Warning: This post contains spoilers for Marvel's What If...? episode 3.
Hank Pym is known for being the creator of the Ant-Man technology, and the third episode of Marvel’s What If…? explores what would have happened if he had taken a villainous path, which also happened in the comics when he took the mantle of Yellowjacket. For over a decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been bringing a variety of characters from Marvel Comics to the big screen and now TV as well, and among those is Ant-Man, with Scott Lang being the one taking the role of this superhero while mentored by the original one, Hank Pym.
Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) made their MCU debut in Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man, where Scott was chosen by Pym to take his place as Ant-Man and steal the Yellowjacket suit from Darren Cross (Corey Stoll). The latter is one of the few MCU villains whose fate is left unknown, as he continued shrinking and thus may or may have not died, but he hasn’t appeared again. Lang later joined the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, and he reunited with Pym in Ant-Man and the Wasp before battling Thanos and his armies in Avengers: Endgame. Pym hasn’t been a big presence in the MCU, leaving the spotlight to Lang, but What If…? episode 3 changed that and made him a villain, which also happened in the comics.
What If…? episode 3 explores what would have happened if the Avengers had been mysteriously killed one by one, thus leaving Nick Fury without the team that would protect Earth from all types of threats. The one responsible for the deaths of the would-have-been Avengers turned out to be Hank Pym, who had a falling out with S.H.I.E.L.D. after his daughter, Hope van Dyne, died during a mission, so he wanted to avenge her death by killing all of Fury’s prospects for the Avenger Initiative. For that, Hank Pym used the Yellowjacket suit and took on that villainous mantle, which also happened in the comics but under different circumstances.
One day, while working in his lab, Pym accidentally dropped some vials containing various chemicals that once he inhaled induced changes in his mind, manifesting as a personality crisis. These side-effects led him to take the persona of Yellowjacket and claimed to have killed Pym and proposed to Janet van Dyne, as he had long wanted to. Janet knew Yellowjacket was Pym but played along, and during their wedding, the Avengers were attacked by the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime. Seeing Janet in danger shocked Pym back into his normal self, but he renounced his power to become a giant due to the physical strains of it and continued to use the name and suit of Yellowjacket, only this time to fight crime. Given that Hank Pym isn’t an active hero in the MCU and he was introduced as a veteran scientist, this part of his history had to be omitted and changed in order to make Yellowjacket part of the MCU but as a main villain through Darren Cross, but it was interesting to see him as this evil character even if briefly in What If…?.
As mentioned above, Yellowjacket hasn’t appeared in other MCU movies but his helmet (a giant version of it) was spotted in The Void in Loki, and with the multiverse of madness now triggered, there’s even a slight possibility that he can return. As for Hank Pym, he’s expected to return in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, though it's unknown what his role will be this time.
Marvel's What If...? releases every Wednesday on Disney+.
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