Fridge / Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Fridge Brilliance

• "Stolen batteries." At first it seems like something funny Rocket did, then of course those same stolen batteries wind up destroying Ego from the inside out. And finally Rocket likens Yondu to himself at Yondu's cremation when he says, "They came back for him, even though he was mean, yelled at them, stole some batteries..." When you think of it that way, Yondu did steal some batteries: he stole Peter. Ego said that Peter would act as a battery for the next thousand years while he drained his powers... before that, though, Yondu stole him during his childhood rather than deliver him to his murderous father. So to Ego, Yondu might have "stolen some batteries" (i.e., Peter) from him, but of course, Yondu really rescued Peter and raised him as his own son.
  • Batteries, plural. Yondu stole some of Peter's half-brothers and -sisters for Ego previously; it wasn't his fault they turned out to be dead batteries.

• Peter cannot master Ego's powers in the way Ego uses them, he has to use them the way Yondu uses his own powers. Because Yondu is Peter's true dad.
• During the climax of the film, both Peter and Ego use their powers to create massive stone avatars. Ego's is himself but Peter's is Pac-Man. Ego only thinks about himself, while Peter retains his ties to Earth and his childhood.
  • Also, what is Pac-Man in general? A giant sphere that devours things. What's Ego? Exactly the same thing.
• While on Earth, Ego used a car painted orange and teal. As the film later shows, he has Blue-and-Orange Morality. It also resembles the colors of the Milano.
  • It actually was Peter's mom's car. In fact, there's a subtle hint establishing this: Peter's Walkman. It was made before he was born, in a time where it would have been readily available for her to purchase, much like the car. And, even more of a kicker, the colors of the Walkman are Orange, Blue and Silver. The same colors of the car, which also are the same three colors of the Milano. This is also a brilliant fridge detail because those three colors appearing on both the car and the Milano, having come from the Walkman that Peter still carries as a connection to his mom, it shows that he has more of her in him than he has Ego in him.

• In the same kind of vein, the first movie ended with Peter finally opening his mother's last gift to him, which turned out to be a new mix tape. The second movie ends with him getting a new list of songs, from his true father: the man who raised him, protected him, trained him, and ultimately, died for him.

• The reason behind Mantis's (attempted) turn wasn't merely that Drax was kind to her, she decides to do so after sharing his grief over his lost daughter. As later revealed in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, Ego is also Mantis's father, so in that moment, she was shown how a true father reacts to the death of his children, and realizes at that moment what a real monster her father is. Also, Drax tells her that she reminds him of his daughter, being innocent. Mantis senses how Drax wanted to protect his daughter while reading his emotions, and how he wants to protect her. He's only known her for a few days, and Ego raised her. But it becomes clear to Mantis that while Drax legitimately cares about her as a person, while to Ego she's just a "flea" who helps him sleep.

• Fathers:
  • While Yondu's line "He (Ego) may have been your father, boy but he wasn't your daddy!" seems clever and funny, it may not make sense at first since there's not much of a difference between the words... except there is. "Father" is a formal and respectable way to call your male parent, but sometimes sounds forced and impersonal while "Daddy" is more casual and is mostly used by kids. Yondu practically raised Peter since he was a kid and is definitely closer to him. Compare to Ego, who he just met. Ego may be Peter's FATHER, but Yondu is his DADDY. In some translations, it's made more poignant, using the contraposition between "father" and merely being a biological parent.
    • In the Latin-American Spanish dub, they translated Yondu's affirmation of being Peter's daddy as "Ego may be your father, but I raised you" to make it clearer — since grown up Latino men (and some women) usually don't use "papi/papito/papacito" (daddy) to call their fathers but their sons -or sexy young men- (in a similar fashion, "mami/mamacita/mamita" is more used to call your daughters or sexy young women).
    • In both the Italian and the German dub the line is reworked to mean "He (Ego) may have brought you to this world, but he is not your father", stressing how Ego's role as a father figure was merely biological.
  • One of the aesops of the film is that there is a major difference between a 'father' and a 'dad'; a mother / father being merely a genetic donor, while a mom / dad is someone who raises you and is the stereotypical parental figure.
  • When Drax expresses his confusion when the group meets Ego, saying he thought Yondu is Peter's father, it was dismissed by everyone (and the audience) as Drax being... well, Drax. But upon recalling the Guardians' backstories, Drax is the only one who was a father and had a pretty stable family life before losing his wife and daughter to Thanos. This is followed by his talks with Mantis about her being beautiful on the inside (well, in his awkward way), which really suggests that Drax knows exactly what he's talking about, but isn't taken seriously due to his lack of phrasing.
    • Alternatively, think about how alike Yondu and Peter act. That could be what Drax based his statement on. They are incredibly alike, in both personality and actions.
  • The film goes out of its way to define 'father' and 'dad' as being two completely separate concepts, so why does Ego introduce himself as Peter's dad rather than his father? Because it is another example of his, well, egotism - he doesn't even stop to consider that there might have been another male parental figure in Peter's life; one who actually stuck around to raise Peter.

• Peter being half-Celestial also retroactively explains how he survived being outside the mining craft in the first movie for a much longer time than the large number of characters that get spaced in this movie, including Yondu.

• Why does Ego have statues of all his various conquests in addition to Meredith? Because he probably spun the same sob story that he gave Peter to every single one of his many children, with the statue of his 'great love' front and center, putting them at their ease and getting them to trust him... note that also none of the statues are fixed structures. They are shown to be able to be made and changed at a whim. Because none of them are actually permanent.

• Why do all of Ego's statues look, well... plastic compared to everything else Ego created? Firstly, it probably requires less "processing power" to create bare facsimiles of people than to create completely lifelike representations similar to his own avatar. Secondly... they don't look like real people because to Ego, they weren't. Similarly, why does the statue of Ego himself match the same stylized look? It's because he thinks of the avatar in the same way as those people: it's not really him, so why should he put detail into it?

• When Ego is describing his contact with alien life with Peter, he creates a slide showing his human body meeting a small alien child as the music swells. The child statue does nothing but wave its doll about, right before Ego admits he found the rest of creation "disappointing."
  • Indeed, the first sapient being which Ego ever encountered was a small child with a doll: an object she interacted with as if it were another person. Could Ego's nascent personality have developed the way it did - as a narcissist who equated other sapients with tools or pets to be manipulated - because its first glimpse of "social interaction" was a faux-relationship between an immature mind and the object it employed as a social proxy?

• Ego's single-minded focus on his plans, to the detriment of all else, might actually have been his undoing; if he'd had more patience he could well have succeeded. That Peter has Celestial powers, when his half-siblings apparently didn't, could just be due to the fact that he's old enough to have developed them. Without any interference from his biological father. If Ego didn't immediately get what he wanted he simply wrote his children off as a loss and found another use for them; if he'd waited for any of them to reach maturity, it could well have been another story.

• In Vol. 1, Yondu tells Peter "we're Ravagers, we have a code!" and Peter is very dismissive of it. It's likely that Yondu never really told Peter the code so that Peter didn't realize he'd violated it by abducting him. Alternatively, Yondu did tell Peter the Ravagers' code, and Peter never took it seriously because he knew Yondu had broken it by abducting him (while being ignorant of all the other children).

• Watch the scene where Ego's lozenge-shaped craft lands on Berhert again. The hull of his vessel crushes a bunch of undamaged trees underneath it, even though it could have fit easily into the cleared strip left behind by the crash of the Milano, had he merely rotated it 90 degrees. Ego cared more about creating a "grand entrance", by landing his ship so that its door directly faced the Guardians, than about trashing still more of the forest... which is an early hint that he's ready to write off the native life of every planet, to feed his own grandiosity.

• Yondu has been exiled by the other Ravager clans for breaking the code. The crew that follows him now are either so loyal to Yondu that they accept being outcasts or are scummy enough that they do not care about the code. A fair number of his crew were killed in the battle with Ronan's forces in the first movie, and the replacements most likely fit the "scummy" category. It's no wonder than that when Yondu is perceived to be weak, Taserface incites a mutiny and the loyalists are easily overwhelmed.

• Why exactly did the Guardians need to kill the monster at the start? The thing was only a battery-hungry, rave-breathing thing. Why didn't it just get shot down from far away like how the Guardians were attacked? Simple. The batteries it was trying to eat were very fragile and explosive. Even if it could be drawn away from them with a drone-controlled ship the native aliens wouldn't risk one of their race. So they decide to hire professionals and because the monster had the audacity to attack their batteries (and it probably couldn't be drawn away from them) they decided killing it there would be the best punishment for it. If the plan failed, they wouldn't have cared about some offworlders' lives and they probably had a few backup plans, too.

• Since Ego is immortal and can reshape his body, why does he appear as middle-aged Kurt Russell, and not as the younger man that was his human body's original form? The answer is, he wants to gain Peter's trust and make Peter accept him as his real father, and that's much easier​ to do if he appears to be the age Peter would imagine his dad to be, instead of looking as young as Peter himself.
  • Additionally, he might've spent enough time on Earth to understand the connotations of the Cool Old Guy. He's deliberately setting himself up as a Mentor Archetype!

• Mary Poppins:
  • When Yondu comes drifting down out of the sky holding his arrow, Peter snarks, "You look like Mary Poppins!". Yondu, not familiar with that particular aspect of Peter's geekiness, quizzically asks, "Is he cool?" Peter hesitates for a moment before saying, "Hell yeah, he's cool!" That isn't just him being polite — think about Mary Poppins; Peter realizes that just like her, Yondu is a specially talented person who floated out of the sky one day to take care of and teach a neglected child with Daddy Issues by taking him on fantastic adventures. Mary was never really clear about her feelings, either. Yondu just taught Peter how to be a Space Pirate instead of a Quintessential British Gentleman. Unfortunately, Mary ended up having to leave the children she helped raise. Yondu embracing the name winds up being prophetic.
  • Related to the above; Yondu, upon learning who Mary Poppins actually is, would have thought it Actually Pretty Funny. Peter was just thinking Yondu floating out of the air = Mary Poppins, but Yondu would have given Peter so much shit for comparing his adoptive father to someone who is "practically perfect in every way."

• On a couple of occasions, Drax and Gamora mangle Peter's words so badly that they aren't remotely similar to what he said. It could be that, thanks to Translator Microbes, they heard and said two very similar words that sound nothing alike when translated back through Peter's device. Alternatively, Gamora gets Hasselhoff's name correct the second time she says it. So why did she mess it up the first time? Well, Peter did mention he was drunk when he told her that story.

• Why does Taserface keep Yondu's prototype fin in the captain's cabin and not try using it? Because the arrow requires year's of practice and, as shown in one of the post-credit scenes, is very dangerous in an inexperienced user (and their surroundings.)

• Yondu's refusal to turn the Ravagers against the Nova Corps for Ronan's forces from the first film makes even more sense after you learn his backstory; he was enslaved by the Kree to be a battle-slave. Due to personal experiences, he definitely refuses to aid anyone who abides a Kree scum like Ronan, and him killing the entire platoon was his way of flipping the bird to allies of his hated oppressors.

• Kraglin gets the prototype fin from the captain's cabin when Groot is about to bring the "candy" tin. Then, he tosses it into Yondu's cell. Why? Because he knows Yondu blames him for the mutiny and the loss of half the crew, not that Kraglin meant for it to happen.

• The Fridge page for the first movie explains the similarities the team has to The Avengers. Since the first movie, the Guardians have now gained new members, much like the Avengers gained new members through Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War:
  • Mantis parallels Scarlet Witch. Mantis is childlike and innocent and an orphan, while Wanda is jaded, traumatized, and has a brother. Wanda is a versatile telepath and telekinetic, with a wide variety of tricks, while Mantis is an contact empath with a small number of very specific abilities. Mantis usually wears green, and Scarlet, as the name indicates, usually wears red.
  • Gamora's relationship with Nebula is similar to Thor and Loki, who teamed up for a time in the second Thor film after Loki sided with planetary invaders in the first.
  • Yondu is Hawkeye's counterpart, but like Hawkeye, he's a dad. Unlike Agent Barton, he was cast out of his organization for his sins. Also, he's a leader, while Clint is a lone wolf and occasional team member.
    • Yondu also has parallels to Black Widow, in that he did horrible things for the Kree as a battle slave for them when Stakar freed him and offered him a spot in the Ravagers.
  • The second Avengers film was a bit more light-hearted and also higher-stakes than the first. And the villain was a clearly insane silver robot who keeps switching plans, with daddy issues. The main villains in this movie are bad guys who stick to their goals. One is an actual father, who dresses in plain-looking earth tones. The other is a gold-colored woman with a leadership position in a collective, who becomes a metaphorical mother by the end of the film. While Ultron was created by Tony and Bruce (and the Mind Stone), these bad guys existed long before the Guardians ever met them.
  • Alternatively, one can consider the Sovereign to be the counterpart of HYDRA, as they are both Nazi-type villains with a cult-like hierarchy. Of course, HYDRA started out as literal Nazis, while the Sovereign were Nazi analogues due to their arrogance towards other species. In addition, while HYDRA prefers to resort to subterfuge and sabotage to achieve their goals (namely, by infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D.), the Sovereign are far too arrogant to dirty their own golden hands with that type of work, hence their use of mercenaries and Attack Drones. Finally, HYDRA attempted to replicate Super Soldier Serum by creating the Winter Soldier, while the Sovereign created Adam Warlock to defeat the Guardians.
  • Considering the current state of the Avengers, the Guardians almost work as a Foil. They're a bunch of Anti-Hero mercenaries and not quite former criminals, compared to the Avengers who come from more straight-up heroic backgrounds, but at the moment, they're a functional bunch of a-holes and the traditional heroes are anything but.

• A tad obvious but Peter receives his mixtape and tape deck from his mom, right before her death, to keep her spirit alive. And now with the Zune, his "daddy" Yondu has given him Awesome Mix Vol. 3.

• Zune:
  • When Peter turns on the Zune, "Father and Son" is immediately queued up. It's likely Yondu intentionally left that song on so it'll be the first thing Peter will hear. Even better, perhaps, is the possibility that that was the track Yondu had been listening to when he decided to make his heroic sacrifice. There's always the possibility that he foresaw something like this coming.
  • Kraglin specifically mentions that the Zune was purchased after the events of the first movie, intended to be a gift for when Peter inevitably came back to them. It was probably queued up well before the events of the movie, as Yondu's response to Peter's actions in the first movie. It's a song about a son wanting to strike out on his own and a father trying to stop him, which is a perfect description of their relationship in the first film.

• Ego and his psychosis make perfect sense. To paraphrase Garth Ennis' Preacher: He's a being with reality-warping powers who grew up in total solitude and thus developed what could be considered a narcissistic personality disorder as well as any number of related mental problems. His demise even matches up with that work: he creates a being of even greater power than himself, and ends up dying at the hands of an opponent he could have easily defeated otherwise if he hadn't been so completely distracted trying to use that being for his own ends.

• Related to the above is a kind of "Fridge Tragic"; Ego is so inherently damaged by his lack of social interaction that he never realized that falling in love with Meredith Quill brought him more fulfillment than his "eat the universe" plan. All he understood was that Meredith was keeping him from carrying that plan out. He was so lonely he didn't know what happiness was.
  • More "Fridge Tragic": a big part of Ego's character was that he was isolated and lonely for millennia before ever meeting another sentient being. When he finally met them after all that time he ended up disappointed because they weren't as "advanced" and long-lived as him, which is why he tried to make more of himself. The irony is, he was never alone. There are other Celestials and long-lived beings out there in the galaxy that could have related to him, if he had been more patient with his other children they might have been able to eventually harness his powers as well and become immortal, and even if they couldn't the fact that he fell in love with Meredith proves that he could have meaningful relationships with "mortals". He could have had the family and connections he always longed for, if he hadn't been so obsessed with his plan and making everything like himself. To add onto that, even if he had succeeded in his assimilation plot it would have just created more of himself. He would have still been alone.
    • He actually states — repeatedly — that his yearning for companionship is his true motivation. He's just too batshit insane to realize that he is Ignorant of His Own Ignorance even as he's screaming it at the top of his lungs!
    First thing I remember is flickering… adrift in the cosmos, utterly… and entirely alone.
    I set out amongst the stars… until I found… what I sought. Life. I was not alone in the universe after all.
    (after successfully infusing Peter with Celestial energy) For the first time in my existence… I am truly not alone!

• And related to the above is the question of why Peter was the only child to inherit Celestial powers. It wasn't some quirk of human genetics, it was because Ego loved Meredith and none of the other women who bore his children. That little difference could be all it took.

• Up until the point Ego admitted he killed Peter's mom, Ego had Peter fully on his side and willing to work with him to (almost) any end. Heck, the other Guardians had short enough lifespans compared to a Celestial. He could have simply waited it out for Peter's friends to pass on and never admitted to planting the brain tumor. But the brilliance? A big Ego is neither patient or capable of keeping his big mouth shut.

• Peter mentions that he'd think being an "evil supervillain", Nebula would be a better liar. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that she's not a supervillain (hence, her poor lying skills).

• Groot is given the task by Rocket to kill Ego by planting the battery-bomb in Ego's core. Now, there are two buttons on the bomb: the one on the left would set the bomb to explode in 5 minutes, the right button would detonate the bomb immediately; Hilarity Ensues with Rocket trying to get Groot to learn which button to press. Eventually, Groot presses the correct button when the moment comes, however, it's not because he remembered which button to press, the wrong button had a crack from when Ego tried to crush Groot and Groot thought it was broken so he pressed the other one. This also means that Ego pulled an inverted example of Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.

• When Star-Lord fights Ego, he uses his Celestial abilities to use the rocks around him to turn into Pac-Man. This makes sense considering that he's still mastering his abilities, so he decided to turn into something that he's familiar with and is simple in shape, Pac-Man.

• How does Peter know what a true Ravager funeral looks like? It's likely reserved for higher ranking crew and Yondu was exiled before Peter was even around. Maybe, in spite of his exile, Yondu made a point to attend any Ravager funeral he could.
  • Or maybe Yondu's own faction of Ravagers held a mass funeral for the ones who'd died defending Xandar from Ronan a few months back. But this one would've been the first really big and individual Ravager funeral Peter's attended, so Quill's still very much impressed.

• Ego sticking with the Kurt Russell model to represent his dalliances with increasingly numerous and physically different alien races may have been an aesthetic choice — bear in mind it would surely be impossible to have children with them if Ego didn't make a new body mimicking that alien's physiology every single time. This works on an additional level, as the obvious genetic incompatibility between these races would render Surprise Incest nearly impossible since Peter himself Really Gets Around. Alternatively, Ego appears to each of his children as a member of their race and acts like that's the form he always wears. If nothing else, it would make them feel more special that a "little g" god chose to look like them.
  • Ego may also have come to subconsciously identify with the Kurt Russell form, as it's the only one in which he ever experienced love.
  • Speaking of human designs, Gamora's reaction when Ego talks about his penis is less about design than determining Peter's anatomy.

• Ego's name is no accident: he's a pure personification of narcissism. He finds other lifeforms "disappointing" because they don't measure up to his high opinion of himself. He wants to spread an image of himself across the known universe, putting it everywhere, front and center. He desires children as a way of propagating himself, but demands they be a perfect mirror of him and rejects them if they're not. And no matter how much he professes otherwise, he only truly cares about himself, to the point of committing infanticide on a massive scale. Ego also makes a great foil to the Guardians, a family who are being torn apart by their own selfish impulses.

• Ego considers the song "Brandy" by Looking Glass to be a metaphor for his time on Earth with Peter Quill's mother and "one of Earth's greatest musical compositions, perhaps the greatest." Of course he does; it's the one most inherently relevant to the narcissistic demigod. It's also a clue about his personality. Ego talks about how he relates to the unnamed sailor in the song, forgetting (or just not caring) that the song is actually about, you know, Brandy, and how she deals with her heartbreak over that sailor.
  • He also disregards the fact that the sailor, insofar as we know, is indeed being an "honest man" with Brandy, as he makes it quite clear that he has no interest in settling down or giving up his life at sea. He's certainly not lying to her about his true nature, planning to destroy her planet, or giving her cancer, which is something of a key distinction.

• "Come a Little Bit Closer":
  • The song seems at first glance like a funny Soundtrack Dissonance song choice for the sequence when Yondu takes his ship back. But if you listen to the lyrics, you realize the song is a parallel the entire sequence itself: the narrator flirts and dances with, then kisses, a woman whom he knows full well "belongs to bad-man Jose", and then Jose comes back and threatens him, so he jumps out a window to escape. Yondu is Jose, taking back what is rightfully his from the reckless mutineers. The title of the song also works great as a taunt, as in "Come a little bit closer so it'll be easier for my friends and I to kill the shit out of you."
  • Going with the old trope of ships being a sailor's "lady," Taserface did just what the narrator of the song did; dance and flirt with another guy's girlfriend when he knew it was going to end badly for him once Jose showed up. And it's also advising Taserface he should follow the narrator's example and jump out the nearest window to avoid the beatdown "Jose" is gonna give him.
  • The song becomes more appropriate as it is played during a bonding experience between Yondu and Rocket as they gleefully take down the mutineers together.
  • After Yondu, Rocket and Groot break out of the "brig," he kills the mutinous crew members, ending with Taserface. Why does he destroy his ship (except for the third quadrant)? Because he just killed 30 to 50 people or more, and it would have stunk to high-heaven soon. Besides, he kept them from getting a Ravager funeral for their deeds.

• The film's main poster◊ shows Peter Quill holding what appears to be the film's MacGuffin in his hand, with a Lens Flare to emphasize it. On closer inspection, it's actually his Walkman holding the Vol. 2 cassette he found at the end of the first movie. The second poster actually has Baby Groot holding it over his head with the "Vol. 2" label clearly visible. However, a song on the Vol. 2 cassette ("Brandy" by Looking Glass) turns out to be the reason his father murdered his mother, and the guy is so self-centered that hearing it makes him admit to it. This causes Peter to rebel against his plan to, well, eat the universe. So it could be considered the element that advanced the plot. Especially since when Ego destroys it, it's the moment when Peter realizes that his father has to die.

• In the opening battle Drax reveals that he isn't wearing a flight harness because he has sensitive nipples (and later confirms this as, when he's forced to put one on, he instantly bellows in pain "AH! MY NIPPLES!"). While treated as a joke, this also explains Drax's costume choices; never in the first movie is he seen wearing a shirt, always going topless. During the Lock-and-Load Montage, Drax is seen discarding the Ravager jacket.

• Meredith and Ego die in similar ways. Both are killed by something being placed in their brain (tumor/bomb) by someone they love (Ego/Peter). They both are helpless at the end, unable to stop what is happening. And both, right before they die, reach out to Peter... who rejects them (one out of fear, the other hatred) before he is taken off planet by Yondu. Poetic that Ego's death so mirrors the fate he forced on the woman he loved.

• Why did Yondu never bother to tell Peter about the existence of his father? Because as someone who grew up knowing his parents hadn't wanted him (selling him into slavery), maybe he thought that it was kinder to know nothing about your parents than to know that they didn't actually care about you. Also considering the fact Peter's half-siblings were never heard from again, it's probable that Yondu didn't want to risk Peter running off to find Ego and consequently meeting the same fate as his siblings.

• Ego letting it slip that he murdered Meredith makes sense when one realizes that his only true experience with love ended with him murdering his lover when he realized it'd get in the way of his plan. Peter, from Ego's perspective, understands and looks game for his plan, so of course Ego couldn't understand why that knowledge would cause Peter to turn on him.

• While the exact reason why Peter was able to handle Ego's powers could have many answers (his maturation and the love Ego felt for his mother are brought up on this very page as explanations), a third possible explanation could have been foreshadowed as far back as Iron Man 3. Aldrich Killian explains to Pepper Potts that humanity's DNA is destined to be upgraded, and he uses Extremis to perform the upgrade. In a similar manner, Ego's genetics probably gave Peter the upgrade he would need to wield Ego's power.

• Baby Groot comes off as far more rude and aggressive than Groot was, being violent and swearing. Depending on how Groot's regeneration works, it's likely he started life all over again from the ground up mentally. For all intents and purposes, Groot's being raised by the Guardians who, while good people at the core, are rude and violent people who probably don't watch their language. It makes sense that the baby of the bunch would imitate his "parents".

• Fridge Heartwarming but why is Groot the first one to call Drax out for saying that he was the one who killed the Abilisk? Because it was Gamora who really did it and since him and Gamora have a mother-son relationship now, he's the first one to stick up for his "mother".

• Why is Groot affected the least by going through the jumpgates? Because Yondu warned Rocket that mammals can't handle going through so many jumps and Groot is obviously not a mammal. It's also why Nebula finds Gamora so easily and without any physical problems. Kraglin programmed the location in, but as she's so heavily cyberized she can make the jumps without worrying about the number of the effect on her body.

• Why does Baby Groot go to sleep on Drax as he cradles the twig during the Ravager Funeral? Because Drax, despite being the epitome of a Boisterous Bruiser, is the only one of the Guardians who has previous experience caring for an infant.

• Ego sticks to summoning Combat Tentacles because the humanoid bodies are too complex to make quickly — then we see Drax falling victim to Quicksand Sucks when everyone else is getting hit by tentacles. Because Ego was trying to spare Mantis.

• A bit of Fridge Brilliance in the horror of The Expansion: it took place in a matter of minutes, maybe an hour, Earth-side. They'd barely managed to blockade the blob before it grew again, and Ego died not long after the second wave of the expansion. However, consider Ego's fate: His avatar dissolves, and his planet shrinks to a singularity and then disappears. It can thus be assumed that each blob on the other planets likewise shrunk and disappeared entirely. Admittedly, this leaves a lot of damage in its wake, but it all happens so fast that very little actual study can be on it (and, what few samples were taken would also disappear). Some clever MIB magic about gas pockets and weather balloons could explain the event, and while a file may be made in the Avengers database, it'd be neglected pretty quickly without a recurrence or anything to study. At the very least, it explains how no one in the post-Vol 2. MCU acknowledges the Expansion, because, relatively speaking, it's a tiny isolated event with no evidence.

• With the revelation that Stan Lee is a Watcher informant it gives some context to Rocket's assessment of him in the first movie. It's pretty much common knowledge in the comics that Watchers exist, so it makes sense for someone cynical like Rocket to call their informant a "pervert". More generally, it explains why he was suddenly in the Andromeda Galaxy instead of the Milky Way.

• How did Kraglin find Groot at the right time and know what he was looking for? Because he was going to steal the fin himself to give to Yondu. Even further than that; when Kraglin gives Nebula her ship, he mentions Ego's planet by name, indicating that she's already told him where she intends to go. He knows Yondu will want the fin when he finds out about Ego, so instead of just breaking them out, he goes to steal it first thing.

• When Stan Lee is informing the Watchers, he talks about his time as a FedEx delivery guy, which canonically hasn't happened yet. Which immediately brings to mind two options: there are multiple guys who look exactly like Stan Lee and he was talking about another time he was a FedEx guy (which makes sense, since he's been seen in so many different places and positions it's unlikely it's the same guy) or he's just unbound from time and space (which also makes sense, as the Watchers have time and space manipulation abilities, he was seen twice in the 40s, and it explains the above plot hole). Either way, a supposed Continuity Snarl actually makes perfect sense.

• It makes sense that Peter would be able to master his powers so much more quickly than Ego, if they are indeed based on emotion. Peter has many people in his life whom he loves and would do anything to protect, while Ego only cares about himself.

• Yondu describes the Ravager High Command as "a lot like the Guardians" when they were young — not only is this a Mythology Gag but what we see of the captains sets up a perfect Counterpart Team to the Guardians:
  • Stakar is Peter: the leader.
  • Aleta is Gamora, The Heart.
  • Yondu is Rocket, as he spells out very explicitly.
  • Krugarr is Groot, non-humanoid with non-verbal communication methods.
  • Charlie-27 is Drax, the big guy.
  • Mainframe is Mantis, the other girl on the team who comes off as very friendly/perky.
  • Martinex is Kraglin, the loyal first mate of a captain.

• The one who identifies Ego as a Celestial is Ego himself, but we've already seen a Celestial — Knowhere was made out of one's head, and it's definitely dead and (obviously) didn't vanish like Ego did when he was killed. Ego isn't a Celestial at all, but his ego is so massive that when he heard about what the actual Celestials were like, he decided that he MUST have been one from the start.
  • This would explain why the Nova Corp geneticist on Xandar only identified Quill as half-"something very ancient we've never seen before". In retrospect, of course he couldn't really be part Celestial: there's a whole moon-sized-head worth of actual Celestial tissue samples readily available on Knowhere, so presumably that ancient race's genetic information would already be in Xandar's databases.
  • Eternals would reveal the other Celestials, and Ego's story becomes even more suspicious.

• Ego states that he had to return to his planet body to recharge his human avatar; it's possible this is true, but it's just as possible that he was leaving out that doing so made it easier for him to disassociate himself from Meredith and his love for her, making his eventual decision about her much easier to make.

• After Taserface's mutiny, he throws all of the crew who remained loyal to Yondu out of the airlock. In the end, he posthumously finishes the job when Yondu also winds up getting spaced as an indirect result of his actions.

• The use of Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" is just as incredibly appropriate as the use of "Brandy" on a meta level. The song was about the situation the band was in during that time — having great commercial success, but the personal dynamics were a full-blown trainwreck (Buckingham and Nicks were breaking up, Nicks was having an affair with Fleetwood, the Mcvies were having a nasty divorce. Drug addiction and alcohol didn't help the situation... and they were all stuck together on tour). The song is about them deciding that, despite their differences, they can't be torn apart. (It's also appropriate as this song is credited to all five band members, meaning Gunn had to get permission from all of them to use the song). What's going on here? The Guardians are having great success as heroes for hire, but their personal dynamics (Rocket's sticky fingers, Peter's daddy issues, Gamora and Nebula's Sibling Rivalry and trauma from Thanos' "upbringing," etc.) are straining them all to the breaking point, but just like Fleetwood Mac themselves, they're determined to tough it out and stay together.
  • As a side note, the lyrics of the chorus are pretty much a warning, especially when it plays during Peter's big fight with Ego; "And if you don't love me now/then you'll never love me again" is directed from Ego to Peter— Peter will never get the chance to love Ego again because his trust and respect for Ego is so far gone that he's willing to kill him; while on Ego's side, if he doesn't love Peter like the dad he wanted (which he gave up when he dishonored Meredith and her gift to Peter), then he'll never be able to love him again. Alternatively, Ego is warning Peter that if he doesn't "love" him enough to submit to his plans, then Ego will never give him the chance to try again.

• Why is Gamora the first one to smell a rat in Ego's treatment of Peter? Think about what Nebula is saying to her. She's been the "favorite" child (for a certain definition of "favorite") of a sick, power-crazed maniac. Thanos probably used some of the same combination of flattery and threats to get her loyalty. Ego's just more subtle than Thanos. In light of her own experiences bouncing from one horrible bogus "father figure" to another, her line about how if Ego turns out to be evil they can just kill him is genuinely sweet as well as hilariously blunt. She wants Peter to know he has options and that she'll back him up if he needs to get out of a bad situation... she's just expressing that like an interplanetary renowned assassin.

• Why did all the Ravager factions show up at Yondu's funeral? What got him exiled was because he broke the rule of "don't traffic in kids," but finding out that his rule-breaking with Peter not only saved the kid's life, but possibly the entire universe? And raised him as an adopted son within the Ravager code, making the Guardians a kinda-sorta 101st faction? Yeah, that probably went a long way towards redeeming his reputation.

• As pointed out on the Heartwarming page, there was no way that the 300 songs that's on the Zune could fit on two cassettes. Yondu probably went and found a bunch of music that either Peter would like or that reminded him of Peter. And that Cat Stevens' "Father and Son" song? Well, Yondu's too gruff to actually admit being that fond of Peter, so it was probably intended as "only play this after I'm dead" message to let Peter know that Yondu did consider him a son.

• Ayesha offering to have Peter demonstrate "old-fashioned" reproduction with her comes off very unexpected, and it doesn't fit in with how arrogant she is shown throughout the movie. But in a wider context, it makes a lot of sense if you consider her having an ulterior motive here: She had just noted how Peter has a very unusual genetic makeup, and since her people apparently are open to further perfecting themselves, they would probably want to see if they could make use of Peter's genetic material. Having sex with him would provide plentiful samples of his genes without Peter realizing her true goals.

• "Sometimes the thing you're looking for is right there beside you the whole time." Quill says this to Gamora as part of his ongoing wooing, but Drax takes this up as his search for a Family of Choice. However, it also applies to Ego; The universe kept giving Ego chances to not be alone. And really that was what he was after in the first place. The tragedy is he didn't realize he could be happy. He knew he loved Meredith Quill. He knew if he visited her again he wouldn't be pursuing his plan. What he didn't realize is that he'd be doing that because he'd no longer need to in order to not be alone. He'd have fulfilled his original goal.

• A cross of horror and brilliance. Of course, Meredith was the "one great love" of Ego's life for the same damn reason Queen Jane was Henry VIII's favorite wife - she had the good fortune to bear the son he wanted and the good sense to die shortly afterward.

• The memetically notorious opening credits sequence is set to "Mr. Blue Sky" by the Electric Light Orchestra. At first it seems like serious Soundtrack Dissonance due to the upbeat nature of the song juxtaposed against the fight with the Abilisk, but it's also Foreshadowing the movie's plot. The "Mr. Blue Sky" in the song could easily be referring to Ego himself, with Peter questioning why he had to "hide away for so long." The lyrics "Hey you with the pretty face / welcome to the human race!" could refer to Ego taking A Form You Are Comfortable With as well as his abortive encounter with empathy and true love. And of course, the arrival of "Mr. Night" could be a metaphor for The Expansion and Ego's darker nature.

• The teaser trailer famously used "Fox On The Run" by the Sweet for its soundtrack. At a first glance, it’s used to amplify the fast-paced action of the Guardians going up against the Sovereign and the Ravagers. But once you know the story, it’s about something more. The song has two interpretations that apply to Ego and Meredith. The first one is that it’s an unflattering commentary on groupies. The second one is that the title could easily refer to a man who impregnates a woman and runs away to avoid the consequences. Meredith is the “groupie” who fell for Ego. The lyric "Take a run and hide yourself away" applies to Ego, who impregnated Meredith and retreated to space, leaving Peter with no knowledge of who his father was.

• Yondu tells Peter that he controls his arrow with his heart, not his head, which explains why he was able to take down all those Ravager mutineers so effectively: He was operating on pure rage over what happened to his crew.

• When Peter finally takes the fight to his father, his Pre Ass Kicking One Liner is, "You shouldn't have killed my mom and squished my Walkman." While this can be read as an Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking gag, it should also be kept in mind that the Walkman and the mixtapes are literally everything Peter has of his mother. The Walkman is his biological family, and by destroying it Ego has essentially murdered Meredith twice. Of course Peter's equally pissed about it.

• Why does Yondu normally use the lower-profile head fin? For one thing, the big fin was a prototype. For another, the new fin is a much smaller target.

• Fridge Heartwarming. It is implied during Yondu and Stakar's argument that learning about what really happened to Ego's children is what convinced Yondu to keep Peter from him. There's a good chance Yondu found out about Ego's true intentions before meeting Peter. If Yondu had simply decided to stop collecting Ego's children after picking up Quill, Ego probably wouldn't think twice about finding someone else to do it instead. Yondu wasn't collecting Peter when he took him away. He was rescuing him.

• Back when Guardians of the Galaxy came out, whining came from everywhere on how Quill's Walkman shouldn't have lasted a year, let alone be pristine twenty-six years later; the foam rubber headphones should have disintegrated within a month or so, and the batteries should have drained after less than a week. In this movie, the Milano crash-lands pretty damn hard, and Rocket is shown conducting repairs - by pretty much spray-painting the broken parts back onto the ship. With that kind of technology, maintaining and powering a metal-and-plastic analog magnetic media reader would be as simple as knapping flint.

• As pointed out by Cinema Wins, Ego's human avatar seems to have the ability to see and hear things across the entire area where he is. He had to have eavesdropped on Peter and Gamora's talk on Berhart, which prompts him to not only play catch with Peter later in the film, but take the form of David Hasselhoff later. He's trying to find things that Peter likes to try and manipulate him to his side.

• Ego is fairly full of himself, he also is actually an entire planet. He is, quite literally, a planet sized ego.

• Mantis seems very timid and silent when walking with the group on Ego's planet, especially when Ego is showing his presentation. As pointed out by Cinema Wins, she's not being shy, she's uneasy at having to listen to Ego's lies for the umpteenth time.

• And speaking of Mantis, it's no surprise Gamora does not want Mantis to read her darkest secret - we find out in Infinity War that her secret is the location of the Soul Stone. No wonder Gamora is willing to break Mantis's arm to stop her from reading her mind...

• Groot's Dancing: As noted by Cinema Wins, baby Groot stops dancing when ever Drax looks at him because he knows that Drax has great respect for the non-dancers whereas. So those who dance probably have to work harder at gaining Drax's respect.

• Yondu's explanation to Peter that he uses his heart to fly the arrow gives several scenes where he uses it a lot more meaning.
  • After putting a bounty on Quill on Morag, one of his Ravagers points out that they should have given Quill to Ego, and accuses Yondu of favouritism. Yondu is able to threaten him with the arrow because he angered him by both threatening his captaincy and his adopted son. It's also likely that suggesting giving Quill to Ego reminded Yondu of breaking the code.
  • Threatening the Broker came after the Broker had repeatedly refused to give him information regarding the Orb, which Peter had and he knew that people would kill for the Orb. He was probably also irritated by the Broker's stubbornness.
  • Threatening Quill with the arrow on the ship before the Battle Of Xandar was simply a pissed-off father figure that was tired of his protege's umpteenth betrayal.
  • The Sakaarans (who worked for the Kree) ordering him to turn on the Nova Corps probably hit a button regarding his Dark and Troubled Past as a Kree slave, allowing him to wipe out all of them.
  • On Berhert, the threat of mutiny obviously caused him some anger.
  • His No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on all the mutinous Ravagers was vengeance for the murder of his loyal crewmembers, and he's also motivated to escape by saving Peter.
  • Any time he uses the arrow on Ego's planet, he's doing it to protect his son.

• When Gamora has gone off on Ego's planet to sit and think, she gets annoyed with two rattling plant stalks and slices them off before Nebula shows up to kill her. Again. Afterward, the bodies of Ego's children are found, yet Ego doesn't react to any of this. Why not? Because he was using the plant stalks as a method to track Gamora, and with them cut, he didn't know where she'd ended up, or where to start looking!
  • I was under the impression that the Light is Ego's true form, while the planet Ego is just another avatar that he slowly crafted carefully around himself over time, and is not aware of if he's not actively controlling it or on it inside his other avatar. Which also brings up the question: when Ego states he has to go back to replenish his body, does that mean his mind will die away from himself if his human avatar dies off world? Or will he just wake up in his true form and go "Well shit. Gotta make another now."

• Yondu burning Taserface alive is not just out of rage but also a dishonorable form of the Colors of Ogord that Yondu wanted when he died, as Taserface dies forgotten and alive. Seeing how he fancies himself as the captain of the ship, the men will get a swift death by the arrow while he ironically gets his Colors of Ogord cremation.

• The Hollywood Darkness seen during the confrontation on Berhert is fairly justified by the planet's huge full moons, but it makes even more sense when you consider that Rocket is the primary POV character for this scene. Raccoons are nocturnal animals with amazingly good night vision, and as we've seen elsewhere in the series, being enhanced has not significantly affected his original species' natural abilities.

• Mantis's name being...well...Mantis...makes a certain grim sense in this movie, considering that Ego was the one who named her (she is one of his children, after all). He's not great at naming things, basically, nor did he give enough of a shit about Mantis to give her a proper name.

• Why was Mantis willing to reveal Ego's true plans to Drax but shut up like a clam as soon as Gamora showed up? Think back to their interaction on Ego's ship. Drax (and to a lesser extent, Peter) immediately established themselves as friends, and Mantis assumed that it would be the same with Gamora... only to be threatened pretty harshly. No wonder she didn't trust Gamora.

• When Peter interrogates Ego on why he didn't return for him and his mother, Ego responds that he didn't want to be on an Earth without her. It's an early signal that something is off about him, as Peter doesn't say anything about his mother dying before then, implying Ego had accurate information of when Meredith died because he killed her.

• It seems like a huge coincidence in the first movie when Yondu's ship appears within minutes of Peter's mother dying, but Ego knew exactly when she would die when he sent Yondu to pick him up, because it was his tumor that would kill her.

• The system used to travel through space isn't going traveling faster than the speed of light (like Star Trek or other franchises) but teleporting short distances. Not only is it a more effective way to travel through space (given the incredible distances) but its also a scaled-down version of the Bifrost! The ships are even surrounded in bright rainbows when they teleport. Another reminder that in this universe Asgardians are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens.

• Nebula being a bad liar makes sense, ultimately, because Thanos implies in Infinity War that he made sure his children were all bad liars so that they could never keep secrets from him.
  • Also Fridge Tragic as the fact that Nebula was a bad liar probably made her optimal to report information back to Thanos, and that was likely the only reason he kept her around rather than killing her.

• In the first film, there are two songs on the official soundtrack that aren't officially on Peter's Mixtape Vol.1 ("Ain't No Valley High Enough" by Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell and "I Want You Back" by The Jackson 5). However, when asked by Rocket if Yondu had "any old clones of Quill's music", there are two songs that are played that weren't heard in the first film ("Come A Little Bit Closer" by Jay & The Americans and "Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang " by Silver). So, GOTG Vol.1 had two songs from Mixtape Volume 2, while GOTG, Vol.2 had two songs from Mixtape Volume 1. And technically, with Yondu's Zune, we already have two songs from what is essentially "Mixtape 3" in the film ("Father and Son" by Cat Stevens and "Surrender" by Cheap Trick, assuming they're not clones from the Mixtape Vol. 1).

• Assuming Kraglin is about as old as the actor portraying him, he would have been a teenager when Yondu picked Peter up as a child, and probably saw Yondu as a father figure. This makes it more understandable that he sees Peter as the misbehaving but favored little brother who gets away with everything, even betraying Yondu repeatedly, while Kraglin stays loyal.
  • For all Kraglin resents Yondu for letting Peter get away with whatever he wants...when push comes to shove, after accidentally kicking off a mutiny, Kraglin is just as Easily Forgiven as Peter was.

• It seems weird initially that Rocket was instantly able to use the Ravenger ship's unique weapon system, but then you remember, Rocket was a genetic experiment made by scientists who would totally want to hijack enemy ships. He was made to be able to pilot all kinds of ships.

• One thing that stands out about Yondu's death is the choice of music. Typically, when it comes to the death of a beloved character you'd usually associate "the end" or death of said character with very melancholic or mournful tunes, like violins or pianos which could indicate great loss or mourning. However this is not the case for Yondu's. Instead, his is triumphant and victorious with trumpets and fanfare. Yondu never really proven himself to be a good father figure to Quill, seeing that as his biggest failure or regret, but when he finally does what he thinks is finally the first and last decent thing he does is sacrifice his own life so that Peter may live, because there was no reason to feel defeat or loss for him, and when the fanfare reached its climax when Yondu puts his hands on Peter's face, it proves that he finally accomplished this seemingly impossible goal for him to achieve: to become a father.

• Guardians of the Galaxy 1 began with "Hooked On A Feeling" and Vol 2 begins with a dancing baby.

Fridge Horror

• During the climax in Missouri when Ego's seed sprouts for his Expansion, think of what the overall reaction was and who could have died in it. People would want to know what had happened or why it stopped, this time unlike Thor in London and the Battle of New York they don't have the comfort of knowing that their heroes stopped it. They don't know it was part of a plan by a Living Planet stopped by the Galactic equivalent of the Avengers. The public and government would want to know what had happened and there might be government agents who would be investigating the site for who knows how long trying to find some sort of answer. Plus since the movie takes place just a few months after the first Guardians movie all the way back before Age of Ultron, who knows what the end result of the investigation turned out to be, especially since there had been no mention of it in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
• The Avengers must have been called in when the Expansion started. Even if they got there after it had already stopped, you know Tony Stark took samples.
  • Actually, no. Even if they did go there as a team, which we really don't have proof of, what is that Tony would take samples of that would result in more danger? All that would be left would be dirt and rubble. Plus, it's been several years since then and nothing has happened involving any "sample" of any kind.

• Yondu tells Peter that the whole "they wanted to eat you" was only a joke. However, since he knew what Ego did to his children, it's possible that it actually wasn't, and Yondu was constantly reminding himself of Ego's real plans.

• Children:
  • The whole concept of Yondu bringing Ego's children to him. If their mothers agreed (unlikely, since that would probably mean Ego revealing his true nature) then they never saw their children again, or learned what happened to them. And it's far more likely that Yondu kidnapped all of Ego's children that he was sent to collect, which has horrifying possibilities if the kids' families tried to protect them from being taken...
  • Also, that is a LOT of skeletons. Just how many children did Yondu hand over to be used and disposed of before he either discovered the truth, or got cold feet? Ego specifies Yondu only brought "some" but just how many counts as that to someone like Ego? Worse, was Yondu the only person Ego ever hired to do it? Given how long he's been around and how many skeletons there were, Ego may have hired others in the past. He may have kept doing it even after Yondu bowed out by hiring someone else...
  • And, did Ego plant a tumor (or equivalent) in the brains of those other females that he tried having children with? Granted, he's an Unreliable Narrator, but Ego says Yondu was instructed to wait until Meredith died to take Peter, so he might've done the same thing with his other children — waited until their mothers died. If they didn't have extended families like Peter did, it would make less of an impact.
  • Even though Ego's planet is only the size of the moon, that's still pretty damn big. So what are the odds that the cave Gamora and Nebula find themselves in just happens to be the one where Ego stores his dead offspring? He's been at this for eons; the entire planet might be honeycombed with caverns full of dead children...
  • It also makes an earlier scene very dark on rewatch. Playing catch with a ball of energy was cute and you had no reason to think anything was about to go down at that moment, even if you knew from comics or cartoons that Ego is the planet itself and definitely a villain. However, we find out that he was testing him for having inherited Celestial powers and thus being a useful battery (willingly or not.) And then we find out what became of those who hadn't inherited the power and proven useful. If, during what looked like the most innocent and friendly moment Ego was going to get, Peter had tried to make the ball and said "Huh, nothing's happening," he wouldn't have even lived long enough to finish the sentence - Ego would have obliterated him then and there, tossed the bones in a cave with the others, and forgotten about him. There's something especially scary about that sweet and innocent moment being the instant when he was in the MOST extreme danger.

• Ego is a Celestial; the last Celestial we saw destroyed a planet. The implications of a whole race of beings like Ego is terrifying in and of itself.
  • Thankfully, Eternals would reveal the rest of the Celestial race, and not only do they take their role of maintaining the working order of the universe very seriously, they don't even look like Ego, implying that he was either wrong or lying.

• Kurt Russell happens to be a big 80s star, which means that much of the movie's target audience — that is, adults right around Peter's age — might feel kindly disposed to Ego, out of sheer nostalgia. So it hurts more when he's the bad guy.

• Ego says he couldn't stay with Meredith because "my life, my love, my lady is the sea". And then he tries to tie Peter down, because he doesn't realize that his son's life, loved ones, and lady are also "out at sea". He even dies from an unwanted growth in his brain.

• Ego and Meredith's relationship is illustrated by the song "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)." The bridge contains the lyrics "But he had always told the truth/he was an honest man. And Brandy does her best to understand." Ego mentions that Meredith was the only one of his conquests he kept coming back to and even showed the seed of himself he planted on the Earth. Just how much of his plan did he tell her, and how much did she even comprehend?
  • Appropriately, "Brandy" is about a sailor who likes Brandy enough to keep coming back to her, just not enough to either remain with her or cut ties and let her get on with her life. Ego enjoys Meredith's company, maybe even loved her, but the possibility of just letting her live out her brief human lifespan was apparently off the table; she was Ego's, which was also a no go, or she was nothing at all.

• Ego comes across as a cross between Jor-El, Obi-Wan, God, and The Man with No Name. He admits he tailored his appearance to be appealing to Peter. So who is he really? Well, Meredith called him an angel, he's associated with light, he tempts a very special son who's half-divine to use his powers...

• One of Mantis's stated powers is the ability to alter the emotional states of others: she can make someone happy and relieved if they felt sad or tense. Ego would want someone like Mantis around for very sinister reasons, more so than just to help him sleep. Most of his other children were probably like Peter Quill: sad and terrified little kids taken from their families by a bunch of nasty space pirates after suffering a horrible tragedy. Mantis probably alleviated some of her half-siblings' fears and concerns after they were dropped off. As she grew up in isolation on Ego's planet, those kids would have been Mantis's only other friends. She probably played with them and helped them adjust to their new "lives" as Ego's kids, only to see him take them away after they were deemed "unworthy" and be left alone again. An even more disturbing and disgusting possibility is that Ego kept her to groom her via Wife Husbandry so as to see if she could eventually host him a Celestial offspring, just in case he didn't find Star-Lord.
  • There's another sinister application of Mantis's powers. She says that she can use her telepathy to make people more compliant, and we see her use this ability in the Holiday Special to compel a store owner into giving her and Drax a map and some money, as well as put Kevin Bacon into a trance that makes him totally calm and compliant. Meaning the reason Ego probably brought her along to chase down Peter was to make his son docile if Peter decided not to go with them willingly. That might even be another reason why he spared her even though she didn't carry the Celestial gene.

• On the other hand, given Ego's Blue-and-Orange Morality, Mantis's purpose being to help him sleep might just say something about his vulnerabilities — he seems capable of genuinely loving people (or at least Meredith), but as an immortal, he just considers his Great Purpose more important than any one brief life. But that doesn't mean he doesn't feel it — he needs help to sleep because, although by his reckoning it was absolutely the right thing to do, he's still affected by having killed thousands of his own children.

• Ironically, Yondu himself is indirectly responsible for his own death. If he had just used his arrow to kill Taserface outright without blowing up the entire ship, Taserface wouldn't have had time to send Yondu's ship's coordinates to the Sovereigns, which leads to them arriving at Ego's planet and distracting the Guardians from destroying Ego's brain. Had the Sovereigns not arrived, the Guardians would've destroyed Ego's brain earlier and they could've all escaped the planet without having to leave anyone behind. Also, taking this into account, Taserface is actually successful in taking revenge on Yondu, even after his death.
  • It's even worse than that. Had the Guardians been successful in their initial attempt to destroy Ego's brain, Ego likely wouldn't have gotten a hold of Peter again, so the second growth of the Expansion wouldn't have occurred, either. In other words, Yondu is indirectly responsible for the death of thousands.

• Rocket is formidable as a pilot and soldier. His skills and determination may come from the experiments he suffered, but he is happiest stealing and messing around with his friends. Imagine the carnage if his creators had unleashed him as a Person of Mass Destruction. Now imagine an army of fighters just like him.

• When Gamora and Nebula are both hit by the explosion from their ship, Gamora is basically unharmed while Nebula is mangled. Given the wide range of strength between different species in the Marvel universe (compare humans and Asgardians for example), it seems plausible that Gamora's species is naturally much tougher than Nebula's, adding an extra layer of cruelty to Thanos' punishments for failing to defeat her. Alternatively, while the flexibility of her robotic enhancements allows her to put herself back together easily (if painfully), they may also cause her to fall apart more easily (i.e. they may not absorb stress as well as her organic body).
  • Perhaps worst of all, the two ideas might both be right. Perhaps Thanos deliberately had Nebula rebuilt with cybernetics that were equipped with a "crumple-zone" function, so that they would collapse and break apart - sparing her organic parts' life, but at a horrific cost in pain, deformity and humiliation - each and every time she screwed up enough to get injured again.

• While Ego is explaining his history, he talks about the journey and relates how he discovered life. His visual demonstration shows him standing in front of what looks like a young girl with her teddy bear. Later on, when he's explaining his plan to Peter and shows how he wooed and impregnated countless females across the Galaxy, it gives that first visual of him standing in front of a young girl some darker implications.

• Ego, used to thinking in terms of aeons, probably thought that spending a thousand years as a "battery" would be a bit of a slap on the wrist for Peter. But it would be his first thousand years, which would be an eternity in a punishing situation for someone who up until that point thought he was a mortal and as such, had a mortal's sense of the passage of time.

• Mantis does not know how to smile at the start of the film. She'd never smiled during her time alone with Ego.

• Ego's seemingly-gentle reassurance to Peter, "I've made a million mistakes; you aren't one of them," is horrifying in hindsight. He's talking about the million other children he fathered and killed when they weren't able to manifest his Celestial genes!

• Ego's spent all this time and effort combing the universe for a genetic strain that's compatible with his own, allowing for the transmission of his abilities as well as viable offspring. A lot of his actions toward Peter are a perverse echo of classic father-son tropes, including the offer of We Can Rule Together, but it's clear Ego is mostly interested in no longer being alone in the universe and (first and foremost), self-propagation. If Peter had been born a girl, would Ego have seen her as a potential consort?

• When Drax and Mantis are sharing a moment and Drax mentions he's thinking of his daughter, Mantis touches him and instantly breaks down crying at feeling Drax's sadness. Drax himself just stares in the distance, looking mildly wistful at most. Now think of what that means overall for his character, the depths of his sorrow at losing his family, and how he has learned to bottle it up so firmly.

• Nebula states that of all siblings that were 'brought up' by Thanos, she hated Gamora the least. Considering that she tried so hard to kill Gamora, can it be possible that she killed at least some of them? Or all of them?
  • Their siblings could be even more bloodthirsty than Nebula was, and even more eager to please their father's wishes. The reason Nebula liked Gamora could be that she did not care about being Thanos's favorite: all she cared about was surviving. At the same time, it must have irked Nebula that Gamora could gain so much of their father's favor without really trying.

• In the climax, when we see the Ego spores destroying whole swaths of planets, the destruction we see on Xandar is deep within the heart of the city, in what appears to be a museum complex of some sort. This means that someone found where he had hidden the alien "plant" and put it in the museum. Now imagine how much worse it could have been if the same thing had happened on Earth, if the plant had been moved to, say, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., instead of still behind that Dairy Queen in a small Missouri town.
  • Alternatively, Ego could've planted his "plant" there before the building. For all we know, the Xandarians could've built the whole city around the plant.
    • For an even more creative idea, they could've started worshiping the plant. Imagine the thing you put your faith into just exploding and destroying everything you've made, even after devoting your whole life to it.
  • Creepy, but not very likely. Remember that the Xandarians tested Peter's genetic makeup and couldn't find a match any clearer than "something very old". If they had known about the plant or considered it interesting enough to put in a museum, let alone to worship, you'd think they'd have tested its genetic makeup to determine where it came from. More likely Ego just tucked it away in some obscure location where nobody would notice it, but where it could inflict enough sudden damage that the locals wouldn't be able to fight back. Heck, he might even have planted it in passing when he stopped off to snoop through Nova Corps' records about Quill, rather than on one of his countless booty calls.

• Had Ayesha knew about Peter's heritage and Ego's Expansion plot, she would have outright allied herself with Ego seeing themselves as the perfect race in the galaxy and being bioengineered clones do not care much about anything except their own personal survival.
  • Note that the Sovereign race is one of the few which Ego couldn't have tried to hybridize himself with. Their reproductive process is wholly artificial and tightly regulated, meaning Ego couldn't seduce his way into their gene pool. Even if he tampered with a clone to insert Celestial genetic traits into it, the resulting crossbreed would fail their "purity" standards and be aborted from its birthing module.

• The joke about Rocket winking the wrong eye is not really a joke. According to James Gunn, it's actually a momentary glitch in his cybernetic systems causing him to transpose the right and left sides of his face. The fact that his enhancements "are a little off" is worrisome to say the least. How often does he experience other problems?
  • Also a possible call back to Rocket's breakdown in the first movie. A contributing factor to this "glitch" may be that he was taken apart and put back together so many times, and with no regard to which facial nerve goes into which muscle, that he still has trouble keeping straight which one is which without the help of a mirror.

• One that extends into Avengers: Infinity War. Peter killing Ego had the side effect of making him mortal. Peter didn't really care because of the stunts Ego had pulled up to that point, but come Thanos getting those Stones, Peter becomes one of the first to go down - probably because, mortal or not, he's still a potential Spanner in the Works that Thanos would want destroyed ASAP.

• As noted by Cinema Wins when Ego is expositing about himself, the whole scene has several red flags that are pretty blatant in retrospect. "If the guy I just met had an entire room dedicated to explaining his backstory with PS2 visuals, I might question, #1, to have such a detailed and thorough setup, how many times has he done this? Which leads me to #2, why is he all alone? And that's all answered shortly."

Fridge Logic

On the headscratchers page.

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