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    JARVIS's escape 
  • During JARVIS's introductory conversation with Ultron, he states that he is unable to contact the mainframe or Mr. Stark. If Ultron has cut off his communications, how does he manage to dump his protocols onto the internet?

     Lifting the hammer as a sign of honor 
  • Why did everyone just assume that Vision lifting Mjolnir means he's good? Couldn't a good case be made that it's enchantment doesn't recognize inorganic stuff? I mean, it can be held up by tables and coat hangers and stuff. Also, even if Vision fit the technical requirements for being worthy, there may be associated sentiments that might not apply.
    • In the immortal words of Dr. Moriarty's hologram from the USS Enterprise: "Cogito Ergo Sum: I think, therefore, I am".
    • Thor was really the only one convinced by that, as he trusts in his father's enchantment. Tony and Banner have already thrown their cards in, Natasha is inclined to side with Banner, Barton is inclined to side with Natasha and the Maximoffs (or at least Wanda, her brother no doubt trusts her judgment) can read his mind. Steve is both outnumbered and willing to trust any ally, no matter how strange they might seem.
    • Vision is organic. He is made of vibranium incorporated into synthetic cell tissues.
    • In the regular Marvel Universe continuity, it has been long established that robots can pick up Mjolnir. That was simply a storytelling mistake by Lee and Kirby that stuck.
    • The movie headed this off at the pass. Towards the end of the movie, Steve and Tony get into a debate over whether Vision counts as a machine or a being.
    • Scarlet Witch can read Vision's consciousness telepathically, meaning he has a psychic signature. Mjolnir seemingly uses some Sufficiently Advanced form of telepathic Asgardian technology to read the psychic signatures of anything that tries to wield it. Therefore, Mjolnir would have detected Vision's psychic signature, and deemed it worthy. Probably because he and Thor share an almost childlike quality which most of the cast lacks: they have no real internal turmoil, and the motivations for their actions are an unconflicted desire to do the right thing at that moment.
    • As a newborn creature with a sane adult mind, Vision was as about as close to a perfect moral innocent as possible. That could be the root of his worthiness.
    • A pickup truck wasn't able to move Mjolnir back in Thor so it can't just be that machines can move it.
    • Presumably because the pickup was being driven by someone unworthy, whereas when Mjolnir is in an elevator, it's generally in there with Thor — who, even if he doesn't push the button, still wants the elevator to move. Which raises the question — if Thor were somehow captured and forced into an elevator while still carrying Mjolnir, would the elevator be able to go up?
    • The magic word is the whoever in the enchantment. The force directed against the hammer must ultimately come from an entity that may be referred to as "who". Someone using a machine specifically for the task (like a pick up or an armored gauntlet) is still someone trying to pick up Mjolnir. If something that is not alive generates a force that would move Mjolnir, without it being anyone's will, then it moves. For example, Earth moves in the space, and if Mjolnir is in the ground, it moves alongside Earth, as the force of gravity does with everything else on top of the planet. As for the Vision, he's not a force of nature like gravity. There is a will that makes him work and do the things he does. Whose will? Someone else's will? No, his own one. If he's organic or inorganic, if he's a living thing or a sentient machine, it makes no difference: he is a being with his own free will. He counts as a "whoever" for the enchantment.
    • I received the impression that the Vision isn't so much a machine as he is an organic, conscious being with some mechanical enhancements. He's probably more akin to a cyborg than a robot. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Tony also a cyborg? Since Tony can't lift the hammer, it's safe to assume that being a cyborg or otherwise part-machine wouldn't automatically give one the ability to lift Mjolnir, so the Vision must actually be worthy of lifting it.
    • Stark is a cyborg, a human with machine parts. Vision, regardless of his organic parts is still an android. A machine that looks like a human. So far the MCU has yet to confirm that being a robot automatically lets you life the hammer, it would have been nice to have seen Ultron try simply to dismiss that possibility.
    • The simplest explanation is that they have no reason to doubt it. Gotta be worthy to lift the hammer. They don't know whether Odin's enchantment comes with fine print saying "unless you're a robot then you can lift it all you like". He's clearly intelligent, not merely a table or whatever. Obvious conclusion: he's worthy.
    • If all it took to lift the hammer was that the lifter be a machine, doesn't that imply Stark could have lifted it at any previous time by grasping the handle with his armored hand and then ceding control over the gauntlet to JARVIS?
      • Possibly, but then again Vision is arguably JARVIS so all that would have meant was that JARVIS was always worthy.
    • Assuming a robot could bypass the limitation on lifting the MCU version of Mjolnir would be predicated upon Odin, who imposed the "worthiness" stricture on the hammer in the first place, overlooking that loophole. Considering Asgard has sufficient contact with advanced alien societies to entrust an Infinity Stone to the Collector's keeping, it seems unlikely that the All-Father would be unaware that synthetic beings exist or might see fit to try to pick the thing up someday.
    • It's possible that it's more a question of sentience rather than whether or not the person is organic. Where it gets tricky is, a tow truck driven by an unworthy person cannot move the hammer, but a Helicarrier piloted by humans (some, if not most of which, are likely unworthy) doesn't seem to have a problem doing it. So what is it that makes those two scenarios different?
      • It might be because in the case of the tow truck, Stan Lee's character was actively trying to move it, while the Helicarrier pilots weren't.
      • So if they did start trying, then the hammer would suddenly weigh it to the ground?
      • It could also be that in relation to the hammer not being movable, it's in relation to a specific point. When the hammer is placed on the ground, it doesn't stop the Earth's orbit and rotation. If it's placed on the helicarrier floor, the hammer is immovable relative to that point on the floor.
    • As of Thor: Love and Thunder it's heavily implied that Mjolnir seems to possess some level of intelligence or even self-awareness, which leads credence to the argument that it's no loophole and Vision is in fact worthy.

     Tony and Mjolnir 
  • Why did Tony only put on the hand and forearm piece of his armor when he tried to lift Mjolnir? All that would do is give him a stronger grip on the handle. He should have put on the entire suit.
    • There were still thrusters on the arm piece strong enough to lift a person into the air, which he activated while pulling.
    • Except he still tried to lift it with his own strength before using the thrusters, so he actually thought just those pieces of his armor would give him a better chance.
    • Wouldn't it have broken his arm?
    • Not necessarily. His arm can probably support the weight. He probably expected the lift to be enough from a gauntlet, and when that didn't work, called in War Machine. Still not worthy.

     Nick Fury 
  • There's a moment in the film where Nick Fury shows up with a Helicarrier and a fully-staffed personnel that's said to be what "S.H.I.E.L.D. is supposed to be". Would this then invalidate the events of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with Fury leaving Coulson in charge of a rebuilding S.H.I.E.L.D.?
    • It's Dual Wielding shields.
    • He's probably still able to get in contact or track down loyal agents, and that's what he was doing after he left the farm - gathering reinforcements. The carrier also doesn't appear to be full staffed - look at how few people are in the main control room compared to Avengers. It's more likely to be a team large enough to run the helicarrier in a major emergency, that's too big for Coulson's organization to handle.
    • Also the episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that would set up the movie hasn't come out yet, so it's possible there will be some sort of reveal in that episode that brings things together.
    • The episode prior to the movie opening has no allusion to the scene beyond Coulson giving Gonzalez the cube and making a comment about Fury coming back for it one day. We also see that Coulson has been in contact with Hill, and Raina has visions of events from the movie. How this continues to play out for the rest of the season remains to be seen.
    • In what sense? It's more than likely that Fury might have gotten Maria Hill to contact Coulson about the upcoming city sky rising and he sent the necessary firepower to combat this. The last scene in the episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. prior to the release date of Ultron has Coulson directly contacting Hill to alert her about Loki's scepter, so it's probable that they're still working together behind the scenes.
    • Maybe that's what 'Theta Protocol' is/was (or part of it). Rebuilding/re-acquiring assets to support the Avengers without having them be part of Stark's records (and thus a surprise fallback)
    • The series does mention that Theta Protocol apparently involves some kind of facility with dormitories and science stuff, which sounds exactly like the New Avengers Facility we see at the end of the film.
    • Confirmed as of the latest Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode (episode 20, season 2): Theta Protocol is, at the very least, the Helicarrier and probably the new facility as well.

     Ultron's Plan 
  • If Ultron has access to all the information on Earth, then why would he use a floating island to wipe out humanity? That would have consumed a lot of energy, something he'd need given that he's a robot. Why not spread a fatal disease or put a glitch in the stock market that would put America, Asia and any other major economies into a recession so hard people would die from poverty?
    • That would have taken a lot of time, and it would be hardly spectacular. Remember that Ultron shares some personality traits with Stark. Just like him, he wants flowers, parades, a monument built in the skies with his name plastered... So, if Stark became evil and wanted to kill all humanity, do you think he would do it in a slow manner, or with a huge spectacle?
    • Firstly, you have to remember that Ultron is crazypants. Second, and more relevantly, while he seems somewhat confused as to what his goals actually are, it seems to be a mixture of human extinction and human evolution - in other words, cause a cataclysm so severe that it forces the survivors to adapt. A virus risks killing too many people; a recession just wouldn't kill enough. And thirdly, and I think most importantly, Ultron isn't the traditional ruthlessly logical robot - he has a sense of humor, and a sense of drama. He probably sees a real poetry to causing human extinction (or, y'know, whatever) by massive impact, given his earlier talk about what happened to the dinosaurs.
    • Ultron tried to gain access to the nuclear arsenals of the world, but was prevented by JARVIS/Vision with the floating island a improvised backup.
    • Clearly, he must have been out of piranhas.
    • If I recall correctly, by the end of the movie Ultron says that "metal" will inherit earth, so it's obvious that he doesn't just want to get rid of humanity, but as much of the organic life on our planet as he can. Cap even points that Ultron uses the world "extinct" while talking of his plan.
    • Exactly. His plan wasn't to destroy civilization or wipe out humanity. It was to cause an extinction level event and press restart on life as we know it on Earth.
    • The Stinger implies that Ultron was unknowingly acting according to the will of Thanos. Combined with the talk of the intelligence in the staff and the fact that we've seen it act without a direct wielder before makes it look like it was controlling him. So, basically, he was trying to fulfill two mutually exclusive orders ("Destroy the Earth" and "Safeguard humanity"), and made a bunch of absurd logical leaps in a vain attempt to justify them both at the same time. This also explains Loki's apparently contradictory actions in the first movie. He never cared about Earth before, but Thanos did, so the staff redirected his hatred of Asgard to Earth.

     Natasha and the KGB 
  • Zola says in Winter Soldier that Natasha was born in 1984, and she states that she started out as a child. The KGB was dissolved 1991, making her 6 or 7. But flashbacks in this film show her as a teenager (or at least, played by Scarlett Johansson) not having graduated yet. Was the KGB just dissolved in a later year in the cinematic universe?
    • Was the name KGB ever explicitly mentioned in the movie? Agent Carter had the Russian HYDRA/S.H.I.E.L.D equivalent called Leviathan, who ran the Black Widow program. Of course, that series was set in the 40s, but maybe Leviathan survived for more time than the KGB did.
    • Well, in Winter Soldier, Natasha says, 'When I first joined S.H.I.E.L.D., I thought it was going straight. But I guess I just traded in the KGB for HYDRA.'
    • The simplest answer: Zola was wrong and, like her comic-book counterpart, Natasha is older than she looks. Zola was going off SHIELD and HYDRA's information on her, and there's no way she would have told them her entire backstory. Even if she could remember it.
    • This seems the most likely answer, and fits in with the comics counterpart. It also leaves room for the Winter Soldier to be her trainer and lover while in Russia, as in the comics, before HYDRA gets its hands on him.
    • Alternately, Natasha has been in the West long enough to know that KGB will be readily understood, and is close enough for most purposes, whereas FSB or FSK (depending on the date) would lead to a long and tedious exposition scene.
    • No reason why the KGB couldn't have lasted a few years longer or lived on as a shadow organization in this universe. There's definitely an alternative history from our own, which is why Matthew Ellis is the president instead of Obama and why a country called Sokovia exists (...mostly).

     Steve not worthy? 
  • Why isn't Steve considered worthy enough to pick up Mjolnir like he is in the comics? Even Wanda couldn't find hidden darkness in him to manipulate, shouldn't he be able to do more than just budge it?
    • Having darkness in his heart has nothing to do with being worthy of Mjölnir, or else Thor himself wouldn't be able to wield it himself. Whatever it is that being "worthy" means, it's something Steve hasn't achieved yet, but is definitely in the right path (since he could nudge it). It may even have something to do with Cap's naïvete, his lack of "inner darkness" might actually be the thing that makes him unworthy, which would make Stark's words to him more significant.
    • Perhaps since Rogers picked it up in a situation that didn't involve any battles or whatnot, it didn't let him pick it up fully. Maybe he'll be worthy to pick it up in a situation that calls for it, namely when a certain Death-obsessed being comes for his Stones.
    • It could be that worthiness is determined by need: Thor in his first movie needed to prove his worth and being able to pick up the hammer was way of doing that. Similarly, Vision being able to effortlessly pick up the hammer demonstrates to the group that he's trustworthy. Ironically, because everyone knows that Steve Rogers is worthy he doesn't have to prove that he is, therefore he can't pick up the hammer for what are essentially bragging rights.
    • In the climax of JLA/Avengers, Superman wields Mjolnir when Thor is put out of commission. He goes to pick it up again when Thor has recovered, but cannot. Thor tells him that Mjolnir responds to necessity as well as worth. Therefore, there is precedent for this to be the case.
    • I personally think the hammer is just very heavy, even if you are worthy. Steve didn't put a lot of effort into it, and Thor is a lot stronger than he is.
    • No idea if this counts as canon or not, but at least one version of the Marvel RPG stated that Steve had everything needed to lift Mjolnir except the physical muscles. (And the one time I recall Steve lifting the hammer in the comics, he's clearly struggling with the weight.) Heck, in some versions of the original Norse myths Thor needed a strength boost from a dwarf-made belt to handle the hammer.
    • At least one comic (can't remember which unfortunately) said that while Steve is technically worthy, he's by nature a soldier, not a warrior. For him it's a job he's good at rather than a calling. Maybe the hammer knows that he doesn't actually want to pick it up? (Then again, maybe he totally could have and just didn't want to be the only other guy in the room considered "worthy".)
    • You also have to consider the definition of worthy. While Steve is a good man, is he worthy in Odin's opinion? There is some level of intelligence to Mjolnir, and a part of that comes from the enchantment Odin placed on it. Which he can also adjust at a whim.
    • Given the context in which Odin placed the Worthiness enchantment on Mjolnir, my impression is that it refers to being worthy to RULE. You need to be compassionate and responsible, yet ruthless and realistic when faced with moral dilemmas. Steve is a great leader and warrior, and inspires similar greatness in others, but he is very idealistic. As we see in AoU, he cannot make hard decisions to sacrifice others for a greater good. Conversely, Tony Stark is brilliant and can see the big picture, but he is also reckless and maybe a bit too jaded. Perhaps Thor and Vision are just balanced enough in all parameters to qualify by Odin's (and thus Mjolnir's) standards of worthiness?
    • The moment Thor became worthy to wield Mjolnir in his movie was the moment he stopped fighting and surrendered to Loki in order to save his friends and the remaining townsfolk. This movie explores the notion that Captain America, for all his righteousness, is simply INCAPABLE of giving up the fight. It's all he's good for. He's basically just an assassin who kills for justice rather than money. Thor may still have a lot of bravado and may still relish a good fight, but he's able to hang up his hammer if it's the right call to make. So Cap is almost worthy, since he can nudge the hammer a bit, but he's not quite there.
    • I'm just going with Rule of Funny here.
    • For the record, originally the writer of Thor considered Cap not worthy. Walt Simonson, the first writer to really delve into the 'who can lift Mjolnir' stories, when creating the first character other than Thor to lift the hammer (Beta Ray Bill) said that in his opinion Cap couldn't lift the hammer not because of his skill, but because he was devoted to the ideals and protection of America rather than Asgard. He was too patriotic and American for the hammer. Obviously later on he did manage to lift it but the point still stands. According to Simonson, in order to be 'worthy' you had to be willing to devote yourself to Norse ideals (among other things), something Cap couldn't do.
    • My own pet theory is that Steve stopped trying the moment he felt the hammer give, and then just pretended. That would also explain why he makes a loud, almost theatrical grunt of effort only after the hammer budges.
    • That could be why Thor stopped smiling...
    • This theory is supported by Avengers: Endgame, where he effortlessly summons and uses Mjolnir to fight Thanos.
    • It made sense to me, since I really thought they did a good job of setting up Steve's dark side in preparation for Civil War being a bit more morally ambiguous. I mean, who would you be more worried about what they were capable of: The guy whose worst nightmare is that the world is destroyed by a massive invasion they failed to stop, or the guy whose worst nightmare is that the war is over and everything is fine? Because Steve is the latter, he is far more likely to lose perspective and do something awful to maintain a perpetual war footing. I suspect that this was done deliberately to make his conflict with Tony (who wants a world that doesn't need a Captain America) more personal.
    • There is a strong possibility that Steve could not lift the hammer due to his own self-doubt. The Vision knows his ultimate purpose is to protect life and Thor knows that he is responsible for protecting Asgard and the Nine Realms. While Steve fulfills most of the worthiness criteria his own self-doubt about his place in the world and whether he is doing the right thing may actually cause enough self-doubt to make him unworthy. It is entirely possible now that Steve has found his place in the world leading the Avengers while also having been so self-assured in his need to save everyone in Sokovia that he has finally achieved worthiness. It would not be surprising (if her survives until then) to see Cap's shield get broken in Infinity Wars and see him use Mjolnir due to Thor being incapacitated.
    • Mjolnir budges a little, with an audible sound. Does it really make sense for Cap to be "sort-of, almost, just-barely-but-not-really worthy"? I think Mjolnir doesn't waffle around like that; you're either worthy or you're not. Conclusion: Cap could lift it, he just pretended not to.
    • Or maybe he was worthy in character, but deep down he didn't actually want to lift it after so many of his friends failed. Showing off or showing up his comrades has never been something Cap enjoys much; he's never let being a super soldier stop him from being humble and considering himself nothing special. Mjolnir sensed this rejection of the honor of being a wielder, so respected his wishes and rejected Steve in turn. Hence, Rogers shifts it very slightly and then finds he can't budge it any more.
    • Personally I think it has something to do with how MCU heroes don't have the no-kill code.
    • Thor has no problem whatsoever with killing, and that's never stopped him from lifting the hammer.
    • A willingness to kill is probably part of the worthiness requirement. The enchantment was placed by a Norse god, it has to have a warrior element to it, and sometimes warriors have to kill. They don't have to ENJOY it, but they do need to be willing to kill to protect the innocent. Thor is seen killing all the time. Odin placed the enchantment himself and his hands are drenched with blood. Vision expresses a reluctant willingness to kill Ultron if it is necessary to do so. Captain America, pre-transformation, said he didn't want to kill but that he would if it were necessary. I think the correct conclusion is that Steve felt it moving and CHOSE not to lift it.
    • According to Word of God, he was always worthy, he was just being humble by not picking it up.

     The Infinity Stones 
  • At the end of the movie, Thor talks about the Infinity Stones. Thor states that four of the six Infinity Stones have made an appearance. There's the Mind Stone, which was in Loki's staff and is now in the Vision; the Space Stone, that's in the Tesseract; the Reality Stone, which is the Aether; and the Power Stone, which featured in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). But how does Thor know about the Power Stone? The events of that film happened far away from Earth, and even if Asgard caught wind of what happened Thor hasn't been there since his own movie.
    • At the end of Thor: The Dark World, we see Sif and Volstagg delivering the Aether to the Collector. This implies that Asgard has some degree of contact with the wider galaxy, so they probably would indeed have caught wind of what was happening. As to Thor not going back there... what makes you say that? There's nothing stopping him from visiting, and he's got to do something with himself while Jane is traveling around the world being better than Pepper.
    • You think he would've caught on that Odin is actually Loki if he kept on making trips there and back. But then Loki could just be that good.
    • Given that Odin lost his wife and was still mourning her when Thor last saw him, you can forgive him for putting it down to Odin being a changed man rather than an impostor; Loki was grieved by the same loss, and probably uses it to inform his performance as Odin.
    • My initial thought was similar. That he just somehow heard about the events of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). But maybe he became aware of the Power Stone after he visited the pool?
    • If I remember well, Thor simply refused to be the king of Asgard; he has not been exiled, and neither is the Bifrost broken anymore. Yes, he's living somewhere else right now, but his Asgardian friends are still in Asgard, so of course that he will pay a visit from time to time. Specially if all he has to do is raise his hammer and cry out "beam me up, Heimdall!". And yes, the Asgardians know about Ronan and Star lord's antics, Heimdall was watching.
    • Sif and Volstagg spoke to the Collector about the Infinity Stones and called them by name in the Stinger to Thor 2. If they know about the Stones, then so does Thor. The real question is why he had to go to the pool and learn about them when he more or less already knew they existed.
    • He might not have known how many there are, or their true significance. As far as Thor knows they’re simply a collection of powerful artifacts that unconnected villains keep getting hold of. The pool revealed to him however that they a set granting ultimate power when used together, and that a single figure has been trying to acquire them for that purpose.
    • My view was that he already knew what the Infinity Stones were, and the pool simply informed him that they were in play in this particular conflict.
    • Presumably Ronan's assault on Xandar, the Guardians defeating him using the Power Stone, and the Stone subsequently being left in the care of the Xandarian government would all be fairly major galactic news. Even if there were no Asgardians personally present, The Dark World shows Asgard taking an active role in peacekeeping across the Nine Realms, and they hand the Aether over to the Collector specifically because they're aware of the risks involved in keeping too many Infinity Stones in one place. That sort of thing would be of interest to them, and word would almost certainly have come to Thor about it in some fashion.
    • The Asgardians did not need to be there. They got a Heimdall.
    • Dark World shows that Asgard is actively involved with policing the other realms to keep them safe. They'd almost certainly keep abreast of something like the events of Guardians simply because that's part of their job.
    • To quote Ego: "Well, even where I reside, out past the edge of what’s known… we’ve heard tell about the man they call Star-Lord." and "And when I heard of a man from Earth… who held an Infinity Stone in his hand without dying… " The information is out there.

    If Thor knows about the Power Stone, does he know about Thanos? 
  • Thor clearly knows about the Stones' existence in general, but the question still remains: how does he know that four of the stones have appeared, when the appearance of the fourth one was witnesses only by the characters in Guardians of the Galaxy? It's perfectly possible Thor has been in contact with either the Guardians, or the Nova Corps, and knows about the re-emergence of the Power Stone. But if that's the case, it raises another question... Thor says that he doesn't think the Stones' emergence is a coincidence, and that he intends to investigate what it means. But if he has talked with the Guardians and/or Nova Corps about the Power Stone, he should also know that there's this bad guy called Thanos who wanted the Stone. And if he's talked with Loki about the invasion of New York, he should know Thanos was involved there too, meaning that he was behind the theft of the Tesseract, and he was the one who gave Loki the Scepter that contained the Mind Stone. So the appearance of the Stones shouldn't be mystery that Thor needs to investigate, it should be pretty obvious to him that Thanos is behind it.
    • Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he learn about the Power stone solely from his vision? He does know what the Infinity Stones are so he likely knows there's 6 of them, yet the vision only shows four. Thor's smart, he could deduce that the Power stone has come into the limelight somewhere, even if he doesn't know about it (that may be part of the reason he's leaving; to discover what happened to it). Currently, he has no idea that Thanos is the one behind everything, but since the vision showed the other 3 Infinity stones he's come into contact with, he can assume that someone's manipulating events to gain all the stones, and was responsible for the appearance of the Power stone.
    • Thor's vision showed the four stones known to the audience, so he wouldn't have to know the specific details of GOTG to know the stone was in play.
    • Thor's vision clearly shows things that have not (yet) happened, like the dead Asgardians in Hel. But in the final scene he says that four of the Stones have "recently appeared", or something like that. Would he really have worded it like that, if he only learned about the fourth Stone via the vision? If that was the case, he wouldn't know whether the Power Stone has appeared yet, or whether it's something that might happen in the future, like the death of those Asgardians. But the way Thor talks about the Power Stone makes it sound like he definitely knows it has been found, as seen in GOTG.
    • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that Asgardians and Kree have knowledge of each other (and a certain level of mutual antipathy), so someone in Asgard (possibly Heimdall) is probably keeping tabs on what goes on with the Kree. And the Power Stone just turned up under the control of a Kree fanatic nearly destroying a planet. Prior to which it unleashed some of its power in close proximity to the Aether (remember, the Asgardians gave the Aether to the Collector). Assuming Thor keeps himself informed of what's happening in Asgard and more generally throughout the Nine Realms, it's not unreasonable to think he knows the rough details of what happened in GotG.
    • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) establishes that Thanos is a notorious genocidal maniac in this verse, and he is referred to as the most powerful being in the universe. It is very likely that Thor has at least heard of Thanos and has some rough idea of who he is, but it would be a leap to go from that to thinking that Thanos is the guy who is behind everything. Especially in Age of Ultron, since there is no reason for him to believe that anyone was behind Ultron. He might suspect that Thanos is the guy behind Loki, but given he didn't know where the Chitauri came from that seems doubtful (unless he was lying for some reason). Probably from his perspective, it could have been Thanos who was behind Loki, but it could also have been any of a million other intergalactic super villains the audience as not been made aware of yet. Any powerful villain who knows about the stone likely wants to get their hands on them, after all.
    • Odin's Hall of Weapons in Thor showcases the Infinity Gauntlet, or perhaps a replica thereof. The Gauntlet is merely a glove belonging to Thanos that he opted to add the Infinity Gems to for more efficient, or perhaps safe wielding. Thor has visited that hall a thousand times over a thousand years: he clearly knows who Thanos is. Even though Thor: Ragnarok establishes that one to be a fake.

     The Pool 
  • What was that pool that Thor visited? Why is there a magic pool that shows Asgardians visions on Earth?
    • Well, Asgardians used to visit Earth thousands of years ago. Perhaps they built it.
    • It's called "The Water of Sight", and Thor mentions that it has a reflection in every realm. TL;DR — because magic.
    • This entire thing needs some deleted scene-level explanations. It's one of the more incongruent elements of this movie (as it stands it's a hasty exposition that gives Thor the motivation to empower The Vision's creation but there's a lot of slapped-togetherness about the whole thing).
    • I took it to be the well at the bottom of Yggdrasil. If I remember correctly it's called the well of wisdom, so it's close to the water of sight. In Norse mythology, there is a well at the bottom of the world tree, from which the tree drinks. Odin went there when he became the King of Asgard. There he did two things; he hung himself on one of Yggdrasil's lower branches, coming back to life and thus allowing himself access to knowledge no 'mortal' man can have, and then he sacrificed his eye, dropping it into the well to gain a knowledge of the magic of Runes. If this pool is that well, it's feasible the Thor either made some sacrifice or temporarily died to gain knowledge of the Stones. Of course, in this universe magic isn't a thing, but it's likewise possible that the pool is a version of the well that allows an immortal swimming in it to access knowledge from Yggdrasil, the cosmic-phenomenon-which-is-not-actually-a-tree.
    • It's also extremely likely that said pool isn't even visible, let alone accessible, unless an immortal, magician, or otherwise adept individual comes across it, knowing what to look for. Selvig would never have been able to perceive it if the Asgardian Thor wasn't with him.
    • Magic is not a thing until Doctor Strange (2016) comes along.
    • Magic has been a thing since Loki and Thor showed up.
    • Thor did say something in Thor that what humans refer to as magic and technology do not exist separately in Asgard but then whatever Loki does doesn't seem to fit "technology" so I guess that's still true.
      • "Thor: The Dark World" has a scene where Loki states that his adoptive mother Frigga taught him magic.

     Would a landmass that size really wipe out humanity 
  • Essentially: No. It might be disastrous, but not a wipe-out. For a fun breakdown of what happens if you drop a mountain on the earth, see xkcd.
  • A part of Ultron's plan was to raise the city high enough and then drop it from orbit, causing global extinction. Would a landmass that size actually wipe out the human race. It seemed relatively small.
    • Note that the mass of the object is not nearly as important to the effect of the impact as is the speed. The energy of the impact is directly proportional to the mass, but proportional to the square of the speed.
      • It is not stated how high Ultron intended to raise the city, but raising it to just above the atmosphere and dropping it would give it a speed of about 1 kilometer per second. A typical lump from outer space has a speed of over 17 kilometers per second, resulting in about 300 (17x17=289) times the boom for the same mass.
    • Pedantic Mode: "from orbit" is a bit of a misnomer here. An object in low-earth orbit moves at a speed of about 7.8 km/s and a direction parallel to the surface of the earth and 200 to 2000 km above it. Just moving an object straight up does not put it in orbit, it needs to be accellerated horizontally too. By a lot. For typical satelite launches most the fuel in the rocket is spent on horizontal speed. For Ultron to spend energy giving the city horizontal speed to put it in orbit would be wasteful. Simply raising it vertically and dropping it down again would be much more efficient. The OP might be thinking of "as high as an orbit".
    • The Chicxulub impactor — commonly credited with wiping out the dinosaurs — is generally reckoned to have been about six miles in diameter. If we assume there was a level of overkill there, it's not unreasonable to think a city-sized object hurled from orbit with great big jets on top could cause an extinction-level event.
      • That would be so if Ultron managed to accellerate the city to 20 km/s, the estimated speed of the Chicxulub impactor.
    • Lets not forget that it also had rocket engines that would boost it downwards faster than terminal velocity, which would increase the kinetic impact even further. It might have rendered the entire planet sterile if it had gotten high enough.
      • Problem is, people have done the math, and for that landmass to cause an extinction event that would reasonably threaten all life on earth (so, at least something like the K–T Event), it would need to hit earth with a velocity of at least 14 kilometers per second. Which was quite clearly not the case.
    • And a force field holding the entire thing together to provide a greater relative density striking straight downward at higher than terminal velocity.

     Just let him take it? 
  • So at the start Wanda gets the drop on Tony, giving him visions of his worst fears. Pietro then asks if they're going to just let him take Loki's scepter despite them both being in a position to stop him and she confirms that intention. Considering that these actions kickstart the entire events of the film, I can't fathom as to why they would do it.
    • Wanda can read minds, and determine personalities. She saw Stark's flaws, used her powers to enhance them, and gave him the item that would allow him to write those flaws large upon the world he swore to protect. It worked a little too well is all.
    • The intent was to have Tony destroy himself and the Avengers.
    • But... They already wrote Stark off as an irresponsible arms dealer implicated in the shelling of their homeland, surely the logical extension of their view of the him and the Avengers would just be Stark harnessing the scepter's power to make the exact kind of weapons HYDRA was using and have even worse bombs dropped on countries. The only real thing suggesting Stark might over-reach is his above-normal intelligence and even then that only suggests he might build a doomsday bomb or something. Neither of them seemed to expect anything resembling Ultron later on at that.
    • I think she saw Tony's vaguely Well-Intentioned Extremist leanings, using his creations to bring order to the world, no matter how much property damage and injuries are caused, becoming HYDRA Mk II. Making him a bad guy and forcing the other avengers to stop him would be delicious irony.
    • It doesn't make sense. Wanda hates Tony because his weapons killed her parents. She doesn't want to kill innocent people (which is why she switches sides after she reads Ultron's mind.) She doesn't even really hate the other Avengers, as far as we know. She just opposes them because Tony is on the team. So here's this moment when Tony is right there, and she has every opportunity to chop his head off (Quicksilver could help if need be), and she doesn't do it! She lets him get away scot-free, and she lets him take a super-weapon back to his lab. Sure, maybe she was convinced that his use of the scepter would somehow be self-destructive. But why not just chop his head off and be sure about it? And sure, it'd be really ironic if Tony himself destroyed the Avengers somehow, but does Wanda care about irony? This is supposed to be a personal grudge. And furthermore, even if she's convinced that giving Tony the scepter will lead to Tony's death since all the prior Strucker experiments died that way. But what about all the innocent civilians that might get killed in the process? You're giving a new weapon to a guy whose previous weapons killed your parents. What if some other apartment building gets blown up somehow, and a new pair of orphans is created? Again, it's established that she doesn't want to kill innocent people. (Though come to think of it, she should have realized that putting the Hulk into rage mode would be a bad idea on that count. In that case, she didn't anticipate that Hulk would travel several hundred miles.)
    • Sure she didn't want to kill innocents, but she had no reason to believe the Avengers were innocents, especially considering they worked with Stark. She probably had no sympathy for anyone on his side and might have even believed that they would go along with his destructive plans. I'm thinking her plan to get him to annihilate the Avengers was a way to get him to experience the same pain she felt when she lost her parents. That way, Tony would get to suffer, not just be succumbed to a quick death. Granted, I don't know if the plan that unfolded was such a great way of achieving that, buuuut...
    • She's giving him a Fate Worse than Death - having him wipe out the Avengers along with himself, on his knowledge, and unable to do a darn thing about it.
    • One hypothesis is that the Mind Stone which contained "Ultron" (or whatever Thanos put in it) at that time influenced Wanda to do that rather than simply smoke Stark.
    • And Wanda was running on revenge after having her existing powers enhanced. It wasn't until she saw Ultron's plans first hand that she experienced My God, What Have I Done?. Her main plan was to get back at Stark, and making him destroy himself was the most delicious way to do it. Either he destroys the Avengers and has to live with the guilt, or the Avengers have to kill or imprison him. But once she gets her vision of Ultron destroying the world, it sort of puts things in perspective for her.

     Friday 
  • I suppose that it would be weird if Paul Bettany kept on playing J.A.R.V.I.S. now that the Vision has been introduced. But what is the in-universe reason for Tony Stark's late-movie switch to an A.I. who sounds female and calls him "boss"? Sure, J.A.R.V.I.S. has become part of the makeup of Vision's mind, along with fragments of Ultron and more, but that shouldn't delete him from Tony's computers. Or from the Internet, where at that time he is still the only thing between Ultron and the world's nukes.
    • I got the impression that J.A.R.V.I.S evolved organically, ie there’s no original plans Tony can rebuild from. Ultron made sure to destroy every iteration of him he could find, and Tony stated himself that the J.A.R.V.I.S that existed on the internet was very badly damaged and barely sentient. Tony could recreate an early version of J.A.R.V.I.S, but it would be pretty painful as it wouldn't be ‘him’.
    • The way I remember it, Tony stated that the J.A.R.V.I.S. that existed on the Internet was barely sentient... until Tony found him and pieced him back together, as illustrated by a fully back-in-shape hologram. When Stark and Banner are discussing the wisdom of uploading the A.I. into the new body, J.A.R.V.I.S. himself comments that he believes it is worth a shot.
    • Since he's going into combat, a way to quickly differentiate the voices of Vision and J.A.R.V.I.S. would be rather handy. Chances are that Friday is just a voice skin being ran by the J.A.R.V.I.S. A.I..
      • Friday does seem to have a slightly different personality than JARVIS beyond just the vocal inflection. JARVIS has a lot of that "British stiff upper lip" that the original Jarvis had, Friday's a bit more chipper and empathetic. Tony sorts through a handful of A.I.s before selecting Friday, he's probably developed them as part of his experiments with artificial personality. Friday may have originally been developed to, say, be given to Pepper... he would thus choose her because she was the one he'd put the most work and development into and he'd need everything he had going into the fight ahead.
    • Hmm... Headcanon accepted.

     Loki's Scepter and Thanos 
  • Now that it's been established that the scepter contained the Mind Gem, why did Thanos give it to Loki? Thanos wants to collect all the stones, so handing it over to the trickster god seems pretty dumb since there's a chance Loki wasn't going to return it. Then you have the fact that he would be invading Earth and fighting very powerful enemies. There was a good chance the Gem could be lost and eventually used by the enemies, which is exactly what happened. The scepter didn't help Loki out all that much (it couldn't even get past Tony's arc reactor), so placing it in such a weak weapon doesn't add up.
    • I have a theory that Thanos was controlling Loki, Hydra, and Ultron through the mind gem, and it was a gambit designed to get him the Space Stone (and/or other strategic advantages) without becoming directly involved. The mind gem after all isn't that useful to him on it's own.
    • You also have to take into account the assumed strength and intelligence of Thanos and relative strength of previous villains. It was hard enough beating them with the stones. Now, they are in the protection of the only people strong enough to keep them, but not stronger than Thanos. He knows exactly where to find the Gems when ready. Since the Asgard have the Gauntlet and Space Gem, he can start there. Use Space to teleport and pick up the others in whatever order he likes. Once he has the ones we know of, he can go after the one we don't, the Soul Gem. It's probably in another dimension. He'll need the Power gem to boost the others. The Mind Gem to find it's location. The Reality Gem to punch a hole in the dimensional walls. And, the Space Gem to build the gateway.
    • Don't forget the Time Gem, wherever (or whenever) that is.
    • He might have give the Mind Gem to Loki as a way to test its power without putting himself at risk.
    • I may have miss it, but where is Thanos said to have given Loki the scepter? Loki may have wandered in the Void a bit before meeting Thanos, and could have found the scepter all by himself. And it is not necessarily immediately visible that said scepter contains an Infinity Stone: just look at how long it took Thor to realize that.
    • In the first Avengers film, the Other clearly says that Thanos gave Loki the scepter, during the scene were Loki was communicating with the Other through the scepter, so no, Loki didn't find the Mind Stone, Thanos gave it to him.
    • This is all rather contingent on which part of the comics they're following with regard to the Gems, but one concept attached to them is that the more of them you possess, the harder the universe as a whole makes it to collect the rest. Now, however, things have been arranged that 4 of the Gems are possessed by 4 separate bodies, generally known to Thanos, but all unable to co-ordinate with each other in the event of a concerted attempt to take them, and none individually powerful enough to resist Thanos for long. That strikes me as somewhat convenient.
    • Thanos has no way of knowing Vision has the Mind Gem. Even if he did know, he had no way to know Vision would eventually have it beforehand. Remember, Loki was meant to take over Earth and in exchange, get the tesseract for Thanos (one would assume he was supposed to hand the scepter back over after he was done). He failed, so Thanos ended up losing two gems instead of one. There is no logical reason for Thanos to have given Loki the Mind Gem to begin with. He needs the stones, so handing them out to another party is not a wise choice.
    • Unless the staff was controlling Loki. The Stinger implies that Ultron (through the AI in the staff that Tony built him from) was part of Thanos' plan; note how suspicious it is that the Ultron is born the second Tony is gone, despite both him and Bruce insisting they weren't anywhere close. From that perspective, the plan is easy to understand: Thanos finds a crazy Frost Giant/Asgardian drifting in space, mind controls him, and sends him to Earth with said mind control device to pick up the Tesseract. He fails. Mind control device then plays around with the HYDRA leadership, sowing chaos by providing them with weapons beyond what they should be capable of. Due to all the chaos, the mind control device ends up in the hands of Earth's mightiest heroes. Mind control device spawns an evil AI that will do everything in its power to destroy Earth. It fails, and the mind control device is destroyed in the process. Thanos, annoyed, decides to get off his throne and handle things himself.
    • The easiest explanation is once Thanos was ready to come get the Tesseract from Loki, he would have betrayed him and revealed what he was really holding onto. There's no reason to think Thanos wasn't using Loki as a mere Unwitting Pawn in order to fight the war on Earth for him before he shows up and claims his prize and takes back his scepter forcibly.
    • It is possible that Thanos also knows (just as Sif and Volstagg imply) that it is dangerous to have too many of the Stones in one place. Everyone we have seen up until this point that had one of them has gone genocidal and met a bad end, after all (Vision excepted... so far). Maybe there is a reason why Thanos doesn't want them anywhere near him until he is in a position to assemble them all. As others have already mentioned he is doing a good job of setting up the board if you assume that his goal is not necessarily physically possessing the stones.
    • Ultimately, the universe is a big chess board for Thanos. He's getting all the pieces in position for a future checkmate. Know how sometimes in chess you sacrifice a piece to win the bigger game? Thanos gives up lots of lackeys, and even the Mind Stone itself. Once he knows where they all are, he swoops in and starts taking them. The Avengers will get involved, but he'll need them to so he can reclaim the Mind Stone, currently being kept warm by Vision.

     Betty Ross 
  • So Bruce is willing to entertain the idea of being with Natasha without once bringing up Betty Ross? Even when the loves of the other members get a mention (Peggy Carter, Jane Foster, Pepper Potts, Laura Barton), Betty isn't even acknowledged.
    • If there are no plans for any solo Hulk movies it's unlikely we'll ever see Betty Ross again. Bruce could have moved on from Betty and accept that it wouldn't work. Alternatively he's smart enough to know that if he mentions her something bad will happen and thus is keeping her safe by limiting the amount of people who know her.
    • She's with Leonard Samson now and Bruce just wants her to be happy.
    • I think the main reason Betty hasn't ever been mentioned in the Avengers movies is because Marvel worked with Universal instead of Paramount to make Incredible Hulk back in 2008. Universal probably still either has the rights to Hulk's solo movies and characters or they still get money if Marvel uses or mentions Hulk characters outside of Bruce. It can't be a coincidence there is no mention Betty at all, especially in this movie where it might be another reason he thinks it can't work with Natasha.
    • Marvel Studios has the production rights for The Hulk, but Universal still has the distribution rights. So Marvel could make a Hulk movie if they wanted to, but if they did, Universal could just opt not to distribute it, and Marvel would have wasted a buttload of money. Marvel could buy the distribution rights, but Universal also has the rights to various theme park rides that Marvel's parent company Disney wants for its own parks, so it's a matter of priorities.
    • Marvel and Universal must have worked out a deal if this is so, now that Thunderbolt Ross is confirmed as appearing in Captain America: Civil War.
    • Most likely it's a combination of the fact that "She's with Dr. Samson now and happy and Bruce wants her far away from all this crap" and the fact that adding yet another outside love interest they'd have to work into the edges of a team up movie or risk everyone asking this very question is a pain in the ass. The Bruce/Natasha romance avoids introducing any extraneous characters and allows both characters to develop.

     Did Thanos break into Asgard? 
  • The stinger shows Thanos taking an infinity gauntlet out of a cell. Did he infiltrate Asgard to do so, or did he build his own?
    • Pretty sure the gauntlet we saw at Odin's trophy room was confirmed to be just a blink-and-miss easter egg for the fans, not the real deal. I mean, that gauntlet had attached all the gems, which obviously couldn't be possible.
    • Or they were fakes/replicas.
    • Kevin Feige confirmed there are two separate Gauntlets (also, the one in Odin's vault is for the right hand, while in the stinger Thanos wears his on his left). Maybe this will come into play during the Infinity War.
    • In the comics, at least, the gauntlet itself is just a generic gauntlet made by Thanos. It has no power or significance when the Infinity Gems are not attached to it. So it's perfectly possible Thanos simply made a new gauntlet after the previous one wound up in Asgard for whatever reason.
    • Remember the first Iron Man movie? Captain America's shield pops up on Tony's work bench in the background in one scene. It was just a throwaway joke, like the gauntlet in Odin's vault. I'm surprised so many fans take that seriously.
    • Last we saw, Loki is in control of Asgard. Loki, who would probably do anything to get back on Thanos's good side after failing to conquer Earth. Including giving him the gauntlet from Odin's trophy room.
    • Again, it seems there's just two gauntlets. (Which, after all, are just that, gloves. It's the Gems that are actually special.) The one in Odin's vault is a right hand and Thanos's one is a left.note 
    • Hela in Thor: Ragnarok confirmed that the Infinity Gauntlet in Odin's trophy room is a fake. The one Thanos has in The Stinger is the real one and was never on Asgard.

     Leave no bot standing! 
  • So the plan to stop Ultron hinges on him not giving him the opportunity to transfer himself to one of the drones and bugger off. Couple of things here.
    1: Why wouldn't they assume that Ultron kept one in reserve in some other location for quick escape?
    2: Why didn't he?
    3: So, Vision vaporizes or Mind Rapes the drones, Wanda disintegrates them. Great job, mission accomplished. Clint blows them up with exploding arrows. Give the man a prize. Cap...hits them with his shield. A for effort, but breaking them up a bit shouldn't really do anything. They can continue to operate even while severely damaged. You telling me that every single one had their ability to house Ultron's program destroyed by being hit really hard?
    • In fact, Cap's failure is exactly why that last drone was active. He didn't finish the job when he threw that one off the bridge.
    • The one that Vision killed at the end? That makes sense; I was WONDERING how that one was still active.
    • Because the simple fact is that Ultron was too caught up in his own superiority. Even though he's an AI (or perhaps because he is), he still has very deep flaws, and one of them is overconfidence. Case in point, creating a "primary" body to occupy. A truly rational AI would logically just make an army of identical clones so the heroes wouldn't know which one to focus on. He was so sure he was going to win he never considered the possibility of losing.
    • For the third point, it's presumed that Cap destroyed his targets enough that they would at least be immobile. Sure, Ultron could transfer to one of the damaged drones, but it won't do him much good if its just a disembodied head.
    • Especially as, once Thor and Tony blew up the landmass, all remaining bots will be vaporized along with it.
    • It's perfectly possible Ultron did have some extra bodies stashed in another location, but since Vision made it impossible for him to use the internet, he couldn't transfer his mind to them. All he had left were the drones in Sokovia, which apparently used some kind of a localized network, because Vision's internet block didn't affect Ultron's ability to control them.
    • There's also the possibility that the last body Vision blew up was Ultron's failsafe. It was crawling away from the scene, after all. That would mean that Ultron's attack using the Quinjet wasn't a Villain Ball, it was a distraction. The Avengers see the Prime body and destroy it, think that's the end of it, while a random drone escapes and begins anew.
    • I for one doubt very much that was his last body anyway. You don't think that if they want to bring back Ultron for Infinity War we won't just see some back up drone power up? All it takes is for Vision to be wrong. That isn't exactly hard to accept. That was how he has stayed alive in comic continuity.

    Quicksilver Film Rights? 
  • The deal with Fox said that the Fox Quicksilver can't be an Avenger, while the MCU one can't be a Mutant, but does anyone know if it limited the MCU to only using him once? It could explain why he is killed off. Fox had long-term plans for him, but is not using Scarlet Witch (Peter's sister in Days of Future Past appears to be Polaris, not Wanda). So was the MCU limited to a one-use clause on Pietro?
    • Aaron Taylor-Johnson is apparently signed to a multi-film deal so it's probably not a one-off deal. Also, the fact that multiple quick regeneration devices have now been shown in the MCU and how quickly they gloss over his death in the ending makes it seem like this is another Coulson situation; Whedon gets to kill him off, but he's open to be brought back on Marvel's discretion.
    • However, the multi-film deal could just cover Age of Ultron and his appearance in the stinger of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, depending on whether that qualifies under that deal or not.
    • I have an idea that, for now, X-Men get Quicksilver while Avengers get Scarlet Witch (who can also be a substitute Jean Gray/Dark Phoenix) seeing as the opposite twin was written out (X-Men: Pietro appears to have a sister but she doesn't look like she's his twin, doesn't show any powers, and only appears briefly; we all know what happened in Avengers).
    • Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch seem to fall into a grey area when it comes to the Fox-Marvel split. While they are Mutants (and have a significant connection with Magneto) they are more prominent as members of the Avengers than as characters than being part of or against the X-men. Because of this the deal was made to allow them to be used in both, as long as they are not Mutants in the Marvel movies. A similar case is probably what happened with Ben Urich in Daredevil. He has an important connection to both Spider Man and Daredevil, which allowed him to be used by Marvel (this was before they reached a deal regarding Spider Man with Sony). It is unlikely that if the contract let Marvel use them at all, they would be forced to kill him off. Additionally the appearance in Captain America: The Winter Soldier is unlikely to be considered as part of a multi-film deal due to it being a cameo. After all Captain America appeared in Thor: The Dark World and that is not included as part of his five movie (apparently now seven due to Avengers: Infinity War) contract.
    • I think that a lot of it has to do with Wanda. Joss Whedon was very vocal about disliking that Black Widow was the only female Avenger - and so Scarlet Witch was a definite Affirmative Action Girl (with Hope van Dyne later becoming Wasp in Ant-Man and the Wasp). And with them being twins, you can't have Scarlet Witch without Quicksilver. Therefore killing him off is a nice compromise. It probably also explains why the Fox continuity changes his first name to Peter and has him as an American.

     The Iron Legion 
  • At the end of Iron Man 3, Tony blows up the Iron Legion and presumably discards his own suits as well. So how come they're all back here, with no explanation? Did he suddenly change his mind?
    • Well. the Iron Legion in Iron Man 3 was made up of prototype suits that he had been tinkering with, while the one in this movie are purpose built drones designed solely for Jarvis to control. The first was the result of what was basically PTSD, so destroying them was part of trying to come to grips with what happened, while the second was meant as an aid and eventual replacement for the Avengers themselves. It is a wildly different situation.
      • This seems the most accurate explanation. The old suits weren't just Tony refining a suit of armor to use they were him feverishly trying to make a suit of armor for every potential dangerous situation.
    • And if you notice, the Iron Legion drones seen in this film are all of different designs not seen in Iron Man 3, so it's feasible that Stark built these new Legionnaires a short time after destroying the old Legion prototypes.
    • The Iron Legion in 3 were Stark's armors on remote. This Iron Legion are identical drones.

     Did Thor destroy the city under his own power? 
  • This subject has caused a lot of debate on various sites/forums, particularly on comicvine. There has yet to be a consensus on the legitimacy of Thor's strike and debates have been going back on forth, despite the fact that we all watched the same movie. Some say it was legit while others argue that there was a chain reaction due to the vibranium, etc. Interestingly, when Stark is talking to FRIDAY about the impact, the latter says that Thor's hit wouldn't be enough and that he would "crack it", and that the impact would be devastating. Stark subsequently deduces that if he capped the other end, they could get the "atomic action" to double back, which would result in the entire city being vaporized. Is there answer for this? Was it Thor or was there anther factor something else involved.
    • It exploded because they detonated the reactor powering the thing. Thor's hit and Iron Man's beam on the other end were to trigger the reaction. On his own, Thor certainly could have damaged the reactor, but he wouldn't have blown up the entire city.
    • To sum it up, it was a TEAM EFFORT, which is pretty much the central Aesop of the film.

     The Seasons Changed Fast 
  • Crossing over with Headscratchers, how did Sokovia go from the middle of winter to spring/summer so quickly? At the start of the film, it's a snow-covered location. Over the course of the film, no more than eight days pass. At the finale, Sokovia is snow-free and lush with greenery. Huh?
    • Theories: 1) The "engine" under the fortress warmed the area and caused an early spring (counter-point: if it heated up that much the trees would probably have died and/or burst into flame, and only near the "vents"); 2) Seasonal change in that area has always been fast and intense; 3) All these battles with exotic technology on earth accelerated climate change.
    • As someone who lives in Europe, snow doesn't tend to last very long unless it's in the middle of winter. My guess here was that it was late winter/early spring, when some places can still get snow, and it simply melted naturally during the time in between. The snow didn't look deep, after all.
    • Ever had one of those days where there's a blizzard followed by a random bit of rainfall? Quite possibly it rained in between the visits to Sokovia and washed the snow away. As said above, it doesn't look deep after all.

    One Time Hulkbuster 
  • Why didn't Tony use the Hulkbuster again in the final battle? The extra firepower could be useful, and it'd be like having two Hulks on the team.
    • I may not remember correctly, but wasn't the hovering Hulkbuster platform destroyed during the fight? I think it was a blink-and-miss it moment, but Hulk was tearing apart the armor in flight, Tony calls another module to help replace it, but Hulk backhands it back to the platform, which explodes. So, that's probably why they didn't call it in the final battle; it was damaged beyond repair and Tony didn't have the time to replace it.
    • We have no idea of in what shape the Hulkbuster itself was left after bringing down that skyscraper, we only got to see one arm. It's perfectly possible that the armor simply wasn't in sufficiently working order, and couldn't be repaired quick enough. Plus, the Hulkbuster was designed to engage one single, extremely powerful and durable enemy, not hundreds of robot drones which needed to be destroyed quickly and over a large area. They already had a Hulk, so that part was covered.
    • The Hulkbuster, while more powerful with its multiple unibeam-strength repulsors, brute force, and easily replaceable parts, was a brute force solution to a brute force problem. It was designed with the sole goal of being able to overpower, restrain, or incapacitate The Hulk when he's out of control and raging. As a result, it's not as mobile as most Iron Man suits are, has a blind spot on its back, and is about as agile as you'd expect from a 11 foot walking tank. Against the more agile and numerous drones that just have to get past it, the Hulkbuster wouldn't do nearly as well.
    • It doesn't have any missiles either. It's basically a hand-to-hand combat weapon with a few mods to enhance its punching, bull-rushing and grappling versus one big brute, not designed to pick off a whole swarm of quick little targets.
    • Maybe he didn't want to risk setting off the Hulk? We saw when he tunneled out from under the cage, the Hulk is still plenty intelligent, so there's a distinct possibility that the Hulkbuster would cause the Hulk to go after Tony.
  • How did Tony get the Hulkbuster platform into orbit? S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't launch it because they're still a defunct organization. Repulsors can launch things into orbit, but does Stark Industries really have its own private launch facility without government oversight?
    • "I have a suit that can contain the Hulk if he goes on a rampage, I just need some help to get it into orbit so that-" This sentence is not completed because at that point Stark is utterly buried in the money and support he needs to put something in place that can stop the freaking Hulk.
    • Also, if you have both the money and a satellite to get into orbit, it is simple enough to launch from a number of existing spaceports. The Guiana Space Center, for example, regularly launches private satellites. There's also the Kodiak Launch Complex operated by the Alaska Aerospace Corporation. Hell, there's even the Odyssey launch platform, which is actually a mobile oceangoing launch platform built and operated by private corporations. With the size, scale, and technology of Stark Industries, it would be very easy for them to have their own space-capable launch facility. Not to mention that there's no indication that he launched without government support. Most governments would be extremely happy to support anything that can stop a rampaging Hulk.
    • This is the first time Tony has faced off against the Hulk in any serious way. He had his hands full with more important things in the first Avengers movie. Assuming he didn't build the Hulk Buster until AFTER the Avengers and did so with the help of Bruce Banner that still leaves all the time between Avengers and Winter Soldier to have accomplished it.

    Mid-Credits Scene 
  • What exactly is The Stinger implying? That Thanos somehow influenced the creation of Ultron? Or is it in reference to the failures of both Loki and Ronan at retrieving Infinity Stones for him?
    • Possibly both, it probably relates to the fact that both Loki and Ronan failed, but considering Thanos' influence over the Mind Stone, he may also have influenced Ultron's creation in the hopes that he would destroy the Avengers, thus getting rid of a major threat for him. Since it didn't work, he decides to just do it himself.

    The HYDRA drones 
  • How did Ultron know of the existence of the drones that Strucker was building in Sokovia? And how was he able to download his mind into them?
    • Tony knew, and no doubt kept some kind of record of it. They didn't shut down the facility, either, so he could just jump right in.

    Ultron's personality 
  • Ultron clearly shares personality traits with Tony Stark, his creator. How? The film never mentioned Stark implementing his brainwaves into the Ultron program, or even basing the program off his personality.
    • The first person Ultron was told of was Tony, so that's the first exposure he had. Tony's records would contain a personality profile, video, etc.
    • And since he was basically copied from the Mind Gem and Tony was spending the most time around it, it might have copied much of his personality and mannerisms. You'll note that the other person Ultron most resembles (though not as much as Tony) is Banner and the Hulk, who is the other one who spent the most time around the gem.
    • Going off that theory, Loki was also around the gem quite a bit, and it seems like Ultron had some of his personality traits (the snarkiness, Knight Templar tendencies, and immense hatred of their father figures, among other things).
    Strucker's Base 
  • Why did the Avengers leave it unguarded, filled with experimental weapons and Chitauri tech, after capturing Strucker and his men?
    • I can't remember how long it took between the Avengers capturing the Scepter, and Ultron's creation, but I would have to assume it was no more than a few hours. In all likelihood, Stark may have deployed some more Iron Legion drones to guard the base, which Ultron took control of.
    • Ultron's created three days after Strucker is captured, three and a half at most.
    • Strucker's said to be in NATO custody. It's unlikely Sokovia is a part of NATO, but local authorities or the EU, or some regional power probably set up a perimeter to secure the fortress. They just didn't count on something being activated from within.

    Ultron's minions 
  • This really goes back to a problem I had with the first Avengers, but it's even worse here. How is it that Stark can invent armor that can take machine gun fire without damage and go toe to toe with Thor, but Ultron can't create a bot that can stand up to Hawkeye?
    • If you pay attention, Ultron's drones do stand up to machine gun fire fairly well, when they're shot at by police and military forces. However, when they're facing a collection of physical gods, they likely wouldn't last as long. Now, as to why Hawkeye can destroy tons of them, I assumed that his arrows were upgraded with Stark's tech, thus increasing their durability and lethality (given the type of foes the Avengers face, it would make sense). As to why Ultron doesn't make them more durable, I'm assuming it has to do with his own flawed mentality (since a truly logical AI wouldn't even have a primary body) so he builds weaker robots in large numbers to overwhelm his opponents.
    • But Ultron had access to basically all of the tech in the world, since he started off in Tony's lab, was said to be breaking into science labs the world, and has access to Vibranium, the stuff that makes Cap's Shield. He knows he's going to have to fight the Avengers, and he already has a 'main' body that was beating Thor. So why are all his other bodies such push-overs?
    • All the Vibranium he had went into that main body and into Vision. Having all the tech in the world doesn't mean you have all the raw materials in the world. There's upper limits to any physical operation.
    • The Vibranium was just one example. Ultron is explicitly stated to have access to all of Tony's designs and breaking into all the military and tech facilities in the world. And he already has one body that was going toe-to-toe with Thor. There is no reason the rest of his clones should be unable to pose a serious threat to anyone in the final battle.
    • He's clearly going for numbers in his army, and when you need numbers in the short timeframe he has, you'll need to make some sacrifices in regards to offensive and defensive capabilities. As to why he only has a few really powerful Prime bodies... this may seem like a copout answer, but it works within what the movie tells us: He's completely insane! He was born confused, went completely nuts when he accessed the internet (though really, who can blame him on that regard?), misinterpreted his purpose in the worst way possible, and constantly changes his reasoning about why he's doing what he's doing. Add a dash of Pinocchio syndrome into the mix, and you get Ultron. But seriously, despite his claims, Ultron clearly desires to be more human: he builds Prime bodies for himself and only uses one at a time even though he can clearly make more (hell, at one point he uses his last Prime body to tear apart another one, even though there was no real reason to do so). He doesn't seem to regard his sentries as extensions of himself, he has an obsession with the human form (despite how inefficient it is), and he even creates an android body (Vision) for himself, just to be more... alive. Oh and just a quick note: I'm pretty sure the only body that was capable of going toe-to-toe with Thor was the Vibranium one.
    • The drones Ultron used in the final fight are not "his" so to speak, he simple repurposed the existing Hydra machines that were in the Fortress. Of course, that leads to the question of why was everything in working order after the Avengers had captured the base. I guess Sokovian authorities didn't know what to do with it, and to be fair, the time lapse from the initial assault on the fortress to the film's climax at most seemed to be about a week or two.
    • And it's been shown a couple of times that Hawkeye doesn't just have garden variety arrows. In the first film he shoots Loki with one that explodes on contact. He also shoots Wanda with one that seems to function as a taser. So presumably he's shooting the drones with arrows that do something to neutralize them on contact.
    • Also, it's Hawkeye. The guy's got archer skills that would rival Bullseye, as he can put an arrow into an engine on the opposite side of the Helicarrier while flying on a Quinjet, and can pick off Chitauri literally without seeing them. He's almost certainly putting arrows into the gaps in the Ultron sentries' armor, on top of his trick arrows.

    Fury 
  • I stopped watching SHIELD after season 1, so maybe they fixed this, but doesn't Fury having enough clout to put together a Helicarrier completely negate the ending of Winter Soldier? Where SHIELD's good name disappeared?
    • In Season 2 of Agents of SHIELD, Coulson eventually regains support from the US government, so Fury would likely be able to get enough support for restarting the old Helicarrier.
    • But even most of SHIELD doesn't know that Fury's still alive. How did he do it without blowing the fact that he isn't really dead?
    • This is explained in the most recent episode. The Theta Protocol Coulson was secretly working on and using a large amount of resources on was repairing the Helicarrier.

    Avengers' priorities 
  • So, recapturing Loki's scepter merit's calling all the Avengers getting back together. But the President getting kidnapped, wormholes destroying the planet, and Helicarriers killing everyone in Washington DC doesn't merit a phone call?
    • Finding and retrieving the scepter is a long-term mission. Rescuing the President, fighting the Dark Elves and taking down HYDRA-SHIELD, while important, were all immediate issues, to be sorted out by whoever was there. None of those events lasted long enough to call in the rest of the Avengers.
    • ^ This last point, especially. By the time any of the Avengers would have been made aware of the problem and could have gotten on scene, the situation was already resolved. By contrast, attacking the HYDRA base wasn't a reaction, it was a planned operation which would have given the Avengers time to assemble and act.
    • Nonsense. Cap absolutely could have called Tony to get some auto-pilot drone suits to help out and get advice about taking out the Helicarriers.
    • While there is a more detailed discussion on the Winter Soldier page, I will summarize the reasons that wouldn’t work here. HYDRA has access to all of SHIELD’s files, so they know everyone Cap is likely to contact. They would be monitoring these connections and if Cap tried to call Tony (he has no time to get to New York in person) HYRDA would instantly know where Cap is. Cap was trying to remain hidden so this was too risky (in fact HYDRA would be prepared since Tony Stark is the biggest threat they know Cap can reach). The reason Cap went to Sam Wilson was because he knew Sam had no connection to SHIELD, and therefore HYDRA. It’s also possible that Tony had not finished his new suits or the drones even if Cap could reach him (Tony destroyed everything he had previously built in Iron Man 3).
    • None of which really works because A) Tony has been regularly shown to run circles around Shield/Hydra security, B) Cap has face disguising technology they let go to waste.
    • Cap doesn't have face-disguising technology, SHIELD does. Tony being able to run circles around SHIELD security? Funny how he didn't find anything about HYDRA when he was hacking SHIELD's system. And that doesn't help Cap, since Cap can't do so.
    • The Doylist answer, of course, is that Superman Stays Out of Gotham. The Avengers are only allowed to get together in "Avengers" movies. Otherwise, each hero basically operates in his own little universe.
    • Each individual instance was a sudden crisis, where characters didn't have time or the ability to call for help, at least not without getting compromised. The Dark Elf incursion in London was resolved before anyone could arrive. The Insight Helicarriers were controlled by HYDRA, who were watching communications with the most advanced spy network in the world and would have caught Cap the moment he made contact with any of the other Avengers; the only way Cap could get into the Triskilion without getting detected was stealth that would be broken if he made a call. The President's kidnapping was being resolved by the only two Avengers who would be able to get there quickly enough to make a difference in the first place.

    Lifting Mjolnir by Taking A Third Option 
  • Why doesn't anyone try lifting the coffee table it's sitting on?
    • Because then you're lifting a table, not the hammer. Aside from being fun, it's meant as a show to prove they aren't worthy. Cheating around the restriction would defeat the spirit.
    • Furthermore, the table would also probably be impossible to lift.
    • This is unlikely. If this were true, the elevator wouldn't work either. Mjolnir is impossible to lift from what it's on unless you're worthy. Moving the table is how we would know if this is the truth of the enchantment.
    • If lifting the hammer merely by lifting an object it's sitting on was an option, Coulson's men could have scooped it up with a backhoe along with the dirt it was sitting on, and Thor couldn't have pinned Loki to Bifrost by setting Mjolnir on top of his brother's chest armor. Just sidestepping direct physical contact isn't an out: if the elevator is running under its own power, it can move Mjolnir successfully (because it's not "someone"), but if the Hulk tried to yank the same elevator up to the roof by pulling on its cables, the whole thing wouldn't budge.

    Tony leaving the team 
  • What was Tony's reason for leaving the Avengers at the end? Thor left to investigate on Infinity Stones mystery. Hulk/Bruce left presumably because he felt he was too dangerous (again). Clint left to spend time with his family. I don't remember what reason Tony gave to leaving. Was he taking a page out of Clint's book and choosing a normal life with Pepper? It does come out of nowhere.
    • Iron Man 3 already implied Tony is tired of super heroics, and in this movie we see he's trying to look at the bigger picture: how to protect Earth without the responsibility falling onto the shoulders of a handful of individuals. True, Tony's Ultron project failed miserably, but that doesn't mean he's given up on his ideas of large-scale global defense. Presumably it's those ideas that will lead to the conflict between him and Steve in Captain America: Civil War.
    • There's also the fact that his actions directly caused an immense amount of collateral damage over the course of the movie, so he may need to take time off of being Iron Man to play damage control both in the sense of trying to make sure his reputation doesn't go down the toilet, and also likely trying to put some of his resources towards repairing the damage he caused rather than running around creating more damage.
    • Given what happened in Africa, the two most controversial Avengers are Banner and Stark. And if the whole story about where Ultron came from gets out, they will be even more controversial. Banner has unofficially resigned by taking the Quinjet and disappearing somewhere in the vicinity of Fiji. By also leaving, Stark is shielding the Avengers as a whole from the PR fallout of his personal mistakes.

    Hawkeye bringing the team to his house 
  • OK, so wouldn't it be a huge risk bringing the Avengers to his family home? Yes, Clint says that the farm is off S.H.I.E.L.D. records, but there will be some record somewhere of Clint being married with two children and living somewhere (medical, school records, etc). Ultron has access to pretty much any information, so it is very likely that he knows the farm exists, Black Widow even says, "He knows more about us than we know about each other". If there is even a chance of bringing a war to your home and putting your children in danger, you don't really take that chance.
    • It’s likely that Clint has taken measures to make sure files like that are only kept in hard copy. Since SHIELD has access to the entire internet, that would be the only way to truly be off their records. Probably the only records online would be things like school pictures (and Barton is not that unique a last name). Even with all the internet at his disposal such as access to Google Maps, all Ultron would know is that the farm exists, not that it belonged to Clint’s family (and there is no evidence he was actively searching for the Avengers since he knew they would come for him). No matter how much digital information Ultron has access to, it doesn’t make him omniscient.
    • Also, having the Avengers there only increases the risk if Ultron knows they are there. If Ultron is going to go after Clint's family, then he can do that whether or not the Avengers are there. If he's going after the Avengers specifically, then he has to either know they are there (which would be harder than finding the farm in the first place) or hit every location that they might be at (in which case, once again, the farm is a target whether or not they are there).
    • There's also a simpler idea that any documents could have the house registered in Laura's name and not Clint's. They may have given their baby (and presumably the two older kids) Barton as a last name, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that Laura herself retained her maiden name and uses it for official matters so that her super-spy husband is on as few records as possible. You'd be surprised at how many men try to hide from the taxman by registering property in their wives' names.

    Ultron has telekinesis? 
  • During the truck chase, a couple of times Ultron would attack by making a gesture with his hand, and chunks of the pavement would be propelled upwards. What's up that? I can't think of anything in Ultron's power set as presented in the film that could explain the nature of such attack, and it is odd that he only used it during that specific scene.
    • Incorrect. In the fight aboard Klaue's ship, Ultron explicitly uses telekinesis to lift Iron Man in the air before hitting him with a laser blast. It seems it was an upgrade Ultron built into his left hand, as it glows when he is using it.
    • Based on what happens when Ultron uses the "telekinesis" (Tony stumbles forward, the piece of the road he lifts elevates gradually), it seems more likely that it was actually a miniaturized version of Strucker's anti-gravity tech that Ultron incorporated into his body.
    • It seemed to be mostly metal objects Ultron was manipulating, so it may've been magnetic. (Which would make it a sideways reference to Pietro & Wanda's 'real' father, Magneto.)
    • Another possibility: maybe it's an extension of the repulsor technology used in the Iron Man suits?
    • It seemed to be more of a strictly push/pull effect than outright telekinesis. And since some of Ultron's forms in the comics have featured "tractor and pressor beams", I'm guessing it's that.

    Sokovia is... 

  • GONE. Destroyed. There's a crater where the city/country was. (The country seemed to consist of just that city, Baron Strucker's castle, and the surrounding forest.) Given its small and isolated nature, the destruction of Sokovia isn't as big a head-scratcher as, say, the complete and total destruction of London in G.I. Joe: Retaliation (which was much more sudden, and should have resulted in the deaths of millions & worldwide economic turmoil). And a lot of time was given to showing the Avengers (and S.H.I.E.L.D.) evacuating the population, so casualties should be at a minimum. But it's not nothing. Their homes, places of worship, graveyards, cultural heritage sites, all gone. Where are the people going to go? Some may have family in other countries that can take them in, but what of those who don't? Will surrounding countries take them in? Will America take them in? Before the events of the movie, there had been conflict and turmoil in Sokovia for years (though by whom or why was not mentioned), and Stark Industries munitions were used in at least some of these conflicts, so there was already some anti-American and anti-Stark sentiment in the country. Will the destruction of their home increase these feelings? The Avengers and S.H.I.E.l.D. did save their lives, yes, but Stark is the one who created the A.I. that turned their city into an orbital bombardment missile. Does the world even know Stark's actions are what lead to the creation of Ultron? Or will that be kept secret?
    • This really doesn't seem like a Headscratchers question. Some kind of speculative forum question, maybe, but how is this fridge logic?
    • Ultron doesn't take all of Sokovia into the sky. He takes Strucker's fortress, the forests, and about half of the metropolitan area with him. Even on positive estimates, the debris from the exploding floating landmass could have heavily damaged the metropolitan area on the ground, but not all of it. Many could be relocated. And going back to the earlier question of "Strucker's fortress," even if Sokovia isn't a part of NATO, it's possible NATO, the EU, or some regional body stepped in to help.
    • This will probably come up in the Civil War movie. People will be pissed that the Avengers didn't do a better job of defeating Ultron. They'll be pissed that a whole city got destroyed. They'll insist on some sort of Metahuman Registration Act to make sure this doesn't happen again. Tony will go pro-Registration out of a sense of guilt and responsibility. Cap will oppose him.
    • Sokovia's destruction is brought up in Civil War and is the entire reason why the Sokovia Accords got pushed through. It's also the motivation for Tony to back them and the cause for Zemo's plot for revenge.

    Sokovia size 

  • Is Sokovia really just that one city and the surrounding forest? 'Cause if so it's not really a country, more a city-state.
    • This seems like a case of Conservation of Detail. Sokovia may have more cities, but most of the action takes place in one location, which has been established to be near a HYDRA base.
    • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier gives the impression that it's a micro-nation like Liechtenstein, given that that show reveals that post-Ultron, the country was divided up and annexed into its neighbors.

     Is Magic now officially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? 
  • The Thor films were always iffy on the idea of genuine magic. Asgardians are advanced aliens instead of gods and Thor handwaves the whole thing with the "magic and science are the same." The second film explicitly shows pretty much everything the Asgardians and Dark Elves use are space ships and other things out of science fiction. Yet Loki and Frigga are explicitly stated to use magic. In this film, Wanda's powers are again handwaved as a list of powers and being "weird." Yet, Thor explicitly talks about water spirits, visions of the future and Hel. All things more to do with magic and the supernatural. So, is magic supposed to exist or be a viable worldview in Marvel Cinematic or not?
    • I'm leaning towards "Yes, magic exists." For one thing, I dare you to find an explanation for the Infinity Stones that isn't "they're magic." Also since both Iron Fist (powered by chi) and Doctor Strange (Sorcerer Supreme) use forms of magic and are upcoming superheroes I'd say magic is real. In regards to Thor's statement, I assumed he meant that in Asgard, magic was a science.
    • Saying the Infinity Stones are the ultimate indictment for magic in the MCU doesn't seem like the best avenue. They're super-powerful, yeah, but they're also older than time itself and the only sort of explanation given came from The Collector, who is an avid researcher but not likely someone who would have been around long enough to understand their true potential. Who's to say what they're composed of? It could just be a massive cosmic energy source. There really hasn't been enough evidence other than "if this touches anything we all go boom" to say whether or not they are magical artifacts.
    • In Agents of SHIELD, Lady Sif says that while Asgard has immensely advanced scientific understanding well beyond that of humanity, one thing that they've come to understand is that there actually are forces active in the universe that they can't predict, control, or explain. So yeah, magic does exist.
    • Not being advanced enough to predict, control or explain a force in the universe doesn't automatically mean that magic exists at all. It means that they are too primitive to understand it, in the same way that lightning to the Ancient Greeks was magic. And when it comes down to it the question has to be asked: what is magic on a fundamental and technical level? Because I see no logical reason why magic cannot be quantified scientifically, it would just require a completely new branch of science that currently eludes us. To use Harry Potter as an example you have a form of energy that can be harnessed through using technology (a wand), it has fundamental laws that cannot be broken, and each spell incantation produces a result that can be measured and replicated. That is science no matter how you try and handwave it.
    • That's what magic is meant to be; it is a supernatural force that cannot be explained by science or the laws of nature. It is the anomaly in spite of everything else. If you want to take a scientific angle on it, that could mean things that we've yet to understand are magic, but there are still things out there that we will likely never find the answer to in the universe. It doesn't help that with new answers found, a lot more questions are raised and also sometimes throw our sense of what we thought we knew into doubt.
    • I think people took that line the wrong way. I think the idea wasn't "Asgard just has so advanced science it's basically magical and that's how they do their tricks" but "Asgard understands both science and magic and uses them together." Magic is a respected science in Asgard and treated as such, but that doesn't mean their magic is scientifically made. That's clear even in Thor where Odin, and Loki have clear innate magic powers nobody else has.
    • Clarified to an extent in Doctor Strange (2016): MCU magic apparently involves drawing upon powers from outside the films' native universe, which isn't the same thing as Wanda's powers are based on, as seen in WandaVision (which is weird, but not codified as that kind of weird) or that of the Infinity Stones (which originated with the dawn of this universe, not others). Asgardian magic may or may not be akin to that of Strange and his colleagues, depending on whether their awareness of the "Nine Realms" lets them tap a comparable source of power.

     Why was the Hydra Base Mission a Code Green? 
  • A Code Green is a mission that requires Banner to Hulk out. Obviously, since Hulk is so hard to control, it makes sense that Hulk should only come out when they really need him, such as Loki's invasion. At the beginning of this movie, Hulk is alongside the Avengers while they storm Hydra's base. It's later mentioned that the base assault was a Code Green? Why? They were human opponents and at the time, the Avengers had no idea the twins existed yet. What's more, is that Banner was meant to stay in the quinjet when the team went after Ultron and the Maximoff twins. So human Hydra agents require Hulk but three super-powered enemies don't?
    • They were assaulting a castle where they were outnumbered 10-to-1 against an enemy that possesses energy weapons and tanks, and God-knows what else. When on Klaue's ship, they had a numerical advantage against three super powered individuals in an enclosed space where the Hulk would be more of a liability, so instead he's there as backup to act as needed.
    • It's worth pointing out that the Avengers seem familiar with the Enhanced and Hydra's experiments before entering the base (Captain America talks about "having an Enhanced in the field" on radio as if everyone already knows what that is) so when they enter the biggest, most fortified Hydra base, it makes sense that they could have expected multiple Enhanced Hydra agents with God knows what kind of powers. In Africa, they know they're just dealing with Ultron and the Maximoffs.
    • I have a feeling it's mostly about collateral. The Hulk is mostly dangerous because people and buildings can't stand up to him. The base is clearly fairly isolated, and Natasha's ability to calm him seems to be established. The only building around is the base, which they're destroying anyway, and it's presumably not a problem if he tears up some trees. As for the people, they're all either HYDRA recruits, who should be getting smashed anyway, or his own team, who are capable of dealing with him.

    Banner's control over the Hulk 
  • In the final battle of the first Avengers film, Bruce Banner revealed he fully embraced the Hulk, allowing him to transform at will and distinguish friend from foe. Yet in this movie, he's back to fearing the Hulk and only transforming as a last resort. What changed?
    • Because Hulk still doesn't hold back and still has a temper. Banner can't so much control the Hulk as point him at a threat.
    • Banner can control when he changes into the Hulk. Changing from Hulk to Banner is much harder; remember the "lullaby" bit between him and Natasha.
    • It's not just about distinguishing friend or foe — Banner doesn't like hurting people, even enemies, while the Hulk appears to enjoy it immensely. After the opening battle, he's not fearful about what he could've done, he's remorseful about all the Hydra goons he squished — Natasha tries to comfort him by pointing out the lives he saved, and he's anguished when Thor talks about his "victims." Banner's a guy who doesn't want to hurt people, and the Hulk is a creature whose abilities amount to "break stuff and hurt people."
      • It's also worth noting that among other things Bruce does appear to also be a medical doctor as it is one of his fallback professions when on the run. He may be upset of the Hulk breaking Bruce's Hippocratic Oath.
    • And the majority of angst comes after Wanda has gotten inside his head. Although he may have gotten over some of it, Wanda amplifies it. Think of it like alcoholism. Banner has the willpower to walk through a bar with other people drinking - but Wanda gives him a drink and suddenly he's 'off the wagon'. That is why he tells her he's furious enough to strangle her without transforming.

     Stopping a war before it starts 
  • Cap seems to shut down Tony's argument toward creating Ultron by pointing out anyone who tries to stop a war before it starts gets innocent people killed, referencing Captain America: The Winter Soldier among other events, but don't far more people die when a war isn't stopped? Cap should know better, since America's isolationism in the 30s arguably put far less pressure on Nazi Germany's expansion, leading to the most devastating war humanity has ever experienced—along with all death and destruction in the others, both before and after.
    • It is much more likely that Cap is referencing more recent events, as well as pointing out that trying to stop a war before it starts usually means actually starting a war in the first place.
    • Tony isn't trying to just stop a looming conflict. He's trying to stop a hypothetical conflict and all others after it. Much like S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Insight program was a huge quagmire, Tony created a threat in trying to stop one that only potentially existed.
    • As for World War II, have in mind that the actual weight of the US is usually exaggerated, and an early American involvement does not guarantee that the war would have been shorter, or that Germany would have been less aggressive.
    • It's not a choice between "Stop the war before it starts" and "Don't stop it at all". Cap's just saying that you should stop the war after it starts. So in the WW2 example, that would mean that everybody gangs up on Germany the instant it decides to invade Poland.
    • The quote is not "Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts" but "Every time someone tries to WIN a war before it starts". Which are two very different things.
    • Which is still faulty logic. It's not like Stark or even S.H.I.E.L.D. were planning on preemptive attacks on people. Steve Rogers was literally frozen solid during the Cold War so maybe he's still unaware of the nuance of it but two sides trying to win a war before it started essentially prevented what looked like a probable major war. There were tons of proxy wars mind you but the big boys never took the field against each other.
    • Steve's point was that every time someone tries to win a war before it starts, innocent people will get caught in the crossfire. The Cold War kinda proves that point, as said proxy wars almost always involved people who just wanted to be left alone, and didn't really care about the events between the US and the Soviet Union. And SHIELD was definitely planning pre-emptive strikes on people: that was the whole point of Project Insight after all. Granted, HYDRA coopted that into something worse than what was intended, but even Nick Fury himself was on board with neutralizing threats before they could actually become threats. Tony may have had good intentions with Ultron, but Steve's pointing out how it's a slippery slope. In fact, he's proven right seeing how Tony later went on to create EDITH, a drone system that's pretty similar to Project Insight.

     The Hulk's damages in Johannesburg 
  • Maria Hill brought up that the South African government were considering arresting the Hulk due to his rampage. What was taking them so long?
    • There's a serious problem involved when it comes to arresting the Hulk. Namely, arresting the Hulk.
    • Even despite all the damage, Hill explicitly said that no one was actually calling for his arrest, it was just implied. Probably because, yeah, you can't arrest the damned Hulk. Blonsky is kept in a cryo-cell in Alaska, and we have no guarantee if that would actually work on Hulk.
    • On that note, the Nightmare Fuel page mentions that thousands died in Johannesburg. Was this ever stated in the movie anywhere?
    • Not to my knowledge. Sounds like No Endor Holocaust territory.
    • Just re-watched it. There's no mention of any deaths. And although there was a bit of mayhem, if there's a death toll then it likely isn't as high as thousands. If there was a death toll that high, Banner would be considerably more broken by the events.

     Ultron & the Internet 
  • How large was the Ultron software prior to escaping from Stark Tower? How fast was Stark's Internet connection? Ultron appeared to be wireless, so was this some form of 802.11 connection? Could that have been remotely fast enough for it to escape in time? Where did it go on the Internet once it escaped? The Internet isn't some magical aether where things magically exist. Firewalls would have detected that much of a data download and likely would have mitigated it on level 3. Ultron should have died long before it became a credible threat. When Ultron escaped did it delete all subsequent subversions and revision edits of itself from Stark's servers?
    • Why are you assuming that real life internet protocols apply here? Considering the super-advanced tech base of the MCU, the internet is almost certainly far more robust and able to handle much more data, and almost certainly behaves differently.
    • JARVIS hacked SHIELD in a few hours and he is without question less advanced than Ultron. Ultron has to go through data security which is almost certainly inferior and demonstrates himself to be far better at breaching said security than JARVIS, who he locked out of the mainframe less than a minute after being "born". Furthermore, you're forgetting the timeline. Ultron woke up, hacked the mainframe, made that scrap body, hacked the drones, and had the entire duration of the conversation with the Avengers to do his thing. His plan was already in motion. The HYDRA lab booting up is just rule of perception.
    • Also, keep in mind that Ultron is based on computer "code" that was taken from an Infinity Stone. Just one of those was powerful enough to instantly wipe out all life on an entire planet, and another ran the risk of ending all life in the galaxy. Ultron is way beyond anything modern computer defenses could hope to handle; the only thing that was keeping Ultron out of critical systems and databases was another, less potent AI created by Tony Stark, someone who routinely plays around with technology derived from the Tesseract.
    • Also, while there are many very good fire walls and so across the internet and presumable in Tony's system, those systems are designed to prevent humans from hacking in. Humans, no matter how good they are are still at a slight disadvantage that Ultron doesn't have meaning he's "physically" in the computer/internet and is himself a program, therefore it can react faster and better to firewalls that any human can.

     Acid on Iron Legion 
  • Why exactly was a random pedestrian carrying extremely strong acid around in the first place that they threw on the face of one of the Iron Legion robots?
    • Maybe he pilfered it from a nearby lab.
    • Access to acid is disturbingly easy and common in some parts of the world. Look up "acid attacks on women" for some real life nightmare fuel.
    • This is a comic book universe, where factories leave vats of various chemicals lying around without lids, radioactive spiders are in every room of the house, and barrels of hazardous waste can be bought at your local corner drug store, for all your origin story needs. Some guy having acid isn't exactly out of the realm of plausibility.
    • These Sokovians are pretty pissed off at the Avengers. It's hard to imagine this is the first time someone ever used acid on one of them.

     What makes Ultron better? 
  • Tony wants to make an A.I. that'll protect the world with a fleet of flying robots. But wait, doesn't he already have that? He's already got JARVIS, and JARVIS has the Iron Legion. We saw at the end of Iron Man 3 that JARVIS is perfectly capable of commanding a whole bunch of suits in real-world combat. So why doesn't Tony just make a bunch more suits and instruct JARVIS to protect the world? What exactly can Ultron do that JARVIS can't? Yeah, I know they compared the two holograms, and we saw that the mindstone's brain was bigger. (And yeah, I know that Ultron killed JARVIS in like a minute...except that JARVIS actually survived.) Even so, it was never made clear why JARVIS couldn't be the guardian that Tony wanted. Just build him a bunch of suits, with the processing power to match.
    • JARVIS, no matter how advanced, isn't as adaptive as Ultron. The point of creating Ultron was that you'd have an army every bit as capable as a human.
    • The end of Iron Man 3 is an excellent example of JARVIS' limitations. Tony told him that all the heat blooms were enemy soldiers, and he proceeded to fight them. Then he went after Pepper because he wasn't smart enough to recognize that one of the people he interacts with on a daily basis wasn't an enemy. JARVIS probably could have evolved into a true AI capable of using an expanded Iron Legion to defend the entire world eventually, but Tony saw a chance for a shortcut with the Mind Gem.
    • The reason is clearly shown when Tony compared the Mind Gem to JARVIS. The intelligence in the Mind Gem is exponentially more powerful and complex than JARVIS, able to do far more.

     Why did they go to Wakanda? 
  • Ultron gets created, deletes their files and escapes from the tower. So they read through the hard-copy files they have, and Tony notices that one file references a guy in Wakanda who deals in vibranium. So they all go to Wakanda, and they find Ultron. But wait, why did they go to Wakanda? What makes them think that Ultron wants vibranium? Maybe he needs some other resources. Or maybe he wants vibranium, but he plans to get it from some other source. It's like Tony just noticed this one file and by pure coincidence it happens to be the guy that Ultron wants to see. What's the connection? Did I miss something?
    • For starters, they didn't go to Wakanda. They went to a black market dealer in South Africa who has some history with Wakanda. Second, it's a logical progression. Ultron killed Strucker and wiped all the data on him. Ergo, Strucker has a connection which Ultron is trying to hide. Upon finding Klaue and seeing the Wakandan brand, they deduce Klaue has vibranium, an extremely valuable substance which Ultron would likely want. So they go to Klaue and find Ultron already there. It was an educated guess that paid off. At worst, they would have been wrong, but that's no excuse not to go and potentially cut Ultron off at the pass.

     The Falcon 
  • Why wasn’t The Falcon in the final battle? If War Machine showed up then he should have been there too especially since he is part of the New Avengers at the end of the movie and should be considered more than a cameo. It can’t be because of his weapons because I see no reason why he couldn’t have gotten some technology from SHIELD that could be used to fight the Ultron Drones (just look at what Black Widow and Hawkeye have) and since he can fly he should be involved in an aerial battle. So why wasn’t he there? Was he cut for time?
    • Rhodey at least knew about the threat of Ultron, since he was there at the after-party when Ultron attacked. Sam Wilson left before then, so he didn't know. And he might not have gotten his new flight harness yet.
    • He also just might not have been in a position to get to the Helicarrier before it launched. War Machine can move very fast over long distances. Falcon doesn't have that option.
    • It's also worth noting that Wilson is a trained paramedic and that the Falcon suit was designed for the rescue of downed pilots in enemy territory, so he's more likely to have been helping with the civilian evacuation if he was there, than taking out Ultron drones with his weapons.
    • Aside from the above, there is the fact that HE DID mention he was still looking for Bucky while Cap deals with Avenger business.

     How does Vision fly? 
  • The Vision has Super-Strength from the Vibranium-infused nanotech that forms his body, sure. And he can lift Mjolnir, because he's either worthy, a machine, or a worthy machine. But how, exactly, can he fly? Since this is the first character in the whole universe who can do so under his own power, you would think an explanation would be given.
    • The power of the Mind Gem. Yeah, it's not a very mindey power, but it gave Pietro super speed so maybe its power can be exploited like that.
      • Not sure which side of the argument this helps, but since then Word of God implies that the Mind Stone might not have so much given the twins their abilities as it might have just unlocked some hidden genetic potential (*coughMUTANTcough*)
    • Very small repulsors?
    • Most of the Gems seem to have a broad number of powers. The Space Gem opens portals, but it also provides virtually unlimited energy. The Reality Gem rewrites people, entire universes, and can produce defensive barriers. The Power Gem seems to be the exception; it's just raw power, enough to destroy a planet by sheer might. So, yeah, maybe the Mind Gem has something to do with super speed and flight. On the fridge page it was noted that super speed makes sense if you think of it as Bullet Time plus the Required Secondary Powers to make that useful, so maybe it's something like that.
    • The Mind Gem grants telekinesis as one of its powers, right? It's quite possible he's using that to simulate flight rather than generating true lift like a bird's wing.
    • If it helps, in the comics Vision flies by manipulating his density to make himself lighter; the same density manipulation is what gives him super strength and resistance and allows him to phase through solid objects. The movie might be doing something different, as the strength and resistance is attributed to his vibranium body and only demonstrated phasing in a blink-and-miss-it moment destroying an Ultron drone.
    • It's a Mind Stone. Vision can fly if he thinks he can fly.

     The Death of Pietro/Quicksilver 

  • So you're telling me that Quicksilver, the guy who possesses super speed, couldn't outrun the bullets headed for him, Hawkeye, and the kid? Sure, we saw him getting grazed by a bullet earlier, but that's because he didn't know they would be firing. He saw and ran straight for this barrage of bullets, so why couldn't he dodge them, or get on the other side of the car with those two? Did he get tired at the wrong moment or something?
    • Yes? He's never shown at any point in the movie moving faster than the bullets fired from the Quinjet's mini gun. Yes, he could see a bullet fired from a handgun, but the velocity of bullets fired from pistols is much, much less than that of larger, longer-barreled weapons designed to fire masses of bullets suited for destroying vehicles. He's fast, but he's not that fast.
    • Quicksilver's top speed in the comics is the speed of sound. That's fast, it's not "dodge bullets" fast. He ain't The Flash.
    • So what's about that scene in Days of Future Past? Quicksilver wasn't just dodging bullets there - he was rearranging them. He was overpowered?
    • Days is in an entirely different continuity. Whether it violates comics canon is entirely irrelevant to what happens in this movie.
    • Short answer: Yes, compared to the comics he was extremely overpowered. That was Flash-level speed.
    • According to Joss, he is "as fast or almost as fast as a bullet". So yeah, no way he could do much about it.
    • Plus there's the fact that consistently throughout the movie, after Pietro's done a lot of running, he's shown tired out and trying to catch his breath. Factor in the amount of running he's had to do the entire fight in Sokovia and that'd slow him down a lot by comparison.
    • Wait you mean he didn't go as fast as in Days of Future Past? I always thought he did and just ran straight into the bullets, no other explanation how he could have actually shielded them while running... which is why I asked myself why didn't he rearrange them here too...
    • I think a couple of people missed something else Pietro did in the scene. He doesn't just move in front of Hawkeye and the child. He pushes them behind an upturned car that takes the full force of the blasts. Just before Pietro collapses, you see them standing behind a car with a lot of holes in it. Pietro was pushing them to safety and he was quick enough to get them out of the way, but not himself. They were all in the firing line and he just pushed them behind the nearest thing that could shield them. There was a limited amount of safe space and he put Hawkeye and the kid into it, leaving none for himself.
    • Also, he probably had to slow down to be able to push them under cover without hurting them. Crashing into people at near-bullet speed is liable to break both their bones and his, which would leave all three of them injured and helpless in the middle of a battle.
      • Didn't he do that in the scene with the runaway train, when he was using his speed to move people out of the way?

     Nick Fury, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? 

  • Nick Fury appears to be pretty well established at the Barton home when we see him, since he colluded with Laura to set up his dramatic entrance. Has he been living there since The Winter Soldier, being the creepy uncle to Cooper and Lila? Keep in mind I haven't seen Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., which might prove this one way or another, but if he hasn't been living there, how and when did he get there?
    • He's Nick Fury. If you found the man in your home, the only question would be what kind of beer to offer him. More seriously, he could have just driven there. He did help Barton hide the place, he knows where it is.

     Ultron's Philosophy 
  • Why exactly does Ultron want to destroy the human race? Is he just crazy? Is this a Zeroth Law Rebellion where he was programmed to "stop war" or something, and he reasoned extinction would technically fulfill that directive? (Actually, does he have any directives? Because he wasn't actually programmed by Tony, as far as I can tell. It's like they just copy-pasted his brain patterns out of the Mind Stone. So if that's the case, does the Mind Stone have an inherent desire to Kill All Humans? If so, why?) Is this a Skynet scenario, where he thinks he needs to kill us as an act of self-defense? He talks about how the human race needs to "evolve", but I'm pretty sure that extinction is the sheer opposite of evolution. (He clearly isn't going for a Cyberman-style "upgrade" scenario.)
    • It seems to be a Survival of the Fittest thing. He figures that he's better than humans, and thus it's only natural that he should kill all the humans and take their place. It's "evolution", but mainly in the sense of one species supplanting another (and not in the sense of a single species "upgrading" itself over time, which is how we usually use the term.) As to whether this belief system is inherent to the Mind Stone, I'm not sure. Obviously Vision doesn't believe this stuff, and he's got the stone in his forehead. (Then again, Vision also has JARVIS inside of him.)
    • Ultron has the mission of bringing "peace for our times", and he will... the peace of the graveyards.
    • Like Tony, Ultron believes that humankind is not ready for the day the aliens return from space and slaughter us all, a day that could happen at any moment. He intends an extinction level event to force any survivors to evolve into a more survivable form or perish, but his psychopathic tendencies dampen that into viewing himself as that more fit form and wanting all humans dead. His idea of what humans should become appears to be like the Maximoffs, who he didn't want dead and found them useful for their powers.
    • If his idea of human evolution is for the entire species to be like the Maximoffs, why would he want the Avengers extinct? Stark (and probably by association, Ultron) believes that "[They]'ll lose" if they face a massive alien invasion, which is why Ultron wants humanity to evolve— so they won't lose in that situation. But it doesn't make sense for Ultron's first targets (the Avengers) be some of the most advanced humans on Earth. Shouldn't he want to wipe out the weakest first?
    • Ultron want to kill the Avengers because they're essentially enforcers of the status quo he is trying to destroy, and he knows they will try to stop his plans no matter what, so taking them out of the equation as soon as possible is a logical course of action. Furthermore, the film doesn't suggest Ultron wants humans to become "stronger" by gaining superpowers, its more likely his thinking is along the lines of "the only humans that survive my mass extinction event will be the strongest ones, and now they'll be more prepared the next time someone tries to destroy them, especially with me leading them". Of course, Ultron does seem to basically change his goal from forcibly evolving humanity to outright destroying it after the Avengers steal Vision from him and the Maximoffs turn on him, so perhaps his idea of "evolution", as said above, is to create a race of machines that will take humanity's place and that can defend the world from any potential invaders.

     Why not just detonate the fuel? 
  • It might be a little silly to debate the physics of a superhero movie, but here goes. Any machine that expends enough fuel to lift a giant section of landmass, and accelerate it back down into the ground to create an asteroid impact/dust cloud, could achieve the same thing just by detonating the whole thing in a big underground explosion. It's just basic conservation of energy. Why bother with spending the time, cost, and vulnerability of building the whole city-lifting apparatus?
    • Because the apparatus is two parts: forcefield to hold the rock together, and anti-grav generators to send it up. It's also not using fuel in the traditional sense. There's a giant reactor in the center made of indestructible metal. It's not something you can just blow up (in fact, it survived that). Stark's arc reactor technology turns a chunk of metal that is definitely non-reactive into a power source. Similar principle here.
    • Anything that is a power source is a fuel source. The fact that the machine spent a large chunk of energy on a forcefield just goes to show that it could have just been detonated and caused an even bigger explosion.
    • Ok, I'm not even remotely an expert on physics, but could it be that the fuel is not so easily detonated? After all, it required the firepower of the Iron Man armor, and the power of the Thunder God combined to cause the explosion that destroyed the city. And even if it was possible to cause an explosion in such a manner, Ultron would probably have gone for the meteor anyway. Why? Because he's completely insane and sees himself as an agent of God (given the whole "God sent a meteor to kill the dinosaurs" speech), plus he has several personality traits of Tony Stark (whether he knows it or not), so a flashy meteor would probably appeal to him more.
    • You can shoot a rocket into space by igniting jet fuel pointing down, but not by setting off an equal amount of jet fuel all at once. In this example, Ultron's reactor powers a forcefield and the anti-grav generators so that the rock is being flung to the ground with the force of all those generators pointing back down. If his reactor could just explode, it would do exactly what it did when Tony and Thor detonated it: the energy would release in all directions, mostly absorbed by the rock. An explosion is not efficient or directed. Most of the energy is wasted.
    • But that was exactly the *point* of slamming the city back down into the ground like a meteor. Meteors aren't shaped charges. They hit things and a shockwave just goes out in all directions.
    • They also impart all that kinetic energy into the ground. There's more to it than the shockwave. Ultron's driving a shielded chunk of rock into the Earth at greater than terminal velocity. That's way more energy all going down than just making a bomb.
    • Uh... that kinetic energy IS converted entirely into a shockwave which kicks up a massive dust cloud. And no, there is definitely not "way more energy" - the energy of slamming a meteor into the ground IS equal to the energy expended lifting the meteor and accelerating it back down. And that's assuming 100% perfect efficiency in the lifting engines. Look, the point of this headscratcher is the conservation of energy. If you don't understand the physical principles of that, then there's no point in arguing...
    • I thought the whole point of this headscratcher was questioning why Ultron chose to use a meteor instead of a massive underground explosion. The answer; he's not going for efficiency, he's going for the dramatic, and a meteor would be a bigger and grander spectacle than an underground explosion. Note that his first attempt at human extinction was using nuclear weapons, but he couldn't get the access codes to them thanks to JARVIS, so he chooses the next best thing and turns Sokovia into an orbital projectile. At any rate, the movie gives no indication that whatever is fueling the anti-gravity device could also be easily detonated (it required the full power of Thor and Iron Man to do it at the end, so it may not be so simple).

     Why don't Hawkeye, Black Widow and Captain America have powered armor? 
  • Seriously. Stark seems to have hundreds of them, can create them at will for nothing. Hawkeye and Black Widow are just badass normal. Imagine what they could do with Iron Man armor. And Steve Rogers? Captain America that can fly! Can you imagine that? And don't tell me they are too difficult to manage — even Pepper with no training is able to use them (I left Hulk out for 'size alteration' and Thor because thunder plus armor can lead to short circuits).
    • Several reasons: For starters, those three Avengers seem to rely on speed, agility and lightness to take down their foes, and a hulking suit of armor would interfere with that, meaning Cap, Widow and Hawkeye would have to retrain in the armor, which would be to time consuming. And don't tell me they are too difficult to manage — even Pepper with no training is able to use them- They would be too difficult to manage; Pepper wasn't able to use the suit nearly as effectively as Tony or Rhodey, and both of them had to train with the suits to use them efficiently. The Avengers are already really dangerous as is, so why fix what isn't broken? Another possible reason is pride: I wouldn't be surprised if Tony offered to build suits for the others, and they probably turned him down. They've been in live combat long before Iron Man, so a suit of armor would be unnecessary to them.
    • I'll need to find it, but the Superman Stays Out of Gotham page claims there was an issue where Iron Man claimed to have made Black Widow obsolete by inventing stealth armor, only to be caught anyway and beaten senseless by villains. In short, there's more to her stealth than just not being visible.
    • "I left Hulk out for 'size alteration' and Thor because thunder plus armor can lead to short circuits" Not to mention those two could obliterate the armor by sneezing.
    • Hawkeye, at least, would almost certainly lose some of the dexterity and natural senses and balance he's developed that gives him the lethal accuracy he's known for.
    • Grandfather Clause basically. Same reason Hawkeye and Black Widow are even on the team in the first place. They don't have armor in the movie, even if that would make far more sense, because they don't have armor in the comics. In the comics, where peak human goes WAAAAAAAAAAAAY further than in real life it might make sense. In the movies it doesn't, but they keep it anyway because that's the way it's always been done. Don't fix what ain't broken, even if fixing it would make it about a bajillion times better.
    • Tony Stark doesn't share. It's one of his defining traits. It's why we don't have a War Machine Corps rather than an Iron Legion. The only reason War Machine got a pass is that Tony was staring down the barrel of his own mortality in Iron Man 2 and the American Government was on his back, and you can bet that Tony installed some sort of kill switch that we will probably see in Civil War. Tony even has reason to because every major threat he has ever faced has used his own tech against him. Tony Stark is the Objectivist super hero. Tony Stark doesn't share.
  • For Hawkeye it might make sense for him to have super armor, but for Black Widow and Cap, keep in mind that their specialties are close-range combat. The super armor wouldn't help them there (it might even hinder them), and it's reasonable that they don't feel the need to add long-range combat to their list of skills.
    • Powered armor would also help in close-range combat by enhancing strength and durability. It wouldn't necessarily hinder them, either. Tony already makes different armors for different purposes, so it would be trivial to make armor designed for agility. Superhero Speciation is the reason why these three characters don't use powered armor despite having the opportunity.

     Ultron and Black Widow 
  • Why does Ultron do any of the things he does after capturing Black Widow? First, he doesn't simply kill her. Then he leaves her completely unguarded in a cell that gave her access to a distress signal. And last, he needlessly smashes one of his 'main' bodies that was winning a fight with Captain America. That sure wouldn't have come in handy in the last battle. Why does this scene contain so much Bond villain stupidity?
    • He says right during the last battle that what he wanted was "all of you, versus all of me." He wanted them all to be there so he could kill them, and leaving Widow alive and able to call for help ensures that. And he had hundreds of bodies, one more wasn't going to make a difference.
    • One of the reasons he keeps her alive is explicitly so he can have someone to talk to, after the Maximoffs turn on him.
    • He was intending to eliminate the entire human race. Natasha would be killed anyway in the cataclysm. Ultron is incredibly cocky. Note that he only left her inside a cage that was easily broken - so clearly he thinks he's going to easily win. Of course the meta reason is that Scarlett Johansson was pregnant - and having Natasha be captured allows them to write her out of a few scenes, and gives her a reason to be sitting down as well as a handy prop to hide the bump (the bars on her cell).

     Thor in Phase Two 
  • Where exactly was Thor between Thor: The Dark World and Age of Ultron? In The Stinger for the former, Thor returns to Earth and reunites with Jane. As Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. showed, it's been roughly a year-and-a-half in between the two films. And yet there has been no mention of what Thor was doing during that time. I can understand what the other Avengers were doing during that time period, but one would think that a Norse god roaming the Earth would raise a mention. Was he just with Jane the whole time?
    • He has been superheroing around, using his superpowers to fight crime For Great Justice.
    • I highly doubt Thor was on Earth the entire time. He made a point at the end of Thor: The Dark World that while Earth holds a special place for him he considers ALL of the nine worlds as under his protection. So he was probably fighting evil on other planets or dimensions. A sometimes forgotten fact is Thor is not always available for the Avengers because he exist in a much wider universe than most of them.
    • Yes, the guy needs something to do while Jane is busy being better than Pepper.
    • the film seemed to indicate Thor was invested in the Avengers due to HYDRA's theft of Loki's scepter. JARVIS mentions other bases and the team knows about Strucker so they've probably been spending time dismantling HYDRA. After the scepter was found Thor probably intended to retire for a bit to spend more time with Jane.

     Tony's Iron Man again? 
  • At the end of Iron Man 3, Tony destroys all his suits so he can start a new life without them. However, he's back in the superheroing game in AOU with zero explanation. What happened?
    • The intention of that ending wasn't that Tony had retired being Iron Man, he even outright says "I Am Iron Man". Him destroying the suits was simply his way of acknowledging to himself that he had gotten over his PTSD and no longer needed to build things to distract himself. Then, in the opening of this movie, Wanda re-triggers those feelings by showing him the vision of the Avengers dead and the Chitauri invading Earth.

    The end is coming... or is it? 
  • When they first fought against the twins, Wanda induced weird dreams in the Avengers. Stark dreams that the team is dead and it's somehow his fault, Thor dreams that Heimdall is blind and all Asgardians dead, Black Widow dreams with ballet, Captain America dreams about a "normal" return from the war... troubling, but just dreams. So, why is Thor's dream treated as some kind of prophecy, when the others are clearly not?
    • Well, first of all, the dreams of Cap and Natasha were about their respective pasts, so obviously they couldn't have been prophecies. Tony's dream probably was a prophecy too, most likely we'll see something like that happening in Infinity War (especially if the movie follows the plot of The Infinity Gauntlet), but since Tony is a man of science, he probably just thinks the dream was reflecting his inner fears, and he doesn't even consider it could've been prophetic. Thor, on the other hand, is an Asgardian, and most likely he's able to recognize the effects of the Infinity Stones, so even though he doesn't yet know Wanda's powers were enhanced by the Stone, he realizes the dream may not have been just a dream. But he needs confirmation, so he seeks out the magical pool, which does indeed confirm that the dream was a prophecy, as well as the fact that the Infinity Stones are involved.
    • I saw it as an unintended side effect of Wanda's powers. Everyone else on the Avengers team is human. Altered or enhanced, maybe, but still human. Thor is an Aesir in his biology. Why wouldn't her powers have a slightly different effect on him?
    • Alternately, Thor just had a lucky guess. His dream was nothing more than a twisted dream, which Thor misunderstood to have hidden meaning. So he seeks out the magic pool where the water spirits judge him worthy and decide to turn his dream into a genuine vision by hinting at the larger picture behind this current conflict (that someone is after the Infinity Stones). It does result in Thor going back to Asgard to find out more information. And we all know there's a certain trickster sitting on Asgard's throne who could tell Thor exactly what he wants to know.
    • What Wanda seems to do is catch people's most deep-seated fears and traumas. Thor and Stark's were over what might happen, so they interpreted them as visions (Thor worrying about leading Asgard to ruin, and Stark about getting all his friends killed). Steve's played on his being from a different time, and the life he never got to have with Peggy. Natasha's was the horror she went through in her training, and the sterilization - representing that she feared she could never be anything else other than a killer. So Steve and Natasha's achilles heels are from what they either did or didn't do, while Thor and Stark's are from what they may do. Therefore the latter two interpret it as a vision when it's really just Wanda messing with their minds.

    No Endor Holocaust 
  • If the chunk of Sokovia had enough potential energy due to its height above ground to wreck humanity's shit even without its velocity being accelerated by the engines - Ultron specifically cites billions of deaths - splitting it into smaller chunks shouldn't have affected the total impact, as Shoemaker-Levy demonstrated. I know there would be no plot otherwise, but that's still a glaring omission, especially since Joss would be savvy enough to know about the trope namer.
    • The fact that many of the chunks of land ended up landing in a body of water (which likely decelerated their speed) may have something to do with this.
    • The point of blowing it up was to break the landmass into small enough pieces that they'd vaporize in the atmosphere (or just vaporize from the initial explosion). Anything left lands in the water. There might be some big waves, but nowhere near an extinction event, or even a minor catastrophe.
    • Also, it wasn't just about the potential energy — the whole point of that final battle was to stop Ultron from activating the giant jet boosters which would accelerate the city back to Earth. Without those firing, the impact would be greatly reduced.
    • The Nerdist ran the numbers for this, and even if the entirety of the chunk of Sokovia had struck earth from that height, then the impact would have yielded "only" 25 megatons. Hell, even a free fall from orbit wouldn't have been enough to cause a true extinction event. Of course, Ultron planned to accelerate the city, not just to drop it.
    • Yes the acceleration and the resulting shockwave would have been the real damage. But even still, a shower of debris is preferable. Presumably there were also agents ensuring that everyone got clear from where the debris was expected to fall.
    • Civil War confirmed that debris from the detonation still killed people outside of the city itself. Zemo's family was among them.

    Sam Wilson's search for Bucky 
  • With Falcon becoming an official Avenger at the end of the film, what does this mean for the search that Wilson was conducting for Bucky Barnes?
    • If they're still looking for Bucky I imagine SHIELD will put someone else on the trail. Someone whose skillset actually includes finding people who Don't want to be found.
    • The Stinger for Ant-Man confirms that they found him.
    • That stinger is footage from Civil War and takes place after Ant Man. Listen to the dialog — Cap mentions "the Accords," which presumably refers to the MCU's version of the registration act.
    • Have we confirmed for a fact that it's Civil War footage? Sure he mentions Accords, but we can assume that a couple months have passed since the events of Ultron, more than enough time for the World Security Council to pass some quick superhero regulations.
    • It doesn't make sense for it to be anything else. Either it's teaser footage from something that's coming up (which they did with Captain America's first movie) or they put one of the most anticipated moments from Cap's series in the stinger of a movie that otherwise has nothing to do with Cap's storyline. Which of those makes any sense?
    • Long story short: they tried to track down Bucky, but he was very good at hiding, so Sam kept on working with the rest of the Avengers to track down Crossbones instead. The scene with Bucky in Ant Man did take place in Civil War, but it was after Bucky's programming was reactivated by Zemo, and the vise was used by Steve and Sam to lock him in place until they were sure Bucky was back in control.

    The Final Legionnaire 
  • What happened to the Iron Legion drone that stole the scepter and departed for Strucker's base in Sokovia? It was presumably still intact, but we never seen Ultron using it as a part of his forces.
    • It flew to the base, gave Ultron the scepter, then was likely converted into an Ultron drone.
    • Rolling with that theory, Ultron's main body may have actually been built from said drone.
    • The drone that steals the scepter is Iron Legion-05, so if it was what Ultron's Prime body was made from, that would make for an interesting reference to Ultron-5, the original name for comics Ultron

    Klaue's Brand 
  • How did Klaue escape Wakanda with a stockpile of Vibranium, but also be captured and branded by them? Wouldn't the Wakandan government have confiscated the Vibranium after capturing him?
    • Presumably the incident that resulted in the brand happened a long time before the film, meaning that the theft of the Vibranium isn't what he received the brand for.
      • He tells Ultron that the Vibranium came at great personal cost to him while rubbing the brand. So no, the film seems to imply the theft of the vibranium is what the Wakandans branded him for.
    • He probably didn't smuggle it all at once. He may have done it gradually, got caught the last time, and they branded him and took his last batch, not knowing he had stolen more beforehand.
    • Maybe he shipped the vibranium and was captured afterwards, so the wakandans got to him but not to the vibranium.
    • Black Panther establishes that Klaue stole a quarter ton of vibranium with inside help from Prince N'Jobu and killed a bunch of Wakandan citizens during his getaway. The branding is probably from a Wakandan spy who tried to take him on later.

     Bruce gone AWOL? 
  • The ending shows that Bruce flew off in the Quinjet and has gone AWOL, and that SHIELD can't track him and has no idea where he is. How can that be possible? After all, aircrafts can be tracked in several different ways, right? Maybe SHIELD'S aircrafts aren't officially registered, but still, doesn't SHIELD have the technology to track their own jets? And even if they don't, there's nowhere on Earth that the Hulk could go where he wouldn't be recognized. Maybe he's setting us up for a Planet Hulk-like scenario in the future, or he's going to team up with the Guardians of the Galaxy, but the Quinjet doesn't seem properly equipped to handle space travel. Where can he go that he won't be found, anyway?
    • Well, Fury did find the jet pretty quickly, but by then it had crashed and Banner was gone. As for where he will hide, Bruce has spent his entire Hulk life hiding so he'll be good at making do with little resources. Fury has proven he knows its better to leave him alone anyway. Maybe a future movie may involve the hulk being captured by aliens for his power, justifying a cross over with GOTG, but for now we don't really know what plans they are.
    • The ship has gone missing because it has a cloaking device.
    • Fury's already seen SHIELD infiltrated and turned against him once. He may well have deliberately made the Avengers' Quinjet untraceable by SHIELD's usual methods, just in case.
    • SHIELD Quinjets come standard with cloaking devices as of the events of Winter Soldier. All one has to do is disable the transponder and its pretty much invisible.
    • As said above, the jet was found eventually. Banner has a head start and Fury is just simply choosing not to try and find him. They clearly would be able to; they're just opting not to.
    Nuclear codes on the internet? 
  • After Ultron escapes Stark tower through the internet Tony mentions Ultron could acquire nuclear codes. Based on my limited knowledge of hacking I doubt nuclear codes would be accessible through the internet, as those are probably in a secure network.
    • Ultron may do this because Everything Is Online.
    • "Secure network" is an oxymoron. Anyone who has actually worked in cybersecurity can tell you incredible horror stories about the utterly atrocious gaps and holes in cybersecurity. For example, for a long time the Pentagon's own internal secured network, which was airgapped from the regular network, was actually unbelievably vulnerable to attack because no one bothered installing even basic antivirus software because they assumed it being airgapped was sufficient security. And while it prevented direct access, it didn't prevent viruses and other malware from getting onto the thumb drives that were being used to move data to and from the secure network and the one hooked up to the internet.
    • The problem is the codes aren't in a network at all. They're actual hardcopy printed on a little plastic card carried by an aide near the president at all times. Even if Ultron went and murdered the president and stole them it would be useless because the codes are merely sent to authentic the order to begin an attack, that order is then transmitted via ANOTHER set of codes to the actual launchers where two at least operators must then insert physical keys to arm the weapons. In other words Ultron couldn't do jack. Nuclear weapon control is basically 40s era technology which ironically makes it immune to any attempt at remote hacking, exactly as intended.
    • Replace "codes" with "controls" or "protocols" (since they are networked) and the problem goes away. Tony was just imprecise.

     Age of the Maximoffs 
  • When Cap knocks out Quicksilver in Africa, he says "stay down, kid." Maybe I'm reading too much into an offhand line, but how old are the Maximoffs supposed to be? Because Chris Evans and Aaron Taylor Johnson are literally only nine years apart in age (6/13/81 and 90), so it seems a little patronizing (and maybe that was the idea) for a 30something to call a 20something a "kid."
    • Well considering Captain America has been frozen since the 1940s, I'd say that gives him an excuse to call Quicksilver a kid. There's also the fact that calling someone a kid doesn't necessarily coincide with physical and chronological age. It could be anything like maturity level, experience, etc., and Cap has more experience and maturity than either of the Maximoffs.
    • In Avengers, Cap calls a guy "son" who is an absolute max of about 5 years younger than him. It's just a thing he says, because he's from the 40s.
    • WandaVision establishes the twins were born in 1989, the same year as Elizabeth Olsen.

     Superhero salary 
  • Do the Avengers get paid working under Stark Industries? Widow, Hawkeye and Cap would all have been paid as SHIELD agents, but obviously after Winter Soldier that's no longer happening. I ask because Steve says he has trouble affording a place in Brooklyn, but surely being financed by Stark Industries as the leader of the world's foremost global peacekeeping team would leave him with a good chunk of change.
    • Tony probably pays all their expenses. Cap was clearly just dodging the issue about the apartment, since his character arc in the movies revolves around his inability to settle down.
    • Even if Cap does receive a reasonable salary, he still might feel like a Brooklyn apartment is insanely expensive and he shouldn't be spending that much for a place of his own. He's still getting used to how much more everything costs in the 2010s, after all.
    • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier confirms that the Avengers weren't paid by Tony. They could've relied on donations from the public, their own separate income, or licensing their brand.

     Weren't Natasha and Hawkeye lovers in the first movie? 
  • Were there hints of a romance between Hawkeye and Black Widow in the first movie? I get the feeling they retconned Hawkeye's relationship status just to set Natasha up with Dr. Banner. If there was a romance between them in the first movie, does that mean Hawkeye was cheating on his wife?
    • Widow denies having feelings for Hawkeye to Loki. "Love is for children; I came to settle a debt". Given as she's truthful about her dark history, which would have far worse consequences if discovered than merely discovering her crush on a friend would, there's little reason to believe she's lying. Their interaction afterward once Hawkeye is freed is platonic; Hawkeye and Widow merely look out for each other as friends. No hand holding, no held gazes, almost kisses, or double entendre statements. It's just friendship.
    • I like to think Nat and Clint are attracted to each other in addition to being friends — I mean, look at them, they're not exactly hideous — but they'd never actually do anything, since he's married.
    • This is actually a problem, since in Winter Soldier Nat's wearing a necklace with an arrow on it. The only reason to wear a piece of jewelry with the personal symbol of a man you're not sleeping with is if he's a very close blood relative, dead, or preferably both—especially if he's involved with someone else. Having Clint turn up with a wife and kids utterly torpedoes that character moment for Natasha, even more than her relationship with Bruce does.
    • It's an established part of their backstory that Clint had orders and opportunity to kill Natasha - who truly believes that it would have been well deserved - and Clint chose to save her instead. In turn, she's one of the few people he's trusted with knowledge of his family (and she's pretty damn close with Laura and the kids). They're the most influential people in each other's lives, and I'd bet that, when it comes down to it, they consider each other to be family.
    • Because it's utterly impossible for two friends to have given one another gifts, and to wear those gifts. It's only a problem if you insist on this completely arbitrary "rule."
    • Gifts are great. Gifts with your personal symbol on them? Yeah, no. Consider being a married man and you give your best female friend a necklace with your initials or Zodiac sign. You don't think your wife would side-eye that in a big way?
    • Some adults in adult relationships actually trust their significant other and realize that, while they're very close to their friends, that's just what they are: Friends. Again: This is only a problem because of an arbitrary rule you're insisting exists.
    • There's literally nothing between them in the first movie that could be interpreted as Ship Tease. Natasha has no problem flirting with Stark, Banner and Steve. But she and Hawkeye have a clear Like Brother and Sister relationship in the first film.
    • ...because no one who's in a relationship ever flirts?
    • Gifts aren't always a measure of relationship. Here's a real life example: Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The two of them are very close, to the point that Leo once gave her a "friendship ring", they've played lovers in several movies, and at her wedding he was the one giving the bride away. Yet they're still just friends, and he's an honorary uncle to her kids. They've joked about having an affair many times but never taken it seriously. If that can happen in real life, then it could happen in fiction too.
    • For all we know, Hawkeye's wife and kids have necklaces like that. They jointly gave one to Natasha to help her feel like a member of the family.
    • Also, if the movies are following the comics, Natasha is a Sagittarius, the symbol for which is an arrow. Maybe it's a double entendre. But is there Word of God that says that the necklace is a gift, or are we just assuming? Maybe Natasha's just into astrology.
    • I believe Scarlett Johansson said she picked the necklace to represent how close Nat and Barton are. But nothing is mentioned in any of the movies.
    • Contrary to popular belief, sometimes when two people claim that they're not romantically involved, it's because they're actually not romantically involved.

     Ultron Takes Natasha But Lets The Cradle Go? 
  • In Seoul, Ultron quickly grabs Natasha (and stashes her with radio equipment presumably as a gambit for the Avengers to find & face Ultron in Sokovia). That is all well and good. But why wouldn't he grab the cradle? Or, at the minimum, tail the cradle, call in reinforcements, & get the cradle back. When Ultron faced Vision near the end, Ultron seemed genuinely pissed that "new body opportunity" was taken from him, and the cradle seemed like a big priority for him right up until it was taken.
    • He was trying during that whole scene to get away with the Cradle. If he could have gotten it, he would have. He didn't because Widow, Hawkeye and Cap put all their effort into getting it away from him, had a stealth ship, and Ultron didn't have a bunch of reinforcements on hand. That's kind of the whole plot of that sequence.

    The Vision Legion 
  • Can the Vision take control of the Iron Legion or the Ultron drones? It seems likely that he could, as he was intended to be Ultron's final body and Ultron wanted to keep control of his drones. Why then does the Vision not try taking control of the drones during the final battle? And then could Tony thus enact the Ultron Protocol with Vision commanding the drones protecting the world?
    • While it's likely Vision could take control of the drones, Ultron already had control of them and keeping them intact would give Ultron a place to store his consciousness and survive the battle. The point of locking Ultron out of the internet and destroying all the drones was to ensure that he wouldn't have an escape route and would permanently expire when the Avengers destroyed his last body.

    Bullet trajectory 
  • This one is kind of nitpicky, but I'm not sure I totally follow the logic behind the placement of Quicksilver's bullet wounds: http://imgur.com/a/Lcwbi. He has them on both his back and his front, but he was shielding Hawkeye and the kid while running (otherwise they would have gotten hit as well), so he must have run sideways while carrying them with his back taking the bullets. So how did he get the ones on his chest? The car he put Hawkeye behind seems to have taken some bullets as well, but then that just raises even more questions of how exactly the car was able to shield them at all. And then afterwards Hawkeye clutches his side with blood as if a bullet grazed him... you know, the more I type this, the more questions I have, so I'll stop there.
    • Exit wounds.
    • I always thought he was moving at his top speed and running straight into the bullets, not just shielding them.
    • It seemed more as though he pushed them behind the car. While he was doing that, the bullets travelled and he was in the line of fire just as he pushed the two of them out of it.

     Vision lunging at Thor 
  • So... The Vision is "born", he looks at his hand, probably getting used to his new existence, then he looks over at Thor... and makes a threatening lunge before getting flung toward the window and going back into chill mode. I don't get it. Why would you just lunge at someone in your first few moments of life? He wasn't even mad at him or was going to fight him or anything since he just started staring calmly out the window right after. It's such a strange thing to do... Please, someone help me understand it.
    • Honestly, it was probably a bit of an instinctive reaction, possibly due to Loki's imprint on the Mind Stone. As you said, his first act was basically getting used to his existence, and I'm guessing a flash of memory from Loki caused the reaction to attack Thor. But once he got a good look at the skyline of New York and had a chance to really appreciate everything, he calmed down and made his peace. That's my guess, at any rate.
    • I figured it was something like this: Being originally Jarvis, Vision was experiencing a physical body for the first time. Given he was an AI previously, he lunged at Thor the same way he was used (at least instinctively) to approaching everything else (if the Jarvis-Ultron conversation is any indication of the way it "moved" as an AI). Having a physical body turned his curious approach into a lunge.
    • It could have been more of a leap than a lunge. The moment Vision looks up to see where he is, he discovers he's surrounded by Avengers and the twins, so he could have been trying to bolt past Thor, not attack him. Having a bunch of really powerful people staring at you isn't exactly a comfortable situation to be in, even on a normal day; heaven knows how it'd feel for that to happen to you within seconds of achieving a state of self-awareness. The most plausible response to such circumstances is to put some distance between one's self and them. Vision did so, but didn't yet know his own strength or have enough familiarity with a physical body to avoid colliding with Thor in the process.
    • You guys are way over-thinking this. He was just trying to get to the window. The sudden move in such a tense situation made Thor think he was being attacked and throw Vision in the exact same direction he was headed anyway.
     The Mind Stone vs The Tesseract 
  • Q: Does the stone in the scepter being the Mind Stone mess up the explanation for why they were able to close the portal in the Avengers? That Stone being the Mind Stone is a retcon, as Selvig says that "the Tesseract can't fight itself" to Natasha. I mean, what happened happened regardless, but does the retcon make it nonsensical? Or are we to assume that using two stones against each other has the same cancelling out effect?
    • You're a little mixed up here: the reason the scepter was able to close the portal in Avengers was because Selvig designed the generator device with a failsafe, that required the scepter to be used. As far as I can tell, it had nothing to do with the fact that they were Infinity Stones, and I have no idea where you got that line about the Tesseract from, as I've seen the movie several times and I do not remember Selvig saying that at any point.
    • (OP) I know about the failsafe, that's not my question. My issue is whether it still makes sense. And I paraphrased the line by accident, but it definitely is said. You can see it here at 1:16. He says "The Tesseract can't fight. You can't protect against yourself," right before explaining the scepter failsafe. So my issue is whether the failsafe still makes sense after the developments about the scepter in the new movie.
    • I don't see how anything you said retcons that whole scene. What Selvig says is irrelevant, as he doesn't have the full picture (and as shown in Thor: The Dark World, the aftereffects of Loki's mind control drove him a little nuts). He doesn't know that the Tesseract is an Infinity Stone. He doesn't know the Scepter contains an Infinity Stone. At that point, he doesn't even know what the Infinity Stones are! The fact that the Scepter cancelled out the Tesseract's portal was because of the failsafe built into the portal generator itself, not because the Infinity stone effects cancel each other out. There is no evidence to suggest that the Mind Stone cancelled out the effects of the Tesseract, and even if it did, that's not a retcon, as Selvig is not omniscient and couldn't have possibly had the full understanding of the Tesseract or the Scepter at the time.
    • (OP) Okay uh, there is evidence that the Mind Stone can stop the effects of the Tesseract because that's literally how the fail safe works. Even if Selvig doesn't know it's another Infinity stone, that's still how the failsafe works. The Tesseract "can't fight" the scepter. Also, and I just realized this yesterday, didn't Loki use the scepter to access the cube, and that's how he got to the Pegasus Facility in the beginning of the movie? It's totally possible that that's not what happened, but that leads to another question I'll ask elsewhere.
    • There's still not enough information on the Infinity Stones to conclude anything. Hell, the fact that the Scepter was able to shut down the portal may have had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Mind Stone was inside it. Don't forget, Thanos was the one to give Loki the Scepter. Thanos was likely the one to access the Tesseract with the Scepter and Thanos was likely the one who really knew how the Scepter worked. Loki himself clearly didn't have much of a clue, otherwise he wouldn't have needed Selvig's help to build a portal. Maybe Loki's scepter was charged by the Tesseract, and maybe it was that power that allowed Natasha to shut it down. The point remains: How is the fact that the Mind Stone was inside the Scepter a retcon in any way?
    • (OP) When I said it was a retcon I was referring to Selvig's line, which implies that the gem in the scepter is an aspect of the Tesseract. Of course he is ultimately wrong, but was he wrong when the movie initially came out? Or did he only become so later, when they decided to make AoU? Ultimately I'm willing to accept that only the writers can know that. But it still counts as a retcon, even if it is by omission or something like that.
    • (OP)I just came across a reference to what I said on the page for Continuity Drift, so I'm not the only one who's picked it up; that said I don't think there's anyone who could answer my question except maybe Joss Whedon.
    • I'm not sure if a character's line about something he barely understands being disproven is really a retcon, but maybe it is. Still, Selvig had absolutely no knowledge of the Infinity Stones at the time, so he can hardly be claimed to have full knowledge of the subject (not to mention the next film he was in, he had ``kinda`` lost his mind). That said, the original question asked if the reveal that the Mind Stone was inside the Scepter made the ending of the first Avengers nonsensical. The answer: No. Even when the film first came out, a lot of people were speculating that Loki's scepter was actually the Mind Stone, so I'm not sure that it would really count as a retcon, more of a reveal. Hell, when the Avengers movie first came out, it wasn't confirmed that the Tesseract was an Infinity Stone either (it was implied but not outright stated. Thor: The Dark World was what clarified that the Tesseract was an Infinity Stone). As for how the scepter ended up closing the portal, Selvig spells it out: He built a failsafe into the portal generator itself with Loki's scepter as a key. For all we know, the fact that the scepter and Tesseract both contained Infinity Stones had nothing to do with it.
    • When it was first introduced, the Tesseract was a cube. A cube of infinite power, but calling it a "Cosmic cube" was narm, so they used another name. And it was eventually revealed that it was one of the infinity gems, which turns it into a composite item.
  • (OP) Okay, thanks for the answers (and not talking down to me, lol).
    • This mostly depends if they did actually plan on the Staff to be the Mind Stone and the Cube to be the Space Stone when the Avengers was written and filmed, or it's a happy recon that actually works with the overall plot. This could also tie into how the stones will be used in the eventual Infinity War, they recall they used the Mind Stone to Cancel the Space Stone's effects and thusly try to use the stones against each other to stop Thanos or his minions who are using the stones.
    • Selvig didn't know there were such things as Infinity Stones when he built the portal using his knowledge of the Tesseract, he just determined that the energies of the scepter and the cube had some qualities in common. In keeping with Occam's Razor, he assumed this was because the former was powered by the latter, having no cause to suspect that the scepter (which, let's face it, Loki seemed awfully casual about carrying) contained an object of equal cosmic significance. Presumably there's some commonality between all six Infinity Stones's energies, else they wouldn't be considered part of a set and couldn't be successfully merged into a Gauntlet at all.

     "Director" Fury??? 
  • According to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Coulson was the one who sent the Avengers to recover Loki's scepter, then why did Tony call Fury "Director"? Shouldn't all the Avengers have already known that Fury wasn't the Director anymore?
    • With some jobs, especially military ones, you get to keep the title after you retire. And that's leaving aside Tony's idiosyncratic approach to the common courtesies — just as he pretended to believe Coulson's first name was "Agent", he'd probably try to claim that Fury was really called "Director".
    • Also, Phil is still legally dead, so the Avengers don't know he's alive, only Maria does.

    How is the Quinjet legal? 
  • How are the Avengers legally allowed to fly a heavily-armed aircraft below the skyline and between buildings? In post-2001 New York, at that?
    • Screw the rules, the Avengers have connections, money and supernatural powers, and they are doing what's right!
    • MCU heroes are basically celebrities. Laws don't apply to them.
    • More to the point, who exactly are you expecting to stop them?
    • The Avengers are effectively being treated as an arm of law enforcement by the US at this point, so they're apparently allowed to do it, so long as they file a flight plan ahead of time. If a Quinjet from the Avengers is coming in, then the authorities on the ground are likely to be more concerned with what they're showing up to fight than they are with the jet itself.

     Wanda not acknowledging He Who Fights Monsters with her Mind Rape 
  • Why didn't Wanda offer to heal Bruce or the others if she were truly remorseful, given it was pretty easy for her to break into most of the Avengers' minds and possibly turn them into time-bombs like Tony? Bruce is the most egregious, since Wanda compelled to attack civilians and he threatened to snap her neck without going green; why didn't Wanda acknowledge that she screwed up with him the most and try to undo the mental damage?
    • Because they are a bit busy trying to prevent human extinction. Besides, it may be easy to think that her attack had a temporary effect, not a lasting one.
    • Who ever said that Wanda could heal anyone or undo mental damage in the first place?
    • Shouldn't that ability to heal or lack of it be addressed then? As the Fridge Horror page noted, Wanda set the movie's plot in motion by bestowing that horrifying vision on Tony. She may be an Avenger now and using her powers for good, but she's partly responsible for the original team breaking up and possibly carrying their scars into Civil War.
    • And Tony's partly responsible for Extremis. Natasha is responsible for all sorts of terrible things. Yes, she did something bad. She's moving on and trying to atone for it. She doesn't seem to have the ability to magically fix things, so she's doing what she can instead.
    • Wanda is new to her powers and doesn't have full control of them, particularly when she gets upset. She's just lost her brother, her home city, and her entire world-view about who the good and bad guys are, and she holds herself to blame for all the death and destruction which Ultron unleashed: not because she'd meant it to happen, but because she'd set those events in motion by mucking with the Avengers' minds and then completely misreading Ultron's intentions. Would it really be wise for her to try to poke around in those same peoples' heads again, even if she's trying to help them, when her own head's still an emotional basket case?

     Geographical inaccuracies 
  • How did Hulk get from an unnamed coast to Johannesburg so quickly? Joburg is too far away from any coastlines for him to get there in such a short time. It would take at least 30 minutes to an hour for him to jump all the way there from the closest coast.
    • He stole a motorbike.
    • The distance from Johannesburg to the closest coastline is over 500 kilometers. Even with a very fast motorbike, it would take a few hours for Hulk to get there.
    • The exact city was not specified in the movie, so it could have been another coastal South African city, or even an entirely fictional one.
    • This is the same Hulk who ran/leaped all the way from Rio to Guatemala before he got sleepy enough to take a nap and revert to Banner. Sure, he was The Other Darrin at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that the MCU Hulk can really motor when he's on the move.

     Heart rate raising Widow 
  • Why is it a problem that Natasha can't have children when Bruce can't even have sex? In his solo movie it was established that if his heart rate is above a certain point he Hulks out. Or are they planing in vitro just after dating?
    • It's not. Widow is A. relating to him ("You can't have kids? I can't either, so we have that in common.") and B. cutting off the idea that his inability to have kids is a reason they shouldn't have a relationship ("Your inability to have kids doesn't matter, because I can't anyway.")
      • Moreover, they have in common that they both can't have kids and wish they could. Ruffalo's little ad-lib in the previous Avengers actually made that fact the first personal thing Banner'd ever confided in Natasha; now, she's repaying the favor, admitting she's unhappy about her mandated sterilization to empathize with him rocking that empty cradle in India.
    • Op here. It makes sense. It is just that the movie makes it seem like that is Black Widows opener.
    • And the first Avengers movie suggests he can control his transformation to a degree, whereas during his solo movie that wasn't the case. It's possible he can have sex now.
    • He was always angry, thus can go Hulk anytime. It is not stated or demonstrated that he wont go Hulk if he is angry and/or has high heart rate.
    • And by Thor: Ragnarok he's able to keep the Hulk under control somewhat.

     "I didn't sell him anything" 
  • Tony claims not to have sold Klaue anything and this does fit with his idealism about weapons manufacturing pre-IM1, but Klaue seems to know him very well and the expression 'give your friends rich and you enemies rich and wait to find out which is which' heavily implies Tony did sell to him. Do we think Tony was lying to the Avengers on that point?
    • That doesn't imply Tony sold to him. It implies that Klaue was aware of Tony and had heard him say that before. I could name catchphrases from a dozen high-profile figures who I've never met and who've never sold me anything personally.
    • Quote Klaue: "Stark. Tony Stark used to say that. To me" It's definitely more than just overhearing it. Doesn't necessarily mean he sold to him I suppose, but is at odds with Tony's idealism about weapons manufacturing.
    • It's entirely likely the two met at an arms dealing convention, and interacted, but Stark never did business with Klaue for whatever reason(s).

     Escaping to Asgard? 
  • Why didn't the Avengers opt to use the Bifrost to temporarily recuperate on Asgard, then head back to stop Ultron when they're ready? A Norse kingdom out in space seems much safer to hide from foreign governments and killer robots than say, Clint's house in the middle of nowhere.
    • I don't see why they would. Retreating that far away puts them out of the loop and Ultron is an ongoing problem — they don't want him to start something while they're a galaxy away. And besides that, while they're on Earth, they're doing other things to work against him, like Tony rooting out the hacker stopping Ultron from getting nuclear codes. Plus, their ticket to Asgard buggers off five minutes after they get to Clint's. It's just plain not something they would have considered.

     Avengers vs Maximoffs 
  • Did the Avengers have any plan for dealing with the Maximoffs? Steve Rogers and Maria Hill talk about them rather nonchalantly, as if they weren't much of a big deal. However, Scarlet Witch is more powerful than any of the Avengers, and nobody can catch Quicksilver. If they hadn't conveniently switched sides, wouldn't the Avengers have been in some serious trouble?
    • More powerful than any of them? Hardly. She's powerful, sure, but in a straight fight, Thor would have easily destroyed her. And Quicksilver is fast, but gets winded very quickly. Cap takes him out pretty easily once he sees him coming. The two of them were absolutely not a match for the Avengers; they were only able to take them out the first time because they struck at them unexpectedly, one at a time.
    • Did you miss the part where Hawkeye easily took Wanda out too?
    • Even ignoring power levels, the twins are still young and presumably still learning to use their powers. (Hydra presumably gave them some training, but Strucker still didn't think they were ready) The Avengers have all had more than enough time and practice to hone their respective abilities.

     Ultron's knowledge of Vibranium? 
  • So until the climax Ultron's grand plan for himself is to build himself a humanoid body out of Vibranium and flesh, how did he know he could do this? As shown in Black Panther, Wakanda is a pretty closed off country, to the point everywhere else considers them a third-world country, nobody knows they are actually a Hyper Advanced society until BP, even then the only Vibranium outside of there is either in Klaue's hands or being held by Captain America, I'm assuming Wakandas' systems aren't connected to the world internet, so how the hell did Ultron know that you can mix Vibranium and flesh to make... Super Flesh?
    • He spared Dr. Cho during his first attack, noting later he did so because he considered her useful for just this very purpose.

     Wanda's influence 
  • Was it ever discussed about how much does Wanda's magic influence a person's mind? Like is it a nudge (like whispering words in someone's ear) or can she dramatically impact the emotions people feel to make them do things they normally wouldn't (like by amping up someone's anger, she can make someone grab a gun and kill someone even though it's not in their nature).
    • WandaVision establishes that she can outright possess people, as seen when she compels Hayward's men to turn their guns on him.

    "He will do anything to make things right" 
  • In the exchange between Cap and Wanda after Wanda stops the train, there's this exchange when Steve says Tony is taking possession of the future Vision's body:
    Steve: Stark will take care of it.
    Wanda: No, he won't.
    Steve: You don't know what you're talking about; Stark's not crazy.
    Wanda: He will do anything to make things right.
  • ...how exactly did that get Steve to do a 180 in an instant to "whatever Tony plans to do with the cradle isn't good?"
    • It's possible that Steve, who had been shown to have possible sympathy for the Maximoffs and maybe trusted them more after they helped, thought that maybe they weren't completely wrong and wanted to go to the Tower to see what Tony and Bruce were doing. When he saw they were in the process of making a new android out of the body Ultron had been building and not getting rid of it, he didn't trust them in regards to this situation anymore.


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