Uatu
Uatu, better known as the Watcher, is the cosmic observer who narrates the three What-If episodes of the W-Series in We Can Fix Pawbert. He is not a mammal and does not belong to Zootopia's world: he is one of a race of enormous, impassive beings who have watched galaxies form and end and who record what happens across the multiverse without stepping into it. He is heard and never seen — his narration opens and closes each What-If episode from outside the scene, and no character in any of the three realities knows he is there.
Background
The Watcher sees every branch of reality at once, and his subject is divergence: the single choice that splits one timeline off from another, and what the split costs. He introduces each of the three episodes with the same declaration, that time, space and reality are a prism of endless possibility rather than a straight line, and then names the question the episode has been built to ask.
Watching every version also lets him report on the realities the episode is not showing. In the timeline where the weakest lynx stops, he is the one who says what the father would have said if the son had kept walking, and what the son has given up by never hearing it. The comparison is always his alone, because none of the mammals in front of him can see past the reality they are standing in.
Personality
The Watcher narrates with detachment and no detectable stake. He does not intervene, does not warn, and does not grieve; he describes what happened, sets it beside the versions where it happened otherwise, and moves on. The detachment has one consistent exception. He has watched a thousand realities raise and bury their civilizations, and he keeps closing instead on the smallest arrangement available to him, which is whatever a handful of mammals have managed to build between themselves.
Series History
W-Series
What If
The What-If episodes are alternate timelines and do not affect the main continuity.
In "What If... the Weakest Lynx Chose Differently?", the Watcher opens on the weather wall control room and lays out what Pawbert has already done and why. He marks the divergence at the moment Judy takes hold of the lynx's ankle and the lynx stops, names the approval the son will now never receive, and closes on this reality as the one where the mammals he hurt are the first to help him stand.
In "What If... Nothing Was True?", he opens a reality where a hidden creed has been shaping Zootopia since before the weather walls went up. He breaks in once over Luther kneeling in the corridor beside the Templar operative he has just killed, and closes by asking whether a city's laws are natural law or something a handful of mammals installed and then called natural.
In "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?", he sets out the making and unmaking of Subject 89P13 and notes that the Asgardian distress signal that reaches the Guardians in every other universe never comes in this one. His closing is the quietest of the three: Rocket found a world that asked him only to exist and left carrying the knowledge that such a place is out there. After the credits, several Watchers stand in the space between observation points while Stan Lee addresses the audience from among them.
Key Relationships
The Pack
The Watcher has no contact with anyone he narrates. He has never spoken to Pawbert, Luther, Nick, Judy or Rocket, none of them can hear him, and the mammals of Zootopia never learn that a cosmic being has been reading their divergences aloud. The traffic runs entirely one way, and the verdict he delivers on them at the end of each episode is one none of them will ever hear.
Trivia
- The Watcher's opening narration, which introduces all three What-If episodes, is adapted from the prologue of Marvel's What If...? (2021); the episodes score it with that series' main title by Laura Karpman.
- The post-credits stinger of "What If... a Guardian Fell from the Sky?" places Stan Lee among a semicircle of impassive Watchers, framed against his Watcher Informant cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017).