Avengers: Endgame was a mind-blowing experience, to say the least. The movie had almost everything you’d expect in a Sci-Fi/Action movie and felt like Marvel did it to thank fans for supporting the franchise the past ten/eleven years. It was a good way to end Phase 3 of the MCU.
However, now that the scales of euphoria are off and we’ve had a chance to digest the movie, there are four confusing things that happened in the movie, which raises some serious questions that Marvel needs to answer.
Below are serious spoilers from Avengers: Endgame, so if you have not watched the movie, check out the official MCU recap before Endgame instead.
Nebula’s Death
After debunking the whole Back To The Future movie, Avengers: Endgame’s time-travelling plot felt like it imploded in on itself with Nebula. When future Nebula killed past Nebula, one would have expected her to stop existing, but that wasn’t the case. Bruce Banner said that according to the laws of time travel, when your future self goes to the past, then that becomes your past’s present self (a little bit confusing, right? I know,) but when your past comes to the future and you both exist in the same timeline, your past should still be your past, no? Ergo, Nebula killing her past self ought to have made her die as well, but that wasn’t the case. Explain?
Strange Timeline Course
When Hulk Banner (see what I did there?) snapped, he brought everyone that Thanos decimated back in 2018 to the movie’s present timeline; five years after the decimation in 2023. So it’s understandable why Iron Man’s daughter should still exist, but how come at the end of the movie, Ant-Man’s daughter who was all grown up when he came out of the quantum realm, went back to being a child? Or was she an adult at the end, was I seeing things?
Captain America Returning The Stones & Growing Old
After The Avengers Assembled (God knows how long I’ve waited for him to say that line in the MCU) and won, Captain America went back in time to return all the infinity stones and Mjolnir to the exact point in time they were taken from. That alone is extremely confusing because the only three Infinity Stones that would be easy for him to return are the Power Stone (by putting it back in the conveniently unguarded planet Morag), Time Stone (by giving it back to The Ancient One), and Reality Stone (by injecting it back into Jane Foster). The other stones, however, were housed in different cases that are not so easy to get to. So how was Captain America able to put the Space Stone back in the Tesseract, the Mind Stone back in Loki’s Sceptre, and the Soul Stone back in its resting place in Vormir? How did the meeting between him and the Red Skull go?
There is also the question of him growing old with Agent Carter. After returning the stones, he went back to have the dance with Agent Carter that he promised her before falling in ice in Captain America: The First Avenger, and subsequently lived out the rest of his Super Soldier serum presumably being Captain America and also being her husband.
It’s confusing because it means Agent Carter didn’t marry the man she later told him about in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Also, the whole deal with Cap in ice is confusing because the question of ‘how long did he stay in ice for?’ comes up. It’s either one of two things happened; either he told them were to find his body in ice so that they could recover it that very day, or he made sure that the plane didn’t go down, which means that Red Skull may not have been transported to Vormir to guard the Soul Stone. At least those are the two hypotheses I could come up with. Answers are needed.
Captain America Holding Stormbreaker
How was Captain America able to hold Stormbreaker in his hands without running mad? Yes, he was worthy of Mjolnir, but Stormbreaker is a whole other weapon entirely. Only really strong beings like Thor, Thanos, and possibly Hulk could have lifted that weapon without dying. But just after Cap lifted Mjolnir, he was able to hold Stormbreaker?
Thor said in Infinity War that Stormbreaker is not a weapon that just anyone can hold because their minds will collapse into madness and they will end up dying from it. Captain America may be more than a man, but he surely isn’t strong enough to wield such a weapon, so how was he able to?
The four questions above have been bugging me ever since I watched the movie. And even though the movie was great, it will really help if we can get answers to those questions.
Over to you, Marvel!
Time travel rules in the MCU are not like Back in the Future rules – they explicitly say that. You can’t disappear yourself (or your enemies) by changing past. You can only create new future – a new timeline or alternate universe and because of that every time they go back to any time in MCU means that they are creating alternative timelines. They can only go back home because there is open gate on the other end guiding them back. So when Banner talks to Ancient One he’s already in another timeline and taking the stones just creates more, darker branches. This is why Ancient One tells Bruce his timeline will be fine no matter (it still will have all the Stones in 2012) what he does but hers will be screwed without the Time Stone. Her timeline still needs it for Strange to defeat Dormamu. His is already safe from that.
So there is alternative 2012 timeline where Loki escaped with Space Stone after Tony’s reactor failure. In this timeline people think Loki impersonated Cap, pretended to be HYDRA agent and stole Mind Stone too. That’s probably the Loki we’ll see in the TV series.
And there is alternative 2014 timeline that has no Thanos (you’re welcome), his forces or Nebula (this is why current Nebula lives even though she shoots her younger self – it’s alternative timeline Nebula who dies). Stark in that timeline will be obsessing about that otherworldly threat pointlessly.
This is also why they can’t just go back and kill baby Thanos – it would just create an alternate universe with no Thanos but won’t help theirs. This is also why the Stones don’t have to be the same – just back in their realities. Although I’m sure they have some packaging for them in that case.
Ant-Man’s daughter is still teenager at the end