And some of this I feel is a pacing issue...this entire season is honestly as big or BIGGER than MCU Phases 1 through 3 all combined, in terms of the threat level and the way the story is coming together. Phase 1 through 3 had separate films giving origin stories for heroes, shows them coming together, and eventually battling Thanos as a universe level threat. What If is using episodes in different universes as origin stories for several heroes who will end up coming together in the end to battle Ultron-Vision as a multi-universe threat.

To get away with cramming all that into a nine episode which are around 30 minutes, they are doing a ton of shorthand based on our knowledge of what happened in the main MCU universe, but also completely rushing some aspects of this, which brings me to Thanos:

>-This series has really plummeted the street cred of Thanos.
>There was a slight rise in stock being a zombie with the
>Gauntlet, but being a nice guy and then getting swooped in
>half really chumped him off.

From a timing perspective it was like "nah, we don't have time for a battle here, lets have him cut instantly cut in half". What didn't make sense to me though was then having Captain Marvel come in and battling Ultron with ALL the infinity stones. So they are saying that Marvel is able to hang with Ultron with ALL the infinity stones for a minute (enough to drive him to the core of the planet), but Thanos with 5 stones gets murked on sight by Ultron with just the Mind stone?