What If...? Season 2 Rumor Teases A Return Of The MCU's Most Powerful Man

Rumors about "What If...?" Season 2 continue to swirl as fans eagerly await so much as a release date announcement for Marvel Studios' multiversal animated anthology series. After an alleged list of leaked titles for the show's sophomore outing was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, the regular Marvel scoops account @CanWeGetSomeToast claimed that fan-favorite character Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is due to appear in one of the upcoming episodes.

The immensely powerful variant of Earth-616's Stephen Strange was last seen being entrusted (or perhaps cursed) with the duty of watching over an unending battle between a cosmically powered Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and an upgraded Arnim Zola (Toby Jones). Seeing as Strange Supreme's home dimension has been all but destroyed by his own hubris, any extended return for the character would likely involve him traveling to another world, though the rumored titles don't clearly indicate where such a storyline would come into play.

Stephen Strange's departure from auxiliary Avenger to multiversal guardian comes at great cost to his soul, psyche, and home world. In the episode "What If... Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?," the would-be Sorcerer Supreme absorbs untold interdimensional power from all manner of monsters and demons — a power he uses to defy the death of Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), an unchangeable "Absolute Point" in his timeline. Though he is briefly successful, this unnatural deviance from destiny ultimately causes his universe to dissolve into black nothingness.

The magnification of Strange's tragedy from intimate to apocalyptic made the episode bleakly impactful for many viewers, including Watcher actor Jeffrey Wright. "I think this idea of his universe being destroyed is a wonderful metaphor too for all of us when we attempt the impossible or rather when we try to reject our path, our destiny, or the inevitability of our lives," he opined to Entertainment Weekly. "When a schism grows between our reality and our relationship to it, we do in fact kind of destroy our universe." Returning to this character will likely mean a return to this familiar dark tone for at least one episode — though which one remains to be seen.

While the rumored "What If...?" Season 2 episode titles signal Marvel's wildest storylines yet, several are inaccurate, according to @CanWeGetSomeToast. For starters, most of these overly long and needlessly comprehensive "titles," notably "What If... the Tesseract Landed in Haudenosaunee Confederacy Before the Colonization of America?" (which seems to have been taken from Marvel's announcement of the episode's central character), are actually short episode descriptions of varying veracity.

On the other hand, @CanWeGetSomeToast does claim that "What If... Happy Hogan Saved Christmas?" is an accurate episode title, so these two, "What If... Gamora Killed Thanos?," and "What If... Captain Carter Finds Hydra Stomper?" are likely the only rumored concepts we can expect to see for certain. Of course, nothing in either the episode title "leak" or @CanWeGetSomeToast's tweet has been confirmed, so all of it should be taken with a large grain of salt. No one will know the final shape "What If...?" Season 2 takes until it arrives on Disney+.