The Avengers: Endgame appearance. Episode 4 of What If…?, “What If... Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?”, provides a better look at the character and explains just how on-brand the move is for Stephen Strange.
The trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home teases Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking for Doctor Strange’s help to make the world forget his secret identity. While Master Wong (Benedict Wong) advises heavily against it before his departure before his portal, Doctor Strange goes ahead and casts the spell anyway after a coy wink to Peter, causing the multiverse to collapse in on itself ahead of evil version of Doctor Strange that threatens to destroy that timeline’s universe.
In What If…? the Ancient One attempts to stop Strange by using siphoning powerful magic from the Dark Dimension to split Doctor Strange in two, causing his evil and good paths to occur simultaneously within that timeline. When she appears the future version of the “good” Strange, he is quick to point out that splitting Strange’s timeline might not have been the “simplest or smartest” way to attempt to save the reality. The Ancient One nonchalantly brushes this off saying that it’s “exceedingly dangerous, actually.” As Doctor Strange was guided in the mystic arts by the Ancient One, the fact that her response to being called out on having done something impulsive and dangerous is one of seeming smugness at her own power explains why Strange’s training did not curb urges to prove himself in hazardous ways when Peter Parker comes to ask for help.
While the Doctor Strange of the Spider-Man: No Way Home trailer might seem drastically different from the Strange that audiences saw in reckless characters like Iron Man and Star-Lord.
Both the trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home and Marvel's What If…? episode 4 use the same technique to call back to Stephen Strange’s defiance of Wong back when he worked as the librarian. In each, immediately before Strange goes forth with his bad idea, Wong sees what he is thinking, advises him against it, and then leaves him to make his own decision. Doctor Strange might now be the Sorcerer Supreme of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, but he will always be the same Stephen Strange who chafes against an authority that tries to deny him his quest to do something impressive and show off his power.
