What If..? Episode 8, the penultimate, perfectly sets up the finale of the canon series and the multiverse puts its hope on a chosen few as Ultron lays waste of it fulfilling his own purpose of killing everyone to be able to achieve peace. Only two remained from the Avengers, Black Widow and Hawkeye, and here is why.
Warning! This portion may contain spoilers for Marvel's What If..?. Read at your own risk!
Why are Black Widow and Hawkeye the Only Remaining Avengers in Marvel's What If..? Episode 8
In Marvel's What If..? Episode 8, What If.. Ultron Won?, Ultron gets his own episode after his appearance in cliffhanger from episode 7 and bringing about an apocalyptic world where he laid waste on life to get peace, his purpose. He was created by Tony Stark, with a vision of a world of peace using the Mind Stone.
Ultron, however, did not see eye to eye with his creator, Tony Stark, on the means of achieving it. Ultron's way of achieving peace is to eliminate all of life and he wanted an organic body to merge man, machine, and mind in one – Vision, and he was successful in making it as his host.
To make things worse, Ultron arrived on Earth bringing all the other five infinity stones and landed right in front of Ultron who just dissipated all life on the planet. He was fascinated by the gauntlet that he immediately cut the Mad Titan into half, instantaneously killing him, and took the stones for himself and proceeded to lay waste on the whole universe, going from planet to planet and bringing about "peace."
Just as he eliminated life in the whole universe, he sat in silence, emerging victorious in bringing peace to the whole universe, except he did not work as clean as possible. There are two remaining survivors, Avengers, to be exact, and they do everything in their power to stop Ultron.
Hawkeye and Black Widow face various robots with Nat on a motorbike playing bait while Clint shoots from a higher ground making it rain arrows. Various sentinels of Ultron try to eliminate them but they managed to escape. Clint even used a cloaking cape and it was revealed that he already lost an arm, one being metal like that of Bucky. They ventured into Russia because Nat believes they could find something to take Ultron down.
They went to the KGB archives looking for what could stop Ultron, and they found the code of Arnim Zola who uploaded himself into various data banks following his death. He could be found in an old HYRDA base in Siberia. They planned to put Zola inside of Ultron's programming through one of his sentinel drones, so, they put Zola into an arrow of Clint and have it targeted on one of the sentinels.
Related: Is Steve Rogers President in Marvel's What If..? Episode 8
The reason why only Hawkeye and Black Widow were the only ones left is that when Ultron nuked the whole world, they were in the skies, on a quinjet. They were too late in saving the other members of the Avengers. It was a good thing, though, that they did not make it in time because had they been there, they would've been dead as well.
However, Hawkeye was not as fortunate. In a familiar scene, Nat and Clint tried to save each other but one of them had to sacrifice to ensure the safety of the other, just like when they retrieved the Soul Stone. However, this time, it was Clint who sacrificed and Nat brought Zola out ensuring the fate of the universe in her hands, at the expense of Hawkeye.
Marvel's What If.? Episode 9 is scheduled for release on October 6, 2021, exclusively on Disney+.
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