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TLDR: It’s a great send-off to the series, even with a few imperfections. If you like these films even a little, go see it along with the rest of the world.
All the spoilers in the world below the cut. You have been warned.
Thoughts on Avengers: Endgame
Race for the Iron Throne 
The people I saw the film with were all mystified by the funeral kid. According to what I read someplace afterwards, he’s the kid/sidekick/whatever from Iron Man 3. Same actor, apparently.
Also, that bit in the big battle scene where more or less every female hero teams up is about the most GIF-able thing I’ve seen since the heroes all in a circle in the first Avengers movie.
Yes, the A-Force movie sells itself now.
The kid at the funeral is the one who helped Tony in Avengers 3.
That’s it? Even if he’s Teen Iron Man, that’s a big missed-step in signposting that for the audience.
Isn’t Hawkeye not really having to deal with the blowback of him killing people all those years just a consequence of the MCU never bothering to establish a no killing rule for its heroes? The line really doesn’t exist, or is important, in this universe unless your in Hell’s Kitchen.
There’s a difference between a no-killing rule and a no-serial killing rule.
Dunno. How many Afghan terrorists, Dark Elves, Chitauri warriors and HYDRA soldiers have the other Avengers killed?
How is Clint going to be seen as irredeemable for killing some Mexican cartels (which the DEA does on a regular basis).
Combatants dying repelling an invasion or during a recognized law enforcement operation is VERY different from going on a vigilante murder-spree.
^ This. Heck, the Yakuza guy even points out that he hadn’t done anything to provoke Hawkeye’s assault.
The Ancient One seemed pretty freaked out about a timeline losing one of its infinity stones. The core timeline has now lost all of them! Seems like trouble.
Should be fun!
Baron Mordo will probably be kind of happy that the Time Gem is gone.
Yeah. I’m looking forward to Doctor Strange 2. Mordo and Nightmare are a great villain combo.
My hope is that Dr. Strange 2 is Triumph and Torment. Now that Thanos is done, it’s time for Doom to reclaim the throne.
Nope. DS2 is Mordo teaming up with Nightmare in the Dream Dimension. Also, Triumph and Torment shouldn’t be the first outing for Doom.
Why not? Doom’s origin is explained by Roger Stern in a clear and concise way in that story in a manner that works as a first Doom story (I say that because it was mine). If you want to do the Dr. Doom who is both sorceror and scientist and diverge from all earlier screen versions, starting with Strange is a good choice. Then you move him in Black Panther’s corner as either a supporting villain, cameo, or gray figure in the middle of T’Challa’s conflict. And eventually you build up to Secret Wars, the story event which has Doom as its protagonist in both 1984 and 2015. Then you do the Fantastic Four right, i.e. pit them against Mole Man, Molecule Man, or Puppetmaster, and save Doom for the sequel.
Triumph and Torment works because of the reader’s familiarity with Doom. On the one hand, if the reader has some investment in Doom as a character, they’re going to care about whether he saves his mother’s soul way more than if they don’t know him from Adam. On the other hand, a big part of the draw is the surprise of seeing someone they think of as a villain on the side of the angels for once.
If it’s his first outing, the audience has no prior investment and has no expectation to confound.
Think of it this way: if the next movie after Avengers had been Infinity War, would we have cared if Loki died? Or did you need Thor 2 and Ragnarok to build up that level of investment first?
I’m pretty sure Steve going after the Mind Gem was entirely so they could set up a “Hail HYDRA” gag.
Which was also an Elevator Fight gag.
You’re missing an end to the sentence about the women supporting Carol scene.
Also, the teen was the kid sidekick from Iron Man 3. (Sorry I’d comment comes off rude, work starts in two minutes and Im wearing off adrenaline from GOT battle ep)
Sorry! I missed the other reviews saying the same thing about the kid!
Not rude at all. Will finish that sentence.
Kid was Iron Man 3 kid
We won’t literally see an AI Tony. All of digital assistants Tony made are audio-only, so AI Tony will be too. It’s much easier if RDJ just has to voice it. He’ll probably mock whoever asks for a video component; “This is not Max Headroom!”
Depends if RDJ has some time to do a bit of mo-cap work, but audio-only would work fine.
RDJ never does mo-cap work. It’s one of his conditions working on a project. He never feels comfortable acting with that stuff. Some actors do, but not him. Not him.
Kevin Feige said at one point that if and when Downey stepped down, they would James Bond Iron Man, i.e recast him. But that’s going to be next to impossible since Tony Stark before Downey was the lesser star of the Marvel comics, and it was he and he alone who elevated Iron Man.
Gotcha. Well, voice-work is fine with me.
I am most interested in how Dr. Strange goes from here. He manipulated Tony to his death having seen this one outcome before and signaling to Tony at the end that it has to be him for the one outcome to work. I can imagine the huge guilt issues that would give him. I love that shot of him raising his finger at the end, it had a mythic appointment in samara angel of death quality to it.
Also wondering how the whole ideology of thanos’ sacrifices for the greater good is disproved if strange’s grand plan complete with the advance apology in IW that it was the only way, hinged on the doc sacrificing Tony.
But did Strange sacrifice Tony?
If Strange doesn’t give up the Time Gem, then Stark dies on Titan anyway, and (based on Strange’s review of the 14 million+ timelines) Thanos wins permanently.
If all Strange is doing is making sure that Stark stays on the timeline that defeats Thanos, it’s still Stark’s decision, isn’t it?
The fact is Strange and his grand plan rested on Tony dying. Tony fought on expecting the win condition included everyone including him and given he is a new father I can’t imagine him being happy about being Strange’s pawn.
Morally of course it is a fitting end. Tony the guy who was the futurist who always neglected his present for the feared future ultimately gets undone by another guy who saw the future for real. It’s a suitable tragic sticky end that is a judgment on the creator of Ultron and supporter of tgd Accords. Decide other people’s future and you end up having no future of your own. The way Tony dies proves that. It doesn’t wash the bad he did while at the same time honouring the good.
I agree with the second paragraph but not the first. I don’t think Stark assumed that he would survive. Didn’t he make some comment about how dangerous the plan was to all of them? I think when he returned to the Avengers complex, he knew he was taking the risk that he would die in the process and lose the chance to live out his life with his family. I presume his decision was a mix of (1) realizing that people like Peter Parker deserved a chance to live their lives with their families, too; (2) not liking the lesson that giving up would send his daughter (with great power comes great responsibility, unless you’ve got a nice lakeside cottage and a cute family); and (3) being a stubborn problem-solver at heart, he just couldn’t leave it alone.
But yes, there is an irony that ultimately, even with all of the power of the universe at his disposal, the supreme control freak couldn’t control the outcome entirely, and that it was someone else who saw the outcome coming first.
I’d say Tony is a willing sacrifice.
I would almost say Doctor Strange’s giving Thanos the time gem is more about “sacrifice for the greater good” than Endgame. Strange keeps reiterating that he can’t tell Tony how it turns out. Maybe it’s less because of chronal interference then “I have to let Tony come to this conclusion and make his own choice.” One might even say his gesture was less about prompting Stark, and more about giving him closure.
Yeah, Tony’s going to do it anyway, but Strange lets him know that his sacrifice won’t be in vain.
I mean, if there’s one thing about Doctor Strange that we learned from his solo outing is that he is utterly pragmatic and willing to be incredibly manipulative for the greater good – hell, his first movie ended with him doing a deal with Dormammu to eliminate Kaecilius’ threat.
That kid was Harley from Iron Man 3.
Since they already had one hero dying and leaving a family behind with Tony, it’d have felt repetitive to do that with Clint.
WandaVision kind of necessarily has to bring back the Vision in some form to have a show.
I’m not sure what you mean regarding Gamora and Nebula. 2014-Gamora is from what is now an alternate timeline, as was the 2014-Nebula who was killed. You could theoretically go grab that world’s Black Widow too and take her to the regular MCU, but there’s no real reason to, seeing as Scarlett Johansson’s contract is up and this is presumably the end of the line for her after the solo film that was been reported for some time to be a prequel.
I think there’s a difference in the sense that Tony’s family ultimately inspires him to be better, whereas Clint losing his family inspired him to be much worse.
Apparently WandaVision involves some time travel, so ???
My point being that people from alternate timelines don’t suffer the Back to the Future fate, so why not grab Vision from just before he died in Wakanda or Gamora right before Thanos captured her?
I’m a little confused about Thanos’s subjective timeline in the films.
2014 Thanos learns, via Nebula, that he succeeds in 2018, snaps half the universe out of existence, destroys the Infinity Gems, and shortly thereafter is killed by Thor. So he time travels to 2023, invades Earth and attacks the Avengers Compound, loses the battle and Stark uses the stones to … kill Thanos?
But if 2014 Thanos time travels to 2023 and dies, then Thanos isn’t around to win in 2018. There’s no original snap. The entire thing is a paradox, which I thought was either impossible or was the entire thing they were trying to avoid. The implication would be that at a minimum there’s a timeline where half the universe stays dead.
Or did Stark — who with the benefit of all the stones is presumably near-omniscient — actually does a bit of surgery on the timeline, sending 2023 Thanos back to 2014 with his mind wiped, so that Thanos continues on his course through the events of Infinity War? Although Stark doesn’t send 2014 Gamora back in time, so that’s a bit of a problem….
Man, the Marvel Universe is a weird place to live, even for an ordinary earthling. Not only has Earth survived an alien invasion in New York, the Sokovia thing, the invasion in Wakanda, all the various battles in various other movies, but now the instant death of half the population, and then their resurrection five years later (sure to be awkward in a few instances). It reminds me of why Marvel tried to start a New Universe in the 80s with the idea that it was just like our reality instead of the weird place that the MU had become — of course, that didn’t last long for a variety of reasons.
There is no paradox because functionally speaking there’s no time travel; every time they went “back in time” they create an alternate universe the instant they land.
Someone even made a plot diagram image to show the sequence of events and the five branch timelines they created in the process. Although it does require Old Steve Rogers to time-jump back to the main timeline to give up the shield.
Yeah, I saw that.
Really curious what happens in 2012 timeline now that Steve Rogers knows about Bucky way ahead of schedule.
Also, this makes me more confident that Steve’s retirement-with-Mjolnir would have not involved staying perfectly still and not trying to change the timeline. Because if it’s an alternate timeline, why not make the world a better place?
Absolutely. I just can’t imagine him not trying to do that, either, with everything he knows. It’s just not him.
Which implies that the entire “victory” in Endgame only managed to create an alternate timeline where half the universe was blipped out of existence for five years. Meanwhile, in the original timeline, Thanos’s victory is permanent and half the universe remains dead.
Which…ok, I guess, but it’s not clear to me what the moral and dramatic implications of this are. Did our heroes just battle Thanos to (at best) a draw? One timeline where Thanos completely succeeds (other than that he doesn’t live to enjoy it very long), and one timeline where Thanos’s success is temporary, and our heroes “win” at great cost?
How upset should we be at Tony Stark’s death if, in the original timeline, he is still hanging out at the cabin with Pepper and his daughter? Is it inherently bad to create alternate timeliness (assuming they aren’t dystopias)? Should our heroes fire up the time machine again (Pym is alive, so no reason you can’t create more Pym particles) and create new alternate timelines, correcting all of history’s wrongs?
And I thought there was some timey-wimey reason why they couldn’t just go back in time and kill Baby Thanos?
I know that “alternate timelines” is established Marvel canon, so probably you’re right and I’m wrong; I can just never wrap my head around this idea. And typically, it’s used as a reason NOT to use time travel, i.e. “we can’t change history, all we can accomplish is creating another timeline,” yet here that’s apparently what counts as victory.
How so?
I mean, technically yes in that there is certainly a “2014-Thanos wins” timeline as well as an “they decide not to even try” timeline and a “that rat doesn’t bring Scott back timeline,” but above and beyond that I’m not sure where you’re coming from here. What they did was pull junk from other timelines into their own. But their own continues to exist and move forward. They did not abandon their original timeline and jump to a new one; the only one that happened to is Gamora.
Yes; because it won’t fix anything. All that does is create a timeline where Thanos is mysteriously murdered as a child. That’s not their Thanos, though; he continues to have had existed.
The one point I was missing, which the picture diagram that Brett links to below, was that the Thanos who shows up in 2023 is from an alternate timeline. So yeah, original Thanos still does his thing in the main timeline, and there are no paradoxes.
But that doesn’t deal with the other issues about alternate timelines. So sure, going back in time and killing Baby Thanos doesn’t fix YOUR timeline, but if it creates a whole new timeline in which Thanos doesn’t kill half of reality, isn’t that a good thing? Your original timeline is no worse off, and trillions of life forms get to live, including the alternate timeline versions of yourself. Why not create 50 alternate timelines: one where you kill Baby Thanos, one where you kill Toddler Thanos, etc. Sure, original timeline will still suck, but isn’t creating 49 “wins” worth taking the one “loss”?
I guess what I’m saying is: why is our heroes’ original timeline special? All of the timelines contain sentient creatures who experience joy and suffering — why do we privilege one timeline over the other? Just because “well, that’s the story we’re following”? I’m not sure that holds up once you have characters who can jump into different timelines.
It is, and this isn’t necessarily a bad way to spend your time, but it also doesn’t make you a moral monster to NOT spend your time creating new timelines. Those timelines don’t exist until you create them, after all. Unless you’re arguing we have an affirmative duty to create as much new life as possible?
In the grand scheme of things? Nothing really. To them personally? It’s their home, and where they live, and where everyone they care about lives.
That’s a decent question; whether or not the Avengers have the right to, for example, unilaterally create, and then endanger, a timeline where potentially the Time Stone isn’t around to stop Dormammu because they took it to save their timeline and failed.
Sorry, don’t quite get how the alternate timeline is distinct from the original timeline.
They create a new timeline every time they jump back in time and meddle – someone even made a good picture diagram of it. The core timeline doesn’t have any paradoxes in it, although the branch timelines are all altered now (the one where Thanos vanishes in 2014 because he came to the main timeline and died really lucked out).
That is helpful.
As you say, Branch Timeline 1 in that diagram does luck out. The question is, how did the other timelines deal with Thanos? Did they use the same technique as in the Main Timeline, which would imply that in turn they might have created their own set of Branch Timelines?
Or do we even know for sure if any of the other Branch Timelines truly are different in any perceptible way? In Branch 2, we don’t know for sure that Frigga lives, do we? Branch 3 seems fairly clearly different with Loki’s escape, and given his role in subsequent events (including his connection with the Mind Stone), that seems likely to be materially different. Branch 4 — eh, I’m skeptical that a single conversation with a strange guy is really going to make Howard Stark a different man or change how he raises Branch 4 Tony. To me, that conversation seems more about Tony realizing that his father always loved him and just struggled with showing it. I hate the word, but “closure” for Tony rather than changing Howard. And Branch 5 could easily be identical to Main if Old Man Rogers kept a low profile all those years.
Good point. I agree that all the non-Thanos timelines will still have to do their own response to Thanos and the Snap, creating further branch timelines.
Branch 2: With Jane not having the Aether and Frigga having her schedule disrupted . . . it seems like there might be some big changes? Not sure.
Branch 3: Definitely changed, plus I strongly suspect that Endgame-Steve would tell his Branch 3 counterpart about Hydra when he returned the Infinity Stone.
Branch 4: Probably the least changed, for sure.
Branch 5: There’s no way he doesn’t tell Peggy about HYDRA infesting what will become SHIELD, which has . . . huge knock-on consequences for that timeline going forward. Quite possibly no Winter Soldier, no Iron Man (because Tony Stark doesn’t come into his inheritance the same way), maybe different reaction to stuff like Thor showing up, etc.
Not necessarily. There are plenty of ways to stop Thanos without doing time travel. For that matter, picking the least necessary stone in each timeline and then destroying it would stymie him real good, wouldn’t it?
Are there? Given what Strange found in his “14 million futures”, maybe there aren’t any alternatives that lead to victory.
But they’d have to find and get those Stones first, and destroying them seems to be really dangerous. Maybe Cap could give them notes on it while he’s returning the Stones?
Re Strange’s 14 million futures: he only starts reviewing those futures once he’s on Titan. At that point, Thanos (who, as we see in the final battle of Endgame, is fairly badass with ZERO Infinity Stones, and can beat the snot out of the Hulk and Thor and kill Loki with just one) already has FOUR Stones. The only thing standing in the way of him getting a fifth are Strange, Iron Man, Spidey, Star Lord, Drax, Nebula, and Mantis (am I forgetting someone?) — a strong team by normal standards, but badly overmatched. Of course they might have pulled it off but for Star Lord’s lack of emotional control, but I digress.
That doesn’t mean that Thanos is “inevitable,” to use his word. He just had such a dominating lead at that late point in that particular game that it was almost a foregone conclusion. So I think Murc has a point that there are other strategies that a timeline could use that weren’t available by the time Strange scanned those 14 million futures.
You could, for example, imagine that Captain America helped his alternate timeline prepare for Thanos decades ahead of time. With a better game plan — by which I mean, ANY actual game plan — and some communication in place that’s better than Banner crashing through Strange’s roof and saying, “Thanos is coming!”, you can imagine our heroes giving Thanos a tougher fight and not needing to resort to time heists.
Well keep in mind, in Branch 2 Steve Rogers returns the Aether. Somewhere/when.
Branch 5. Hell yes. I’m absolutely convinced that Steve and Peggy take a month to themselves, and then it’s off to the USSR to get Bucky and then clean out HYDRA from SHIELD, and so on.
The Thanos-free timeline does have its own issues, though. Rhodey cold-cocking Starlord means that Korath acquires the infinity stone for Ronan, and there’s no Guardians in this universe to stop him since Quill would in turn not go to Xandar to sell it and there’s no Gamora to start a fight with him. Also, Ego the Living Planet would presumably still be out there.
How so?
This only happens if Steve puts it back in the temple for Korath to find. (For that matter, it sure seems like Rhodey and Nebula should have had to fight Korath; the timeline there seems off.) There’s nothing stopping Steve from either handing it right to Peter, or, hell, just dropping it off in the Nova Guard’s vaults.
(If I’m Steve, I drop off space and time LAST, because those make getting around real easy.)
I say that because they only discussed putting it back, which implicitly would be putting it back where they found it.
Yeah. Giving it to the Nova Corps and telling them “maybe instead of your slow and clumsy defensive spaceship wall, maybe concentrate the Nova Force into your best fighters, maybe a plucky earthling or something” isn’t a bad call.
Good point. I suppose as long as Ego doesn’t find out about Quill, he won’t be able to go about his plan. Maybe Cap should have stuck a note in his pocket explaining that his dad is an evil sentient planet.
Xandar is screwed, though, unless Quill manages to steal back the Infinity Stone.
You can’t change the past of your own timeline so Thanos jumping from 2014 to 2023 doesn’t change the events of the core timeline.
WordPress won’t let me insert the Austin Powers crosseyed gif.
That was some of the funniest stuff of the whole episode. I love the idea of the characters turning to their pop culture ideas of how time travel “should work”, and then being like “Are you saying that Back to the Future was wrong about time travel?”
Sorry, to add –
1. It was definitely not great that Natasha was the one to buy it, rather than Clint. Maybe that was dictated by outside-story factors (ScarJo might have wanted out rather than a contract renewal).
2. I’m kind of bummed that we’ve effectively got a reset on the Quill-Gamora relationship as it was at the end of Guardians 2, because it was handled really well in that movie and I liked how it progressed. But I am still stoked for Guardians 3, if only because having Thor aboard as part of the group seems hilarious now.
1. Except she’s got a solo film coming up, which doesn’t suggest a burning desire to be out.
2. Yeah, a bit, but that relationship was going to change anyway given that both of them died.
1. I forgot about that when I posted it. In which case . . . . it’s not good.
This requires no such thing.
Tell your damn story. Don’t get hung up on needing to make your audience gasp in surprise when the big twist happens.
That kind of thinking has long poisoned the comics industry; from DC shooting Armageddon 2000 in the head back in the 90s because they were mad nerds figured out the identity of their big bad, to Nick Spenser telling us baldfaced lies (backed up by the lies of Marvel’s PR department and editorial staff) in order to get us to pay attention, to get that all-important “gasp! what a TWEEST” response for their audience.
Fuck “osmosis spoilers.” Write your story. Trust that it stands on its own. And really, in this specific context, worrying about spoilers is asinine; these are the people who dropped a Spider-Man trailer three months ago “spoiling” the most integral plot point anyway.
Can we talk about how fucking ridiculous Thanos’ ideology is, and how the Russos are either not that intelligent themselves, or have contempt for our intelligence, in how they present it?
The MCU has been relentlessly presenting Thanos ridiculous assertions that his plans can work as an unquestioned “yes, certainly they can, they’re just morally monstrous” perspective. From nobody challenging him on “Titan destroyed itself because of too many mouths, not enough to go around” or on “Gamora’s homeworld is a paradise now” all the way to that travesty of a line they crammed in Cap’s mouth about how he saw a pod of whales in the Hudson and the water is cleaner now.
And this is bullshit. It is one hundred percent bullshit. The problem with Thanos’ ideology isn’t JUST that it is morally monstrous, it is that it is morally monstrous AND WON’T WORK. Bare minimum, he’d have to snap his fingers every few hundred years from now until the end of time, which he can’t do because HE DESTROYED THE STONES.
And then we have 2014-Thanos, who reveals that he knows how to use the gauntlet to create a universe teeming with life in which Malthusian dooms will, presumably, not apply… and rather than apply that to THIS universe, he’s just gonna commit omnicide and then rebuild.
This reveals Thanos not as a conqueror, not as any kind of moral sage, but as a performance artist. He’s committed to genocide as an aesthetic choice, not out of any kind of necessity. And if they were gonna do that with him, they should have gone whole hog and stuck with his initial motivation, where he was trying to get laid with the ultimate goth chick, death herself.
I don’t think “mole” is right. She got captured on accident and Team 2014 Thanos never thinks she’s on their side. That’s not really what a mole is.
I can’t for the life of me understand why Steve was so cagey at the end. Sam knows about Peggy! He might even have met her, come to think of it. Why doesn’t Steven just say “Oh, it was Peggy.”? Sam would have nodded, and then fist-bumped him.
The scuttlebutt is that Marvel/Disney doesn’t want to work with Portman again when it comes to the MCU if they can possibly help it. She extended a public olive branch to them awhile back, but reportedly, she raised high holy hell when Patty Jenkins was fired off Dark World (to the ultimate detriment of that movie) and they just don’t want to deal with her.
This rings true to me. It fits with Marvel’s modus operandi on these films.
There’s a very, very annoying plot hole here; namely, Nebula, for no reason I can see, dicks over Nat and Clint by not telling them what will be required of them on Vormir.
Because she clearly knows. It is a plot point that she knows. She uses that plot point to get 2014-Gamora on her side. But she couldn’t be arsed to explain to Nat and Clint that one of them ain’t coming back? She had to outsource that to Red Skull?
An even bigger issue for me was Shuri not being there.
I know, now, that Shuri in fact was dusted. But I didn’t before I saw Endgame because they don’t show that in Infinity War.
The whole time they were trying to figure out time travel I was like “well, they’ll ask Shuri about this, of course. Any minute now. Annnnnny minute now.”
Loki’s show is apparently just going to be him being a dick on Earth throughout history. When I found that out I lost ALL interest.
Now, I realize that this show will have many of the same limitations Agents of SHIELD did with regard to not being able to get the really big names for a streaming series as opposed to a movie. But I’m just… not all that interest in “Loki loaned his dagger to Brutus” or “Loki secretly founds the Huguenots” or whatever.
I feel like they maybe shot themselves in the foot here by murdering the Warriors Three, who absolutely would have made effective foils for Loki in the modern post-Thor era. For that matter Sif would have as well. And those are all gettable actors and actresses.
I have to admit I’m shocked Loki didn’t come back. The instant I saw his death scene, I was like “this is clearly Frost Giant chicanery. Loki turned himself blue, which is the color he is anyway, and used his Frost Giant physiology to fake being choked out.” I figured he’d show up at some point.
I can’t help but feel like, while every movie involving them has been satisfying, overall the Asgardians have been mismanaged.
This isn’t quite right. They try to explain this onscreen multiple times, even having the Ancient One call up some visual aids for us, but a lot of people were confused by it. Let me try and untangle it.
You CAN’T change the timeline. It’s not actually possible. The only thing you can do is create ALTERNATE timelines. Any time you go back in time, the second you touch down you instantly create a fork. Anything you do can only affect that new fork. When you return to the future, you return to YOUR future, which remains the same.
This is why going back and twisting the head off Baby Thanos won’t work. All that does is create a timeline where a pair of Titanian parents grieve at the mysterious death of their infant. It doesn’t affect your own timeline; Thanos still exists there and still murdered everyone. This is why the Ancient One is reluctant to loan out the Time Stone; even if they win, if they don’t return it to her, that creates a timeline where Dormammu wins and wipes out Earth.
Yes, this has some holes in it, like how you visit the same alternate timeline multiple times. But it’s the main gist of how it works.
So by the end of Endgame, we’ve got these timelines:
-A timeline where, immediately after the events of Avengers, Agent Sitwell believes that Captain America identified himself as a fellow Hydra Agent, while Steve Rogers fought a doppelganger of himself who told him Bucky was still alive before stealing the Mind Stone, right after Loki made a daring getaway after Tony had a heart attack. This is a timeline where Loki is on the run from both Thor and Thanos with only the tesseract and his wits to save him, and possibly a timeline where Captain America has a very accelerated collision with Hydra and the Winter Soldier, depending on how and when Endgame-Steve returns the staff and Mind Stone.
-A timeline where the Tesseract was stolen from SHIELD in the early 70s. The fallout from this is indeterminant depending on how and when Endgame-Steve returns it to them. They might not even notice it is gone before it is back. But this is STILL a different timeline.
-A timeline where Thor has a very long conversation with Frigga, disrupting her itinerary on the day Malekith attacks Asgard, at the same time that Rocket assaults Jane Foster in her room, disrupting HER itinerary on that day. For that matter, that Thor may wonder where the hell his hammer went even if Endgame-Steve returns it promptly. This disruption may mean Frigga doesn’t die at the hand of Malekith if everyone is in different placed. It could have further consequences as well; I can’t see Endgame-Steven just shoving the Ether back into poor Jane. He may simple deposit it in Odin’s vault clandestinely. This could change a LOT of things.
-Finally, a timeline where Thanos, his lieutenants, his daughters, and his armies vanish from the universe, never to be seen again, in 2014. Peter Quill wakes up on Morag with a headache. Does he also wake up with the Power Stone clutched in his hand? That depends on Endgame-Steve. This timeline has a ton of changes; Ronan the Accuser continues his hunt for the Power Stone independent of Thanos, and perhaps finds it. The Guardians of the Galaxy most likely do not form, and if they do it is sans Gamora. Ego might never find Quill, which is good in the short term as he won’t try to kill the universe right then and there, but bad in the long term in that he’ll continue to try. Back on Earth, people just… keep keeping on.
So the upshot is that when Nebula killed 2014-Nebula, this doesn’t effect her because it is a completely different timeline. In essence, time travel isn’t possible in the strict sense; travel to parallel universes is what’s really going on.
Incidentally, 2014-Gamora had a hell of a day, didn’t she? An alternate sister showed up, got her to rebel against Thanos way sooner than she was planning, shot her regular sister in front of her, and then Peter Quill took a bit of a liberty with her right before her dad got murdered.
I’m not surprised she up and skeedaddled. I would have too. If the Guardians ever find her again it is going to be weird, because she isn’t their Gamora; she doesn’t know them, that was someone else.
You could, but this would essentially be kidnapping. If you try and pluck Loki from the grasp of Thanos before he dies, you’re not getting YOUR Loki. Your Loki is dead; Thanos choked him to death and you CANNOT change that. What you’re doing is plucking an alternate Loki from an alternate timeline and hauling him forward. He would probably be grateful for the save, but if he has an understanding of what you’ve done he also might want to go home.
1. Agree completely that “surprising the audience” is overrated, and creators need to get past it. Especially when a story comes out in installments over years, if it has any kind of following at all, some fans are going to figure it out. If, under those circumstances, NOBODY SAW THIS COMING, then you have actually failed as a writer or else not played fair with your audience. Consider detective stories: sure, it’s probably not a good whodunit if everybody sees it coming after the first chapter (unless you’re going for the Columbo thing, in which case the story is not so much whodunit as howshegonnacatchim), but it’s equally bad if the resolution comes as a complete surprise to thousands of intelligent readers. GRRM has, I think, confirmed that at least some fans have guessed generally how ASOIAF will end, and it would indeed be astounding if nobody more or less got it right. Predicting the ending is not some contest between consumers and creators, where creators “lose” if consumers get it right.
2. Yeah, I wish that, over the six-plus hours of these two films, we’d gotten some more serious pushback about Thanos’s theories. Either pointing out that it’s warmed-over Malthusian theory, or noting that Thanos would presumably have to repeat his work every so often (I guess I can imagine Thanos believing that everyone will end up so happy with his work, or else so scared of him doing it again, that voluntary population controls become popular), or noting that, if everything Thanos believes is true, surely he could use the most powerful artifacts in the universe to accomplish his goals in a less harmful way? Like, why not rewire everyone to be slightly less fertile or less interested in procreation? Set the birth rate to slightly less than replacement level, and you can bring things in for a nice smooth landing! Also, there was some ambiguity in that some characters referring to him killing half of “all living things” — surely he only affected sentient living things? I mean, if you’re going to destroy half the of the crops in the field, half of the trees, half of the fish in the ocean, etc., it doesn’t exactly reduce the competition for resources now does it? I guess they just wanted a handy way to reference that Thanos affected not just humans, but also Asgardians and space raccoons and everybody else, and didn’t want to futz about with words like “sentient.”
While I agree that there could have been a more explicit ideological rebuttal of the efficacy of Thanos’ plan, I think the post-Snap depiction of Earth is an implicit rebuttal. Killing half the global population has clearly not improved anything.
Love your contributions Murc, but man WordPress’ comments makes it hard to reply to long ones…
1. I think there’s a way to do both. For example, we knew from some time back that there was going to be time travel involved and that it involved the plot of Avengers, but the double-jump that Steve and Tony did was still surprising. Likewise, we knew that the band was going to get back together and go after Thanos…but I didn’t expect the whole killing-Thanos-in-the-first-ten-minutes or it not solving anything.
2. I may be being too charitable here, but here’s my understanding of Thanos’ way of thinking. In the long term, he’s completely wrong, because even if he does the second snap, eventually the Malthusian trap will reassert itself, unless he somehow also prevents the mind-wiped survivors from ever having children above replacement rates. So why does he do it? I think the key thing is that Thanos was committing genocide at the retail level before he ever thought about using the Infinity Stones and how that created his self-image as the Only Sane Man on Titan. The argument about “why not use the stones to just ensure that resources will keep growing in pace with population” won’t work on him (nor will the argument that, the Malthusian trap will keep reasserting itself as populations start growing again), because if he accepts it for a second, his past actions have to be re-interpreted as the work of a moral monster.
3. I was referring to the way in which her neural network and Thanos’ remote-lockdown-backdoor were used against her will.
4. I think that’s just the writers being coy. Look how angry Stucky fans got even with the ambiguity, after all.
5. That’s so odd, because all of the Portman/Jenkins drama was with Perlmutter and Feige has been quite happy to bureaucratically war against Perlmutter all along the line, from wresting away the films from him, to the Disney Plus shows not being under Marvel TV, to cancelling on the Inhumans, etc.
6. I assume she was planning to tell them in person, but her kidnapping prevented that.
6. Shuri got dusted, yeah. That could have been clearer.
7. Why not get the Warriors Four in the Loki show? Agents of SHIELD is winding down anyway.
8. Yeah, the supporting cast never got the full Valkryie treatment necessary to make them work as more than redshirts.
9. Sorry, let me clarify. If Branch Timeline 1 Gamora can be running around the Main Timeline without problems, why not do the same for a pre-death Vision from any timeline, yeah it creates an alternate timeline, but why would Main Timeline Wanda care?
As for it being kidnapping, you could also say it’s a rescue, since that Vision or that Loki would have died if you hadn’t acted. As for it not being the same person, I think that comes down to your philosophy of mind. Personally, I feel the reliance on continuity of consciousness that comes up in the whole cloning/teleporter argument is a bit much. Arguably the me that went to sleep last night and the me who woke up in the morning aren’t the same me because there was an interruption of consciousness. But if that’s the norm, why worry about it?
You’re kinder to me than I deserve, Steve.
WordPress makes commenting difficult in many ways. It lacks text formatting options, edit functions, and preview functions, which places it firmly in the internet dark ages. The lack of edit is particularly galling for me personally because I use HTML tags a lot and god help me if I forget to close one.
That’s true, but the priority should always be on the story and narrative. In my opinion, if you find yourself spending a lot of time obsessing over “man, how can I really throw them a curveball” you’ve lost your way, and I think comics writers especially have become far to obsessive about this, a pathology I see creeping into other forms of media.
I know that I’m implicitly consenting to be emotionally manipulated merely by consuming media, but there are limits here.
My understanding of the second snap is that there would BE no survivors, mind-wiped or otherwise; he was literally going to render the universe down into nothing, kill EVERYONE, and then rebuild with entirely new people.
And the thing is, if you have the power to do that, you can also tinker with universal constants. You can stop entropy from working the way it does, for example.
Oh, I agree, but the thing is, that’s with regard to Thanos personally. Other people aren’t so blinkered, and more to the point the narrative, itself, never seems to question him. That’s disturbing to me in a lot of ways, because it is implicitly accepting a lot of grotesque assumptions on Thanos part and doesn’t speak well of the writers.
It’s also just bad writing. Scott or Tony would have been ideal vehicles for a rant about how Thanos isn’t even right on his own terms, for example.
That’s not a very good reason, though. And honestly, the Stucky fans can blow me. I’ve got nothing against the ship, but it was basically 100% a fan construction, it was never gonna happen, and the level of entitlement I’ve seen on the part of some of them rivals that of Harry/Hermione shippers.
Except that literally the only reason Nebula didn’t return to the future with Rhodey is because Thanos overrode her two seconds before she could press the button. And even if that’s not the case… why the fuck wouldn’t you brief them BEFORE the trip? Why wouldn’t you brief the entire group so that everyone can work out who has to take the bullet WELL beforehand?
Nebula is really lucky Clint doesn’t know she held out on him, because if he did he’d probably go at her really hard.
The Warriors Four would make an excellent addition to any Loki show, but my point is kind of that except for Sif they’re all dead; they all died onscreen at Hela’s hands.
Now, since the Loki show takes place in the past, you can (and should!) continue to use them as foils for Loki in the absence of Hemsworth and Hopkins. (They can probably get Russo if they want her, she’s not above TV work.) But this limits your creative and development choices, because any growth or change in their relationship with Loki has to eventually be reset back to his state at the beginning of Thor. Indeed, any change or growth with Loki, himself, has to eventually change back to his state at the beginning of Thor.
And it’s like. I’ve very little interest in seeing a Loki who is not permitted to change or grow interacting with history. I just don’t. Maybe they’ll surprise me with some bold or original developments here, but…
Main Timeline Wanda might not, but Alternate Timeline Wanda and her friends might. If instead of Vision dying at Thanos’ hands, she witnesses Cap step out of a hole in the air, cold-cock Thanos, grab Vision, and vanish, she’s going to have questions. Questions that might eventually lead to her mounting a rescue mission.
Not really. It comes down to the fact that they’re literally two different people.
Like, take Loki and Heimdall. They died in ways that left bodies behind. If you reach into an alternate timeline and pluck duplicates of them right before the moments of their death (and the ability to do this does NOT currently exist; you can’t just reach out and grab like using the Time Scoop in Doctor Who. You’d need to actually fight Thanos in order to rescue them) those bodies are still there, still exist. It seems to me it is hard to argue with a straight face “this isn’t a different person” when their corpse is, you know, right there.
And, again, this raises concerns about their counterparts. If Main Timeline Thor steps out of a hole in the air, punches Thanos in the neck while he’s choking out Loki, grabs Loki, waves jauntily at his counterpart, and then vanishes again, Alternate Thor is probably going to eventually come looking for the (in his mind) evil version of himself from an alternate future who kidnapped his brother. Loki is probably going to want to return to HIS brother, who he just made up with, rather than fulfilling the emotional needs of an alternate Thor.
I miss original timeline Thanos. New timeline Thanos just seemed like a jerk who never “earned” the stones.
Well, he earned one of’em, as that Thanos is post-sending Loki to Earth with the Mind Stone.
I’d have loved to have seen that conversation, by the way. Loki managed to convince Thanos to HAND HIM an Infinity Stone and then go carry out a mission for him. That’s impressive even for Loki.
I like the idea of End-game Steve telling his branch timeline counterpart the whole beans on Hydra in SHIELD after he returns the Time Stone and Staff. It seems like something he’d do.
There’s a fifth timeline where Steve goes back and re-unites with Peggy, which has . . . honestly, too many consequences to count. Presumably HYDRA gets rooted out early on, and they never go on to do a whole ton of stuff up to and including the Winter Soldier assassinations (which means no Iron Man as we know him, since Tony probably comes into his inheritance much later). Does his knowledge also mean he stops things like Banner’s experiment that turns him into the Hulk, Loki’s attempted conquest of Earth after he tells Thor stuff during his arrival, and so forth?
Heh. I can only imagine that timeline’s Loki being utterly non-plussed when Captain America tracks him down and pulls out Mjolnir.
1. I can’t for the life of me understand time travel in this movie. Apparently they went for the classic Marvel “time travel creates different realities, it doesn’t change your past”, but at the end it shows Steve Rodgers going back in time and growing old with Peggy IN OUR TIMELINE, changing completely the past (you’d think Steve would have seen that Peggy married a man identical to him when tracking her down, unless he was Peggy’s lover on the side for 60 years, which is completely out of character for both).
2. I wish they had adressed the real cost of Thanos snap (just with all the roads blocked by crashed cars the count must be closer to 75% than to 50%), as well as whether it only affected sentient beings or animals too (the Russos once implied in an interview that it was the later). More whales on the Hudson means nothing if half of the whales themselves were ashed. As it stands, the films message seems to be “Thanos had a point, but we miss our buddies”.
3. The snap should have created an economic crisis unheard of since the Great Depression, and the sudden doubling of the population 5 years later would only make things worse, yet Spider-Man far from Home seems to picture Peter going to Europe as if they had money to spare and not much had changed from our 2019. I’m going to be generous with my headcannon and say that Banner thought of that and fixed it with the Gauntlet.
4. Carol’s new haircut sucks.
No, it didn’t, although it could have shown this more clearly.
What happened was that Steve went to another timeline, grew old with Peggy, and then came back to our timeline but deliberately missed the platform so he could have a private word with Sam. They talk about this briefly when Banner says something to the effect of “well, we got his timestamp back, he SHOULD be right there.”
It’s one of her iconic comics haircuts. Carol looks good super butch.
I think when Prof. Hulk says that Cap blew past his timestamp, he meant that Cap had gone further back in time than was originally intended. Plus, Cap isn’t wearing the temporal location device.
It does seem like his discussion with Bucky before departing suggests that something changed for Bucky in his new past, like Cap and Peggy Carter rescuing him sooner.
1. To be fair, we never saw Peggy’s husband, so it’s possible it was Steve all along, and Peggy used her spy skills to give Steve a false identity.
2. Yes, more of a pushback
3. True, but between Stark tech, Wakanda tech, and the assistance of a grateful universe of advanced aliens, I think that can be fixed.
4. Counter-argument: it’s an awesome haircut (with some very vocal fans on tumblr), and I find it hilarious that her haircut gets butcher every movie she appears in. Come Captain Marvel 2, she’s going to have blue streaks or something.
So everyone who got snapped should come back five years younger than everyone who didn’t get snapped. I assume this means all of Peter Parker’s named classmates got snapped as well.
Yeah. Which is weird for their families and friends who didn’t get snapped, but as we saw with Scott and Cassie, that’s going to be a common phenomenon.
I think there’s a slight mistype in the first paragraph of The Big Battle.
I agree it did have a lot of entertaining call-backs. Like the stairs.
Thor… was not served best. I get he is kind of reclusing away. But they could have done more. There was a bit of fat shaming though and he could have at least cut his hair at Tony’s funeral. He could have at least had a moment with Loki in the cell, saying he hopes Loki turns out better eventually. They might have put more effort into confronting some of the flaws in Dark World, certainly one of the weaker MCU films. Ah well.
I was wondering if they had past Loki use the Space Stone to give a way for him to return in the future.
And seems u were right Asgardians settled in Norway. I hope the Asgardians snapped back appeared on a planet.
Seems Thor heading off with Guardians rather then staying with Asgardians (I only just got the pun in the Cinema, though as the speakers werent great wondering if it was a pun or not) is due to his best-like film being cheesy space-stuff. And we saw Korg again!
I suppose not having Vision made sense, though would have liked it if they made some ref to him being brought back. Could Shuri have finished him in the last 5 yrs?
I also think Hawkeye should have been the one who sacrificed himself. And Im unsure how Vormir works.
On a side note I would have liked it if Vormir was mentioned as being in the Helgentar system to fill in the THANOS locations for the Stones.
I was also unsure who that kid was.
They seem to be using Starlord as a joke after him screwing up the plan last film. Could have addressed that.
The Time Travel logic… well took me to the day after to get it and why Cap didnt really work. Apparently they are creating alternate timelines, I suppose with their suits they are on the equivalent of a fishing line to reel them back to the correct timeline so unlike Doc and Marty they wouldnt just go into the future of the new timeline (though Biff could). But then Cap could exist… or is this the Cap from another timeline and they keep on creating timelines? I’ve gone cross-eyed.
But overall I liked it. The battle sequence was utterly brilliant as various skills were used. Though was it OK to have Thanos do so well against three Avengers even without the stones? I know Thor isnt at his peak but still. I suppose… Thanos has armour this time?
Still, I agree its good Cap got to use Mjolnir. And at least it was returned at the end to its timeline.
We got to see more of Ebony Maw and the Black Order.
And Tony died like we thought. Makes sense, his arc is done.
The 5 yr gap… how will these people cope with coming back? Wont it likely cause huge disruption to the world?
Well… some things left unanswered and hanging. But overall a great film.
Vormir works because a bunch of assholes decided that being willing to murder a person and calling that “love” was sufficient criteria to fork over one of the Infinity Stones, is how that works.
Yeah, apparently whoever came up with that idea had the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, and was unfamiliar with the concept that Bad People Can Experience Love, Too.
I was curious whether Nat or Clint’s willing sacrifice would have a different result, but it didn’t seem to.
Then again, I thought there would be a whole plot of all the heroes in the Soul Realm, so clearly I was wrong.
My thoughts on the Natasha/Clint thing were that they probably intended for Clint to take the fall, but perhaps Scarlett Johansen (like Chris Evans and RDJ) was kind of over the role. It added more emotional punch that she died and Jeremy Renner’s cry face is devastating.
Unlikely, given they’re doing a solo Black Widow movie.
Didn’t go through all the comments to see if someone answered this, but that kid at Tony’s funeral was the same kid from Iron Man 3 that Tony interacts with in that rural Tennessee barn.
I think the movie failed to be consistent about time travel. Which is fine. Few works of fiction manage to be consistent about the rules that they establish about time travel, and I still enjoyed it.
To me there are two major theories of fictive time travel:
1. Everything that happens always did happen, always does happen, and always will happen. There are no timelines. Past and future can’t be altered. You can’t kill baby Thanos because you always went back in time to try to kill baby Thanos, and since we know that Thanos matured, you failed to kill him. It doesn’t matter how many times you try or when in time you attempt it relative to your past.
2. Infinite timelines. (I prefer to conceptualize all timelines as always existing rather than being created by actions or decisions. Those move you onto another branch, but the branch always existed because that’s the nature of infinity.)
Just before the first attempts at time travel, when everyone is repeating what they know about how it works from fiction, I thought that Prof. Hulk was saying that the rules in Endgame were #1. It appears from the Far From Home trailer out today that it’s actually #2. But I don’t think that’s what Banner says. (He also says that it’s not his area of expertise, but I took his statement as the film’s summary of the rules anyway.)
The major inconsistency, I think, is returning the stones to the past. If you’re operating under #1, then you plan to put the stones back because you know that they existed in the past and have to bet there somehow, so you might as well take care of it. But then Steve staying in the past, Loki escaping, etc. can’t happen. So if it was #1, then they’ve made other narrative choices that are inconsistent.
If you’re operating under #2, then there’s no point in putting the stones back. Contrary to what the Ancient One says, infinite timelines necessarily means that there are timelines with one or more stones missing. Putting the stones back when you found them in no way ensures that there isn’t a timeline without stones. The nature of infinity demands that there be timelines without them. In fact, we know that such a timeline exists because we know that Thanos destroyed them. So, you might was well figure out the most secure way to keep them, rather than try to put them back, which doesn’t prevent the existence of a stone-less timeline or that they will remain within the timeline that everyone is in at the end of the movie. If there are infinite timelines, and the movie ends in one that’s different from the one in which it began, better to keep the stones within the new timeline, if the Ancient one is to be trusted on the topic at all.
And the biggest issue if you’re operating under time travel scenario #1 is pulling 2014 Team Thanos into the future and not sending them back.