Well, let me get a couple of things out of the way first.

@Amanojaku96 It was never going to be. The show is called "Marvel Studios LEGENDS", it's Marvel Studios footage only. As well as this, the Marvel Television shows exist as supplemental material, not to be referenced in the Marvel Studios tier in such a way that requires you to have watched the shows, so they wouldn't acknowledge it. AND Agent Carter isn't on Disney+ everywhere, so it's unclear what they could have included anyway. AND they used an image from the show in the official thumbnail. (Plus, of course, Jarvis is literally in Endgame, and the countless other times Marvel Studios have acknowledged the show outside of their films and shows.) Don't listen too much to the clickbait/misinforming articles.

@Tigerlegos Incorrect. Runaways spilled over into August 2018 which is post-Snap, though they were in the Dark Dimension during the Snap. Helstrom was 2020/2021, a couple of years on from the Snap. None of the Netflix shows ever passed the Snap. There are small contradictions between everything in the MCU. Also that "Timeline Order" on Disney+ is pretty meaningless.

Anyway, the episode itself? Pretty flat and rushed. Came across like a rushed piece of fan-fiction based on someone half-remembering The First Avenger but not the details.

Hayley was fine, Sebastian Stan unfortunately is not meant to be a voice actor. Steve's voice was too distracting. The rushed story and awkward animation, dialogue, and recordings made the Peggy-Steve romance really, really cringeworthy for once.

And then Steve "died", and I was actually somewhat impacted and was ready to praise the show for taking the opportunity of the separate world to do bold things like kill off Steve Rogers. But never mind, he's fine a few minutes later.

Also Erskine looked like a Disney character.

I agree with @Asddddd6 that it's very unclear why Peggy just staying in the room caused events.

And @HYDRA Agent is exactly right. I was glad they got June 1943 correct, but they're pretty clear that the timeline diverges right there... 15 months after Schmidt stole the Tesseract, which is explicitly March 1942. So why is he seemingly only stealing it now? It could be considered a flashback, except they talk about how it's being transported.

*Sigh* I miss the old shows.

I loved the episode.

I think there were differences between the MCU timeline and the Captain Carter timeline even before she took the serum, like Red Skull plan.

I think Red Skull's plan was affected by Captain Carter getting the Tesseract. "I was going to use it to build bombs, but opening a portal is easier to do without actually having the Tesseract, so I'll do that instead" (although how Zola knew about it even though he was captured before that change of plan is beyond me).

I think that if the original Red Skull could have a god as pet, he would have done it in the first Captain America movie, for me, he was in search of the tesseract (in the series) for the squib (I’m not sure of the term, I’m french) and he probably read about it somewhere, and he probably told about it to Zola.

Cool first ep, the voice acting was little off in some places, but that's probably because these actors are used to live action acting. Ngl, I was kinda hoping the HYDRA champion Red Skull kept mentioning was Hive, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Also, I think they missed an opportunity to make Steve Rogers the Winter Soldier, that would've been really cool, overall tho I liked it.

@Jehphg What Hive reference? I think the tentacle monster looked more like Shuma-Gorath than Hive

I have it figured on how this isn't a divergence from the main MCU we know but a similar MCU reality who followed the same path overall (with a few differences) that coexisted in the Sacred Timeline.

That is the only solution I have :v

As a long time comic book reader my advice when it comes to What Ifs and why there were differences from the previous work which shouldn't have changed like that from the premise (i.e. Red Skull in Norway, Kruger not waiting for the experiment to complete before detonating the bomb etc):

Just go with it. Happens all of the time, now you're seeing it for the first time in animation form.

On the pacing, again that's a feature in What Ifs, cramming multiple issues into one is much like cramming a 2+ hour movie into a 30 minute animation.

As for the show, I enjoyed it but I never had a huge amount of love for What Ifs so it hasn't hit me in the heart yet. However the production & performances were a huge leap in quality for Marvel Animation.

Imo I thought the episode was bad.

Did Steve really need to die? smh

This is a What If story people, anything can happen. At least they should have subverted our expectations. We all know some had to go.

Marvel could’ve capitalised on that.