and NOT CHRIS EXPLODES!

HAYLEY ATWELL

NOT CHRIIIIIS!!! And now Hydra has the Tesseract, fuck! I guess maybe it wasn’t a great idea to spend dozens of missions sending the planet-destroying artifact right back towards the megalomaniacal terror cult.

SEBASTIAN STAN

I mean, we could go to the wreckage of the train and retrieve the Tesseract right now. And possibly even Not Chris, since his suit is basically indestructible and shrugging off explosions was like the first thing we saw it do.

HAYLEY ATWELL

Nah, we’re not gonna do that. Instead I’m going to go question Toby Jones, and get him to give up Red Skull’s location! ...Might’ve saved us a whole bunch of time if I’d done that right away, it occurs to me.

SEBASTIAN STAN

Especially as, by now, his intel would have to be hopelessly outdated. I mean, surely Red Skull wouldn’t have stayed in the same top-secret headquarters for months after one of his most knowledgable underlings was in enemy custody.

HAYLEY ATWELL

You only say that because you haven’t seen how much dumber he is this time around. Just watch, it’s... it’s something.

INT. HYDRA HEADQUARTERS

HAYLEY, DOMINIC, STAN, and the COMMANDOS all break into the lair of RED SKULL AKA ROSS MARQUAND.

HAYLEY ATWELL

HALT, VILLAIN! WE WON’T LET YOU holy shit is that a perfectly alive and unharmed Not Chris?

ROSS MARQUAND

Uh huh! Instead of just pulling the Tesseract out of the suit then killing Not Chris and coming home, I brought Not Chris back here and then just left him alone in the same room as the power armor. Which I conveniently hooked up to a power supply which can charge it for him.

HAYLEY ATWELL

...

ROSS MARQUAND

Also my big evil plan is different this time, for seemingly no reason at all! Now instead of bombing cities, I’m using the Tesseract to open a wormhole and let a tentacle monster come out and kill everybody!

(opens wormhole)

Aw yeah, nothing could fulfil Hydra’s prized ideals of order and control better than yanking Cthulhu out of a random dimension and just letting it smash everything into a million-

(crushed into paste by tentacle)

Honestly I don’t know what I was expecting.

(dies)

The TENTACLE MONSTER starts flailing its TENTACLES all over the place, and the good guys FIGHT IT! But NOT CHRIS’S BATTERY DIES and the COMMANDOS are FUCKING USELESS, so it’s all up to HAYLEY!

HAYLEY ATWELL

I’ve got to get all these thrashing tentacles, which are all about thirty feet long and twice as wide as I am, back through the portal! I know, I’ll just push on them with my shield, that’ll work! Just like it’s possible to herd a pack of greased wild pigs into a phone booth with a ping pong paddle!

She shoves the TENTACLES back through the PORTAL, which then CLOSES BEHIND HER.

DOMINIC COOPER

Aw nuts! Don’t worry Not Chris, we have the Tesseract and already know how it can be used to open portals in space, SHIELD should be able to get her back no problem.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Oh, good!

DOMINIC COOPER

In about seventy years’ time.

NOT CHRIS EVANS

Wait why the fu

INT. SHIELD HEADQUARTERS, 2011

SAMUEL L. MOTHERFUCKING JACKSON and JEREMY RENNER are running a TESSERACT EXPERIMENT when a PORTAL spits a STILL TENTACLE-SPATTERED HAYLEY out.

HAYLEY ATWELL

Oh hey look, turns out time travel is possible. Keep that in mind if you ever want to do some kind of time heist, I guess.

JEFFREY WRIGHT (V.O.)

And so now you know what a drastically altered new course of events took place, all thanks to that one small decision: pretty much all the same stuff happened, but a different person did it.

(pause)

Look, I promise they’re not all gonna be like this. Join us next time, for-

(checks notes)

“What If Star Lord, But It’s T’Challa”? Damn, this is gonna get old fast.

END.