Headscratchers / Avengers: Endgame

Headscratchers for Avengers: Endgame.

New questions on the bottom. Spoilers will be unmarked.

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• Headscratchers on Timelines and Time Travel

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Why does Clint get the Soul Stone if Natasha committed suicide?

• You have to sacrifice someone to earn the stone. Since Clint did everything to stop it from happening that means he didn’t make the choice.
  • Didn't he release her hand in the end of their fight? Doesn't that count as making a choice?
    • Natasha pushed off the mountain causing Clint to lose his grip.
  • You had to lose that which you love, a soul for a soul. There's no stipulation that you have to kill them yourself.
  • There's no indication that it's completely literal; in fact, the visions and the guardian seem to suggest otherwise. It's a mystical trial of loss and sacrifice, to test worthiness to carry the soul stone. Honestly the fact that Clint was willing to sacrifice himself was proof of that. Red Skull certainly doesn't seem to disapprove during their fight, so long as one of them dies and the other is forced to carry the weight of that death it fulfills the purpose of the exercise.
  • Think of it like the trial has a kind of "loss detector". By Natasha dying, the "loss detector" picked up what Hawkeye was feeling and gave him the stone.
  • Alternative interpretation: Clint didn't earn the soul stone by loss or by sacrifice, because he didn't earn it at all. Instead, Natasha is the one who sacrificed, and she's the one who earned the stone. Clint received the stone afterward because the magic recognized him as her 'designated recipient', or just because he was the only person still around when her sacrifice triggered the magic.
  • Given the parameters, reluctance is par for the course.

Uhhhh, where's Mjölnir?

• Steve took Mjolnir with him when he traveled back to the past, however when he took the slow path back and met up with Sam and Bucky as an old man, Mjölnir was nowhere to be seen. Not exactly something you want to leave just lying around...
  • It's last seen with Steve when he departs to return the Infinity Stones, on the time machine portal. Given that the Aether/Reality Stone was taken from Asgard at the same time as Mjölnir, it's implied that he's also returning it at the same time it was taken. Trimming the branches, and all that.
  • Yeah, pretty sure he took it with him to return it, not to use it. Removing it from that timeline would be just as likely to cause a bad alternate reality as removing the stones, considering that Thor was about to need it to fight the Dark Elves.
  • Indeed. And given that when Past Thor does need to battle the Elves, he's bound to just summon Mjolnir to his hand, it doesn't really matter where Steve leaves the hammer: it'll fly to Past Thor's grip from wherever Rogers sets it down, leaving the God of Thunder none the wiser that his weapon had gone walkabout with his future self and a talking rabbit.

How can Hulk and Iron Man use the Infinity Stones from an another universe/timeline?

• In one of the episodes of Loki, it is explained that the Infinity Stones can not be used outside its own universe/timeline. How can Hulk and Iron Man snap with these Infinity Stones from different universes?
  • They only said they don't work in the TVA's realm.
  • Technically, they were using the gems from their own universe, but from a different time point.

Scott's van?

• The van is in a storage unit for "Lang". But it shouldn't belong to Scott in the first place - according to "Ant-Man" it belonged to Luis! I guess maybe Luis signed it over to the firm, and if they all got dusted with no-one but Scott leaving any heirs, Cassie ("Lang") might have inherited all their stuff including the van.
  • But that just poses more questions. For one thing, Hank Pym installed a Quantum tunnel in the back. It seems extremely improbably that a control-freak like Hank Pym would install his proprietary tech in someone else's vehicle, so presumably by the end of "Ant-Man and the Wasp" the van belonged to him? (Though you'd have to wonder why, in this case, he didn't get rid of the annoying horn sound. Unless Janet convinced him it had flair or something.) Again, if the Pyms all got dusted, he might have left some of his stuff to Scott and Cassie. But certainly not a Quantum tunnel!
  • Or, if we go by "Quantumania", Cassie is apparently a science genius who studied the Quantum Realm during their five-year absence. In which case it might sense that the van would have gone to her - but not that she'd keep it in storage! A van is useful for transportation if nothing else, and again, this one has a Quantum tunnel in the back! Why wouldn't she have kept it somewhere more accessible?

Sorry about HYDRA, but...

• Okay, Cap goes back to 1970 to live his life with Peggy. Cool, that's acceptable. Does he just... not mention that the organization she founded has been infiltrated by Nazis? For that matter, he also knows Bucky is off getting tortured somewhere and just lets that happen?
  • We don't know what he did during all that time. The one scene we saw is him dancing with Peggy in their home. There's probably more going on offscreen that we don't know about. Perhaps the original Cap goes back to the past, surprises Peggy, informs her that SHIELD is infiltrated by HYDRA sleeper agents, and they take care of that before they could have a chance to take over the organization from within, saving Bucky while they're at it as well. Of course, this still leaves us the fact that there should be two Caps at the same time in that timeline: the original Steve and the one that's still stuck in the ice, and obviously only one of them will get to spend the life with Peggy, so...another headscratcher?
  • As much as he hated it, Steve figured it was better to let HYDRA continue and Bucky captured to not mess up history even more. Like it or not, HYDRA's secret work did influence SHIELD and their technology, and removing that could mess up things like the formation of the Avengers.
  • "The one thing I regret is that you never got to live yours." That's what elderly-Peggy said to Steve when she told him about how their respective lives worked out. Was she talking about him vanishing into the ice, as everyone's assumed for years? Or was she really talking about how, having returned to the past, he had to suppress his heroic side, rather than risk disrupting the timeline and undoing everything the Avengers had sacrificed so much to accomplish? Yes, it'd be a terrible burden for Cap to have to stand on the sidelines and do nothing, but if it's what's necessary, that's what he'll do, because future Bucky and his teammates and trillions of others would be depending on him to do so.
  • There is no going back to the 'original' past. The second Steve arrived he created an alternate timeline, one where he's free to change history however he wants without affecting the main timeline. As for how he got back to the main timeline for the epilogue, he still had the suit and enough Pym particles to travel back to where he started.
  • But if he used Pym particles to travel back to where he started, wouldn't he have come out of the time machine they were watching? Throughout the movie, they needed the suits, the particles, AND a time machine (Tony's or Scott's) and that was the only one nearby...
  • He probably didn't use the Pym particles. He just likely waited 75+ years from the point in the past he went back to and made sure he arrived at that location on that particular date and time to let everyone know what happened and hand off his shield to Sam.
  • But it's explicitly stated multiple times that this isn't how time travel works. If going back and killing Baby Thanos doesn't result in a dead Thanos in the present, then Cap going back and marrying Peggy shouldn't result in Old Man Cap in the present. He would have created an alternate timeline, and our present-day Bucky and Sam wouldn't have seen him again.
  • Nitpicking here, but based on the cars we see in the final scene, Cap went back quite a bit further than 1970.
  • There's at least one case of jumping to a different destination instead of back to the platform (Tony and Steve going from 2012 New York to 1970 Camp Lehigh to recover the Tesseract and get some more Pym particles for the extra jump). Apparently, Steve did that to jump back to his own time, lived his life on an alternate timeline, and eventually jumped back to the main timeline (presumably after Peggy passed away and there was nothing left for him on that timeline but painful memories).
  • My interpretation is that time travel cannot actually change anything in the past (as Hulk explains). The Ancient One explains this is because of the Infinity Stones, so things only change if one gets removed which is why they have to be brought back. Any other change gets corrected by the Infinity Stone which means Loki may actually be alive since he used the power of an Infinity Stone to change his fate. Old Cap is in the same timeline because he just never returned but nothing could be changed because of the stones. There is only one timeline, it just isn't a straight line anymore.

Where (who, why, how) is Gamora?

• Past Gamora saves Quill, then attacks him because she doesn’t know him yet. Then she just... vanishes? Presumably, she didn’t get dusted, but we don’t see any evidence of her leaving the battlefield either.
  • She pulled a Winter Soldier exit but will more than likely be back for GotG 3.
  • She wasn't there for the funeral; presumably, she decided to take off at some point during or after the final battle. You can see that the Guardians are searching for her on the holographic screen that Quill and Thor are arguing over, so she wasn't dusted and isn't on Earth anymore.
  • Well now we have an idea what Guardians 3 might be about.
  • The Search for Gamora.
  • A deleted scene shows that she walked away as soon as the battle had ended while Nebula and Quill had noticed Stark had died and were distracted grieving.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 reveals that she joined Stakar Ogord's faction of the Ravagers.

For that matter, why not Gamora?

• Did Peter Quill ever learn about how time travel was involved in everyone getting snapped back? Cos you know he'd use it to go to Vormir at the same time Gamora was there, then swoop in with his rocket boots after Gamora is flung over the cliff to Big Damn Heroes her. We know another Peter does the same later...

Captain America, the... god of Thunder?

• So is Cap was able to lift, use, and psychically call Mjölnir to him — he was judged worthy by the hammer. Fine. But why was he able to summon lightning with it? In Thor: Ragnarok, one of the main themes was that Thor's power was in himself and that his hammer was unnecessary and simply a conduit for his power; when his hammer got destroyed and he was forced to rely on himself, he was still able to summon lightning, implying that his "power" was that very ability to use lightning, and not just something that originated from Mjölnir. So... how is Cap suddenly calling down lightning bolts? Did Thor somehow charge it before the battle (like in that moment when he called both Stormbreaker and Mjölnir to him and lightning crackled through him and the weapons) and Cap was just using that?
  • Odin said, "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." Cap was worthy of possessing the hammer, therefore he has the power of Thor.
  • Think about it this way: while Mjölnir existed, Odin used it to lock down the power of Thor. The power of Thor. It's Thor's power. He doesn't need Mjölnir to access it once Mjölnir is destroyed. Mjölnir isn't granting him the power, it was only restricting his access to it. Meanwhile, while Cap has an active Mjölnir and is judged "worthy", he also has access to Thor's power.
    • That's actually a really interesting way of looking at it; Steve is channeling Thor's power while the power remains within Thor.

Captain America's confusing conclusion

• Captain America concludes that after he returned the Infinity Stones and Mjölnir to their original points in the alternate timelines, he goes back to the past of the "Original" timeline after Thanos is defeated and decided to take The Slow Path and enjoys the peaceful life with Peggy. Problem is, shouldn't there be two Captain Americas, then? If the OG Cap went back to a point in the past of the Original timeline, his past self should still have been stuck in the ice. So...did he just leave him right there waiting for SHIELD to discover him in the present? Also, if he went back to the past, then he obviously wouldn't stand by and watch HYDRA take over SHIELD from within, so he had to take care of that and saves Bucky from being brainwashed as well. If all this happened in the original timeline, then it means Captain America had succeeded in changing history instead of creating an alternate timeline because the original Bruce, Sam, and Bucky still remember him and their prior adventures together in the present day. Steve's conclusion is the only one that doesn't make sense at all.
  • Original Capsicle stays put, so he'll be revived in 2011/2012, and presumably, the events of the original Avengers movie where he met Bruce stayed much the same, and he'll have met Sam while jogging in Central Park. Winter Soldier is where the timeline goes pear-shaped, since that story just doesn't work if HYDRA was rooted out of SHIELD and Bucky remained brainwashed. The most logical conclusion is that Future Cap decided not to deal with HYDRA and Bucky, despite how much he must have wanted to, to keep the timeline as normal as possible and in the knowledge that Capsicle would eventually be in a position to right those wrongs.
  • Okay, but that still leaves the issue of two Captain Americas being present at the same time. The Future Cap who stayed with Peggy throughout the rest of their lives means some events have to be changed, like Future Cap's reunion with the elderly Peggy in The Winter Soldier. If Peggy had lived her life with the Future Cap beforehand, then she shouldn't really react so shocked when she sees Capsicle again (unless we handwaved it as her suffering from Alzheimer's or willingly keep the very existence of Future Cap secret for the rest of her life until Future Cap decides to reveal himself to his friends when the time is right).
  • She could have been shocked to see him so young again, or that Old Steve hadn't told her that was the day he'd be stopping by. Alternately, she's just a good actress (as spies should be) and didn't want to give the truth away to Young Steve, lest it changes his future actions in a way that might impede the Unsnappening or prevent him from coming back to her in the past.
  • There is no going back to the 'original' past. The second Steve arrived he created an alternate timeline, one where he's free to change history however he wants without affecting the main timeline. As for how he got back to the main timeline for the epilogue, he still had the suit and enough Pym particles to travel back to where he started.
  • But if he used Pym particles to travel back to where he started, wouldn't he have come out of the time machine they were watching? Throughout the movie, they needed the suits, the particles, AND a time machine (Tony's or Scott's) and that was the only one nearby...
  • Maybe be returned to that platform an hour or a day earlier just so he could make his dramatic entrance on the bench. Bruce said something to the effect of Steve overshot his return.
  • He has Hank Pym, a time suit, and the basic theories being dimension-hopping and time travel. He could easily come in almost anywhere he wants, and then simply park himself on that bench and wait for them to find him.
  • The main reason Cap would need to stop Hydra is because something bad happens in the future. Which he knows isn't true. Until Winter Soldier, Hydra doesn't prevent a lot of good. Cap knows that that Hydra's infiltration doesn't stop SHIELD from doing its job, and they get defeated pretty quickly once they do try to take over. He doesn't know exactly how Hydra infiltrated SHIELD, nor if fighting that would have a more positive outcome. But he knows him doing nothing will definitely work out.
  • But from The Winter Soldier, we know that Hydra's been carrying out assassinations (including the assassination of Tony's parents) to shape the world to one where it's easier for people to accept their rule, and the idea that Cap would just go "Well, Hydra ends up getting defeated anyway, so I guess I'll just let these people die because it's not like anything really bad happens" seems sort of antithetical to his nature as a hero who is chronically unable to sit back and do nothing.
  • He would be doing exactly what they did in getting all the stones. Not messing with the past. Everything that he knows happened has to still happen to get to the outcome needed. Cap has grown and sacrificed a lot. He's been fighting a war for a long time, and he gets to go home. He can do other small things to try to keep time on track, but he also has learned that he can't just rely on his instincts. He also spent five years trying to help others move on from Thanos, but he never moved on himself.
  • Armed with the knowledge of the future, it’s even possible that Cap is not only merely standing aside and watch the history he knew unfolds, but also actively trying to make sure the pivotal events still happen. (Both good and bad things, making sure HYDRA is not rooted out of SHIELD earlier, letting the assassination of Howard Stark, keeping Nick Fury, Hank Pym and other important figures away from HYDRA, etc)
  • For what it's worth, we've already seen that Steve is willing to stand aside and let history take its course, even if it means not saving people when he has the chance. He didn't rush out into the street and start flipping his shield at the attacking Chitauri when they jumped back to the Battle of New York, did he? Even though there were probably still civilians in the crossfire at the time, whom he could have saved. Steve is extremely disciplined about his mission and principles; if he swore that he wouldn't change history when he decided to stay in the past with Peggy, he'll have stringently adhered to that oath. He's quite possibly the only Avenger who could stick to such a promise, come what may.
  • Alternative theory - the MCU we have been watching is not the 'original' timeline but the alternate branch in which the Captain America from the 'original' appeared in the late 1940s, married Peggy Carter, and whatever actions he did or refrained from doing resulted in the events we've seen. In the true 'original' timeline, Cap never returned.
  • It could be that Cap didn't stay idle or tried to avoid changing history at all. He went to an alternate 1945, was reunited with Peggy, and then the two of them set out to make that timeline the best it could be - rooting Hydra out of SHIELD before it had a chance to fully infiltrate, rescuing Bucky in the '40s, convincing Wakanda to end its isolation and share its technology with the world in the '50s (probably pre-empting the Cold War as well), and then forming the Avengers decades earlier, going out to stop Thanos long before he even thought of collecting the stones, etc. By the time Peggy died and Cap was ready to retire he could take his shield back to Sam in the prime timeline because the alternate universe he had lived in didn't need a Captain America anymore. That world had long been at peace and had well-established heroes to protect it, thanks to his efforts.
    • Though of course, Loki (2021) creates a complication for the above: divergent timelines are nipped at the bud by the Time Variance Authority, which means Steve would only be allowed to live with Peggy if he didn't create further changes to the past. (the possibility of an alternate timeline could happen with the restoration of the multiverse at the end of that series, but that's a discussion for another day)

What happened to the Soul Stone, anyway?

• In addition to the above, Soul Stone is the only Infinity Stone which can't just simply be put back on where it came from. To gain it, one must sacrifice the person they loved the most. Captain America couldn't just simply return it, and if he actually went to Vormir, he'd have found Red Skull again (interesting scenario, though). Did Cap just put the Soul Stone somewhere else instead?
  • Gaining it and putting it back are pretty much the exact opposite thing, so there's no problem. It wouldn't be a surprise at all to learn that the Soul Stone just magics itself back into position if you get it to Vormir.
  • Alternatively, if we keep the 'soul for a soul' ethos, it's not impossible that Cap was able to bring Widow back by returning the stone that she sacrificed herself to retrieve. (Whether she'd want to be brought back is another issue.) Maybe she decided to retire alongside Cap in the past and/or try to do more good that way?
    • "No refunds."
    • Even if the Stone released Natasha's soul, there's no particular reason why she wouldn't still be dead. It's the Soul Stone, not the Life Stone.
  • This seems unlikely, as the conditions to obtain the Soul Stone is treated as an absolute and nonnegotiable in both Infinity War and this movie. Besides, the stones (including the Soul Stone) are implied to have a degree of consciousness, so it's very likely that the Soul Stone will enforce its "no refunds policy" and won't resurrect Romanoff even though it's returned to Vormir.
  • He could just give the stone to Red Skull, and then Red Skull could put it back in its mystical box or whatever. (Though incidentally it might be weird for Cap to meet Red Skull again. Maybe Cap punches him in the face a bunch and then gives him the stone.)

Loki

• In 2012 he manages to escape with the Tesseract; what happened to him?
  • Sequel Hook, perhaps? They're planning to make a Loki spinoff TV series, after all.
  • Or Guardians 3, since Thor is rollin' with them now.
  • That Loki exists in an alternate timeline that doesn't affect the main Loki or his part in the other films. He's probably planning a new attack on his timeline's Asgard, but it's extremely unlikely to be revisited.
  • When Steve returns the stones to their original points in the timeline, presumably that also means ensuring that Loki doesn't escape.
    • Tony & Steve grabbed the space stone from an early point in time. Before Tony was born in fact. Cap would have returned there.
  • How would that be possible? Once Loki's gone in the altered Avengers timeline, he's gone. You can bring the Infinity Stone back, and that'd be nice, but you can't reverse time within that specific timeline so that he never escaped in the first place (unless maybe you want to use the Time Stone, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). If Cap were to go back a little earlier and prevent Loki from disappearing when he returned the Stone, that would only create an entirely new timeline, not do anything about the one in which Loki already got away. This might be where the spin-offs come in.
    • But there's no need for any of this. If Loki escapes with the Tesseract, that means the Space Stone is still inside the timeline. Therefore the flow of time is in no danger, so there's no point to replacing it.
  • Loki (2021) answered it all.

Couldn't the team steal more Pym Particles first?

• So, the issue with using the quantum realm to travel through time is that it requires Pym Particles, which are in short supply and Scott couldn't make more of it because Hank Pym was a victim of Thanos's snap. Okay, that makes sense, but then couldn't they just go and steal Pym Particles from the past first? This is exactly what Tony and Cap did when they time traveled to the '70s after they attempt to steal the Tesseract in 2012 was botched. With more Pym Particles to be used, they can afford to make more tries to gather each Infinity Stone during a period in which it would be safer and less likely to botch the attempt.
  • It somewhat overcomplicates the plan, and judging from how many they found in the lab is of limited profit. They need to field enough avengers to steal five or six shots of the stuff from high security labs, and for large parts of history none of them have any real idea where they would even be kept.
  • An even better plan propose itself then. Travel to a point in time between Infinity War and Ant Man and the Wasp, when Janet is back and Hank would probably of better disposition, and ask him for the formula of the Pym particles. It’s even possible Janet would vouch for the team, as there are hints she’s a borderline liminal being like Frigga or the Ancient One.
  • That's a big ask, and one that runs the risk of Hank still refusing and the team then stuck with even fewer Pym particles than before.
  • So just steal them, as Cap did in the '70s. They just need to steal enough so they can pull off multiple low-risk time heists and after everything gets fixed, they can ask the revived Hank Pym for his stock Pym Particles and return them to the past later. It's not like they're in a race against time, they just have limited resources which should make them be more careful and make the time travels count.
  • (a) There isn't a point between those two movies; they butt right up to each other. (b) Hank is never of better disposition.
  • There is clearly a time skip of at least a few days, perhaps weeks, between Janet come back and everyone getting dusted. Hank had literally enough time to grow a mansion on the beach. However, if getting Janet back doesn’t improve his disposition for sharing his tech, nothing will.
    • "Growing a mansion on the beach", for Hank, means "taking his old townhouse out of a suitcase and triggering its expansion". Ten or twelve seconds, tops, most of which would be spent backing away so he won't get squashed.
  • Note that Scott himself didn't have a clue where the Pyms were hiding, during the period between Civil War and Ant-Man and the Wasp. He only finds out when they approach him and bring him to the lab's temporary current location. For most of the subsequent events, the lab where Hank keeps his Pym Particles is both shrunken and on the move, changing hands like a hot potato in the midst of car-chase chaos: fat chance of Lang pinpointing where to intercept it at any given moment.

How did Valkyrie, Korg, and Miek (and all the refugees in New Asgard) survive Thanos's attack on the Asgardian refugee ship at the beginning of Infinity War?

• At the beginning of Infinity War, the Asgardian ship is in ruins, and it seems that every refugee except Thor, Loki, Hulk, and Heimdall has been slaughtered (not just half of them). And yet, when the gang travels to New Asgard, there is no explanation for why there are still so many living Asgardians (even after the snap). How did they escape the doomed ship?
  • It was explained in the previous film that when Thanos arrives on a planet, he only kills half the people there. He only killed half the Asgardians; the rest were allowed to live.
  • If you watch that scene, you can see a ship flying away. We can assume that had the other half of the Asgardians.
  • Also, Thor notes in Infinity War (during his conversation with the Guardians of the Galaxy) that Thanos only slaughtered half of his people, confirming their survival.

Marvel Leaving

• So Carol is there for the first fight with Thanos... and then basically vanishes until the final conflict. Really? There's no reason the Avengers couldn't use someone of her obvious power with them to deal with the chaos on Earth?
  • Carol openly stated that "there were a lot of planets that need help" and that was before Thanos's actions. The only reason she came back to Earth was to answer Fury's call. With Thanos dead and seemingly no way to fix things, Carol figured she was better off helping other worlds deal with the chaos and let the Avengers handle Earth.
  • To be honest there wasn't much happening on Earth, all the real action took place in the past. And once Thanos showed up in the present she arrived shockingly quickly.
  • A better question would be, why not call her in for the whole time heist thingie. Surely she’d be more useful than fatass Thor and more discrete than Professor Hulk or Rocket.
  • None of them really know her that well, and might not want to put their trust in someone whose core personality trait in the five minutes they spent together was 100% ego. On the other hand even Nebula explicitly bonded with Tony, and the Avengers have clearly kept in touch with her during the five year time skip.
  • It's possible they tried to reach out for the time heist but Carol was too busy with another situation to get there in time (no pun intended) to help.
  • For all we know, Carol arriving during the big battle was her answering the Avengers' summons.
  • The only in-universe explanation is that it would take too long for her to get there, though that seems a weak argument seeing as how she rescued the Benatar from the other side of the galaxy in a few hours. This is one of those things where the primary motivator was pure plot necessity. Carol needed to be far away, because otherwise she would have joined the battle against Thanos early, and together with Thor and Mjölnir Cap it would have been a Curb-Stomp Battle right from the start.
    • The film never states how long it took Carol to reach Tony & Nebula after receiving their distress call.
  • Even that in-universe explanation doesn't hold much water, because there was no real rush to start the time heist. At that point there were no villains and no threat, so it wouldn't have cost them anything to wait a few days while the ultra-powerful demigod flew back to Earth to lend a hand with the whole "one shot to save trillions of lives" thing.
  • Carol's powers are extremely flashy and attract a lot of attention, things that the Avengers wanted to avoid (fighting was barely a factor for most of the heists). One could say the same about Hulk but he made sure to go back to a point in time where another version of himself was already present and transformed so he could still have a chance of not being seen as suspicious.
    • Not to mention she hasn't actually lived on Earth since the 1980s, save for one very brief visit decades ago. She'd be nearly as much a Fish out of Temporal Water as Rogers was, early on, so would tend to stand out in 2012 even without plasma-blasting stuff.
  • We need to separate what we as viewers know about her and what the characters know about her. Oh, she makes big claims as to her powers certainly, but does she demonstrate any of it short of her rescue of Stark? And the same goes for her exploits on other planets - does she provide proof of anything heroic she has done before or after the rescue of Stark? From their point of view; she turns up, acts overly egotistical when talking about herself, and then leaves, only to turn up at the end and then prove herself. There's no problem with believing that they decided that a drunk, overweight Thor and a psychotic Hawkeye were still better bets over someone they barely knew and had no reason to believe could be trusted. The last thing they needed at that point was yet another unknown factor during their last hope to save the universe.
  • Basically, in-universe explanation: Carol needs to police other planets affected by the snap. Out-of-universe explanation: her being out of the pictures gives more room for the original Avengers, this is their send-off movie after all.
  • Given their limited amounts of Pym Particles, Carol would've had to replace one of the others. And arguably, each member of the team had a particular role to play in the heist.
    1. They figured they needed Thor for the Asgard part of the job. Rocket had to go along with him to operate the device they made to extract the Stone from Jane.
    2. Hulk was in the midst of the Battle of New York, so him bouncing around in 2012 Greenwich Village wouldn't have necessarily raised any eyebrows. Whereas Carol showing up would've at the very least drawn the attention of Fury and SHIELD. Plus, Carol herself only knows about events in the Battle of New York secondhand, so wouldn't be familiar enough with how that fight or its aftermath went down to slip through the carnage without altering events.
    3. Nebula was needed to help track down Quill and the Power Stone. They could've sent Carol in place of Rhodey, Black Widow or Hawkeye... but it's plausible that Carol's powers make her really easy to detect. Just think of all the energy she puts out, not to mention the fact that her powers derive from the Tesseract. So sending her to either planet in 2014 might've just been as good as putting up a big "Hey Thanos look over here!" sign, potentially screwing over that reality way sooner than it's prepared for.
    4. So all in all, she might not have been as big help in this particular situation as one might think.
  • Maybe Doctor Strange saw that Captain Marvel appearing would cause a Bad Future, and so he just told her about it?
  • Nah. He was dusted at the time, remember?
  • The surviving Avengers have definitely been keeping in touch with Carol for the intervening five years, so no idea how the commentators above can say "they barely know her." There's even a clearly obvious rapport and camaraderie with her in their stand-up call with Natasha. So, on the one hand, the Avengers are there to deal with "the chaos on Earth" caused by the Snap, while she does the same in a multitude of other, Avengers-less systems (exactly as she said she's been doing.) On the other, why she didn't participate in the Time Heist? There's exactly as much evidence to infer they DIDN'T contact her about it as to infer that they DID—and that, since the Blipping of half the universe BACK into existence would plunge countless worlds into chaos just as much as the Snap did, and they didn't expect there to be a battle at all, they all decided she would be more productive by helping those other worlds deal with their respective messes.
  • Right before the Time Heist, Carol says where she's off to next, they probably won't hear from her in a long time. They didn't bring her on the Time Heist because she was not someplace they could get in touch with her.

Thor taking Mjölnir

• The conversation between the Ancient One and Banner stated that taking something from the past would create a new timeline, but Banner assured her that they would return the stones, and thus the timeline would return to normal. But Thor takes Mjölnir out of 2013, which would create a brand new timeline where the hammer no longer exists from that point. (Maybe the idea was that the alternate timeline still existed, but by giving the stones back it wouldn't just leave them defenseless)
  • He wasn't meant to take it, but then he wasn't meant to speak to his mom either. Why did they bring him again?
  • Mjölnir is on the time platform when Cap returns the stones, so he presumably took that back to Asgard too and restored the original history.
  • You also see Cap pick up Mjölnir before he gets sent back.
  • And he's being sent back to put the stone back to just after it was taken. So Mjölnir will really have only been gone from 2013 for a few minutes.
  • The Russos confirmed that Cap staying in the past created an alternate timeline on its own, so it stands to reason that, though the Banner and Cap believed that they were "clipping the branches" by returning the stones, they weren't actually getting rid of the alternate timelines. They just wouldn't be defenseless/out of balance due to a missing stone.
    • Right, Banner notes that not returning the stones (and presumably Mjolnir) would open up a lot of "really nasty" alternate realities. Meaning that they don't want to make Bad Future alternate timelines, but a good one where Cap got to return to Peggy and be a hero throughout the last half of the 20th century is presumably just fine.
• Why did Thor take it with him at all? He summoned the hammer to see if he was still worthy, which he was and that's fine, but then he takes it with him into the future. At the time no one was expecting to have to fight any supervillains, they were just going to undo the snap and then return the stones. Thanos entering the present is a completely unexpected event that only comes about due to the quirk in Nebula's neural database. So if Thor wasn't expecting to have to use Mjölnir in the present, why bring it with him? He was already warned about the effects of screwing around in the past and that seems like a pretty big thing to screw with.
  • Thor is drunk more or less throughout the movie and it seems he's kind of paying half-attention to the planning session, when he isn't outright passed out, so he might have genuinely not been aware of or cared about that part. At the time he grabs Mjolnir, it's probably as simple as him being excited that he's still worthy and kind of forgetting that he's holding it when he hits the button to go home.
  • Except they weren't warned about screwing with the past. Just the opposite. They were told that, no matter what they do in the past, the present will remain unchanged. So Thor can take Mjolnir back with him, as a keepsake if nothing else, and there will be zero consequences.
  • Possibly Thor had actually been thinking of abdicating his kingship for a while, and he'd intended to use Mjolnir to test Valkyrie (and others?) for worthiness to assume the throne. Had 2014-Thanos not gate-crashed the unSnap, Thor would've gotten another Lift-The-Hammer drinking game going during the subsequant celebration in New Asgard, hopeful that another Vision-caliber candidate would emerge.

Strange portals

• In the grand final battle, Strange opens up huge portals to transport the recently-resurrected heroes and other armies from Wakanda and Titan (and maybe some other places) to help the Avengers in the battle against Thanos's armies. So... it seems that Strange can open an interplanetary portal after all. In Infinity War, why didn't he just open a portal back to Earth after they killed Ebony Maw from the spaceship? He did say that he has to go back to Earth to protect the Time Stone from Thanos's forces, and only agreed to continue and confront Thanos on Titan after Stark managed to convince him. Okay, maybe they going to Titan and losing the battle there is important to the 1/14 million possible outcomes in which they win the overall war. But, he shouldn't have known about it yet because he only used the Time Stone to see the 14 million scenarios while waiting for Thanos on Titan. For all he knew at the time, it would be much safer bet to portal themselves back to Earth to regroup and plan for their defense.
  • It's possible that a portal can't be opened at superluminal speeds. After that point, the crash on Titan and fight with the Guardians occupies Strange's time until the next time he has a moment to think. Then, he promptly opens Agamotto to get a lay of the land, leading to his plan.
  • We only know he looked at 14 million different possible outcomes. We don't know all the different variables involved. Once they landed on Titan, Strange had the opportunity to still open a portal back to Earth (or any other location).
  • It seems strange (no pun intended) that Strange didn't immediately try to open a portal back to Earth after sorting out the situation with the Guardians, where it would be easier to defend and organize. A simple scene showing that he has to adjust the portal spell for interplanetary distance would suffice.
  • Strange agreed with Stark, while still on board the flying donut, not to return to Earth until they had "taken the fight" to Thanos's turf on Titan. Opening a portal to Earth, even if just to rally their forces, would have still risked attracted Thanos there and that was exactly what they were trying to avoid. For all we know, one of the 14 million possibilities involved doing exactly that and ended up with Thanos pulling the Moon down on Wakanda.
  • Also, notice just how LONG it takes for the cavalry to show up between Hulk's snap and the sling portals opening around Cap. Sure, it would've taken some time to contact and organize all those forces, but at least part of it could have been Strange pouring all his brain and mystical know-how into figuring out how to create an interstellar portal to begin with.
  • An important difference between the battle on Wakanda from the last movie and the final battle on this one: Thanos had the Infinity Stones then, he doesn't in the new timeline. It would seem that the only way to defeat Thanos once and for all (and with the least amount of casualty) is to defeat him when he is without the stones, and the only way to reach that point is to allow Thanos to achieve the first snap, have him destroy the stones, and let the events of this movie play out on its own.
  • Who says the portals transported anyone from Titan? Spiderman and the guardians were last seen there, sure. But they were also dusted, and then unsnapped by Professor Hulk, and the unsnap didn't necessarily bring people back in the same place they disappeared from. Bruce would have made an effort to make sure people reappeared in safe places. And in the case of a few people he'd specifically been told about on Titan, Bruce might well have moved them back to earth when he unsnapped them.
    • You can clearly see the ruined landscape of Titan in the portal when the Guardians, Strange, and Spidey come in.

How to know the Un-Snapping is going on?

• After Banner wield the fully equipped Stark Gauntlet and snapped to undo the Decimation, Scott goes outside, looks through the windows and says that it's working. We didn't see whatever he saw outside the windows, but as they are in the Avengers compound, it seems unlikely that there are people in the grounds that is being restored from oblivion to let him know that the Snap works. In the previous movie, after Thanos snapped half of the universe out of existence, the Decimation didn't happen immediately and we as the audience only knew that something was going on because of the change of music and overall tone following the snap, not because of something visible (before people started turning to ash) in-universe. So how does Scott know that Bruce's snap is working correctly?
  • He was looking at the birds, the original snap got rid half of all life including animals and he could see the restored birds coming down onto the tree.
  • Specifically, he's seeing birds of the same species squabbling, presumably over whose territory the tree is. The Vanished birds that had built nests there five years ago are trying to chase off the ones that took up occupancy after the residents were dusted. (Possible foreshadowing of territorial strife that we see in WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier?)
  • Maybe he saw a bird re-form from dust?
  • Scott doesn't say it's working. He says he thinks it worked. I.e., he looked outside, saw signs of life and the sun shining, and was inclined to believe it had worked.

Returning the Stones to their timeline

• ...Just how is that supposed to work? About how Ancient One's explanation contradicts itself. Basically, the moment Avengers arrive in the past (or the moment they take the stones from it; first option seems more logical, second is what AO suggest will happen, but both run into the same problem), an alternate timeline is created. By taking the stones from it, they take away its only protection from Dormammu - but it can be prevented by returning the stones. Only question is... HOW are they gonna return them? The time travel device allows them to travel to any point in original timeline and ONLY original timeline. They can't go back to the alternate timeline once they leave it - if they go back to say, 5 minutes after they left, they won't actually arrive 5 minutes after they left in alternate timeline, but to the same point in the original one. if they go back to the exact moment they arrived earlier, they won't go with the same alternate timeline, but start yet another one. Said alternate timeline is doomed no matter what - which would be Fridge Horror, except that AO makes no mention of this despite her great knowledge of how time works, and Steve ultimately succeeds in returning the stones to their original timeline even though he should be unable to access it anymore.
  • The original timeline is still intact, it simply now includes a point in the past where the stones don't exist. That would create an alternate timeline as well, but only until the stones were returned. It's similar to Back to the Future 2 where Old Biff goes back in time to give Young Biff the Sports Almanac. That point in time is shared by by both timelines (and they split from there), but going into the future takes Marty down the alternate path. So when Cap goes back to those past points to restore the stones, it rights the course for any alternate timelines.
  • To quote Tony Stark, "Are you seriously telling me that your plan to save the universe is based on Back To The Future?" That's not how alternate timelines work. You can't merge branched timelines back together. You can lead to the situation where they are virtually indistinguishable from each other - but they're still two separate timelines, because at some point they DID differ. So there is no "it creates alternate timeline until fixed" - it permanently creates alternate timeline, period.
  • It was my understanding that the stones were returned a split second or less after they disappeared. Thus essentially erasing any possible alternate timelines they might have created and undoing any damage they might have done while still keeping the main time line intact. Once Captain America has the stones as long as he does not dust anyone, he can use them how ever he wants with out incurring any damage to himself. And using the stones to return them in the proper order, a split second after they disappeared would be easy and use less power. Especially compared to altering reality so that attacks turn into bubbles, or throwing a moon, basically any thing Thanos used the glove to do outside of dusting half the universe.
  • Even ignoring the fact that Steve has no way of putting them back split second later (he has to physically put them back, as he doesn't really have any way of teleporting or materializing them) and that timelines don't work this way (putting them back split second after they disappear may seem inconsequential, but there is no such word as "inconsequential" in quantum physics - it still creates alternate timeline, even if virtually identical simply because it made some minimal changes to how air particles move) - timelines don't work THAT way either. AO made it sound like they only create an alternate timeline by taking the stones, but in reality it was made clear earlier by Bruce that it was created as soon as they arrived in the past. Once Steve comes back to return the Stones, he'll find that he has no way of doing it - since instead of said alternate past he'll arrive again to the main timeline past (and create another alternate past, but that's not important), in which Stones never disappeared in the first place.
  • Steve does have to physically put the Stones back, but remember that the Starktech quantum suits are powered by Pym particles, and by the end of the movie, Hank Pym has been undusted and respects Tony Stark enough to attend his funeral. We can assume that to fulfill his mission, Steve has access to as many Pym particles as he could want, which means he went into the past wearing a fully functional Ant-Man suit. He can put back the stones by shrinking down and sneaking into the places they were stolen from.
  • To the above, for the movie's plot to work one has to assume that it is possible to return to the timelines where the stones were taken. The idea being that if they are returned soon enough then the changes to the timeline will be minimal and harmless (or at least manageable for the various beings capable of determining damage has even happened). The Ancient One wasn't necessarily against making alternate timelines, she was against making ones that were likely to turn out badly (i.e. if the stones were gone). Of course Bruce's demonstration outright erasing the hypothetical alternate timeline she was showing him argues against this idea, and argues further for the idea that it would take something major for a new timeline to form (and that its not only possible to return to the point where a timeline diverged, but to make it so it doesn't diverge), that the universe could "adjust" to the smaller changes without making a whole new time line.
  • Steve does have a way to get all the stones back quickly. He can use the Space Stone to go everywhere instantly and put it back last.
  • Perhaps the time machine was simply configured off-screen by Bruce to send the user to the exact co-ordinates of those alternate timelines.
  • Way too much emphasis is being put on the "split second" thing. Banner emphasizes returning them "the moment" they were taken because he's trying to assuage the Ancient One's worries and assure her that they're being very, very serious about fixing the timelines. All that actually has to be done is to return the stones before they're needed. Some of those have a much longer stretch of time than others... the Soul Stone can basically be put back whenever, the Reality Stone isn't actually relevant until after Thor shows up, and so on. In fact he could probably return the Time Stone any time between the Chitauri invasion and Strange having his accident, though presumably the Ancient One would be rather peeved about it. The Ancient One's concern is taking the stones and not returning them because they'll be needed at some point, things aren't instantly going to go haywire the very second the stones are removed.

2014 Thanos with 2019 Objectives

• It's established in the film that timelines do not "preserve" continuity in the same way that Back to the Future or Hot Tub Time Machine, wherein changing the "past" alters the future, instead opting for a multiple timeline/dimensions approach. Thanos from 2014 understands this as he needs to go into the quantum realm to time jump. However. Why would Thanos in 2014 care what happens in an alternate universe timeline that has little to no direct relation to his? Wouldn't he instead opt to use the knowledge that Post-finger snap Nebula obtained and prevent 2019 Avengers from his timeline to even attempting it (e.g. destroying the Lang van so they can't escape) to the past in his timeline? Thanos is a master strategist. It would be much smarter to A) learn the location of the stones from post-snap Nebula B) download information on how to defeat the Avengers C) do his snap with anyone who can stop him dead in his own timeline.
  • Except that the Power Stone had already been taken from Thanos 2014's universe, and he had no way of knowing the stone would be returned. For him, his plan had become impossible unless he went where the stone had gone. Further, to him this meant he didn't have to go to the trouble of gathering the stones (as he notes in the movie).
  • Honestly going to the future just allows him to skip all that effort, and retain a huge amount of lost resources. He now knows that the snap will cripple him, so why not head off to a world where it's already been done, retrieve a bunch of infinity stones that have already been gathered for him, and try and conquer a universe where half the heroes are already dead? He didn't expect the heroes to actually build a working infinity gauntlet that quickly, and even with that wrinkle in his plans he came damn close to winning with minimal causalities. There's also the fact that it's hinted that Nebula's betrayal and the Avengers trying to undo his work has seriously dented his pride, and though he's clearly trying to keep his cool it's obvious a nerve has been touched.
  • Watching his future self being beheaded hasn't helped his mood much, either.
    • He actually seemed less bothered about that than the fact that the Avengers were trying so desperately to undo what he'd done. In fact he specifically brushes off Ebony Maw's attempts to comfort him over his future death as it not bothering him, because he'd clearly finished his goal first. Remember that one of Thanos's conceits, which he repeats many many times throughout both Infinity War and the start of Endgame, is that he's looking forward to a grateful universe. The fact that the universe isn't so grateful as he assumed and is still struggling against his ideal after it's been enacted clearly pisses him off and makes him decide to go with his "destroy it all and remake it from the ground up" plan.

Repopulation

• So the Snap halved the population of Earth to 3.5 billion (give or take a few million more dying in accidents/crashes/etc in the aftermath). There should have been several hundred million more births in the five year span. So when Tony brings back those other 3.5 billion people, where are they going to go? The logistics of integrating all these people are going to be a huge mess and could be even more chaotic than the Dusting itself was. Further, how is the economy still going? Half the planet vanishes, the effects on the stock market and such should be catastrophic and bringing everyone back increases it.
  • To the first part, the homes, infrastructure, vehicles, etc. for the missing people would likely still mostly exist after a mere five years (admittedly much of it in a state of disrepair but better than nothing), just look at how long it often takes to clean up after localized disasters like hurricanes (and that is with an intact government and civilian population helping).
  • Avengers seem to have become the closest thing there is to a worldwide government and even with stones destroyed they still seem to have some hope that everything may come back to the way it was. They may have kept the population prepared for unsnap.
  • The combined power of all six Stones is as close to omnipotence as any living being can get. It should be easy to assume that the Stones managed to hand wave most of the logistical problems away.
  • It appears that those who survived were all thrown in such a state of apathy and depression that they got next to nothing done in 5 years. The shots of populated areas seem like a complete apocalypse happened, rather than just half of the people dying.
  • To the above, indeed, the sheer amount of chaos and depression, likely millions of suicides, etc. make it possible the population could have possibly even gone down further during those five years. Now of course once the recovery was in full swing there would have been a population boom (much as what happened after the black plague), but perhaps five years was simply not long enough for it to really get started.
  • Clint killed enough people to offset that difference.
  • The fact that 3.5 billion people weren't reproducing during that five-year span (because they were otherwise engaged in blowing around as dust-flecks) means that the Earth's total planetary population will be a lot less that it would've been by 2023, had Thanos never done his snap in the first place. And even if the un-dusted underwent a baby boom to try to repopulate, none of the surplus kids will be older than four, so there'll still be plenty of vacant jobs, houses, farms, etc for the Vanished to move back into; their un-dusted neighbors will just have a few more kids than previously.

Returning the Soul Stone

• How do you return the soul stone? Did Cap just drop it on a rock on Vormir? Hope the Red Skull wouldn't do anything with it (He who explains in IW he couldn't get the stone?). Does the shrine of the stone have a return counter?
  • Presumably he took it back and told Red Skull he wanted to return it. There doesn't seem to be any "No Returns" policy. Red Skull would likely have the cosmic knowledge to know that the Stone's purpose was fulfilled and it was no longer needed.

Why doesn't Black Widow....

• ...come back after Steve Rogers returns the soul stone? A soul for the stone, shouldn't the reverse also be possible? Hulk's "wish" obviously wouldn't have worked since he's using the soul stone to bring back the sacrifice, but sacrificing the stone should bring back the soul?
  • The "rules" regarding the sacrifice seem very strict, given Clint indicates that offscreen Red Skull made it clear there was no way to bring back someone sacrificed to the stone. If the sacrifice could be undone by simply returning the stone, then it's not really a sacrifice (i.e. someone who wanted to use it could just give up a loved one, use the stone, then return the stone to get the loved one back).
  • The trade is likely a one-off. If you want the Stone, you have to sacrifice that which you love. Then you can use the Stone as long as you want. If you return the Stone you don't get a refund, because you paid for the ability to use the Stone. It's not a pawn shop.
  • Also, even if bringing the Soul Stone to Vormir did merit retrieving the soul of a loved one, Steve Rogers' deceased love isn't Natasha, it's Peggy. The sacrifice has to be one's dearest love, so the exchange would not be workable for Steve. Even Clint couldn't trade it back for her, because his dearest love is his family now that they're alive again; indeed, had his wife and children not all been dusted, he couldn't have obtained the Soul Stone at the cost of Natasha's life, in the first place.
    • All Red Skull said is you must sacrifice "that which you love". He never says "dearest love".
  • If Thanos couldn't bring back Gamora or his children when he had the Infinity Gauntlet, why would the Avengers be able to bring back Natasha?

Weapons of Nidavellir would melt your mind... not.

• What happened to the whole "Mere mortal would die instantly if they tried to wield Stormbreaker" issue? Both Cap and Thanos can briefly wield it without any ill effects. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with Cap's worthiness (this enchantment was exclusive to Mjölnir, plus unlike "worthy" thing, mind melting was an unwanted side effect and not protective enchantment) or Thanos's resilience (without Stones he is still inhumanly strong and resilient, but not THAT resilient).
  • Thanos is noticeably stronger and tougher than Thor, just from watching their respective fights against Hulk. He also wields the INFINITY STONES, once without the gauntlet, and survived two snaps. He's easily strong enough to use anything Thor can. As for Cap...? Eh, he's Captain America. Did you miss the part where he kicked the crap out of the Thanos?
  • Thor's use of the term "mortal" tends to be non-literal. After all, Thor himself is mortal, just long-lived. He tends to only mean "much weaker than an Asgardian." Thanos is clearly not (and is presumably long lived himself), and Steve's enhancements ought to have made him powerful enough to handle Stormbreaker for a short time at least (in Age of Ultron he could handle alcohol that Thor also noted was not meant for "mere mortals").
  • Thanos - okay. While, Asgardians and dwarves have superhuman resilience AND magic - not Sufficiently Advanced Technology, as some believe, it's been established to be actual magic - to protect them from unwanted side effects of their weaponry; titans only have superhuman resilience. Cap however... no. Him being able to drink asgardian alcohol with no ill effects doesn't prove anything - he's been established to have had his metabolism enchanted to the point where he simply can't get drunk on normal, human booze, so it's understandable that he'd be also resistant to the effects of Divine Asgardian Ultrahypermegamead 3000 With 1500% Ethanol Content (TM) (and for that matter, Stan gets terribly drunk from just a little bit of it, but doesn't seem to suffer from any other lovely effects of alcohol poisoning, like coma, hypothermia, seizures, breathing trouble or pale/blue skin, so while said megamead is strong, it's not that strong) - but efficient metabolism has exactly nothing to do with toughness. He is super though, of course - but it's low level of super that still makes him come off as fragile compared to Asgardians and titans. Remember than he's been shot twice with almost lethal effect, almost blown up by a suicide vest, beaten to a bloody pulp by Mark 47, sucker punched in his pretty face by the Mad Titan wielding five Infinity Stones - and that's just some of the most memorable of many injuries he suffered throughout the series. He's far from immortal.
  • To the above, given that Steve was barely hurt by Thanos's punch and survived all those other things, it doesn't seem like this proves he is too weak to hold Stormbreaker for a short time. As noted above Thor isn't immortal either (and has likewise been injured or nearly killed several times), so clearly he isn't being literal when he refers to someone else as "mortal".
  • The point is, Thanos or Thor would be both completely unfazed by all these things. Cap meanwhile may have survived, but was still seriously injured, and most of the wounds Thor just shrugged off would do him in if they happened to him.
  • For Cap, it's possible that him being able to handle Stormbreaker is actually a side effect of Mjölnir. The enchantment put on Mjölnir is not to give the ability to lift and use the hammer for those who are worthy, but to "possess the power of Thor". Presumably, after summoning Mjölnir, he also received Thor's power to handle Asgardian weapon's side effects. He did also summon the lightnings, which as established by Ragnarok, is not actually coming from the hammer, but is Thor's innate ability. Where the "power of Thor" comes from, that's the real question.
  • The 'mere mortals will instantly die when using Stormbreaker' idea was never a thing to begin with. What Thor really said was that the Guardians "lack the strength" to use one and that if they tried their bodies would collapse as its power drove them insane. So, the answer is that Cap has the strength to not be afflicted. And it's worth noting that Thor makes a point of using Stormbreaker himself and insists Cap wield only Mjölnir, so prolonged usage might have still been a problem for him.
  • Maybe Thor was just making that up to get Star-Lord off his back?
  • Groot did kinda wield it when forming the handle.
    • Groot's probably not a "mortal". The fact that they teach Groot as a language elective on Asgard could imply that the species arose from Yggdrasil, which is why Groot's arm makes such a great handle for Stormbreaker.
  • It's not like Cap used its full power anyway, it's like using a rifle with a recoil so powerful it shatters mere mortal's bones and mind as a club.
  • Cap never really wielded Stormbreaker. He accidentally caught it and held it for a few seconds before Thor made him give it back. It's entirely possible that if he'd try to do more with it - like turn it into a spinning lightning storm, or summon the Bifrost - he'd have exploded on the spot.

Why didn't Captain Marvel use the Infinity Gauntlet to wipe out Thanos's army earlier?

• She was holding onto it for a good several seconds while zipping around and avoiding enemy blasts. That's what Tony does, so... yeah.
  • She could probably snap away Thanos and his army without dying from the strain, but note that at the time the gauntlet was formed to fit a hand much larger than her own, so if she put it on then she presumably wouldn't have been able to operate it (due to not being able to move the fingers of the gauntlet in a controlled manner). Now assuming the gauntlet was still in good enough operation to shrink itself to fit her hand (it must have suffered some damage from Hulk's snap), that process would take time (note how long it takes to shape itself around Hulk's hand), time in which Carol would have been left semi-vulnerable and unable to use the stones. The risk was simply too great with the entire army bearing down on her location. Iron Man had the advantage of already wearing tech that changes shape with his thoughts and having designed the new gauntlet knew how to quickly release the stones from it. He also had the advantage of no one knowing he had the stones until it was too late to do anything about it.
  • It's not really something she would think of, she's not a scientist or a strategist. Her general approach is "punch it until it stops moving". It's also far from a given that she would be able to handle them, she doesn't have any sort of device to hold them whereas at the very least Stark had his heavily insulated suit. The Power Stone alone was enough to seriously tax Ronan, who's almost as tough as she is. A better idea would be to take one of the stones, but she obviously didn't think of that in time and/or figured she could handle it without that gamble.
  • We don't really know if she can survive the snap; Hulk has a healing factor that made him unable to kill himself. She probably wants to do what they are planning instead of snapping the whole army and dying. Self-harm and suicide is never plan A if you're sane.
  • At that time they're just trying to get the stones back through the quantum tunnel; with Carol on the field, the Earth forces are more or less winning the fight. Nobody thinks of using the stones offensively until they absolutely have to.
  • Or, Dr. Strange wouldn't let her. He saw ONLY ONE scenario out of 14 million where the Avengers win, and he saw how it ended. He makes it clear he had to make sure that scenario would happen, and probably he knew it had to be Tony to do it? If Captain Marvel did do it, she'd probably make things worse because her powers (which came from an Infinity Stone) may not react well with the gauntlet. There was a good reason why the Kree put a Power Limiter on her—because her powers are unstable as it is. Dr. Strange would not want to risk any freak accident that can cost them, and he'd stop her before she even tries.
  • Let's not forget that Carol has an Air Force background, so she's used to following orders and letting the decision-makers worry about the reasoning behind them. If Cap and the other "top brass" want her to get the Gauntlet into the Quantum Tunnel, then that's what she's going to do, not improvise her own strategy on the battlefield.
  • Marvel's powers derive from the Tesseract. There's no telling how the gauntlet would interact with her.
    • Her powers are from a LITTLE SPARK from the Space Stone. She would have to fight the recoil of the FULL POWER of the six stones combined. It's doubtful she could survive that.
    • Well, given that Hulk managed to snap when he lost to Thanos in his stronger pre-professor form, whom Carol would have defeated if not for his quick thinking even in his stronger 2014-state, it's clear that even that "little spark" is much stronger than whatever amount of Earthly gamma rays that created Hulk. Captain Marvel specializes in brute force and durability, so it's clear that the energy from the stones matters much more once it gets integrated with someone as their superpowers and is no longer toxic. Only a direct, offensive hit from the Power Stone incapacitated her for a bit, and she still wasn't hurt even by that, considering how she was able to show up and kneel to Iron Man only minutes later. If Hulk and Thanos can survive snapping, Carol definitely can-not to mention that she only needs to snap Thanos and his army, not half of the universe.

Back in high school?

• At the end, it's shown that Peter Parker returns to his high school and reunites with Ned. It's been five years since Peter and Ned were in their sophomore year, and while Peter's case can be handwaved with him being "gone" for all that time, shouldn't Ned (and everyone in Far From Home, for that matter) have graduated by now?
  • With the minor issue of many of their friends and family members vanishing and society collapsing, graduating wasn't very high priority for anyone.
  • Considering they're all still around for Far From Home, the most likely scenario is that all of Peter's classmates (or the most story relevant ones, at least) died as well. Ned, MJ, Flash, Betty, all of them were turned to dust and had to miss out on five years, otherwise, there would be no reason for them to stick around.

Returning the Stones as stones?

• At the end, Cap is sent back with the Stones in their gem forms and told to just restore them to the timeline. How? The Space Stone was kept in the Tesseract. The Reality Stone was in liquid form as the Aether (and had been absorbed by Jane). The Mind Stone was in Loki's scepter. The Power Stone was in its orb. The scepter, the Tesseract and the orb were brought back to 2023, and the Tesseract had to be physically shattered to access the Space Stone. Plus, Cap didn't bring all of those containers to the past. With the Aether, did he just tell Jane, "Here, swallow this red gem"?
  • Use the Reality Stone to refashion the required containers. Turn it into goo, stick it in Jane last.
  • The Tesseract can be replicated, the Orb can be replaced, the Aether can be re-liquified through whatever process it was solidified, and the Mind Stone can be put back in the scepter. Worst case scenario, he has to use the Power Stone or Reality Stone to rehouse the others first.
  • Alternately, his first step is the Ancient One, who uses the time stone to rewind them to their pre-stone states.
  • In addition to the previous solutions, keep in mind the plan wasn't "return the stones in the exact state you found them", but "return the stones to their timelines so that those realities don't implode". The specifics on what state the stones themselves have to be in doesn't really seem to be important.
    • But it -IS- important to return them in their state: If there is no tesseract, but a lazily thrown Space Stone, there wouldn't be a Captain Marvel, since the accident would be different, the investigation of Loki's staff would have been different -so no Ultron, no Vision, and the Sokovia incident would have played diferent- and the Power Stone... weeeell...

Nebula opening a portal without Pym Particles?

• But if the whole issue was that to get back to the present they needed more Pym Particles, then how does Thanos (from 2014) along with his whole army get through? Did they only need Pym particles to open the portal from the past (though if so, then Scott could have just grabbed Cap and Tony as soon as they had the tesseract).
  • The implication is that they analyzed it and made more. Hank's got nothing on cosmic science.
  • To paraphrase Rocket, Hank's only a genius on Earth.
  • 2014 Nebula took 2023 Nebula's Pym Particles after they caught her. Most likely they did analyze all the captured info and figured out how to travel through quantum tunnel without one. The Pym Particles itself is only a means to travel to quantum realm as conceived by Pym, which presumably other cosmic forces have their own different understanding and way to do it. It’s only a matter of entering the quantum tunnel and navigating to the correct exit point, and they only need to do it for a single object (the Sanctuary II), anyway.
  • It's highly unlikely that even Thanos's scientists could have figured out how the Pym Particles worked, how to use them to traverse the quantum realm, and that the particles were even a vital part of the whole shebang... except that Old Nebula explicitly takes the particles AND the quantum navigator. Even if Thanos's science guys didn't fully understand the science of the quantum realm, they could probably extrapolate the navigator's tech and install it on Sanctuary II.
  • There's actually another possibility here — since Rhodey doesn't seem to notice any sort of gap between when he leaves and 2014 Nebula arrives, we can assume that San Dimas Time isn't in effect. So virtually any amount of time could have passed between when Rhodey left and 2014 Nebula left. Enough time for... say... Thanos to take the Sanctuary II to 2014 Earth and forcibly acquire more Pym Particles from the inventor himself, possibly by using the one sample vial he has to build a detector capable of tracking the source down from orbit. Which really doesn't bode well for 2014 Earth, especially since Thanos knew at that point the Avengers are a much more significant obstacle to his plans than he expected...
  • He may not even need Pym Particles. The particles are used to shrink a person down to the quantum scale, so that they can get through the tiny, quantum-sized wormholes. But what if instead of doing that, Thanos took the quantum wormhole, and enlarged it until it was big enough to fit the ship through? Inflating a quantum wormhole to macro sizes has been proposed before, and spacetime-warping technology seems to exist in the galaxy (judging by the ftl 'jump' technology).
  • Unlikely. We see that Thanos's ship was shrunk down when it came through the gate and began enlarging when it flew through the ceiling.

Tony using the Stones

• Minor one, but how do the stones fit onto Tony's hand without a specially created gauntlet? Had he planned for this eventuality or do they just work by magic (which, to be fair, would not be much of a stretch).
  • Tony's experimental data and designs are all source controlled through F.R.I.D.A.Y. As long as he had enough nano-machines in his suit for a new one, it would be simple for her to configure them into the infinity gauntlet design again.
    • Especially since the gauntlet Banner uses is clearly Stark nanotech, given its ability to re-size itself to fit. F.R.I.D.A.Y. just copied over half a dozen stone-mounts from that gauntlet's design on the fly.
  • It's also a far less impressive feat than normal (only dusting a thousand or so people in a limited area) and outright kills him with the backlash. Sure, it would likely have happened anyway, Tony is a mere mortal, but having a hastily built faux infinity gauntlet can't have helped.
  • The Stark Gauntlet is his own specific brand of nanotech, just like his latest suits. And we know that his suits are malleable and controlled directly by his mind. He probably never planned for this, but it'd be very easy for him to merely touch the gauntlet and have his suit interface with it, commanding the Gauntlet's nanomachines to just pop the stones onto his own glove.
  • Minor aside, but why didn't Tony dose up on Extremis like in the comics, using his armor for heat control, as a general precaution?
  • His Iron Man armor had already been shown to be better in a fight than 99% of Extremis users (since he killed almost all of them with it) and had none of he negative side effects like potentially exploding.
  • Again, he'd be using his armor to regulate the heat so he can take advantage of Extremis's Healing Factor.

Just use the time stone

• What exactly is preventing Doctor Strange from grabbing the time stone after the final snap, and restoring Tony to life?
  • Because half the point of his position is to be Earth's protector against supernatural forces, and the other half is to protect the Time Stone from those who would abuse it. Using it to defeat Dormammu was treated as a Godzilla Threshold that explicitly broke the rules of Kamar-Taj, and The Ancient One was brutally called out on using forbidden magic to gain immortality. If he starts going around raising people from the dead, his order would be unhappy to say the least.
  • He literally just saved the entire universe. It would not be abusing the time stone, it would a very small thank you considering everything Stark went through. Just imagine if Strange went about in universe on how he can’t resurrect Stark because dumb rules. Even Parker would be literally at his throat in milliseconds for that.
  • If he undoes Tony's death, he has to undo the snap that killed him, in which case Thanos continues existing, and that puts them off the one Golden Path to stop him for good. And, once again, if it means protecting the world, Strange will not hesitate to sacrifice any individual hero, including himself.
  • Actually, judging by how Vision's death was briefly undone in Infinity War, it should be possible to reverse time for only Stark's body (Wanda killing Vision still happened, it just no longer happened from his perspective). However, it's possible that when it comes to sacrifices using the stones that there are special rules. Just as one can't use the stones to bring back someone sacrificed for the Soul Stone, they can't use the Time Stone to bring back someone who sacrificed their life to use all the stone's powers.
    • Nope. In Infinity War, Thanos'd use of the Time Stone reverses the shockwave caused by the destruction of the Mind Stone. There is no indication that you can target the time reversal effects on a single object — you can only prevent it from affecting you.
    • On the contrary, it actually has been demonstrated that you CAN target the time reversal effects on a single object. In Doctor Strange's own debut movie when he first used the Time Stone out of curiosity on an apple he had just eaten, playing around with forwards and reverse effect on the apple repeatedly.
  • Tony died because he snapped his fingers to destroy Thanos and all his army. If Dr. Strange reverses Tony's death, he reverses the snap and brings back Thanos and the army. That puts other people's lives at risk all for the sake of Tony's. And Thanos was able to reverse Vision's death specifically because he had all the stones together. Strange would need the gauntlet for that and, although a powerful wizard, he's still mortal and probably not strong enough to use it.
  • And maybe Strange looked into an alternate timeline where they did try to resurrect Tony and it made things worse - like the above-mentioned possibility of bringing Thanos back.
  • Tony was killed by the Infinity Gauntlet. The Time Stone, operating by itself, simply isn't powerful enough to undo what the whole set of six has wrought. And the heroes have no one left who could reasonably be expected to survive using the complete Gauntlet anymore; even if Bruce were willing to spend the rest of his life writing with his toes, he was so badly injured the first time that a second attempt would probably kill him, too.
  • There is no reason reviving Tony would undo the Snap. Every time the stone has been used it has been shown as rewinding just the objects or locations the user chooses. The above explanation of Dr. Strange being unwilling to do it without a damn good reason is the most likely reason.
    • Not true. Thanos used the Time Stone to reconstruct the Mind Stone in Infinity War, bringing back Vision in the process. People seem to be forgetting that Wanda didn't kill Vision to destroy the Stone, she destroyed the Stone which had the unfortunate side effect of killing Vision. The only way to revive Tony with the Time Stone would be to rewind far enough that the thing that killed him didn't happen, and that's not a good idea at all.
  • He probably could but that might have a mystic price, Thanos doesn't care if the snap means Dormammu or someone else can breach in from different dimensions but Strange might have learned more about what Mordo meant by unbalance.
  • Story-wise it would negate Tony's entire character arc. Remember that Tony's story is all about his inability to let go being Iron-Man, and that the only fitting end for such an arc is for Tony to die AS Iron-Man. Resurrecting him in any way would only be seen as a cop-out
  • Dr. Strange risked damaging the laws of reality by rewinding an apple and a book. Even assuming you can rewind a person to bring them back, it probably is very dangerous.
  • You can't. Freeze-Frame Bonus combined with Fridge Brilliance shows that the writers considered this plot hole. Back in Avengers: Infinity War at the very end at the very last shot of Thanos, careful viewers will notice that Thanos is slightly limping and has scarring and burns on his left arm, shoulder and a slight part of his face. When Thanos healed himself of his battle wounds after he snapped away half the universe and when he portaled away, those burns remained. The implication being, like the price for obtaining the Soul Stone, the price for using all Six Stones cannot be undone by Stones.

New Shield for new Captain America

• How did Old Steve have a brand new shield made for his successor? The original shield that was destroyed by Thanos represented every trace of vibranium that the US govt had acquired by the time of WWII, so there wasn't any more left for Strategic Scientific Reserve to fashion a new one. The preceding rulers of Wakanda have no idea who he is so they would've been unlikely to lend him some, either. And if, as theorized elsewhere, Steve remained in hiding throughout the nearly 80 years from WWII to 2023, buying vibranium in a black market AND giving it to someone with the technology to forge vibranium into a shield would have taken a billionaire fortune and blown his cover.
  • He knows T'Challa and has a time travel suit (that's how he got back to the "original" prime universe to sit on that bench on the lake). He could have either gone to T'Challa in the Alternate Universe where he spent his life with Peggy, or prime universe T'Challa when he got back, and asked him to have Shuri make a shield for Sam literally whenever he wanted before going back to meet up with Sam and Bucky.
  • Apparently Steve lived out his life in an alternate universe (which is a different can of worms, but people have touched on that on this page already). It's probably the original, unbroken shield taken from that timeline.
  • Possible simple answer, we don't know how much time passed between the Funeral and Steve returning the stones, both of the Quantum Generators were destroyed in the battle so they needed to build a new one, that could have taken some time, Old Steve could have picked up the repaired Shield on his way to the bench to meet up with Bucky and Sam. For all we know they left it in the back of the car and Old Steve just walked by and picked it up.
  • A simpler answer: Steve used the Reality Stone to fix the shield.
  • Maybe Wakanda has a bunch of Vibranium-repairing machines lying around and he just got the shield fixed between the final battle and the funeral.
  • Maybe, when he was returning the Time stone to the Ancient One, he asked her to fix his shield. "It's for a friend, in the future". She knows about the time travel shenanigans so asking her the favor won't do any harm (Asking for that to T'chaka -who never knew cap- or T'challa would indeed have alerted them about too many things)
  • It is NOT the same shield that we saw since "The First Avenger", because that Steve Rogers is not "our" Steve Rogers, but one from a parallel world, and OUR Steve Rogers, without his shattered shield, will end in yet ANOTHER parallel world.

Thanos's army

• Where exactly did Thanos's whole army in the final battle come from? The Sanctuary II was the only ship shown to came out of the Avengers’ quantum time machine, and not long after that they started obliterating the HQ and the time machine. It seems there was no enough time to transport the HUGE amount of army between Sanctuary II emerging from the tunnel and the attack on HQ (including those massive donut ships, Chitauri army, outriders, the Chitauri giant flying monster, etc).
  • Thanos's ship is huge, and he probably didn't give his army much individual space (the Outriders seem outright packed into their storage places like sardines), so they did come from Sanctuary II and that a lot of the ship was hollow to house them.
  • Plus he may have Pym Particles in extra, they couldn't use Nebula's one shot for a whole ship after herself going back in time.
  • Perhaps from the current timeline? The Chitauri, at least, seem to be cybernetically enslaved. Perhaps when Thanos calls, his army answers, regardless of any complications — such as Thanos not being the "real" Thanos of this timeline. If anything, this may even explain why the army isn't exactly cosmic in scale. Only Thanos's closest forces could have responded in time.

Peggy's surname

• It's shown that Peggy was still officially called Margaret Carter in 1970. However, it's mentioned in The Winter Soldier that she got married probably not long after 1945 to a WW2 veteran. Why did she still go by her maiden name in 1970?
  • Anything you change in the past branches it off into its own Alternate Timeline. In other words: the 1970s timeline and the 1940s timeline are separate realities that don't touch, just as neither of them touch the 2023 timeline. Steve just got together with one Peggy in one Alternate Universe, the ones in those other two timelines never saw him again till around Winter Soldier.
  • No. Peggy is married to someone else in the original timeline, a soldier whom Steve rescued from the HYDRA camp.
  • That's what she told people. She was Director of Shield and we all know how good they are at lying and keeping secrets. At no point did we see a picture of her husband or even hear his name mentioned. Nothing that has been shown or said contradicts her being married all that time to Future Steve. It may also be why Cap won't talk about who he married, to protect the anonymity of his descendants.
  • Steve kissing his grandniece Sharon kind of contradicts Peggy being married all that time to Future Steve. One would hope...
  • Also, she may have simply kept her maiden name despite being married. It does sometimes happen, and there are many variations (for instance you can take your husband's name legally, but still use your maiden name professionally).
  • Also the 'No Fault Divorce' bill was passed in 1969, one year before we see that office. Meaning if Peggy and her husband split up, it would be much easier to get divorced. So she could simply have been divorced at that point.
  • For all we know, Steve was the husband she married in the original timeline. Technically, Steve could honestly be said to have rescued himself from the HYDRA camp, given that he was cornered a few times and even leaped a freakin' inferno to get out of it alive. He, Steve Rogers, couldn't have done that without his 'Captain America' abilities to save him. As for her surname still being "Carter", that may argue in favor of Steve and her being married originally via Stable Time Loop: if she'd wed some random guy, her name probably would change. But if it's Steve, he might've adopted a pseudonym, under which to lead his new life in the past, whose surname just happened to be "Carter" too, just to avoid mucking up the timeline or detracting from how respected Peggy'd already managed to become under her birth name.
  • Also... "Carter" is a pretty common name. Might have been her husband's surname already.
  • As for Steve being the one she married in the original timeline, that doesn't add up with Peggy seeing him for the first time in decades in Winter Soldier. The husband might have as well been SSR Agent Daniel Sousa as the end of Agent Carter season 2 suggested.
  • Time travel doesn't function like Back To The Future where time loops and such exist. It functions like in Dragon Ball where any change to the past creates a new timeline completely separated from the one where the time traveler hails from. The movie even makes a point of showing this by showing Nebula shooting her past self without any consequences. It's also why they don't just kill baby Thanos: doing so will only change things in that particular timeline, not in any other ones. Cap cannot be Peggy's husband all along in the original timeline because time travel only changes the timeline he travels to, not the one he travels from. As for why old Steve appears in the original timeline, it can be explained as Steve traveling back to his original timeline after spending his life in the changed timeline. Cap can muck up the altered timeline all he wants without it affecting the timeline he comes from.
  • Her husband, the one Steve helped rescue from World War II could have subsequently died in Korea. No year was shown when Steven was dancing with Peggy, so conceivably, this could have been in the mid- to late-Fifties. As for her not remembering him in Winter Soldier, she could have not remembered him coming back and the last thing she remembers is he went into the ice. Now, she sees him still looking in his 30s while she is in her 90s so that could have been confusing for her.
  • Alternate possibility: Her husband in the Prime universe is a version of Cap from another timeline that also tried to do the Time Heist. Nobody said the MCU Prime is the only one to try it.

Who knew about the Soul Stone sacrifice?

• It seems likely Nebula and/or Tony figure out the sacrifice aspect of the Soul Stone. They picked the perfect two people to go look for it. Or was that just luck?
  • In Infinity War, they only knew that something happened to Gamora when Thanos forced her to take him to the location of the Soul Stone, so neither Tony or Nebula knows about the sacrifice part. There was not much time between the revelation that Thanos killed Gamora and the ensuing fight and Thanos leaving for Earth, so it seems unlikely they could even guess that Gamora died as a sacrifice to obtain the Soul Stone, without Thanos himself explaining. But if Tony and/or Nebula knows about the sacrifice part, well...
  • Assuming Tony and Nebula didn't know about the sacrifice, why would they choose to send the two least powerful team members on the most dangerous mission? Vormir was an uncharted alien world and the team had no idea what obstacles Thanos had to face to get the stone, yet they sent two completely normal humans who had never even been to space before. What if getting the stone required fighting an alien army, or swimming through lava, or just lifting a really heavy rock? It seems like Nat and Clint's skills in stealth and deception would have been better suited to practically *any* of the other stones, and any of the superhuman demigods on the team would have been better suited to exploring Vormir.
  • That would have been one of the 14 million unsuccessful timelines foreseen by Doctor Strange. It's a major cop-out, but it is justifiable to say that Natasha and Clint had to go to Vormir because it was ordained by the Sorcerer Supreme.
  • From what we see, Vormir seems to be an uninhabited planet without much in the way of threats. Maybe Nebula has some knowledge of what it's like, even if she's never been there. She doesn't ask "what's Vormir?" when Gamora tells her about the map to it, so she seems to be somewhat familiar with it. Hell, maybe at some point in that montage they called up Captain Marvel and had her check the planet out for any threats they should be aware of.
  • Nebula knew Gamora would do ANYTHING to keep Thanos from getting the Stones, most likely answer is that Nebula believed that when they reached Vormir Gamora made an attempt to kill Thanos before he got the stone and she failed and he killed her. With no inkling of the TRUE cost of the stone, we don't get a reaction from Nebula post return because by then she had been swapped out for her 2014 self.
  • It would have been pretty terrible for Nebula and/or Tony to know that whoever goes to Vormir has to sacrifice someone and not tell the people they sent. It was basically dumb luck that they sent the only pair of heroes who could reasonably fulfill the "sacrifice" requirement - the one-in-fourteen-million chance.
  • While it was a bit convenient, they are by no means the only ones who could have made that sacrifice in the group. We don't know enough about the rules to say specifics, but Nebula and Rocket could have (they're the only ones they have left), Tony and Steve could have, and several others.
  • Actually none of the other Avengers are as close as Natasha and Clint are. Tony and Rhodey, maybe. Nebula and Rocket despite being the only surviving Guardians have barely ever spoken a word to each other through four movies, and Tony and Steve have a pretty rocky friendship at best.
    • It's not exactly clear how strict the terms for the sacrifice are. We assume that the sacrifice requires a familial bond, but it could just be anything close to resembling basic friendship or even a one-sided desire as the sacrifice only requires one of the parties to have the appropriate feelings. Since we have no idea what's on anyone's minds, it's very possible that pretty much any combination save for ones with characters who just met in this movie (i.e. Rhodey/Rocket, Thor/Nebula) would have been adequate.
    • This. Remember that Gamora had come to loathe Thanos, and his "love" for her was paternal possessiveness at best. (You don't orphan or terrify people you legitimately care about.) If even he could pass the challenge of sacrifice, any two Avengers who've been comrades probably could.

But really, how would Scott Lang fare against Thanos?

• While the film never gave fans the intense closure they wanted on the Gi-Ant Man vs Thanos debate, as Lang disappointedly never directly interacted or had a fight sequence with the titan, just how would Ant-Man handle against Thanos 1 on 1? Not looking for a direct answer here (ie. "He'd just die" or "He'd just win"), just a more creative response than what the film gave, which was nothing.
  • While big, Scott is still a normal human. Just much larger. Thanos is much stronger, so it probably wouldn't last too long. We've only ever seen Scott fight other humans in giant form, so in that sense he's a big fish in a small pond.
  • Seeing as how Scott turning into Giant-Man allowed him to smash through reinforced concrete and whatever other materials the heavily fortified Avengers compound is made out of in the finale, it's theoretically possible for Scott to be able to explode Thanos from the inside too. Alternatively: Hey, remember Aaron Cross's Pym Particle device that turned people inside out in Ant-Man? Bet Scott could jerry rig one of those with his engineering degree. Or go use the Quantum tunnel to trap Thanos in the Quantum realm like the Phantom Zone in Superman stories.
  • The film itself gives a few very good hints, in fact. While relatively slower as Giant Man, his durability goes way up, he can still cover huge distances in a much shorter time than Thanos would, and if he got a hold of the Mad Titan, he could very conceivably crush the wind out of him and incapacitate him long enough for a more powerful hero —say, Iron Man, Thor, or Marvel— to put him down permanently. After all, not only did Giant Man smush Cull Obsidian into extremely dead paste with a simple stomp (and ground into him with his heel for good measure), he punched the absolute fuck out of a Leviathan without much effort. And as opposed to Civil War or Ant Man & the Wasp, Scott was actually keeping up admirably in giant form, and only shrank back to regular size (again, without signs of exhaustion) because he needed to get to the van to repair it.
  • Ultimately what would have happened if Scott had fought Thanos as Giant Man would be that the "Rain fire!" scene would happen earlier once the abovementioned scene began, but have less pathos because Thanos hadn't directly tortured and wronged Scott like he had Wanda.

Sokovia Accords

• Did the Accords get ripped up post-snap? Because Cap was openly running therapy groups for five years in New York and nobody tried to arrest him.
  • That shit was petty to begin with, but with half of those on either side dead in an event that all parties involved tried to stop, it'd be just as weird if the government cared to try and arrest them.
  • There's no word on whether General Ross was part of the Snappening. If he was, then there's nobody around to stop Steve. His presence at Tony's funeral at the end indicates that whatever happened, he's either decided or been persuaded to bury the hatchet on the whole Accords.
  • Word of God states Betty Ross was a victim of the Decimation. Even Thunderbolt isn't going to be so petty as to try to enforce the Accords knowing that the efforts of the assembled Avengers brought his daughter back to life. It's safe to say the Accords are dead.
  • Screw the Rules, It's the Apocalypse! is in full effect here. It's pretty implied that governments aren't running at full capacity if at all, because criminals and gangs are running amok and no one's maintained all but the most necessary social services. No one's going to give a shit about the Avengers when there are other more pressing problems. Heck, it's shown that the Avengers are helping maintain order.
  • Possibly Rogers was pardoned for whatever criminal offenses were pending against him, thus permitting him to aid in recovery efforts and non-military work even as a non-signatory. Which might explain why he was running therapy groups rather than re-joining the Avengers team.
  • WandaVision establishes them to still be in effect, since Hayward's efforts to revive Vision are stated by Jimmy Woo to be a violation of the Accords.

Forgetting Someone's Funeral

• Why does Tony get a funeral, but not Natasha?
  • The movie was already over three hours long. She, of course, would get a funeral at some point, but it didn't need to be onscreen. The equivalent and arguably just as meaningful was the Avengers mourning her death and noting that they were her only family.
  • Yeah, if we want to get meta about this, Tony Stark has more fans than Natasha and thus is the logical choice for screen time in a film that many have accused of Ending Fatigue. We didn't need this to be the third Lord of the Rings film.
  • It should also be said this was a funeral held on Tony Stark's estate. It's unknown what Natasha's will would consist of, but it's not too likely she would ask that her remains be placed in Tony Stark's yard.
  • According to the directors, they thought having a funeral for Natasha would be "dishonest." That's bullshit. It could easily have been a double funeral with wreaths commemorating both of them being on display, cue the same line of mourners for them both. Even if Natasha wasn't buried on the Stark estate (if anyone ever returned for her body, which they probably didn't), they could have had a picture or a plaque or something... Heck, Clint and Wanda could have been shown standing in front of some sort of commemoration for her when they had their moment.
  • Something related to her being an ex spy/assassin or something, maybe (looking at the Watsonian side only)?
  • Immediately after they get back from the past, all the Avengers have a sit down by the lake where they talk about Natasha. It's not far off from having a wake for her. Having a separate funeral on top of that might've felt like too much.
  • A wake generally implies a reception or something akin to what Tony had.
  • Presumably Natasha did have a funeral, but it was likely only attended by people who knew her personally. Like, T'Challa met her maybe twice, Valkyrie never has, and none of the Guardians except Rocket have ever even heard of her. Given all the other crap going on in a post-Snap world, they wouldn't necessarily make time for her service. But Tony? He died saving the whole frickin' universe from Thanos. His is the one funeral where absolutely everyone is going to show up.
  • Natasha's getting her own movie so maybe they'll honor her memory in that.
    • That was exactly the reason given. They wanted to focus on Tony and Steve's endings because this was the last we'd ever see of them while Natasha, despite her death still has one more major appearance to make and they thought it would be rude to treat Endgame as Natasha's big finale and step on the toes of her own film by implying her story is completely over and there was nothing worth seeing there.
  • Or possibly Steve promised to rappel down the cliff at Vormir, retrieve Natasha's body, and lay her to rest on his Stone-returning jaunt. Because he opted to take The Slow Path, he had her buried in the past as well (possibly as an "unknown casualty" of the Battle of New York), and told Sam and Bucky where to find her grave when he returned as an old man.
  • The coda to Black Widow (2021) implies that Natasha's body was returned so she could be buried, since we see her grave there. Though it's also possible that it's just an empty grave serving as a cenotaph.
  • Something else to consider would be the individuals. Nat was a spy and assassin for the better part of her life. She may have wanted to simply be laid to rest, quietly, covertly. In death as she was in life, she may have wanted to remain undercover, unseen. But Tony? He was always the star. The bombastic, outspoken, flashy one. The man who requested his Iron Man armor be painted "Ferrari Red", who made his entrance against Loki by blasting "Back in Black", etc. He would have wanted to be given a final send-off that would be seen. A way to be remembered as Iron Man, and as Tony Stark.

"We only have enough Pym Particles for one round trip... but I can be Ant-Man whenever I want."

• Does Ant-Man use their precious reserve of Pym particles any time he's Ant-Man? The same Pym particles that couldn't (before they went to the past and got more) be made again and yet their vital plan in 2012 required Ant-Man to put Tony in cardiac arrest and steal the Tesseract? And if that plan failed, either Scott would remain the size of an ant (seemingly) forever or they'd be stuck in the past?
  • It's probably a matter of scale (no pun intended). The amount of particles needed for Scott to do his standard shrink or grow is essentially insignificant next to the amount needed to go quantum and time travel.
  • Implication is also that that vial that was supposed to be for one of two test runs is what's powering the size changing in the suit during the Time Heist. Then, after they knew he had particles to size change anyway, they planned the operation around that fact.
  • A variant of the theory outlined above is probably the best explanation. Think back to the scene where the problem of limited Pym Particles was initially brought up. Although Scott implied that he had wasted one of the time travel test runs by accidentally shrinking and reenlarging, he actually wasted only a "fraction" of the test run. Time traveling involves shrinking to enter the Quantum Realm, navigating it, and reenlarging to exit it at a new place and time. Undergoing a "round trip" to the past and back involves doing this twice. Shrinking and reenlarging as Ant-Man usually does requires only a fraction of the number of Pym Particles required to enter and exit the Quantum Realm, but this is a significant fraction contrary to what the theory outlined above states. Scott stated that they had enough Pym Particles for a round trip each and two test runs, a.k.a. 24 jumps through the Quantum Realm. After he wasted some of the Pym Particles, they had enough for 23 jumps plus some extra left over, enough to allow him to shrink and reenlarge as Ant-Man several times but not enough to power another jump. Now a 23rd jump wouldn't do much good because whoever made it wouldn't have enough Pym Particles to return to the present. So we're left with 22 jumps, a.k.a. a round trip each and one test run. But this leaves a jump and change's worth of Pym Particles. So instead of using them to time travel, they let Ant-Man use the extra Pym Particles to shrink and reenlarge for his part in the Time Heist. Keep in mind that they didn't hammer out the details of the Time Heist until after they were done with the test run phase. So Scott actually did them a favor by "wasting" a test run, since an extra test run would really have been a waste of Pym Particles which he could have used.
    • This does raise the question of why Scott didn't give his extra jump's worth of Pym Particles to Steve and Tony before they traveled back to 1970, but it's probably because Tony was rushing them. Plus it would have led to them facing a sadistic choice if they didn't succeed in getting more Pym Particles: which one of them gets to go home?
  • This is answered most simply by the fact that Scott isn't Ant-Man "whenever he wants". Once they go back, he shrinks, stays at one small size for most of the mission, shrinks a little more to go inside Tony, then unshrinks once the mission is over/botched. He probably factored in needing at least two size changes into his prior calculations of how many particles they had, since he would at most have used one or two particles (growing back to normal apparently doesn't use them up). He changes a few times after the mission, but then Steve probably stole plenty of them and just handed them over after he and Tony got back.

Thanos in the third act

• So Tony snaps Thanos into nothing. As awesome as that was, this was a Thanos from 2014, yet things proceed as though he never left 2014. Even with all the science and alternate timelines as an explanation, the fact that Thanos dying and not returning to his own time effectively creates a paradox still stands. Without Thanos in the past, the Gauntlet would never have been created, Vision wouldn’t have been broken, hell even the first snap would have never happened. How is reality not shattered into a billion pieces already?
  • Because it's not Back to the Future time travel. If you go back to the past, it becomes your future. And if you change events in the past, you would only create an Alternate Timeline splintering off from the main timeline. This is also why Professor Hulk shut down War Machine's suggestion to kill baby Thanos; it won't undo the Snap in their time at all.
  • Just as the above comment said. As soon as War Machine, Nebula, Hawkeye/Ronin, and Black Widow arrive on Morag in 2014, that timeline has already changed - becoming an alternate timeline that separates from the original one entirely. That timeline's 2014 Thanos discovered what happened in the original timeline through Nebula's past self 'syncing' with the original timeline one and invades the future to destroy the Avengers. He and his entire army are then dusted by Tony in that timeline - meaning that the alternate timeline where 2014 Thanos came from is left without him and thus inadvertently saved because there's no one around to do the snap. Hell, you could say that that timeline fares better than the original one considering that at the very least Xandar, Knowhere and Nidavellir don't get annihilated by Thanos's forces, and there will be more Asgardian survivors because there's no Thanos's ship to intercept it (meaning Loki and Heimdall of that timeline would live).

US Military

• A battle for the fate of the universe is fought on US soil, they have methods of instantaneously transporting people to the battlefield from other planets, and the only formal military force to arrive is the Wakandans? Did nobody think to invite the US Army? The only times in the entire MCU film series where the US military (not counting Avengers or future Avengers who are or were serving military) are First Avenger and Hulk, and in the latter they're the problem. Does Marvel Studios have an issue with RL military forces?
  • Probably the same as how Nick Fury and SHIELD are somehow conspicuously absent in the final battle despite that they would be the last people to miss out on such a battle. They simply can't mobilize fast enough to join the battle.
  • Real Life Military had a problem with The Avengers and didn't want to support it. (Specifically because it was unclear who ran SHIELD). Also the appeal of the movie is the Superheroes not Bayformers-esque milwank.
  • Even if it has opened to the world recently, Wakanda is still a warrior culture and it's very likely most citizens have sufficient combat training, and the loyalty, to take up arms for their newly resurrected King at a moment's notice. Plus, Wakanda is a relatively small country, and therefore its standing military is concentrated and easy to contact. By contrast, mobilizing the US military requires multiple levels of approval at the best of times, never mind during the chaos of the resurrections, and it'd take more than Wong's word (who is hinted at being the one who contacted everyone as soon as Strange was back) to convince all the necessary authorities to lend a hand in such a short time. Even if he could, the US hundreds of times larger than Wakanda and pulling together an armed response would not have been easy in the afforded timeframe.
  • Adding to the "they didn't have time to mobilize", when the Snap happened, the Wakandans happened to be in the middle of a huge battle against alien forces. So, when it was undone, suddenly half of Wakanda's army was back, and completely ready to be dropped into... another huge battle against alien forces. In the point of view of a random Wakandan (or even Black Panther himself), this battle was just a continuation of the last one, they simply switched battlefields thanks to some magic portals. Meanwhile, the US army was not mobilized when the Snap happened, and the climax moved fast enough that the half of it that survived certainly didn't have the time to act.
  • And let's not forget that half of the US military just popped back into existence after 5 years out of it. The chain of command must be all kinds of fucked up. Does the US even have one Commander In Chief/President right at that moment...or two? We know governments largely fell apart, but there's presumably some kind of interim solution in place to prevent complete anarchy.
  • Okoye is also on close terms with the Avengers. It's quite possible Natasha told her what they were planning, and when it worked Okoye tried to call them, couldn't get a response, noticed the compound was under attack, and quickly mobilized the half of the army that hadn't been Snapped (the Snapped half, as noted, were already mobilized). Then sorcerers showed up with portals.
  • This is probably the answer. The only ones able to get to the battle in time to make any sort of difference were those that Strange picked up.

You can't cut off ALL the branches

• They want to return the Stones (and probably Mjölnir) to their place in history so that the alternate timeline will become a Close-Enough Timeline. Great. But if every possible outcome spawns a different alternate timeline, surely by removing those stones you just created a whole bunch of new timelines where you don't get the Stones back to their proper role in history. Right? Didn't this plan create a whole slew of new universes where Dormammu couldn't be stopped, and The Bad Guy Wins?
  • While every possible outcome may spawn an alternate timeline, from the perspective of the Avengers we're following in the MCU films, they're just making sure the specific realities they stole stones from don't get screwed over. To put it a different way, the Avengers basically stole Infinity Stones from a couple different realities in The Multiverse, and then put them back in those same particular realities so those versions never suffer a The Bad Guy Wins. Their "Time GPS" from Tony allows them to travel back to those specific realities as well, as opposed to another random one. So they're just being polite and making sure the realities they stole from still get a Close-Enough Timeline to theirs where Dormammu doesn't eat reality or Ronan doesn't keep going around being a terrorist. Now, are there potentially an infinite number of Alternate Universes out there, including ones where The Bad Guy Wins? Quite possibly given the upcoming What If...? series. But these Avengers still wanted to make sure the 3 or 4 realities they visited didn't end up that way. Also if you want someone to blame for all these infinite timelines, it's explicitly 616 Reed Richards ever since Secret Wars (2015). Fuck that guy.
  • "A bunch of new timelines where you don't get the Stones back to their proper place" is EXACTLY what the Ancient One feared could happen, however good the Avengers' intentions were, and why she doesn't want to surrender the Time Stone to Banner. And she indeed contemplates the possibility of a reality where, bereft of the Sorcerers' "chief weapon", Dormammu overruns the universe. It's implied, when she's finally convinced, that she trusts Banner et al not to screw this up. (Fun fact: from a certain perspective, Thanos does this to himself, creating an alternate reality where he and everything related to him vanished in 2014.)
  • Safe to say only one new branch was created when they took the stones from the four time periods (1970, 2012, 2013, and 2014), not infinite. Steve returned the stones (and Thor's hammer) to the exact moment they were taken (same alternate timelines) under the pretense that they will no longer exist, though they likely will still exist due to the changes that were made.
  • Maybe timelines only branch again if you go back before the time of the original branch. So the Avengers could create a timeline without the Infinity Stones, but they won't as long as they actually return them and don't jump further back to before they were taken in the first place.
  • According to Loki, the variant timelines get pruned by the TVA.

Despite all the big brains planning the time heist, getting the time stone basically luck?

• No one thought to verify Dr. Stranger's address at the time they were going to.
• Even if they had, he didn't have the time stone, the Ancient One did.
• The Ancient One could have just as easily been nowhere near New York; her sanctum is on the other side of the planet.
  • Which is about five seconds away from the New York Sanctum via sling-ring, so not really an issue, especially with the Chitauri invasion to attract her to NYC. As for the Avengers not knowing Strange's then-current address, most of them have never actually met Strange, or knew he even existed before the events of Infinity War. It would seem that he'd remained out of the public eye up until then, after which he was dusted and no longer around to exchange background stories etc.
  • The only person who knew Strange was a) not at the New York sanctum during the Battle of New York, b) not wielding the Eye, and c) not even a sorceror yet was Strange himself, who was dusted the entire time the planning was being done. The Avengers were going on the only information they had.
  • Wong would have also known, but it's unknown if the Avengers were in contact with him.

Soul Stone Sacrifice Stuff

• Does the thing you love HAVE to be a sentient being?
  • Red Skull said it flat out in the last film: "A soul for a soul". So yes, the Soul Stone actually needs a living being to sacrifice.
  • The rules "a soul for a soul" were reiterated in this film.

Functioning Society

• The state of the world seems to be largely inconsistent throughout the film. One would imagine that 50% of the global population dying at random would cause, at best, the complete collapse of modern infrastructure, yet businesses like diners and restaurant are still running while Thor's post time-skip introductory scene also shows that video game servers (or at least those of Fortnite) are in working order and seem to have a sizable player base. The only consequence of the snap just seems to be that the world is slightly emptier and people are depressed, when the real issue should probably be just trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic anarchic world.
  • Judging by the condition of New York City, it's possible that cities that were too complex to maintain with the reduced population were simply evacuated altogether, with their inhabitants filling in for the Vanished in smaller municipalities that had a chance of being kept operational. The 50% of doctors, teachers, farmers, repair crews, etc who were left behind were redistributed to places that most desperately needed them until the dusting reversed.
  • It is stated that in the immediate aftermath of the Devastation that many governments essentially ceased to function. However, it's important to note that MCU Earth has a lot of things going for it to help recover that the real Earth doesn't. Various miracle technologies from Stark and Wakanda for instance, superhumans to help settle unrest, and even intergalactic contacts (who of course had their own issues to deal with but could have still been of some help). Lastly, we skip ahead five years to a point where much of the chaos has died down.
  • Given Wakanda is about a century ahead of the rest of the world in technology, it makes sense M'Baku (shown spared by the Snap and the logical next king with the Royal Family gone) aided in using their resources to try and help the rest of the world. While it was still strained, that technology alone would have helped keep some sort of order going.
  • Marvel is also pretty far on the optimistic side of things. We have no idea what would actually happen, but "banding together against the crisis" is certainly a valid human response, and Marvel will have assumed that's what happened. Particularly given that many people probably just got a HEAVY dose of perspective on their more petty concerns.
  • The people running those diners and maintaining those servers are probably doing so to maintain a sense of normalcy. For themselves and their customers.
  • Only about 60% of the world's adult population have jobs; replacing most of the people who got snapped would actually not be all that difficult. The problems subsequent to the Snap would almost certainly be mostly psychological rather than logistic.

Pegasus

• OK, where the hell did Valkyrie get that flying horse from??
  • When Strange is about to portal her and the Asgardians to New York, she goes, "Wait! Can we stop at Horse Planet first? I befriended a few back when Asgard was whole and I would like a steed to ride into battle."
  • Alternatively Thor used Stormbreaker one drunk weekend over those 5 years to open a Bifrost to Horse Planet and Valkyrie picked up one then.
  • Perhaps they serve as New Asgard's Air Force.

With greatly OP superheroes comes great tactical oopsies

• Captain America is rightfully recognized as one of the best tacticians and strategies in Marvel, in any continuity. But he must have been caught up in the moment in the Final Battle as he squandered his two biggest assets against Thanos and his forces:
  First, to keep the Gauntlet away from Thanos, instead of summoning a powerful, flight-capable hero, he has Scott shrink down from Giant Man form and go repair the Quantum Tunnel in the van. Scott has a masters in electronics engineering but he's no PhD; Hope is intimately familiar with the tunnel's technology, but, unlike Tony's portal, the tunnel has no way to navigate the quantum realm's time vortices so they would be blindly tossing the Gauntlet into the microverse. (And the van itself wasn't all that valuable, so long as Tony or Banner could build a new portal after the battle.) All this accomplished was take out Giant Man and Wasp from the fight for a desperation move that would have ruined several timelines.
  Second, when Carol comes back and destroys Sanctuary II, Cap orders her to take the Gauntlet and go into the quantum tunnel (again, with no guidance, and also no way to get her back). This Thanos has no personal teleports, flight, or interstellar sensors like Comic Thanos does, so as soon as his ship was down he was grounded hopelessly in the Upstate New York countryside. Why not have Carol grab the Gauntlet, fly to the Moon, and guard it there until the battle was done, and free Scott to flatten Thanos and his forces? It's not like he was counting on her power and skills as a tactical asset anyway.
  • Thanos already had several landing craft on the surface, and his fleet's limitations aren't common knowledge to anyone but Nebula, who's not been around to teach Cap about them. So far as Steve knows, those things could take off and haul Thanos to the Moon, Mars, or the Andromeda Galaxy faster than Carol can fly there. As for Wasp, does Rogers even have a clue what she's capable of...? Scott himself didn't learn about the Wasp suit until shortly before he got stuck in the Quantum Realm, and the only time he's mentioned Hope to the Avengers was when he went off on a tangent while trying to explain the quantum-tunnel device to them. So sending her off to try to give them somewhere to dump the Gauntlet out of Thanos's reach was the most plausible way Steve knew to let the pair of shrinkers help end the battle, altogether.
  • The problem with that is that Cap had already witnessed Carol's abilities firsthand just from the few seconds of her no-selling and then sinking Sanctuary II. Destroying that ship also took down its detachable flying donuts, and the only landing craft on the field were the Outrider nachos, which, as Cap himself would have realized, would've posed as much of a threat as a dust bunny to Binary-mode Captain Marvel. Plus, in the intervening years of Carol coming and going to help out in the cosmos, they must have heard she can fly faster than light from a standstill. So even if Thanos DID have an intact craft somewhere on the field, it probably couldn't catch up to Carol, let alone outgun the battleship that didn't even mess up her hair, so there was nothing he could do if she just yoinked the Gauntlet and flew out of sight.
    And while Wasp was probably not as valuable an asset, Giant Man WAS knocking Leviathans out of the sky and was way too massive even for Thanos to seriously injure—his sword may be sharp enough to destroy vibranium, but it's still tiny and can only do so much against a hundred-foot foe. Sure, he'd chop off a finger or two if Scott tried to grab him, but then Scott would just squash him flat. And there's still the matter of tossing both the Gauntlet and Carol into the quantum realm without guidance or a tether where, at best, they'd require nigh-miraculous triangulation to retrieve them, like they did to save Janet.
  • It's unknown what limits or conditions Carol's powers have to say for sure if she could have escaped with the gauntlet into space or not (of all the MCU heroes her abilities seem the least defined). For instance, perhaps shifting to light speed would take a few seconds of powering up wherein she would be vulnerable, or perhaps going that fast inside a planet's atmosphere is a dangerous thing for the planet or at least the area she takes off from. Or perhaps that kind of flight power has a limit/recharge time that she was in after crossing who knows how many galaxies to reach the Earth in time to help. At the very least we know she can't just zip around at that speed at will (or she could have gotten to the van in an instant). As for dropping the gauntlet into the tunnel (whether it involved her going in too or not), perhaps it was simply a command given in desperation without enough thought to the potential consequences. Perhaps the makers of the film may eventually give us some insights on this admittedly confusing part of the fight.

Is the prime timeline screwed without the Infinity Stones?

• The Ancient One tells Banner something along the lines of "the Infinity Stones create what you perceive as the flow of time," and is afraid of what will happen to her reality if the Time Stone is removed. So... It seems real bad that Thanos destroyed them, doesn't it? The possible ramifications of this are never addressed.
  • It was more a flowery way of saying without the infinity stones, history would have proceeded down a very dark path, i.e. Dormammu would have eaten that version of reality and other bad things.
  • It's probably setting up a future Dr. Strange or Captain Marvel movie about restoring the stones.
  • Directors and writers also said the infinity stones aren't gone from prime timeline, just atomized. (might be setup for mutants and whatnot)
  • The Infinity Stones are physical embodiments of concepts/primal forces of the universe. They can't be destroyed outright, but they can be rendered down to a point where they're unusable, which is presumably what Thanos did. It's possible that given enough time or external influence, the scattered atoms will eventually converge back together and reform elsewhere in the universe.

Reuniting with Peggy

• Steve finally getting his happy ending with Peggy is nice, but wouldn't she notice that he's aged ten years since the mission he disappeared in? He lived a decade in the 21st century before going back to the 20th, after all. Or did he retire to 1955 and hope she hadn't moved on and that nobody asked awkward questions about where he'd been?
  • Why would you assume he wouldn't be honest with her and tell her his entire story of coming back from the future to be with her? Peggy also would have had a relatively easy time fabricating an identity for him given her connection to SHIELD and Howard Stark.

Recognizing Red Skull

• Why don't Nat and Hawkeye know the Red Skull on sight? On AoS we see SHIELD Academy gives history lessons to cadets, beside the fact Natasha saw Schmidt in Zola's little HYDRA propaganda film in CA:TWS.
  • It's a dark and gloomy planet, they're a little preoccupied, and he's wearing a hood. Even if Red Skull popped up in their head, it's also equally likely to them that he's just a creepy-ass stonekeeper, what with the whole grim reaper aesthetic.
  • They have every reason to believe that Red Skull is dead. Since Cap gains control of the plane, it's reasonable for everyone to assume that Cap already took care of him. Even if they don't see him die, they can still assume that he's dead because the serum doesn't stop aging and Red Skull is over a hundred years old.
  • Well, Cap is like 120 years old by the end of the film. But the Vormir guide speaking German should have raised eyebrows.
  • Cap has the benefit of being frozen in the plane.
  • Cap also saw the Red Skull apparently disintegrate before his eyes. Even if he talked about his fight with the Red Skull, he also has every reason to believe that the Red Skull is dead.
  • They're on an alien planet, so logically they'd expect anyone they meet there to be of an alien race. They got a look at Schmidt's freaky skull-face and assumed he was just a red-skinned skull-faced alien.
  • Also possible is that part of his role as the stonekeeper is that who/what he was is GONE on a cosmic scale. That he knows who he was, but the ones seeking the stone would just see a vague figure, a phantasm that vaguely resembles Red Skull if you turn your head just so and squint a little.

So is it now confirmed that plants were not dusted?

• We do get Nat saying that half of "all life" was undone by the Devastation, however, to my knowledge, we never once in either movie see plants referenced or shown as being destroyed. Indeed, the planet they find Thanos on shortly after is exceedingly vibrant with plant life (with no indication he used the stones to create them, as he only used them once more, to destroy the stones), and we see a good minute or two pass after Clint's family is dusted and not a single tree vanishes. The interview that had people thinking plants were included in the culling was a bit ambiguous as the context of the question being answered was specifically about if animals were included, and thus "all life" may have meant "all animal life". If plants were excluded (not counting sapient ones like Groot, who may not actually be a real plant), this would also help explain how worlds continued to function as well as they did as they would have a great deal of excess food available for a time.
  • That was obvious even in Infinity War. The Snap occurred in a forest, and we certainly didn't see half the trees turn to dust.
  • Thanos's underlying gripe was about the over-exploitation of resources, and his only aim after completing his insane mission was to settle down and grow vegetables. To him, non-motile, non-sapient plants are resources, not exploiters thereof, so regardless of how scientists might quibble about them being "life" too, he let them live on undisturbed.

"We don't know where Thanos is... except we totally do, and even got evidence of him."

• At the beginning of the movie, it has been 23 days since the Snap. When Tony asks where Thanos is, the team claims not to know where he went... until Nebula gives a very vague "The Garden". She doesn't point out what planet this is, or where it is, she just brings it up and gives Rhodey an opening to quip. Then Rocket states that the Snap caused a cosmic power surge originating from Earth, "Unlike anything ever seen", and that they detected the same kind of surge on another planet two days ago. So... doesn't that mean you DO know exactly where Thanos is, you have known for two days, it's just that you don't have a spaceship to get to him? (Which wouldn't have stopped Carol, mind.)
  • The implication is that Rocket and Nebula were looking for Thanos's location using the Benatar while the entire Tony meltdown was happening. Once they did that, Nebula comes in and says the whole "don't bother, I can tell where Thanos is." So basically: They didn't know using Earth tech, but once they had access to the space tech/communications channels/etc. on the Benatar, they found out. And Nebula's knowledge about "The Garden" confirms that's where he retired to, and it wasn't just a planet he stopped on for a second.
    • Just to clarify the above explanation, the power surge occurred (and was detected by spacefaring civilizations) two days earlier, but Rocket and Nebula didn't find out about it until they accessed interstellar communications channels using the Benatar right before this scene.
  • Which also may explain why there weren't hundreds of other alien races hankering for Thanos's head, they probably had no idea where he was or who did it.

Loki getting away with the Tesseract

• If the confusion caused by the time heist allowed Loki to get away with Tesseract in 2012, how did they get the Space Stone?
  • That was the point of the 1970's sequence. Steve and Tony, instead of using the last of their Pym Particles to return home, jumped back to a place they were pretty sure had both Pym Particles and the Tesseract. Tony grabbed the Tesseract from SHIELD's vaults, Steve grabbed the Pym Particles from Hank's lab, and they returned home. It's not quite clear what happened to 2012 Loki, if Steve fixed that when he went to return the Scepter, but they very clearly showed them getting the Tesseract.
  • 2012 timeline Loki also may be a Sequel Hook for the Loki series they're making for Disney+, So Cap may never have caught him. We'll just have to wait and see.

The Ancient One and Doctor Strange

• When Bruce is conversing with the Ancient One, she reveals that she knows who and where Doctor Strange is, that he'll one day become a sorcerer, and that he'll be the best of them. The Ancient One does a lot of peering into the future so by itself this would seem consistent, but how does this gel with her initially rejecting Strange as a pupil and telling him she never looked into his future in Strange's own movie?
  • ”Stephen, it was the only way.”... or she was a Lying Liar who Lied. Sorry, ”Metaphorically True”
  • She didn't see into his future but likely saw into her order's one and saw the new employee was pretty good. As for rejecting him well have you seen his movie? Guy was a total ass, she probably either thought destiny was bad or that he needs humility before accepting him in.
  • As Strange puts it in this movie, "If I tell you what happens, it won't happen." Strange can't become the greatest of the Sorcerer Supreme unless she does a lot of Batman Gambit crap to get him there, just as Strange can't get Tony, Scott, and the Ancient One to act in the ways they do if he doesn't give away the Time Stone in Infinity War at that exact second.
  • The line in Doctor Strange is "I never saw your future, only its possibilities. You have such a capacity for goodness. You've always excelled, but not because you crave success but because of your fear of failure." The Ancient One is saying she tried to see Strange's future but saw many alternatives. Marrying that with the line in Endgame: Strange always becomes the greatest sorcerer on Earth, but in some possible futures he uses that power for good, and in some for evil.

Thor trying to save his mother

• Didn't they already state that altering the past doesn't change the future? So his mother would not be alive when they got back even if he did warn her, so why bother trying?
  • Just because its an Alternate Universe version of his mom doesn't mean it's not his mom. Why would he want to leave any version of his mom to die? Especially when Thor's an emotional wreck at this point who hasn't been thinking with his head but wallowing in his pain for 5 years?
  • Additionally, he might be wanting to prevent his alternate self from going through the same loss he went through.
  • Doesn't Frigga say she doesn't want to know what will happen? Maybe Thor respects her wishes. And in context of how she died, it was in protecting Jane from Malekith. So if Frigga doesn't create her distraction and face off against him, that risks Jane also dying. So Thor could be trading his mother's life for that of the girl he loves.
  • The team isn't concerned with keeping history unaltered. They just need to make sure each universe has its six infinity stones after they're done with them. Even the Prime universe still has its original stones, just in the form of stray molecules.
  • A bigger question is, why doesn't Frigga want to save herself? She acts like time is some sacred pre-determined thing that must not be altered. Yet we know time doesn't work that way in the MCU. Technically, she's only a few hours old, having been spawned when Thor caused the divergence of an alternate timeline by coming here. There is absolutely no reason for her not to save herself. Something Thor should have explained to her when she says things that clearly imply she believes in a single, sacred timeline. Her whole "this is my sacred destiny" atitude, and Thor accepting it doesn't ring true at all.
    • They discussed how not to change the past, i.e. make it what happened all along. Steve and Tony failed at that, thereby starting at least one new timeline. Clint and Natasha did okay, but Nebula messed it up. Thor may have wanted to, but he must have known that he would only be saving one version of his mother while creating an entire universe for things to go wrong in without her. They hadn't created a new timeline yet because until you change something, it's just a loop.
    • No, it's not a loop. It's a different timeline whether or not they changed things. They just wanted to minimize the changes because they're not assholes and they don't want to completely screw over another timeline for their own benefit.
    • In that case, he did forewarn his alternate-timeline mother, and she actually stands a chance.

Why didn’t Cap take Bucky with him?

• Captain America was willing to split the Avengers and lose his freedom for his best friend Bucky… Yet he left him in the future while he got to go home in the past. Bucky has had it just as hard as Steve and in a way he has had it even harder – being forced to become a heartless assassin against his will. He never asked to be revived. Doesn’t he deserve a chance to start over as well? Bucky now has no one that is connected to him from that era.
  • Its heavily implied by their words (mirroring another time they had said goodbye knowing it would be a long time before they saw each other again) and Bucky's expressions and reactions, that Bucky already knew what Steve was going to do. Assuming they had already discussed it, Bucky presumably opted to stay behind. He seemed quite happy retiring to Wakanda and being beloved as their White Wolf. That was his chance to start over. One could even reason that staying around Steve would in the end make it hard for him to move on from the traumas of his time under Hydra, and that living in a place and time with no connection to it was what he wanted.
  • Plus, Bucky was probably enough of a realist to know he'd have a terrible time concealing his cybernetic arm from people in the past. No Latex Perfection in the 1940s, and nobody who could be trusted to repair it if it developed a fault.
  • Events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier suggest that Bucky felt obligated to stay and make whatever amends he could for the innocent people he'd hurt as a Hydra pawn.
• Who's to say Cap and Bucky didn't have that conversation offscreen and Bucky turned the idea down of going back with Steve?

What about the other Steve in the new timeline?

• Cap has now gone back to the past and reunited with Peggy sometime after the WWII… Yet there is another Steve in the ice… What will happen to the poor fella when he wakes up to discover that his ‘one true gal’ has been nicked by his future self? Will he have to create another timeline to get his own Peggy?
  • Who's to say he would ever find out or that it would matter? By the time he comes out of the ice Peggy will have dementia and be near death. And Steve would likely go back to the original timeline soon after her death. As for the Steve of the new timeline, that Steve may well make other decisions regarding retirement.
  • This is assuming that the Steve of that timeline ever even comes out of the ice. Going back to reunite with Peggy, plus changing a bunch of other things like rescuing Bucky from HYDRA (not confirmed, but there's no way Steve's basic sense of decency would've allowed his best friend to be tortured and brainwashed just to try and keep the timeline somewhat the same) and/or preventing things like the Kennedy assassination or 9/11 might mean that the circumstances that led to Steve being found never happen at all. The Steve of that particular timeline might have been stuck in the ice for good or at least delayed for a much longer period of time.
    • Kinda doubt that "our" Steve would have just left the other timeline him in the ice, since that'd be a pretty dick thing to do just because he wanted to have a life. It's likely that he had a think on it for awhile and asked SHIELD to hold off on thawing out the "native" Steve until after Peggy was dead and he'd gone back to his home timeline. This would actually provide more of a clean break for the "native" Steve since he can more thoroughly accept that Peggy is gone without having to deal with her as an elderly dementia patient, and also let that timeline have Captain America again (and for longer).

Hawkeye loves Black Widow more than his family?

• So Black Widow was Hawkeye's sacrifice, meaning he loved her more than anyone else. Does that mean he doesn't love his family? They were dead at the time, and couldn't have been sacrificed, but it's still strange. If it could be anyone you love, why didn't Thanos kill one of his other children?
  • It's been five years since the decimation, and Hawkeye has had time to grieve in his own unhealthy way. It's very likely that, at that moment, Natasha was the one being he feared losing more than anything else.
  • To get the stone you have to lose something you love, they never say it has to be the thing you love the most. Clint has room in his heart to love his family and his best friend. As for Thanos using Gamora over his other children, he's twisted enough that Gamora is possibly the only one he truly loves.
  • Perhaps you're confusing it with the Dark Curse of Once Upon a Time - there the curse won't work unless you sacrifice what you love most. Here a sacrifice of someone you love will do.
  • As for why Thanos doesn't sacrifice another one of his children, he doesn't know about the sacrifice until they're on Vormir. Sure he probably could have portalled to where the other children were, but maybe he's thinking pragmatically as well. Gamora is his favorite and she's also the only one of his loved ones who's actively fighting against him. If he sacrifices one of his other children, he's down a useful ally. In sacrificing Gamora, he both gets the soul stone and removes someone who could do a lot of damage to what he's trying to do. What's more is that if he doesn't sacrifice Gamora, he'll probably have to end up killing her anyway when she inevitably tries to stop him.
    • Much simpler explanation: He doesn't actually love any of his other children. He obviously rather likes Ebony Maw, probably in the way that you like a coworker that does a really good job and you've been on the job with for a long time. His feelings towards Nebula seem... complicated... but they're definitely not love, even someone like Thanos would so casually torture someone they loved for such an extended period. The reason he sacrificed Gamora? She was the only thing in the universe he actually loved other than his vision.
  • That's not how love work unless you're a psycho like Thanos. Clint doesn't love one kid more than the other or his wife more than his mom and so forth, unless like Thanos where the only person you consider a dearest love is the little girl you turn into a child soldier and kill her parents in front of them you probably have plenty of people you love enough that you can't really quantify which love is stronger and which is the strongest. Any of them would do.
    • "That's not how love work unless you're a psycho like Thanos." Well, yes. He's not called "Thanos the Reasonably-Minded and Rational Titan," after all.
  • He doesn't love Black Widow more than his family. It's more like, his family is gone: of the people who are still left alive, he loves Natasha the most. She's his BFF, after all.
  • We just saw he won't kill her even if it can bring back his family, he loves her just as much it's just not the same kind of love.
  • We didn't even see that he wouldn't have killed her to bring back his family, actually: what we saw was that, given a choice, he'd rather kill himself - or rather, the gangster-slaughtering monster he believes he's become since the Snap - than kill her. Either of the pair might well have let the other jump if Red Skull had told them that only one of them was eligible to be the sacrifice; there's half a universe at stake, including Clint's family, after all. We'll never know how it would have played out, had that been the case ... and no matter how they may grieve for Natasha, both Clint and his family are probably thankful that events ensured he neither had to push her, Thanos-style, nor stand back and let her fall. Not being fast enough to jump first was guilt enough, on top of all the rest he's burdened with.
  • Something else worth considering is that to Clint, Natasha IS family. In his book, she's his sister, no less a part of his family than his kids (They do call her "Auntie Nat", and his next kid is named for her, after all). I think to him, everything they've been through together has made them family, sure as blood.

Captain Al-Qaeda

• Cap couldn't get involved in high concept sci-fi superheroics, but he knew 9/11 was going to happen and didn't warn anyone. He doesn't deserve to be called Captain America if he is okay with letting thousands of his fellow Americans and fellow New Yorkers die in a terrorist attack. If anything, he should also be against the subsequent political culture that lead to the Patriot Act, which he should clearly be against due to his stated antipathy towards Project Insight and the Pro-Registration side of Civil War.
  • First of all, is 9/11 even a thing in the MCU? Second, you can't change the past with MCU time travel. Any changes simply result in a new timeline being created. So even if Cap did stop 9/11 after he went back (and for all we know, he did) it wouldn't have changed anything in the prime timeline, it would have just created a new reality where 9/11 never happened.
  • 9/11 happened in the MCU. All of the establishing shots of New York show One World Trade Center, and the first season of The Punisher had a scene with Madani talking to her partner while walking around the 9/11 Memorial. Still, if Cap can bring an un-damaged shield into the future for Falcon, that means he can change the past, as the shield was damaged in the past and there was no time to have it repaired between the big battle and the scene with old-ass Cap.
  • Cap spent his life in an alternate reality with Peggy and then returned to the prime timeline after her death, Word of God has confirmed it. So the shield he gives Falcon is just one from the alternate reality. Also, the twin towers being gone doesn't necessarily mean 9/11 happened, it's possible they were just never built in the MCU. But either way, it's a pointless argument, because we don't know if it happened, we don't know if Cap tried to do anything about it if it did, and we do know that if he did do something about it the changes wouldn't be apparent in the timeline we see.
  • 9/11 did happen in the MCU. The War on Terror is still in full force in this reality, as the inciting incident of the first Iron Man occurs because Tony was demonstrating the Jericho Missile to American troops fighting in Afghanistan.
  • For what it is worth, Osama is mentioned in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Al-Qaeda is mentioned by Foggy in Daredevil, and Frank Castle is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
  • What makes you so sure he didn't stop 9/11 in that particular timeline? Or at the very least leave some kind of warning?
  • There's a simple answer: he probably didn't live that long. He probably met back with Peggy in 1945, after the end of the war (why go to the 1970s and leave her alone and miserable for 15 years, if he can choose?). Let's say that Captain America is aged 37 (Evans' age as of 2019). As of 2001, he would be aged 91.
  • Assuming Peggy lived to the same age in the alternate timeline (since there isn't any apparent reason she wouldn't), Steve almost certainly remained with her for the rest of her life (i.e into the second decade of the 21st century). He probably returned to 2023(?) in the main timeline very soon afterward, since there would then be nothing left to keep him in the the alternate timeline and he'd want to be sure he was able to pass on the shield and see his old friends again before old age finally caught up with him.
  • Telling an American audience that the most recent catastrophe in our history was reversed through time travel shenanigans as a cute throwaway while we in the real world have to deal with the actual consequences and pain is tone-deaf and unnecessary.

Why not just go beat up the Infinity War-Thanos then take the Infinity Gauntlet + Stones from him?

• So the Avengers came up with this complicated Time Heist plan of go steal the Infinity Stones from separate locations from different points in time, which creates a new timeline in the process, with the added stake of having only enough Pym Particles for one trip each. Yep, that's a cool idea, and it's an excuse for us to go back to our favorite moments in MCU, but there's one place in the timeline where they could get all the Stones at once: the Battle of Wakanda. The Avengers could go back, assist their past selves and curbstomp Thanos together. Even if Thanos has all Infinity Stones, he can't withstand everyone's combined might. Or if they weren't sure if Thanos can be beaten with all the Stones in his possession, they also have the second choice: the Battle on Titan. Imagine if the surviving Avengers go to Titan and assist the Titan team in taking down Thanos before he had the Time Stone, then they can win easily. After that just go to Wakanda and finish the battle there, wait for Shuri to extract the Mind Stone from Vision, then went back to their original timeline and use the Stones to revive the dusted population. That way, they can save two timelines at once: the alternate timeline where Thanos was stopped before he could accomplish his goal, and the current one where they undo the snap that Thanos already caused, and nobody has to die! Well, except the ones that are already killed prior the snap, of course.
  • Note that even on Titan, as soon as Thanos realizes he has any chance of being beaten the fight is essentially over. He takes out most of the fighters in one move, and then proceeds to simply have some fun with Strange and Tony. Things only went on as long as they did because he was enjoying the fight and giving the heroes a sporting chance. Chances are if a bunch more suddenly showed up he would have shattered a moon and brought the fight to a close much sooner (or simply vanished via the Space Stone if he actually thought he would lose). Tony at least makes it plain when Steve asks about his "fight" with Thanos that as far as he is concerned at that point there was no beating Thanos. Basically, the Avengers probably thought that going back to a time when Thanos was already using the gauntlet and teleporting across the universe at will was simply too risky compared to a covert operation. Also, they didn't seem aware of the dangers of alternate time lines until the Ancient One told Bruce about them.
  • Regarding the battle on Titan, there is one moment where Thanos is briefly vulnerable. When the Titan team blitz him and had Mantis kept him in a trance. Thanos was under-control at that moment, at least until Star-Lord screwed everything up. Just have someone knock Quill out while everyone else helps restrain Thanos until they get the Infinity Gauntlet off his hands. Boom, they win.
  • The problem with the above is that the timing may be too precise in this instance. No one was keeping track of the specific minute or so that Thanos was restrained, so going back to that time may not be feasible. Keep in mind that they didn't seem able to get too specific with their arrival points either, as when they traveled to the past they always had to then travel some distance to actually reach where the stones were at a given time. Say they arrive on Titan a mile from where the fight is taking place, they have no way of knowing if they will get there in time to help.
  • Yes, but as you said, they didn't need to keep track of the specific minute that it happened. They know that Tony, Dr. Strange, and Spidey would go to Titan, join up with the Guardians, and ambush Thanos there. Even the Titan team has to wait for Thanos to arrive, and it was apparently long enough that Dr. Strange could sit through 14 million variations of the battle outcome far into the future, and for everyone else to come up with a plan to blitz Thanos and restrain him even with him wielding the Infinity Gauntlet. There's plenty of time to prepare. If the present Avengers traveled to Titan during, say, before the Titan team arrives on the planet, there'd be plenty of time to explain the situation and come up with a plan to deal with Thanos. As for preventing Peter Quill from screwing it up, they could explain Gamora's fate gently to him, convince him to bottle his grief up first (the reason he vents out at Thanos is that it comes as sudden information and Quill, being hot-blooded as he is, lashes out at Thanos and ruins everything as a result) and get the job done. Or, if they weren't sure Quill or any of the Guardians would be distracted by the news of Gamora's death that they can't do their jobs, then just keep it quiet, then when Quill is about to lash out at Thanos when he learns the truth, have someone restrains him from doing so as the rest tries to get the Gauntlet off. Bottom line is, the present Avengers has all the time in the world to prepare. They could even travel and set up camp on Titan a week in advance if they wish to.
  • The idea that they can simply take on Thanos at his absolute strongest is incredibly risky for no reason. Thanos without the stones is powerful enough to take on all of the Avengers in 2023, and with any of the stones the fight becomes that much harder. They can easily lose, possibly creating an endless cycle where Thanos wins, the Avengers go back in time, lose, the past Avengers go back in time, lose again, repeat. Additionally, taking the stones from that timeline would still have the same problem as taking them from any timeline. The Time Heist allows them to revisit relatively less dangerous eras for the stones that they personally know and use to their advantage. Except the Power and Soul Stone heists, which were derailed by factors the Avengers could not have possibly known about, it went really well all things considered.
  • There's one moment during the battle on Titan where Thanos is vulnerable when he was restrained by the Titan team who managed to get the drop on him before he could use the Stones' powers effectively. The only thing stopping them from gaining victory is Star-Lord going nuts and ruined the already perfect plan. Iron Man and Nebula were there. They know how the battle played out so they can use this to plan accordingly. The Avengers can go back and wait for the Titan team on Titan, say, a day earlier. When they arrive, explain the situation to them and tell Star-Lord not to ruin it, then carry out their plans as usual. Or if they don't want to risk Star-Lord and the Guardians deviating their plans again, then just don't tell them anything and let the battle plays out until Thanos is restrained, then have someone stop Star-Lord before he could go berserk on the Mad Titan and have everyone else try to get the Gauntlet off.
  • That's still taking a ridiculous level of risk for no actual reason. They already know periods of time where they can retrieve the Stones without having to fight against Thanos again. They want to actually succeed in getting all the Stones, so why would they insert themselves into a time where even at his most vulnerable, Thanos still has the potential of taking the Gauntlet back and screwing everything up?
  • Also, we keep assuming it's a guarantee that getting the gauntlet off of Thanos in that scene would mean a victory. Surely in at least a few of those millions of scenarios Strange saw they did get the gauntlet off (or Quill didn't hit Mantis), but it ended up not mattering. For all we know he would have broken out of Mantis' mental binding an instant before they got the gauntlet off even if Quill didn't get in the way of Mantis' efforts (she was already at her limit judging by how much she was straining). Hell, we know Thanos held some influence over at least some of the stones even when he wasn't touching them (it's been stated in commentary that he was influencing Loki with the Mind Stone to some degree), and that could have come into play if they got the gauntlet off.
  • To add to the above, maybe they do get the Gauntlet off Thanos. Maybe they even make it five steps away. And then maybe Thanos just takes it back from them anyway after curbstomping them and actually killing them all, seeing as he'd not need to hold back anymore. The future folks could try to sneak in there to grab the Gauntlet, but for all they know, Thanos catches them and kills them too (and/or their past selves think it's an elaborate trick and attack them too, not immediately grasping that they're from the future and not bothering to ask questions, like how past Cap attacked present Cap). The future folks by then probably knew to avoid being anywhere in Thanos's vicinity if they could help it, Stones or no.
  • Not OP, but definitely thought the same thing. In the present they were pretty much prepared to do battle with a Thanos who they thought still had the stones. Assuming they brought Captain Marvel with them back to the past - someone who ripped a loaded gauntlet from Thanos's hand and stopped him from snapping - it's really hard to imagine how they couldn't make a stand against him on Titan (during the Battle for Wakanda, all bets are off, though there's a case could be made for them overpowering him given how close Thor came... hell just tell Thor to aim for the head if you end up traveling back to that fight). It's definitely not like their actual plan was significantly much less risk. It's dumb luck that they sent the right people to Vormir for example, or dumb luck that they, without contingencies for 2014-Nebula were able to deal with the trouble she brought (Thanos still almost won and he had no stones)!
    • They had no reason to expect the events with 2014 Nebula to even happen. Nebula herself certainly hadn't anticipated it, and she would know herself better than anyone, yet she was utterly blindsided by it.
  • There's also a time they can go where Thanos is at his weakest AND has all six stones on him: just after Thor has stabbed him in the chest with Stormbreaker. It's simple: send 2023 Thor to the past with his Stormbreaker and have him, like, wait in a bush or something until 2018 Thor does his thing, chop off Thanos's arm, take it to the present, and transfer the 2018 Stones into the 2023 Gauntlet before snapping. It's not even like Thanos could get revenge by coming to the future like he did in the actual film, since he'd be one-armed, with zero Infinity Stones and an ax in his chest, which Thor would soon use to chop off his head. It's not even like this would lead to a bad timeline, since Infinity War could actually get a good ending in this alternate timeline. And it's definitely not like nobody would think of this, as Thor's been brooding over this moment for five years and five of the other nine Avengers were in Wakanda when it happened.
    • That would mean trading Vision's life, though.
  • 2023 Thor is a an absolute wreck after five years of drowning his own misery, so it's not likely that he'd be able to do that so easily. No one else on the Avengers side has a hope in hell of hurting Thanos at that point either.
  • What about Thanos in the Garden post-IW? He didn’t destroy the stones immediately and waited for a few days before making them self-destruct. His body is a pale shadow of its former glory. Given how well the ambush worked in the prologue, this is pretty much their best chance to do so minus the temporal complications that would have occurred.
  • The only reason that ambush really worked was because Thanos didn't have the Stones, nor did he have the will to fight anymore. If they show up before he destroys the Stones, that would change. Seriously, trying to take the Stones from Thanos when he already had them is a terrible idea, especially when they have much less riskier locations to take them from.
  • Go back to Titan, bring Captain Marvel with you, wait for the moment where Thanos gets immobilized by Mantis, restrain Quill, help Tony and Peter take off the Gauntlet from Thanos's hand, have Carol kick his ass, explain to your past self what is going on, go back to 2023, undo the snap. There you go. The day is saved.
  • That is a very high risk/high reward plan. If something goes wrong you end up fighting Four-stone Thanos. (And it only gets you four stones.) Going to Thanos's farms post-snap before Stone destruction should be viable, but you still have to take on Thanos when he has all the stones. The plan they did was low risk, get the stones by stealth when no-one's paying attention, minimal risk for high reward.
  • Not to mention that in all the above mentioned cases, the Avengers's past selves are right there. If they saw doppelgängers of themselves asking to take the Stones/Gauntlet for reasons they would probable be evasive about, they would much more likely assume that this is some sort of trick Thanos is pulling on them with the Reality Stone.

Where is The Other

• One may recall Thanos's former henchman The Other, the guy with the sharp bloody teeth who acted as an intermediary between Thanos and Loki and made a brief appearance in GotG before he was killed. The issue is 2014 Thanos is alerted to the other Nebula before the scene where the Other died so he should have still been around leading Thanos's forces and such during the big final battle. The Other is the mouthpiece of Thanos, and even Loki is terrified of him. However, in the 2014 part of the time heist, why is The Other's role as a mouthpiece being handled by Ebony Maw? This is happening before The Other died.
  • By all appearances The Other was not much of a fighter, he was basically a glorified mouthpiece for Thanos when interacting with subordinates he didn't care to speak to directly. Chances are he stayed on The Sanctuary and at most coordinated the fight from there.
  • That or one of Thanos's other minions got annoyed at him at some point and killed him just for the hell of it. It's not like Ronan doing it really broke Thanos's heart.
  • Ebony Maw is just as good as a mouthpiece and better as a fighter, there was no reason for The Other to be there.
  • Possibly the Other was still on board the Sanctuary II, and was frantically ordering the gunners to redirect their fire at Captain Marvel when she destroyed it, killing him.

Why didn't Nebula just go back to the future before she got captured by Thanos?

• So the present Nebula is freaking out that the past Thanos now knows about their plans and tries to warn Clint and Natasha in the ship, before Thanos's ship arrives and captures her. Okay, but there's a period where she's still free before Thanos captures her, right? As in when the ship she's in is being beamed up? There's still some time that she can still use the Quantum suit to go back to the future before Thanos's forces could bring her in. So why didn't she do that?
  • Given she didn't travel back when Rhodey did (despite being just as prepared to) and was shocked/distressed by it, the implication was that Thanos was actively preventing her from doing so, via whatever controls he had in place through her mental network.

Captain America and Mjölnir/Thor and Stormbreaker

• In the final fight against Thanos, Thor divided his power equally between Mjölnir and Stormbreaker, which was why he wasn't able to bring the full power of the All-Father against Thanos the way he did at the end of Infinity War. Is this true? It would make sense because Captain America was then able to wield the power of Thor without Thor himself being visibly effected, i.e. Thor wasn't weakened because he had already divided his power himself? Furthermore, because Steve then travels to an alternate timeline with Mjölnir (presumably still with half of Thor's power), then will Thor be weakened enough for him to appear in the next Guardians film and not have the Story-Breaker Power he would have had in that context otherwise, as he is only wielding a half-charged Stormbreaker?
  • a) Thor couldn't channel the same power as he did at the end of Infinity War because he is out of shape and this was basically his first battle in 5 years of depression and alcoholism. Also Thanos using skill instead of raw power this time certainly made things harder. b) The hammers just let him channel his power, they don't permanently hold it (though Mjölnir can also be used as a Power Limiter, thus what happened to him in Thor.) When the alternate Mjölnir returned to its timeline, Thor still had all the power he has always had in him. As ever, the only thing stopping Thor from being all he can be is his own character failings.
  • Given that the Mjölnir Cap wields is from an alternate timeline, if him having Mjölnir take's Thor's power, it is probably taking it from that timeline's Thor rather than the one he's fighting beside.

Shawarma and Exhaustion

• During the trip to the Battle of New York, we see the aftermath of Loki's defeat. Only this time, the Avengers seem to be in perfectly healthy shape, not at all in the injured and exhausted state we originally saw in the denouement in the Schwarma restaurant. Captain America for example can fight his future self to a standstill, despite supposedly nursing a nasty chest wound from a Chitauri blaster, and Thor is walking lightly and jovial, despite having a stab wound from Loki in his gut. Are we to assume they were mostly putting on a show for SHIELD and then promptly collapsed into near unconsciousness in the restaurant an hour later?
  • Took a while for the adrenaline to wear off.
  • Maybe they patched themselves up a bit before bringing Loki downstairs. They only look so tired at the restaurant because they just finished filling out all the paperwork required to settle matters with SHIELD, the city police, the U.S. government, the insurance policy for Stark Tower, civilians whose cars Hulk smacked around the Chitauri with, fees for parking their Quinjet in the middle of the street, etc...

Could Black Widow be saved?

• So we know from the conversation between Bruce and the Ancient One that as long as the stones are returned to the past as close as possible to when they were taken that the time-stream would continues as normal and not branch off into alternate realities. With this in mind, when Captain America is returning the Soul Stone, wouldn't it be possible for Cap to just explain the situation to Clint and Natasha, hand Clint the Soul Stone, then bring Natasha back with him so their timeline of acquiring the Infinity Stones plays out like it already has? Yes, one timeline still loses Natasha, but they'll rest easy knowing she's safe and alive in the prime timeline, and they'll still have a Soul Stone while also leaving the pre-existing Stone on Vormir for Thanos to find later.
  • Still sounds like an attempt to cheat a ritual that is supposed to have no cheats. Plus, the plan that the Ancient One said would work would be to return the stones shortly after they were taken, not shortly before they were taken.
  • It's not that the stones need to be returned "as close as possible to when they were taken." It is that they need to be returned immediately AFTER they were taken. If Steve took the stone back to Clint and handed it to him, then sent Natasha back, the soul stone in this hypothetical universe would still be there but the universe the soul stone originally came from (which was like 5 minutes forward in time) would still be left without a soul stone and therefore doomed. Also time traveling to interfere with other time travelers gets a lot more messy in ways with so many potential ways of happening. Like would that create another universe where Clint time traveled and had to send its own Steve back to the universe that prime Clint got the soul stone from? If time travel is the only way to create alternate universes (as far as we know there isn't a multiverse that already existed) then are they creating an alternate universe where people traveled to alternate universes? Could this new universe's Steve even travel back to the timeline prime Clint took the soul stone from even if he’s theoretically now on a different branch? It's also possible that having two of the same stone in the same universe (as doing this would cause if it's pre-Natasha's death) would be very bad for the universe in how important they are to its balance but that's speculation. The other thing to remember is that the time travel required very specific coordinates to safely go through the Quantum Realm. The ones Natasha had in her bracelet would be synched to her original world and the machine inside the Avengers base whereas Steve's bracelet would be matched to the one they built later after that was destroyed at a later point in relative time and it's unlikely Steve would be able to reprogram time travel return coordinates on his own and it's entirely possible that the return coordinate were fixed from the start. Even if you wanted to make things less complicated then trying to cheat the soul stone by having Steve take a Natasha from any other time period (assuming could bring back another time travel bracelet), you still are stealing her from her current life for your own sake and saying fuck you to another universe permanently (since she’s a hero, removing her then would mean she can't help stop future threats, unlike how losing Gamora at least rid a universe of Thanos as well). And if you did this then as long as these characters have access to that time machine you could eliminate death as a threat from the entire MCU because any time someone dies they could just go "call Banner so we can rip someone out of their lives to live in our present."
  • Completely understandable and well thought out, but one point needs to be clarified a little. Taking Natasha from her current timeline to the prime timeline wouldn't be a "fuck you" to that timeline so much as ensuring events play out properly, providing a less tragic way to remove Natasha from the picture. After all, Natasha wasn't present for the Battle of Earth, and while having another hero on the battlefield would seem to tip the scales in the favor of success, it's still an unknown factor to a delicate set of variables. But as for the matter of time travelers interfering with other time travelers and multiple Soul Stones upsetting the cosmic balance, well, as it's been explained, time travel is messy and confusing.

What would Thanos want to happen if the post-snap universe's population regrew itself?

• Thanos's original goal is to kill half the population of the universe so that it doesn't become overpopulated, harsh, and unlivable like his home planet. But after he succeeds, he also destroys the Infinity Stones, making it impossible to do the same thing in the future should the population of the universe ever grow back to its previous level. Would a regrowth of the population to its previous level take so long and be so far into the future that he doesn't care or would leave it to someone else to deal with in some other way? Is he just extremely nuts?
  • Was the fact that he wanted to wipe out half of all life in the universe not obvious enough to prove his insanity?
  • To elaborate on it a bit more than just “he’s insane,” the way 2014 Thanos reacted to learning the Avengers are trying to undo the snap proves the details of his madness. The way it’s presented, it seems he legitimately thought that once half the universe was wiped out, people would easily realize how great the world is with more resources and realize he was right. It stands to reason therefore (in his mind at least), that these people who witnessed first-hand how he “saved” them from overpopulation would then want to keep the balance he started. That would mean that all sentient life would try and put a check on the population themselves in whatever way they thought best. As time went on and people lived happily in this smaller population universe, most species would have worked to ensure future generations kept that level consistent (again, this is all from his perspective of things where everyone is grateful). The core of Thanos’s madness is that he refuses to see that he could be wrong (and therefore couldn’t have saved Titan even if everyone just listened to him). He can’t understand civilizations falling apart and stagnating after witnessing the horror of losing so many loved ones and that the world wouldn’t improve and people would try anything they could to fix the snap. That’s why 2014 Thanos’s objective shifts to restarting the universe where no one remembers a non-halved universe after learning about the future. He realized that the people wouldn’t see the greatness of what he was doing and would never let that balance stay. Ironically, starting the universe from scratch would probably be even worse for his plan since this new universe wouldn’t know overpopulation was a thing and would probably explosively populate over time like most species did but this movie shows Thanos is too small-minded to see beyond how he will immediately fix everything and the universe will be perfect forever.
  • Then someone else raise an army and kill half the population of other planets by hand. Thanos just wanted to show it works before retiring and living on a farm until he dies. He doesn't care if it happens again or if it didn't exactly solved anything he just wants to kill half the universe to show he was not mad when he suggested it on Titan.
  • Thanos tells you himself: "I am inevitable." He doesn't just mean that he will always succeed, but that he believes that there will always be someone who thinks like him with the resources and tenacity to do what needs to be done. Thanos isn't just "mad," he's profoundly arrogant with a messiah complex who identifies a problem, deems bloodshed the solution, and then "burdens himself" with the challenge of solving it. This is why Thanos's final confrontation is with Tony, a man he identifies as a peer, someone "burdened with knowledge." Thanos believes Tony, like him, would be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to bring peace and stability to the world. Which he was in Age of Ultron. But he's grown since then, rejects Thanos's way of thinking, and destroys everything that Thanos built. So when Thanos said "I am inevitable," he was wrong.

The vacant Quantum Van

• Why didn't Doctor Strange, in the time between giving up the Time Stone and the Snap, tell Tony to go look for the van with the quantum tunnel in San Francisco? Leaving Scott's escape from the Quantum Realm up to chance means there could've been countless futures where Strange giving up the Time Stone meant nothing because Scott was never freed or was freed too late.
  • Presumably because if he had been freed too early, Scott would've never realized that the Quantum Realm could be used for time travel.
  • That's also assuming Dr Strange knew everything that happened. Which we're not indicate that he does.
  • In Doctor Strange (2016), the Ancient One could see possible futures, but couldn't peer past the moment of her own death. Assuming she used the Eye of Agamotto to do so and not her own separate magic, the same would presumably hold for Dr. Strange—meaning that when he viewed the one successful timeline, everything between when he was dusted and when he woke up again five years later would be blank to him.
  • It is possible that he did not know or was 100% sure how things were going to go. He also said that if he told him about the future, it would no longer happen.

Why didn't Banner use the gauntlet a third time to bring Tony back to life?

• This is more of a nitpick than anything, but Banner still had one good arm left after the battle was over. So why didn't he take a shot at resurrecting Tony (and possibly Natasha) while they still had the Stones? He knows that he'd survive using them again. Is there any particular reason the other Avengers wouldn't have let him go through with it?
  • The Gauntlet dusted along with Thanos. Apart from that, they're all a little tired to using artifacts of doom to fulfill slightly selfish motives, and hopefully are genre savvy enough to know that using them to resurrect your loved ones never goes well.
    • Seconded. Remember, they make it a point to use the Gauntlet only to restore those Thanos dusted, and nothing else. Tony made a heroic sacrifice (and got to see the world finally safe before he died, by his last wish), which is not the kind of supernatural/extraordinary circumstance that they have the right to undo.
  • Bruce clearly says he tried bringing Natasha back with his snap, but he just couldn't. There's no reason to believe the stones can bring dead people back, except for those the stones themselves dusted.
  • That was implied to because she was sacrificed for the soul stone, not an inherent inability of the gauntlet.
  • And even if Bruce had decided on trying to bring Tony back, the other Avengers probably would have stopped him since there's no telling if he'd be able to survive another dose of Stone energy. And practically speaking, they also need him to rebuild and run the quantum tunnel machine so Steve can go replace the Stones. So Bruce risking his life is also risking all the mega-billions of lives at risk in the alternate timelines.
  • Another question worth asking: Why couldn't Tony use the stones to heal himself? It wouldn't take a lot of energy to do, especially compared to the armada-destroying snap he performed (and initially survived).
  • If by "survived" you mean "on the brink of death". Just wielding all six Stones was killing him as is, and trying to use their own power to undo the backlash doesn't seem like it's technically possible, otherwise Thanos wouldn't have been walking around with a burned arm at the end of Infinity War.
  • Nobody's considered that the arm burn wasn't the full extent of Banner's injuries. He could have severe internal injuries after the snap, so a second one so soon afterward could kill him. Without his rage fueled healing factor, he physically can't snap a second time and survive this quickly.

Why didn't they keep Thanos's gauntlet?

• Again, more of a nitpick, but do we have any confirmation that Thanos's glove was busted after he destroyed the Stones? Otherwise, it looks like part of the reason using the Stones proved so dangerous for the Avengers is that they were using Tony's tech to make their own gauntlet instead of using the Nidavellir-crafted one, which (as Eitri said in the last movie) was the only thing capable of safely channeling the Stones' power.
  • ...for that matter, why not have Thor just go back to Eitri and help him make another gauntlet?
  • Eitri can't make another gauntlet remember, he has no hands. And Thanos's gauntlet was a blackened lump, even if it was still usable in some fashion they wouldn't risk it. Not to mention the only Avenger it would even fit would be the Hulk. And to be honest... thank god. If they hadn't used Stark tech for the gauntlet, Thanos would have WON. Tony was only able to steal the stones because he could interface directly with the gauntlet while touching it, even without him being the one wearing it at the time.
  • Good point. Strange might have even selected a timeline where the gauntlet was irrevocably damaged, just so Stark would be able to make the transfer.
  • Side question: Why can't they give him robot hands like Nebula? Whether or not they need him to make another gauntlet, it seems like it would let him have a much better quality of life than those two lumps of metal he had on.
  • It's possible they did. Eitri didn't show up in the movie, but we know the Avengers were doing things all around the galaxy. Even if Thor was too depressed to mention Eitri's problem, Rocket probably would have at least checked in on him once.
  • Was it ever stated Eitri survived the snap? In commentary the makers of the movie implied that even Thanos himself fell under the "random half" aspect of the snap, despite being the last Titan (and unless all the dwarves lived on that station, Eitri wasn't the last of his kind).
  • This is probably it. If Eitri got Snapped, that means there's no one around to run the Nidavellir forge. And Thor and Rocket probably wouldn't be capable of restarting it without him. (For that matter, it's also possible Thanos went and killed Eitri before he went to Garden World, just to make certain the Gauntlet couldn't be replicated.)
  • Also, even Eitri's gauntlet didn't "safely" channel the stone's powers, its more like it mitigated the "you will certainly die if you use multiple stones" aspect. It was a testament to Thanos's durability and power level that let him use it so much, and even then the gauntlet (and Thanos himself) was quite damaged after the first snap (much as Hulk was). Some extra material on the DVD or other commentary even said that despite the gauntlet the snap may have permanently injured Thanos. One can also presume that the remains of the original gauntlet were studied and Tony replicated it with his incredible nano technology, so it was about as usable as the original gauntlet.
  • Tony's just a genius on Earth, though. And even if he's capable of it, he wouldn't have access to frigging neutronium or eru or whatever it is the Dwarfs made Mjölnir and Stormbreaker out of.
  • On the above note, we don't see exactly how the new gauntlet was made. They may well have salvaged the remains of the old gauntlet on Thanos's severed hand and managed to melt it down or otherwise incorporate its remains into the new gauntlet.
  • Tony Stark made a mini reactor in a cave with a bunch of scraps! Yes he can make a better gauntlet than a giant space dwarf with human tech.
  • In addition, they may have destroyed the Gauntlet along with Thanos's body in the intervening five years, since they had no idea that they might need it.

Tesseract on Asgard

• At the point in time when Thor and Rocket went to get the Aether, the Tesseract was in Odin's vault on Asgard. Why didn't the team have them get the Tesseract then rather than from 2012? Given that Thor lived in Asgard and knew around the vault, it would probably be easier getting it there than in the confusion of the aftermath of the Battle of New York.
  • They probably assumed that it was much easier to get the Tesseract in 2012. In The Dark World, one reason why Thor goes to Loki for help is because "Odin locked the Tesseract away in a vault". So it might not even have been the main vault but one that's hard to get into, since Thor and his friends didn't consider to attempt to steal it, but thought the easier and safer (and maybe even only) way to get out of Asgard would be to set Loki free. The Avengers probably thought that in 2012, it would just be "take the case", and they would have the cube.
  • They could also take it when Red Skull has it or in the monastery he stole it from if they want to but then they still have to jump back to 2012 for the scepter and time stone. Black Widow pretty much points out that in one time in space three reality stones are in the same city, why not grab them all there?
  • Also, Thor isn't exactly at his most reliable then. The other Avengers probably all quietly decided to keep his part of the heist as simple as possible.

Order of events

• Carol gets flagged by Nick in The Stinger of Infinity War and rushes back to Earth. Then her own movie's Stinger happens, at which point everyone (probably Bruce) tells her "Tony went into space to chase after Doctor Strange" and then she tracks down the Benatar and carries it back to Earth. That's how it goes, right?
  • That's right, and presumably Rocket was able to give her a way to find the Benatar.
  • The reason the Guardians went to Titan was because Nebula called to tell them Thanos would be there (with Gamora, she thought) because she overheard him ordering Maw to meet him there. So presumably the Guardians called Rocket, told him that once he and Thor got their weapon, to go to Titan. So Rocket knew roughly where the Benatar would be, and could send Captain Marvel to Titan. Once there, she probably picked up a distress signal or homing beacon or whatever and found the ship. The main reason Rocket didn't do any of this before is because he didn't have any FTL-capable ships on Earth.

Vanished and vehicles

• It’s made explicitly clear that that everyone who was wiped out after the original snap return in the exact state and location that they left. It’s not made clear what this means for anyone who was in a vehicle when the snap happened — did they return to the vehicle, or where the vehicle was? And if it’s the former, what if the vehicle was destroyed in the intervening time? And if it's the latter, what if they were flying at the time?
  • Knowing Banner he would make sure everyone brought back would not be placed in a situation where they would be in danger.
  • Bruce did murmur something about "bring them all home" before snapping his fingers. Presumably someone who'd be killed if they returned in the exact spot where they disintegrated would be sent to their home (or the nearest safe location to it, if their home's no longer there after five years) instead. They had plenty of time to brainstorm all the specifics of how they would use the stones to bring people back before actually time traveling.
  • "It's made explicitly clear that…” it is? When is this made clear at all? There isn't a single person shown being resurrected on-screen. It all happened off-screen.
  • Considering that Nick Fury and Maria Hill are alive and apparently unscathed at Tony's funeral, despite having been standing in the middle of the street when they went poof, we could consider that a hint that the Unsnappening didn't necessarily return people to the exact spot where they disintegrated. Otherwise, they'd probably have shown the signs of getting run over for popping up in the middle of traffic.

Fetus

• On the Fridge page for Infinity War, the question of how pregnant women were affected remains up in the air. If the fetus came back, you'd better hope Mom is still alive. If the mother disappeared, she may come back to find her baby dead.
  • Of course, this is assuming that the Snap even treated an unborn fetus as a separate individual.
  • FWIW, the dusting didn't leave clouds of gut microorganisms and Demodex eyelash-mites pattering to the ground every time somebody disintegrated. So an organism encompassed within another organism, be it an unborn fetus or a tapeworm, probably goes the way of its host, same as the Cloak of Levitation went poof with Strange.
  • Given that the snap even took away clothing, weapons, and other things, it's a pretty safe bet that it considered the fetus to be part of the mother.
  • Not to mention that Thanos believed that wiping out one half of the universe would allow the other to thrive. Leaving unborn babies to die wouldn't fit with his deluded vision for the future. The stones aren't a monkey's paw that that advantage of the Exact Words of the user's wishes to give unwanted consequences. The stones seem to know its users will so that scenario wouldn't happen unless Thanos specifically wished for it to happen.

Peter and his friends

• This is especially relevant to Peter. Is he five years behind on school? Have half his friends moved on without him in the meantime?
  • When Ned is asked to provide a distraction in Infinity War, he shouts "we're all going to die". When he meets Peter at the end of Endgame, he's clearly still his age.
  • This is addressed in Far From Home. Yes, Peter is still in school, and several of his friends (i.e., his main supporting cast) were also snapped, and have to pick up where they left off. Others weren't snapped and kept going. One boy in Far From Home even gripes that now his younger brother is physically a couple years older than him.

Vanished and abandoned cities

• Large parts of New York City have been abandoned entirely in the five years since the Decimation, and it's safe to assume other less-populated or maintained areas of the world followed suit. Some people will suddenly be brought back to life with absolutely no one to turn to, stuck in a hellhole that was their residence.
  • Again, this is assuming that Banner didn't take that into account. The Infinity Stones should be able to at least hand wave the logistical problems of bringing half the universe back five years later.

Vormir mission

• Nebula and Tony knew, they knew what getting the Soul Stone cost, they figured it out at the end of the Infinity War, they clearly must have assigned the task to Hawkeye and Black Widow knowing that one of them would have to sacrifice the other. They did that and they didn't tell them and we don't even know if they felt bad about it. Just the cold practicality of the requirements of the mission.
  • It can be argued they didn't know. In Infinity War, Thanos never said why he killed Gamora, only that "he had to." He didn't even say he needed to do it to get the stone. All Nebula knew was that Thanos returned and Gamora didn't, she may well have assumed that Gamora tried to stop him and Thanos killed her for it. None of the other stones have special requirements for attaining them, so neither Tony nor her would have reason to think the Soul Stone was an exceptions.
  • Nebula and Tony might know. Why? Thanos genuinely loves Gamora like a daughter and when he said "he had to", they would easily figure out that someway, somehow (in their perspective), to get the Soul Stone, you have to kill a person you love not in cold blood. They have 3 weeks in space to realize it after all. The movie did not bring it up because of one, time constraints and two, this would make Tony and Nebula VERY immoral, which will undoubtedly hurt their characters in this movie.
    • That is nowhere near enough information for Nebula and Tony to figure out the exact requirements to get the Soul Stone. Gamora, who found where the thing was had no idea.
  • If they didn't know, they accidentally picked the perfect pair of Avengers to go to Vormir. Two killers who love each other (platonically), either who can kill the other to get the stone? That seems very likely to be planned.
  • Especially since otherwise, the team sent two completely normal humans to explore an unknown alien planet. Clint and Nat's stealth and subterfuge skills would have been much more useful in retrieving pretty much any of the other stones, so Tony must have suspected what their mission would entail.
  • Based from their reaction when they found out the requirement to get the Soul Stone, it's more likely that both Clint and Natasha volunteered for that assignment. Also, it's more likely that even Nebula wouldn't have known that the Soul Stone needed a sacrifice, as she would assume that Thanos would only need Gamora to find the location of the stone and her sister's death was probably the result of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness or Gamora's final attempt at not letting Thanos have all the stones. Even if they did know this requirement, Clint and Natasha would be the least likely pair to be chosen because either of them do not have loved ones to sacrifice, and nobody would be willing to sacrifice them.
  • My assumption for Clint and Natasha are conveniently selected to be the two to go to Vormir is that it's the lucky choice on the Avengers' part. Remember that in Infinity War, Strange oversaw over 14 millions of outcomes. A large chunk of those alternate outcomes might be the ones where they sent the wrong team to Vormir. Of course, given that the timeline in Endgame has to be the one that goes right, Clint and Natasha are correctly chosen to go to Vormir.

Steve and Peggy

• Steve marrying Peggy means that she no longer marries her original husband in this alternate timeline. It's shown that Peggy had two children with this husband in The Winter Soldier, so Steve has inadvertently erased two people and their descendants from existence in that particular timeline.
  • The implication of the time travel presented in the movie is that new timelines can be created but never erased. So at worst, Steve created a new timeline where he is married to Peggy as opposed to her husband, so he and his children are still existing in the original, non-Cap timeline.
  • Alternatively, given that Peggy is still using the name Carter in S.H.I.E.L.D. and even at her funeral, it could be possible that her marriage ended in divorce and Steve's arrival didn't change that.
  • Except that she is explicitly shown as having two children in a picture. The original timeline cannot be altered, so these children can only be Peggy's with her original husband.
  • Unless Steve's marriage to her is a You Will Be Beethoven, in which case those are Steve's children with Peggy. Could be he's not in the picture because he's the one who took it.
• That's not how it works. Steve cannot alter the original timeline in any way. The children that Peggy has cannot be his because time travel doesn't allow him to go back to his own timeline.

Natasha's blood

• Depending on how much of the original timeline stuck — in Avengers: Infinity War when Gamora died on Vormir, there were other bloodstains on the rocks onto which she fell. After the events of this film, is it possible that some of those bloodstains were Natasha's?
  • If they were, what happened to her body?
  • No, the film establishes with its own internal logic that the 'past' the groups go to aren't the past in the Stable Time Loop sense, but alternate realities that will lead to different versions of the present as a result of the impact they make on going to them. In the main universe, a 2023 Natasha didn't die while Guardians of the Galaxy was happening, for the same reason Quill didn't originally get knocked out and Nebula wasn't getting interference from her future self — because that didn't happen in their timeline, which remains unchanged and unaffected by the meddling in the past (otherwise the ripple effect would've taken ahold on them returning to the future with 2014 Nebula because it would've erased everything about 2023 Nebula), they've merely altered a few other timelines (though by returning the stones, not enough to doom them to destruction).

Bureaucracy

• Imagine the post-snap bureaucratic nightmare of having to parse through who died and issuing death certificates with significantly less staff because they got dusted. Then everybody returns and now the death certificates have to be revoked and then there’s the fact that those who were dusted didn’t age. They get the fun job of figuring out what to do with somebody like Peter Parker who is now legally 22, but still 17. Is he allowed to buy alcohol and vote? Legislative government employees have a future of working around the clock to not only resolve the return of the dead, but all the clean-up and the billions, if not trillions, it is going to cost to rebuild. What would that do to the economy?
  • It'll certainly be a headache, but given the unprecedented event that the last five years were, the world governments are going to be a little more flexible and decisive to get the gears going again, since they essentially got their voter/tax bases doubled in no time, so there's an incentive to quickly figure out a system to prevent national shock.
  • Considering how many people vanished — and that tribute memorials evidently call them "the Vanished" rather than, say, "The Honored Dead" — it's entirely likely that governments whipped up an alternative to the usual death certificate to use instead: one that specifies that the person disappeared on that day, and whether or not anyone witnessed them turning to dust. Regular death certificates generally require a doctor to certify them, after all, and nobody who vanished left a body behind for a physician to examine. So they could've issued a "vanished certificate" for Snap victims instead, to sidestep the need for medical verification ... and to keep alive the hope that those Avengers weirdos don't know what they're talking about and everyone really got teleported to some other world, not massacred. Anything to keep global morale from collapsing completely, after all.
  • As for the status of the un-dusted vis-a-vis legal age: do we know if Steve Rogers has been collecting social security benefits since his return?

Clint's murder spree

• So... all those murders Clint did after his family disappeared. Is everyone just gonna be okay with that? Or is he about to be arrested and sent to prison just as soon as he's reunited with his family?
  • Clint's been assassinating people for decades and not been imprisoned for it. He'd know how to not leave material evidence behind that could interrupt his vigilante spree; the Avengers probably only caught on that it was Barton doing all that killing because Natasha knows his mind so well and how his grief must be spurring him on.
  • Plus he was killing hardened criminals. Excessive and wrong as what he did was, he probably won't have many people all that motivated to put him in prison.
  • And let's be honest, anyone who does put the connection together and tries to arrest the guy who played an important role for bringing half the universe back to life is going to be fired on the spot. At this point, all the remaining Avengers basically have get out of jail free cards for life.
  • Given the nature of the people Clint was killing, which included drug cartels in Mexico and Yakuzas in Japan, there's plenty of plausible deniability that Clint had anything to do with their deaths. When members of organized crime turn up dead, the first assumption from any law enforcement is that some rival crime family was involved. Natasha even mentions this briefly, though it was likely just her way to cope with what Clint was doing. And like it was said above, there's little to gain from trying to tie Clint Barton to his crimes.
  • For that matter, surviving members of the criminal organizations in question aren't likely to want the police to come poking around, as investigations into gangland murders rarely settle for probing just the murder itself. If anything, it'll be the gang's own assassins whom Barton may need to worry about... assuming that said survivors aren't grateful to him, for giving them all a Klingon Promotion-by-proxy. Or that they aren't outnumbered and outvoted by unSnapped members of the same gangs, who'll owe Barton and his friends their lives.

"Hey Peter Parker, got something for me?"

• Carol's line is noted on this very wiki as being easily read as a Double Entendre, and did seem oddly flirtatious. What exactly were they going for?
  • A bit of levity most likely, perhaps a reference to how Peter did at one point date her in the comics?
  • Given that the guy looks and sounds terrified and she's shown to be good with kids in her own movie, she was probably just trying to make him less nervous.
    • How would an attractive adult woman flirting with a hormonal teenager make him less nervous?
  • It wouldn't be unheard of for someone to utilize flirtatious language for fun or just as a confidence booster. It might not be the most opportune moment for it, but it's not like everyone else isn't chatting away mid-fight in this universe all the time.
  • It may have been less "flirty" more "super confident and trying to be reassuring". Her tone was less flirting, more "relax, kid. I got this".
  • The poor kid is plainly half-poleaxed with shock from the Outriders' attempts to maul him. Breaking through his "oh shit oh shit oh shit I'm gonna die again oh shit" brain-freeze with a quick jolt to the hormones isn't the worst way to interrupt a teenager's terror.

What does the Soul Stone actually do?

• Like Infinity War, this movie doesn't actually show Thanos or anyone else using the power of the Soul Stone. So what function does it actually serve in the MCU? Presumably it still has the same powers as in the comics: it can absorb the souls of living beings, it gives you power over the astral plane, etc. But the thing is, in the movies Thanos's ultimate goal is the erasure of half of all living beings, while in the comics that was just one part of his plan to make Death love him. So, in the comics Thanos actually had some use for the Soul Stone, as it came handy in fighting against various cosmic beings, etc. But in Infinity War, all Thanos wants to do is erase living bodies, and the Soul Stone isn't really needed for that. And this movie confirms that after his finger snap, Thanos has no further use for the Stones. Which begs the question: why did he even go through all the bother and pain of acquiring the Soul Stone, when he could've reached his goal with just the five other Stones?
  • Uses for the Soul Stone in the movies have included Thanos using it in Infinity War to see through Strange's doppelgänger spell, as well as the idea that he needed it to perform the Snap because he first needed to locate all the living "souls" in the universe. And of course, he outright uses it to speak to Gamora's spirit in child form after the Snap.
  • Didn't the filmmakers confirm that scene with child Gamora was merely symbolic, and Thanos wasn't actually conversing with her soul?

Human Chain

• If we know that holding hands can spread the power of the Infinity Stones amongst those in the human chain, then why didn't all the Avengers join hands, so that everyone was connected to Tony (or whoever) when he did the Snap? Would that have spread out the energy enough and saved his life? Or just plain killed everyone?
  • Quill was only able to hold the Power Stone because of being half-celestial, and barely at that. The Collector's video showed that others attempted it before and failed. And in this scenario, he's holding all six stones. Likely, anyone holding Tony's hands would also be killed. Even the stronger characters like Hulk would likely be left permanently crippled.
  • Furthermore, Tony had to decide a matter of seconds, before Thanos tried to grab the Stones back. Even if Rocket had told him about the human chain incident, he didn't have time to gather other heroes around him.
• "Or whoever". They could have made a plan like that from the start, or an adjustable gauntlet. After seeing that Hulk didn't die, they could have had another powerful hero (like, say, Captain Marvel) use the gauntlet and hold hands with everyone else. They could have just plain discussed the human chain idea, if Rocket ever told them. But they never did. Seems like an oversight on their parts. The plan could still have gone tragically wrong, so that Tony had to make his Heroic Sacrifice, but that would have made it MORE TRAGIC if they had an original no-one-else-after-Black-Widow-dies plan like that from the start...
  • And as for Captain Marvel not being able to use the gauntlet because of its size, well why didn't they make it adjustable in the first place? Somehow Iron Man built a failsafe so that the Stones could slide right into his own gauntlet, and he has nanotechnology... So why wasn't the gauntlet adjustable in the first place? All the brightest minds with all of Stark and Avengers technology at their disposal couldn't even make a glorified metal glove adjustable?
  • The gauntlet was able to adjust size to fit Hulk's hand, as it appeared to be made from the same nanotechnology as the Iron Man suit.
  • Indeed, the gauntlet did adjust when the Hulk used it...and was then likely completely deep fried after the resurrection snap given what snapping did to the likes of Thanos and the Hulk. Even Thanos gauntlet, forged for the purpose, was melted to his arm from snapping twice, so it is unlikely the Tony designed gauntlet was particularly well of after the resurrection snap. In short the Avengers were stuck with a size Hulk gauntlet and Hulk himself was pretty much down due to the first snap.
  • Also there was basically no time for any kind of backup plan with Captain Marvel or any other strong hero. Seconds after Hulk snaps Thanos levels the place and invades. And then the final battle started at which point it was too chaotic for that. And Carol showing up took everyone by surprise. And that's ignoring the fact that the gauntlet was supposed to be a one time thing. They bring everyone home, then send the stones back. No using the glove twice. Alternate Timeline Thanos catching onto them and following them back was something that completely took everyone by surprise that nobody was planning for. Many of these what if scenarios are presenting the situation as though the Avengers knew that there was a battle coming and should have prepared for it, when that was not the case.
  • It was one stone and they needed hospitalization, instead of one dead you just have all the avengers that held hands crippled forever like the Hulk. Captain Marvel might need to have two arms for her next movie.
  • The Power Stone's destructive force on contact is unique to that particular Stone; the other five can apparently be touched without injury. It's likely that the capacity to share its energies across multiple people is unique to that Stone as well, meaning a human chain would do jack-squat to prevent the Space, Time, Mind, Reality and Soul Stones' discharges from tearing up the Gauntlet-user anyway.

Dr. Strange's peeks into the future

• How does his visions of future possibilities work exactly? Can he only see what his future self experiences, like for example, he sees that he'll be dusted, and the next thing he knows, he's un-dusted, 5 years into the future, getting ready to fight Thanos's army? Or does the visions give him a more complete picture of what happens in the future? If so, he must have seen that the one timeline where they actually won rested on just that fluke of the rat reactivating the quantum portal to release Ant-Man. Did he not think this was maybe only a bit too ridiculous?
  • Dr. Strange is only present to view the future at all because a freak coincidence let him survive an accident that should have killed him, because that same coincidental accident injured his hands rather than some other body part, because he heard and gave credence to a rumor that some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo had restored another man's mobility, and because chasing that unbelievable rumor allowed him, of all people, to become a freakin' sorcerer. He spent his whole first movie using up his lifetime's ration of assuming things are "too ridiculous". Plus, it didn't have to be a rat, it only had to be something - a bird, a human looter, a fallen object, an earth tremor - that re-activated the Van Tunnel.
  • While we can't say what exactly Strange see in his vision, after 14 million timelines and only see that one managed to be a chance of victory are you really NOT going to take it no matter how ridiculous it is?
• So Strange saw 14 million timelines and only one where they won. It seems that he only saw one where they won and Tony also died. At the start they only had two objectives, Kill Thanos and use the stones to bring back everyone. They killed Thanos at the start but they weren't able to use the stones. So they get the stones via time travel. Once all the stones were successfully collected, Hulk snaps his fingers and brings everyone back. But Thanos from the past came through and now they have to kill him to win. But wouldn't there be another timeline that wouldn't end with 2014 Thanos coming to the future. Which would have avoided the big battle, Tony's death, and everyone would still have came back.
• Like a video game, he does that, die, restart with a new plan, does that die, restart until he found the course of actions where they win. A million of those scenarios are likely him and Tony dying because they flubbed the teamwork during the fight or had yet to learn about Thanos needing to close his fist to use the stones.

Hitching a space ride?

• How did Gamora even leave Earth in the end? Thanos's ships all turned to dust with his army and the only other interplanetary spaceship left on Earth is the Guardian's Benatar, which the Guardian's are taking to look for her in the first place. Thor who wants to go explore space, hitches a ride with them suggesting it's the only way off world for anyone other than Carol who can fly through space under her own power.
  • The Ravagers were in the final battle, and they had to get home somehow. Maybe the sorcerers opened more portals or they called friends for rides, but Gamora could have hitched either way. Furthermore, Earth quite possibly has spaceships now; they had the Benatar for five years, which is plenty of time to learn from it at their tech level.
  • For all we know, Gamora is stowed away in one of the hatches on the Benatar and they'll discover her at the start of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Which would be hilarious. But they could. Or she could be hiding out on Earth somewhere just chilling. Or long gone as already mentioned. How exactly is Quill tracking her anyway? If this is the Gamora from before they met, she could be subtly different in a way that prevents him from tracking her properly.

Scott getting to New York

• How was Scott able to drive halfway across the U.S in a post-snap world? Given the state of cities like San Francisco and NYC, major highways and roads are almost certainly going to be messy and difficult to navigate in something as old and beat-up as the X-Con van...
  • Difficult, yes, but hardly impossible. Especially since he met up with his daughter first, and presumably they discussed his plan to go to the Avengers. So she'd be able to give him whatever information he needed, tell him which highways are still working, and so on.
  • We have no idea of the state of U.S. highway infrastructure during the 5 years. Assuming everything went to shit on the highways (planes emergency landing/crashing, 50% of cars suddenly losing their drivers and crashing, stopping) transportation would be one of the first hurdles the Avengers would need to tackle after resolving immediate humanitarian crises. For example, even half the population of New York would have depleted all food in a few weeks with no food being brought in by truck. We also see that Professor Hulk is a beloved celebrity after 5 years, not the Green Monster people run away from. It's not hard to assume he went to town with Captain Marvel clearing highways in the interim.
  • Two main possibilities. Remember, we have no idea how many Pym Particles he started with, only that he had a very limited number when he got to Avengers HQ. Let's assume he used a few creatively to make the journey. We know the Ant-Man suit was fried by his journey in the Quantum Realm, but the van could still shrink. He didn't use it to escape the storage unit because he was terrified and confused at the time. After getting a grip, he had time to consider the possibilities.
    1. Option 1: He bought all the gas, food, and spare parts for the van that he could in San Francisco. Then he shrunk them down to fit in the van, so he would only need to stop to sleep. Then as he encountered obstacles along the highway, he would either shrink the van to go around/under them, or simply stayed full size, shrunk the van, and carried it around said obstacle. It might add a few days to his journey, but it's doable.
    2. Option 2: The Avengers seem to have kept basic infrastructure afloat or rebuilt in the 5 years, so there are probably at least cargo planes going from NYC to SF. For a man with Scott's skills as a burglar, it would be easy to shrink the van and sneak aboard one.
  • It's been five years, folks. Even if the highways were a disaster zone initially, there's been plenty of time for the wreckage to be bulldozed off the major ones and the abandoned cars, driven away. The Avengers aren't actually needed to tackle that job; ordinary humans are pretty good at cleaning up after disasters, once they work out who's left alive to direct such operations.
  • In fact, in the five years after the snap, the government in all likelihood put a lot into creating make-work projects to keep people busy, employed, and not thinking about everything they lost. Cleaning up the highways would be a no-brainer. After that, San Francisco and New York are connected directly by Route 80, so Scott's journey amounts to, "Drive east until you hit the Hudson, then turn left." If he does nothing but drive, eat, and sleep, he can be there in three or four days, tops.
    • There's no need for make-work. In a post-snap world almost all existing capital still exists, and the modern US already has chronic understaffing problems. There's enough actual work around for everyone that remained and then some.
  • In addition to all of the points above, the US has no fewer than 20 different reasonably straight routes between San Francisco and New York, most of which would have been lightly transited or completely deserted. This is a really big country, and most of it is pretty much empty, but it's full of roads. The only likely serious problem even immediately post-snap would be dodging abandoned cars and unmanned tolls getting out of SF and into New York.

Does Thanos still win in 14 million parallel universes, and loses only in two?

• Since this movie confirms the MCU is a multiverse consisting of countless parallel universes/timelines, just like in Marvel comics, that must mean that when Doctor Strange saw 14 million different futures where Thanos won, what he saw were actual parallel universes. So this would mean that there are only two universes where Thanos lost: the main universe whose events we're following, and the one where Thanos and his troops traveled to the future in 2014 and never returned. In that case, it would actually make sense if, after having restored their own universe, the Avengers would do what Rhodey suggested and travel back in time to kill Thanos before he ever acquired the Stones. According to the rules of time travel laid out in this film, that would not save the 14 million universes where Thanos killed half of all living beings, but at least it would create a whole bunch of new universes where the genocide never happened.
  • On the other hand, if each decision that might result in either X or Y will create parallel universes for both X and Y, there are probably countless parallel universes where Thanos was never born, or died with the other inhabitants of Titan, or never became a villain, or died before acquiring the Stones, or... So if there's an infinite number of universes, 14 million is not that much.
  • They are potential universes. There is no sign they actually exist in any form other than theoretical. As far as this movie shows, alternate universes are only created through time travel.
  • But Kevin Feige has confirmed that alternate universes of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse exist in the same multiverse as the MCU. And those universes weren't created by time travel, so that would mean the many-worlds theory applies larger Marvel multiverse, and new universes are created whenever things can go into two or more different directions.
  • The existence of the multiverse also seems to be confirmed by the new trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home.
  • Until and unless Far From Home specifically mentions parallel universes where Thanos won, the poster above is right: Strange saw 14 million possibilities, not actual, fully-formed realities. The Ancient One did the same when she peered into Strange's own future. A world where Loki and the Tesseract went off after The Avengers is an actual, parallel reality; it happened and it cannot be unmade. A world where Kingpin has a particle collider built so he can breach into those parallel realities happened and is reality that exists in parallel with the rest. A world where the heroes lost against Thanos because Strange used the Time Stone to look into a future that hadn't happened yet is only a potentiality, and that potential collapses into oblivion or reality only when you actually do the thing that prevents or enacts it. And as soon as Strange pointed out the "One" to Stark, and Stark did his thing, those 14 million potentialities collapsed into 1 reality.
  • Also, those 14 million outcomes were off of that single branch. A branch where Thanos encountered a small team of relatively amateur heroes (the GotG are a relatively loose coalition, Strange has only a few years under his belt at being Sorcerer Supreme, and Peter is, what, 16?), AND Thanos has 4 stones, AND so on. He likely saw minor permutations that were pruned as the events happened (so the instant the rat crossed the QR keyboard, all potential outcomes differing from that are gone). As above stated, the result is the only ACTUAL timeline that exists in the MCU.
  • If it's any comfort, remember that even if Thanos did win in 14 million parallel universes, there are surely billions where he didn't even make it as far in his mad quest as he did in Infinity War, and trillions where he never actually existed and/or began it in the first place. So no, the MCU Multiverse doesn't have to be limited to just two viable universes, post-Endgame.

What happened the first time in The Avengers?

• How did Tony and company get around Pierce the first time while they were trying to leave the tower with the Tesseract and Loki? Pierce seemed pretty insistent he take custody of everything himself and a fight almost broke out until Ant-Man forked the events by giving Tony a heart attack.
  • Probably A) Thor displaying to Pierce and his agents that he means business and he's going to take Loki and the Tesseract back to Asgard no matter what they say. Even Pierce and his men won't dare to anger a Norse god after seeing what he could do. Or B) Everyone was distracted by Hulk's semi-rampage in the hallway after finishing his flight down the stairs, and Tony and Thor take this chance to get away with Loki and the Tesseract. Most likely he does that in the original timeline as well because it was not influenced by the future Tony and Scott's actions.
  • They didn't, Pierce took the Tesseract and Loki then they had a diplomatic talk about how they are Asgardian's jurisdiction later so he give them back.
  • Alexander Pierce trying to get Tony and Thor to hand them over is one thing — they can talk rationally and Pierce is reasonably sure that, for all their power, they're not going to take a swing at him. But once the Hulk is in the room, jurisdiction issues tend to be the last thing on anybody's mind, it becomes, "OK fine you can have the stupid blue box before he accidentally steps on me."

What was 2012 Cap doing all alone on the 14th floor?

• So in the original timeline after finishing the business with Loki, Tony and Thor take Loki and the Tesseract down the elevator, while Hulk takes the stairs down. We don't know what Natasha and Clint are doing, but presumably, they take other routes down or waiting inside Stark Tower to report to Fury. As for Cap, we later see him patrolling Stark Tower on the 14th floor when he runs into the future Cap. Okay, he might get the report that Loki has escaped due to the time-meddling Tony and Scott botching the Tesseract heist, but from the short time it takes for 2012 Cap to run into the future Cap, it seems like 2012 Cap was there on the 14th floor the whole time. What was he doing there all alone?
  • Probably exactly that: Looking for Loki. Future Cap had to get to the elevator and negotiate with the HYDRA agents, that would give 2012 Cap some time to scour the building and end up in the right place.
  • Before running into 2012 Cap, future Cap is attempting to call Tony and Scott to ask them whether they get the Tesseract. In the scene before that, it shows Tony and Scott botching their attempt and Loki escaping. Presumably, future Cap heard the whole ordeal going on through his earpiece and is asking Tony and Scott for details when he runs into 2012 Cap, which means the scene where Loki escaping is happening at the same time when 2012 Cap is patrolling the 14th floor, so 2012 Cap is somehow on the 14th floor the whole time when he got the report that Loki has escaped.
  • The STRIKE team directly confronts Cap with something along the lines of "We thought you were doing search-and-rescue." In the original timeline, he likely was: while the top priority was to contain Loki and the Tesseract, Tony and Thor were handling that; in the meantime, Cap was probably setting up somewhere with a phone or comms equipment in Stark Tower, so he could coordinate with SHIELD and NYC's emergency response teams before heading down to the streets himself. Alternately, he could have been looking for Chitauri stragglers in case they hadn't all shut down, or even for more of Loki's human goons, since Selvig and the portal machine had to go all the way up from the cargo van in the first place and the Avengers had to make sure the building was secure.
  • 2012 Cap even mentions that he's coordinating search and rescue when Tony is preparing to send Scott toward the Tesseract, which Loki mocks with his illusions, prompting Thor to put the muzzle on Loki.
  • Note that 2012-Cap is first seen confronting Future Cap on a clear-walled elevated walkway that crosses over the gaping lobby of Stark Tower. This probably wasn't a coincidence: it's a good vantage from which to view a large part of the building quickly, to check for unauthorized activity.

Hulk Speak in 2012

• How is it that the Hulk in 2012 can speak coherent sentences after the Battle of New York? Didn't he only expand his vocabulary while on Sakaar 5-6 years later?
  • His vocabulary did expand on Sakaar, but he wasn't incapable of speech before hand.
  • When Hulk is brought out by accident in 2012 on the Helicarrier, he seems incapable of speech. But when Bruce intentionally brings him out ("I'm always angry.") he can at least say "Puny God". He doesn't say much more than scream about the stairs, so it's not much more than his previous two word sentences.
  • 2012 Hulk only seems to talk when relevant, as most of his shtick while being off the leash is smash whoever is trying to hurt him or his friends.
  • Hulk generally didn't speak to other people much until the events of Ragnarok. For all we know, he talked to himself from time to time before then, a la "Puny god"; we just didn't see him do it on camera in his solo movie, because we didn't glimpse much of Hulk at all, except when he was too enraged or busy running to monologue, and/or was being kept out of view as a Mook Horror Show.
  • While it's true that he didn't speak much, even in his solo movie he speaks twice: In the factory ambush, just after one of Blonsky's team members throw him a grenade, he says «Leave me alone!»; and in the final battle, before smashing the ground with both fists, he says «Hulk smash!». So in Sakaar his vocabulary did expand, but even before that he could speak coherent sentences. It's just that he didn't speak if he didn't see it as necessary, and that those sentences were componsed of just two of three words, with an awful grammar.

Carol and the Portal Network

• How did Carol carry the Benatar from its drifting location all the way to Earth? It clearly wasn't in the Solar System at the time, and if she were fast enough to do it on her own in a matter of hours she'd be faster than Quicksilver on the battlefield. Can she navigate the portal network that the Kree and other space faring civilizations use and simply uses it to hop around the galaxy, just without a ship?
  • At the end of her solo film you see accompany a skrull ship flying alongside it. So yes she's capable of FTL travel in some manner.
  • Except wasn't the whole reason why her solo movie took place that there is no FTL travel in the MCU, just sub-light propulsion and portal networks? That's what Mar-Vell was trying to use the Tesseract to develop in the first place: a light-speed engine.
  • No. This is explained better on that movie's headscratchers page, but the Tesseract was merely capable of better FTL travel.
  • The fight with Thanos in the previous movie took place on Titan, a moon of Saturn. And now Nebula and Tony are trying to get from there to Earth. So they are in our solar system, and Carol wouldn't have needed any portals to get them home.
  • Titan in MCU doesn't refer to the Saturn moon. Among other things, Thanos explicitly refers to it as a planet.
  • Who says the trip back to Earth only took a matter of hours? We only see her find the ship and later deliver it, we don't see anything in between. For all we know, she took it directly to the nearest world with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere to re-stock, then stopped off for drive-through en route to the next portal.
    • This is the only explanation that makes sense. Carol's not going to just find the Benatar and then haul it to Earth; the first thing she needs to do is check on the survivors, tend to any critical injuries, stabilize life-support systems, all that stuff. As an experienced galaxy-spanning hero, she's not going to move it far until she's sure the ship and its crew are all capable of handling the light-years trip.
  • It's worth remembering there's a big difference between speed and acceleration. Carol isn't as fast on the battlefield as Quicksilver, because she can't change speed and direction as quickly as he can. She can't match his acceleration from rest. But that just means that she can't get up to super-speeds near-instantaneously like he can. That doesn't mean that her top speed can't be higher than his. She may be capable of reaching true Ludicrous Speed, but only if you give her 5 to 10 minutes of continuous straight line acceleration to warm up first.
  • Or maybe she can only do it in a vacuum. Or she can only do it outside of a gravity well.

Married Couples and Un-Snapping

• What happens to everyone who lost a spouse or a boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancé(e)/significant other as a consequence of Thanos's original Snap, grieved for their lost partner, eventually fell in love again, and started seeing someone else in the five years between Infinity War and Endgame? If they've re-married, are they unintentionally now committing bigamy? How are they going to resolve custody issues when someone who survived the Snap re-marries, and their surviving children are legally adopted by the new spouse? How are those who're newly un-Snapped by Bruce going to cope with the extreme emotional trauma of coming back from being disintegrated to find that not only have five years passed; their soulmates have left them for someone else, and built a whole new life around their fellow Snap survivor?
  • Marriage only lasts until death, and technically the snappening victims were all killed, so there would be no bigamy involved. While it is unfortunate for the snap victims, at least they're alive again.
  • The answer to these and similar questions is that nobody said no difficulties would arise out of snapping half the universe back into reality. It is a great, terrible choice made by very flawed people with good intentions and no means to determine the outcome. But given the opportunity, it's their moral responsibility to take it. Some people will be snapped back only to have their lives ruined, and that's terrible. But taking away the lives of those who have moved on would be terrible, too. All the Avengers can do is bring back the dead and let them come to terms with the inescapable tragedy of what happened.
  • They are probably glad someone they thought were dead came back, honestly less traumatic than having them turn into dust forever.
  • It'll be dealt with in the same way that it's dealt with in Real Life, when a person who'd been thought long dead suddenly turns up alive again. It'd be on an unprecedented scale, but it's not unprecedented for someone who was stranded on a desert island while lost at sea, or faked their death to hide from their enemies and/or spouse, or got secretly imprisoned by a corrupt regime, to turn up alive years after they were declared legally dead and their loved ones had moved on.

Ancient One's surprise

• The Ancient One didn't know Strange gave up the time stone in the future, since it happened after her death. But how did she not see that Bruce would inform her of this?
  • The timeline in which Banner would go to TAO had only existed for about a half hour, or however long it took Banner to get to the sanctuary, and we can assume that TAO didn't look into her future during that time, as she was busy dealing with the Chitauri. In the original timeline, she never saw her meeting with Banner because it never originally happened.

Alexander Pierce

• How did Pierce and STRIKE get to Avenger's Tower to get the Tesseract and Scepter so quickly? The timing suggests that they were in the immediate area to begin with, which suggests that they were in the blast and/or fallout range of the nuclear missile that Pierce had ordered be used on the city.
  • By the time the 2023 Cap, Tony, and Scott reached Avengers Tower, the 2012 Avengers were already there, apprehended Loki and dealing with the aftermath of the invasion. This suggest that quite some time already passed since 2012 Stark blew the nuclear missile in space and fell back to Earth. Remember the Hulk roaring scene that woke Stark up in the first Avengers movie? That sequence of scenes should last long enough for Pierce and STRIKE team to get there using Quinjets or other high-tech transport SHIELD had at their disposal.
  • Pierce and STRIKE probably mobilized and were en route to New York from DC as soon as they heard an alien invasion was going on there. They landed shortly after the "all clear", and in time to meet the Avengers on their way out of the tower.
  • Pierce didn't order that a missile be used on New York, by the way, the World Security Council did that.
  • And Pierce was head of said Council.
  • He wasn't in any of the conferences Fury had with them in Avengers, including the one where they discussed firing a missile at New York. Perhaps he wasn't on the WSC at the time? When he meets the group in the lobby he's arguing that the Tesseract is US government property, which implies that he is some sort of US official at the time, not of the WSC.

If a past version of Gamora is now in 2023 despite the Soul Stone transaction...

• ...could the same thing perhaps happen to a recent pre-sacrifice version of Black Widow since messing with a timeline's events only creates a new timeline and not alter the previous one? This was probably already answered in the above folders.
  • It could, but what would be the point?
  • Honestly IDK, just so that the Avengers could retrieve her.
  • If they went back in time to snatch Black Widow before her sacrifice, they would create a new alternate timeline where the 2023 Avengers of that timeline never got hold of the Soul Stone, so they weren't able to undo Thanos's genocide. Even if her original timeline is still safe, Natasha wouldn't want that to happen to an alternate universe either, so she'd probably refuse to be rescued. Sure, they might snatch Black Widow from an earlier point in the timeline where she doesn't even know anything about the Soul Stone and its price, but that would just mean someone else from that timeline would have to sacrifice themselves on Vormir in Natasha's stead. Compared to that, taking Gamora from an earlier point in time is actually a ''good' choice, because even if the 2014 Thanos hadn't died in the battle, Gamora traveling to the future would mean his plans were still foiled, as he has no one else to sacrifice on Vormir.
  • The same thing does happen with Black Widow. It just happens in the "2014" universe/timeline. That timelime's Vormir has a dead Black Widow at the bottom of the pool. But there's also the 2014 version of Black Widow, presumably alive and well, in the same universe.

Strange's death and seeing the future

• In Strange's solo movie, it was established by the Ancient One that even the holders of Time Stone cannot see the future past their death. But if so, how was Strange able to see the 1/4 million timeline in which they win, in Infinity War? He would only be able to see the future up until the point he turns into dust. Was the "death by Snapping" not counted as permanent death?
  • It's possible that he was able to see a little bit past his dusting in other timelines given his resurrection in the main one. The only reason that he knows he lost was because Thanos must have succeeded in getting the Gauntlet during the Battle of Earth, in which case Stephen wouldn't be able to see anything else.
  • Presumably, in timelines where Strange was brought back to life, he would be able to see the future again from that point. There would be a five year gap in his knowledge, but that would be it. This would also cut down on the potential timelines he could look at, as presumably many did not involve anyone successfully undoing the Snap.
  • The Ancient One herself said that Strange was to be the greatest of the sorcerers, not only that but Strange was an advance user of the time stone so he probably gained abilities the ancient one never had, such as looking past his own death. Otherwise Strange wouldn't have said he only saw one way to win, he would've said that he doesn't know.

Person of Interest, yet he's still performing surgery?

• If Doctor Strange wasn't close to becoming the Master of the Mystic Arts in 2012, then why was he on HYDRA's radar during the events of The Winter Soldier? HYDRA's paranoid, but putting an (at the time) ordinary surgeon on their watchlist seems a little bit overkill.
  • HYDRA wasn't just targeting superheroes or political leaders during Insight, they were targeting anyone who could be a potential threat or resistance force against HYDRA. Strange is too arrogant to ever consider kowtowing the HYDRA line, which would mark him as a target for extermination.
  • It’s doubtful that HYDRA/SHIELD knew the existence of Kamar-Taj and/or the sorcerers during the events of The Avengers (or even now). HYDRA most likely put him on the kill-list as he’a a potential valuable asset for the resistance side with his brilliant expertise in neurosurgery. Selfish and arrogant prick as he were, Strange would’ve still oppose a Neo-Nazi-Big Brother-style-One World Government dictatorship.
  • The Doctor Strange film initially wasn't intended to be an origin story at its inception, and likely would have followed the comic book's example of keeping Doctor Strange rooted in the seventies due to his agelessness making a time bump unnecessary. Contradicting a throwaway line in an earlier movie was probably considered to be an acceptable price to pay to retool the Doctor Strange film into something the director/producer/Disney wanted to make.
  • One of their targets was some kid in Bangladesh or something. Zola's algorithm is about targeting anyone that can not accept Hydra's regime, not even if they are potential assets to the resistance just people that by the algorithm won't willingly give away their freedom.
  • In 2012, Stephen Strange wasn't just an "ordinary surgeon". He was an extraordinary surgeon. One of, if not the absolute best in his field. He had a whole wall full of awards at his house. And as said Project Insight wasn't just aimed at people who will potentially become superheroes or political leaders. Sitwell even lists "a TV anchor in Cairo" and "a high school valedictorian in Iowa City". People with potential to cause HYDRA problems. Strange's intelligence and attitude make him a potential threat regardless of whether he's a sorcerer or not. Strange's profile would basically make him sound like Tony Stark if Stark was a doctor instead of an industrialist. It's an algorithm that collects public information and spits out a list of potentially threatening people based on existing threatening people. Strange would very easily come up as a Tony Stark-like figure.
  • We now know from Black Widow that HYDRA's been heavily invested in mind-control research - chemical, surgical, cybernetic, whatever - since at least 1995. A genius neurosurgeon could definitely pose a threat to such a program, no superpowers required.

Ravagers at the Battle of Earth

• Of all the groups of people brought into the fray of the Battle of Earth, what do the Ravagers have to do with it, and how did Doctor Strange know about them to bring them in? Yes, they were likely affected by the Decimation, but they didn't have nearly as personal stakes as say, the Wakandans (who lost their king and technology/weapons expert expert) and the Masters of the Mystic Arts (who lost their Sorcerer Supreme).
  • Who says the Ravagers didn't lose anyone? The snap affected half the people of the whole universe. That probably includes half the ravagers. (And could easily include their leaders).
  • Most likely due to the relationship with Quill and the GotG crew.
    • Yep — all it'd take is Quill sending a message to the Ravagers along the lines of "You know that asshole who killed half the universe? I know where he is, let's kick his ass!"
  • Strange had time to tell Spider-Man what's happening immediately after they were all resurrected. Strange was also in the presence of the other Guardians, namely Quill. It would take as simple as "do you know anyone who can help (stop Thanos)?" for him to know about the Ravagers.
  • The Ravagers almost certainly lost people in the Snap. So all it would take is Quill calling up Kraglin and saying "You probably noticed anyone that turned to Dust 5 years ago suddenly came back. That's because our buddies on Earth just fixed that for us. Also the guy that did it is back on Earth and trying to cause it again and we're going there now to kill him. You guys want in? Yeah I thought so. Ok a wizard is gonna teleport to you now and give you a gate to Earth. I know it sounds weird but just trust me on this."

Clint knowing Thanos's name

• How was Clint able to learn who Thanos was and what he did before/during his time as Ronin? Scott Lang gets a pass because it's probable that the Avengers just told him who he was when he arrived at the headquarters, but Clint has been deliberately avoiding them. And it's incredibly unlikely that anyone in Japan, much less the rest of the planet knows about Thanos and the Decimation...
  • Maybe the surviving Avengers and/or the Wakandan government made a worldwide press conference? The whole world would want to know what happened when a lot of people suddenly disappear into dust.
  • Considering Steve directly mentioned Thanos by name at a support group, it's pretty obvious that the Avengers told everyone who was responsible. There's no reason not to mention the cause of the Decimation, especially since it would be impossible to keep it a secret (half of humanity turning into dust is kinda hard to miss).
  • You think that Clint wouldn't contact anyone to find out was happening when his family disappeared or that none of his friends would check on him?

Steve Rogers, King of Asgard

• A minor one, but could Cap technically become the ruler of Asgard as he’s proven worthy of Mjölnir? In Age of Ultron, Thor did confirm that Tony could rule Asgard and enacting prima nocta if he's worthy to lift Mjölnir (he's not). Especially since at the end of Endgame, Thor is off for adventures with the Asgardians of the Galaxy and appointed Valkyrie as the new ruler of Asgard. It's a shame that the filmmakers wasted a potential scene in which Thor offers Steve the throne.
  • He probably didn't offer because he knew Steve well enough to know he wouldn't take it.
  • That, plus the fact Steve literally has no idea how to govern a small town/nation like Asgard. Steve might have the skills to lead in the battlefield, but he's never held a position of government in his life. So giving him the throne would be a very unwise decision on Thor's part.
  • Not to mention that realistically, the Asgardians probably wouldn't want an outsider to rule them.
  • If Thor knew anything about Steve, he'd know that the symbol of everything good and noble about the United States of America would scoff at the idea of becoming a king.
• Only in that one scene of AoU does it suggest or imply that worthiness of Mjölnir is linked to the throne, and it's Stark who said it. They were joking around not seriously discussing Asgard's line of succession.
  • Thor was humoring Tony, lifting Mjölnir just means you are worthy of lifting the hammer, he didn't give the throne to Vision when he lifted it. Thor was ruler by birthright.
  • The fact that Tony claimed he would reinstate prima nocta was more than enough of a tip that he was being his typical snarky, assholish joker self, and that at no point was anything he said taken seriously by anyone.
  • This. Besides, being able to life Mjolnir only bestows the power of Thor, i.e. the power that's always been innate to him as the god of thunder. It doesn't bestow the bloodline of Thor, nor does it bestow kingship: an authority that rightfully belongs to the current occupant of Odin's throne, not to the hammer's current wielder. A throne that was, in fact, still occupied by Odin when Mjolnir's "worthiness" geas was laid upon it.

Tony using the Gauntlet specifically against Thanos's forces

• How was he able to specifically target the bad guys? And if it's possible, why didn't Thanos specifically target the worst people in Infinity War?
  • In Thanos's case, he said to Strange that his half decimation plan that he pitched to his people would kill people at random, so his snap not having specific targets is keeping with his original plan, which he was too stubborn to abandon.
  • Same like how Hulk was able to resurrect only the Snapped people back, and nothing else. Seems the Stones could understand what you really wanted when doing the Snap. So, Tony just willed the Stones to erase Thanos and co., and only them.
  • Presumably the Mind and Soul Stones are there for that kind of precision.
  • Thanos did use precision too, "half of all living creatures but not Tony Stark since I promised the wizard". Plus what is the worst people for the Mad Titan?

Ghost's Quantum Particles

• Whatever happened to the Quantum particles that Scott got for Ghost? We see him gathering them in Ant-Man and the Wasp's first stinger, and yet they're not on them when he's brought back. Did he just... drop them while he was in there?
  • Most likely he did just forget/drop them somewhere in the Quantum realm while he was panicking for 5 hours (his perspective) being trapped there. Otherwise, maybe it was thrown somewhere around the van when he's yanked back from Quantum Realm by the rat, and we just didn't see it on-screen. Afterward, he would've just put it in his house and didn't remember about it anymore because he was too busy dealing with the aftermath of the Snap.
  • Considering how he catapulted out of the Quantum Tunnel into a waist-deep pile of storage locker bric-a-brac, he probably lost his grip on the container while face-planting. Cassie would've told him that Ghost is dead (either Snapped, or expired because Scott didn't bring her the particles in time), so he no longer had a reason to retrieve them from the locker.

Why not use the Gauntlet?

• Hulk had one good arm left, surely giving that up would be worth curing cancer or the like. They have a time machine so they can give the stones back whenever they want why not do some good with them while you have the chance?
  • Abusing the power of the Infinity stones individually or altogether has proven to have dire consequences for the user outside of damaging arms. Doctor Strange nearly broke all of reality experimenting with the Time Stone, the Collector's assistant blew herself up simply by touching the Power Stone, the Reality Stone nearly killed Jane Foster, and the Space Stone teleported the Red Skull to Vormir. Trying to do anything else with the stones as a whole is just begging for trouble.
  • That line of thinking is way too close to Thanos's. The Avengers just fought bitterly to undo the work of someone who wanted to improve the universe. Likely after all they've been through, no one wants to go around playing God in any manner.

Do the Infinity Gems only work with a fingersnap?

• In the The Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos's fingersnap of doom was merely a dramatic gesture, which showed how easy it was for him to wipe out half of all living beings, and he could've done the same without moving his fingers at all. The snap seemed to be the same in Infinity War too. Early in the movie it's said that with the Infinity Stones, Thanos can erase 50% of life with a mere snap of his fingers, so once he has all the Stones, he does exactly that. Again, it doesn't seem like the snap itself is needed: why would the gauntlet have been made with such a limitation? But then the Avengers build a new gauntlet, and it seems like a fingersnap is the only way to activate it, as both Bruce and Tony snap their fingers, and the heroes can stop Thanos from using the Stones by keeping his fingers apart. But that doesn't make sense, because why would Stones care which way the user activates them? When the Stones were used separately in earlier movies, they didn't require any special hand movements. But if the requirement for a fingersnap is some kind of failsafe in the new gauntlet, why would Tony and Bruce have added it, since they didn't know someone was gonna come and steal it? And even if they were anticipating that, and didn't want the Stones to be activated too easily, wouldn't they have made the failsafe something else than the most obvious gesture, one that Thanos had already used before?
  • In Infinity War, it was noted that Thanos could only use the Stones in the Gauntlet when he closed his fist; that became part of the strategy against him several times. In Endgame, he was able to briefly (and painfully) use the Power Stone by pulling it out of the Gauntlet. So yes, the Gauntlet does make it a little harder to use the Stones, in exchange for avoiding most of the pain and death of using them. So maybe Thanos didn't need to use a fingersnap specifically, but he needed to do something more than just thinking about how to use them. As for why the heroes built their Gauntlet the same way, presumably it's an inherent mechanical feature of putting the Stones in the Gauntlet, not something they could just reprogram.
  • Also, in the comics, using the Infinity Stones doesn't seem to have the "it might kill you" backlash when used in the gauntlet that they do in the films. Requiring some kind of mechanical motion is a safety feature, so you don't accidentally kill yourself just thinking of something you might do with the stones. Secondly: why would Tony and Bruce have added it, since they didn't know someone was gonna come and steal it, you don't only make security features when you know that something is going to happen. You get a security system in case someone tries to break into your home, not only when you know for certain it's going to happen.
  • Decoupling visible cause and effect is tricky and unsatisfying in a visual-audio medium, where weird effects occur spontaneously can be jarring. A finger snap is a good visual cue to precede Thanos's powers, and makes him a more realistically manageable threat; he can't just dust people at the speed of thought.
  • Probably not. It's just a shorthand technique for the audience on how the stones/gauntlet can work. Like in Back to the Future, there's no reason given why the time vehicle needs to be moving at precisely 88 mph; the filmmakers said it was just an easy number to remember. The same principal can be applied to the use of a snap here.
  • Or Thanos used a fingersnap as a gestural snark: a smug demonstration that "I'm so far above you pests that I can remake reality with a snap of my fingers". Banner and Stark only used a fingersnap because they knew that's how Thanos did it, and were copying the only method they knew for sure had worked before. As for why Thanos couldn't use it without closing his fist, it's possible that he was simply too distracted by being grappled and/or the pain of Captain Marvel bending his fingers backward to concentrate, and he needed to focus to make sure he carried out his wipe-out-half-the-universe plan exactly as he'd conceived it.
  • Another possibility is that the original Gauntlet created by the Dwarves of Nidavellir, being created under duress, was forged in such a way that the Infinity Stones can only be used via some sort of hand gesture. They have been creating advanced weapons for Asgard for many generations — their weapons don't inherently require that kind of gesturing to use. It's not only a good safety measure, but it also would give those opposing Thanos more of a window to fight back. Since the Stark Gauntlet was likely reverse-engineered from the remains of the Dwarves' Gauntlet, it would work the same way or as close to the same way as they can make it.

True might of Thanos's armies

• What IS the extent of Thanos's real might? We've only seen him "conquer" two planets — Gamora's home world and the unnamed planet his forces are invading in 2014. But it all seems to fit in Sanctuary II, and even if Ebony Maw somehow found and teleported further reinforcements to the battlefield in 2023, it's still a relatively small army of perhaps a couple thousand units, maybe a few hundred armored vehicles, and definitely only a handful of Leviathans. While hardy in close-quarters combat, none of these seem capable of taking on aerial (or even orbital) bombardment, and if they had any artillery of their own (outside Sanctuary II's guns and missiles) they certainly didn't bring it to bear against the very squishable humans in the Final Battle. A force like the Kree Accuser Fleet could have definitely flattened Thanos with little difficulty, and even a primitive planet like Earth would have fared relatively well if its armies had had the time to rally against such a single-point invasion. Does Thanos have any more Sanctuary-class battlecruisers filled with troops stashed away somewhere, or is his ability to halve the populations of entire planets with just the one ship and a huge focus on individual ground infantry a "take my word for it" situation?
  • Obviously that's not his entire army, just what he needed at the time and what he could fit through the quantum tunnel. Bruce says in Infinity War that Thanos has the biggest army in the universe; they just couldn't keep up with him for most of the movie since he had the Space Stone, and he didn't need them anyway. In fact, that's likely part of the reason that Strange set things up so that Tony would need to Snap away his army at the end of Endgame; what was left of Thanos's army in 2023, not counting the people from 2014, could have been a huge threat. Especially since at least some of them would have been indoctrinated to his ideology and been willing to collect the Stones again and kill half the universe again after the Avengers fixed it. This way, when Tony Snaps while thinking "kill Thanos and his army," not just the 2014 group but anyone still around in 2023 would turn to dust.
  • What are you talking about we saw in the first avenger movie even regular Chitauri can do aerial strike that's how they pinned down the Hulk. Stark had to blow a mothership to take them down otherwise they would have been no end of it when there is a direct link between the armada and the planet. Thanos only brought one ship because he usually only need one, he can take down a whole planet by himself given almost nothing can scratch him.
  • What we see of Thanos's army in Infinity War is what he has after his assault on Xandar, homeworld of one of the most powerful empires in the MCU. Likewise, in Endgame he only has what troops he could bring with him on Sanctuary II. We never see the full scope of Thanos's army, but there are good reasons for them to be depleted by the time he attacks Earth in either film.

GoTG characters and English

• This might be covered elsewhere, but how can Tony, Natasha, etc. understand what Nebula and Rocket are saying? In the first GotG film we see that Quill has a translator implant so he can understand the different languages, but the characters from Earth don't. Have they specifically learned English before they traveled to Earth?
  • They all have two-way translators. Like we saw in Captain Marvel (2019), they don't just let them understand any language, they also let them be understood in any language. And yes, this has come up before.

What are you swinging from?

• In the final battle, Spider-Man is freely web swinging at full speed. Cool, but they're in an open field. They made a joke of the fact in Homecoming that Spidey needs something tall to properly swing from. His web couldn't reach Thanos's flagship, and grabbing any of the Leviathans would have made his swinging way more awkward and unruly.
  • There are quite a few airships and other flight-capable characters flying around in the sky, he could just be using them as anchor points.
  • During the charge his web is connected to Giant Man's hand.

Terrible birthday gift

• Battle Couple aside, with Pepper's experience with armor it's really not an appropriate gift.
  • Is there a question here? Tony probably made her a suit for the same reason he made himself the nanotech suit despite being retired in IW. "Insurance"/Paranoia that they'd be attacked and she'd need protection. The post-snap world is hardly a stable place after all.
  • Have Pepper and Tony really entirely withdrawn from the world during the five years, or did they help out where they could, just not as part of the Avengers? If so then this may only be the latest set of armor Tony has made for her.
  • Let's face it; this is not worse than the big stuffed bunny he got her for Christmas in Iron Man 3.
  • She probably would've loved being able to fly with the suit (which, remember, is what the Repulsor Rays were originally designed for). Ever see one of those movies where the hero shows their love interest an experience like flight as a gift and it's super romantic?
  • Having a daughter to protect probably gave Pepper a whole new perspective on whether or not she needed a battle-suit.

2014 Nebula

• Nebula from 2014 absolutely refuses to betray Thanos — even siding with him against her future self. But in the original Guardians of the Galaxy, she jumped ship from Thanos's side without a second's hesitation the moment Ronan suggested the idea which in that timeline would have been literally a few days later at most. Why would 2014 Nebula be so different from 2014+1week Nebula?
  • GotG's Nebula jumped ship when she was far away from Thanos, Ronan had an infinity stone, and Thanos didn't. 2014 Nebula in Endgame has just learned that Thanos will get all six of the stones and is held helpless right in front of Thanos. In other words, Nebula jumped sides because she was opportunistic, and her Endgame version never had the opportunity.
  • Also, 2014 Nebula saw the recording of future Thanos admitting he treated her too harshly. In her desperate eyes, perhaps that gave her some renewed hope of winning his approval, and she turned all her built-up hate into an obsession to gain that approval instead. Whereas in the original timeline, her hatred rapidly festered with Thanos once again choosing Gamora over her.
  • 2014 Nebula tearfully admitted that the reason why she couldn't change was because "He won't let me." As stated above if the opportunity to defect had come up for her she would have but knowing what she knew, it didn't appear she had any hope.

Getting the funds and the lands to get New Asgard built?

• After Thanos murdered half the refugees that survived Asgard's destruction and then following the Snap, there were at best 2 dozen or so Asgardians left in existence, with not one penny of Earth Money Among them. Even though it is shown that the picturesque fishing-town they are building is still a work-in-progress with a far way to go before completion, how did they get the approval of the Norwegians (who themselves were half-decimated by the snap) to build a new home on their land, and more importantly, have the money to build so much in even five years?
  • Even the weakest Asgardian has Super-Strength and Super-Toughness; that would make their services valuable. And it's quite possible that the Asgardians had some tech or artifacts that they could trade. If nothing else, they had to come in a ship. Besides, half of Norway's population would be gone, so they'd have plenty of room for New Asgard.
  • Uh oh... Now that you mentioned it... Since those Norwegians are now back from the dead, there would surely be some political/social/financial tensions resulting from at-*least* another two dozen Asgardians and who knows how many Alien gladiators now joining in the mix, wouldn’t there?
  • Even a few hundred new people moving into a decent-sized population shouldn't be that hard to adjust to. And as noted above, chances are the Asgardians can contribute a lot more to a given society than the average human immigrant (many of them doubtless have centuries of experience and knowledge to spare).
  • On that note, considering how shockingly-rich Tony Stark is, and that he would probably consider Thor a personal friend, how much cash/political-clout would he have invested to help his fellow Avenger build his countrymen their new home, if any? (Watching it a third time, there seems to be the beginnings of a shining golden-hall/cathedral in the town square, which would not be affordable to humble fisherman without some millionaire backing).
  • The Asgardians were once worshipped by early Norwegians (and other Scandinavians) as gods, and those myths remain well remembered to the present day. The Asgardians may be venerated in Norway in modern times for this reason, and many Norwegian citizens might consider it an honor to help out their ancestors' gods when they ask for a favor.
  • Five years is a long time and we don't know when they started living in the place. For all we know they could've tried different planets and then settled on Earth a few months before the movie started (Not likely, but that puts things in perspective). We also don't know if those two dozen Asgardians are all Asgardians or just the ones that didn't have better options than "fishing village under our drunken king".
  • It is heartening then to see that King Charlemagne is evidently *not* as successful in forcefully converting Pagan Warriors to Christianity by the sword in the MCU; the remaining Sons and Daughters of Asgard would otherwise have found no shelter in MCU’s Norway had it become fully-Christian and no longer honoring the Old Gods, like the Norway of our world.
    • Nobody's asking for people to worship them or call them gods, so most Christians would probably accept the Asgardians fine in the religious department. Plus, modern Norway isn't as Christian as it used to be. The country's now more secular, skepticism is rising, and even the remaining Christians are secular and admit Christianity isn't a certain thing. Plus, your old gods ACTUALLY COMING TO EARTH AND WREAKING SHIT tends to get people to believe in you and acknowledge your existence.
  • Or maybe the Christian Norwegians just decided to be nice to the superpowered refugees who politely asked for some land. No one said they were worshiping the Asgardians.
  • The world got half of its population snapped out of existence and is now shorthanded. A population of a few hundred "humans" arrive on the planet capable of carrying their own weight. They build or claim a little fishing hamlet and nobody gives them any trouble, because why would they? 3.5 billion people just died.
  • Some countries are actually nice to refugees.
  • For all we know, the village could be a major seasonal tourist attraction: the only place in Europe with a known resident Avenger. Even if he is an overweight slob...

Why restart the world?

• Why not morph the current world one into the grateful one Thanos wanted instead? Since the stones were formed from the Big Bang, restarting the world might overclock the stones and kill him.
  • Thanos ends up wanting to utterly change how the universe works, merely forcibly morphing its current life forms to suit his taste wouldn't necessarily ensure that their descendants would be the same way. However, if he remakes the universe so that its very foundational principles follow his philosophies, then the universe will forever follow it and forever be grateful. Of course attempting something on that scale may well have killed him along with everyone else, but he was probably too hyped up on his belief in his own "destiny" to really take that danger seriously.
  • Also, he's pissed off. He's no longer thinking about "the good of the universe," he's angry that people don't think that he's an amazing savior. Once again: He's called the Mad Titan for a reason. Don't go in expecting him to be reasonable or pragmatic.

How did Dr. Strange determine what set of circumstances constituted a "Win"?

• While it's obvious that his actions coordinated events and set them up just right to lead to our current reality, in which the Avengers successfully un-dust everyone, Tony sacrifices himself to stop Thanos, and the Stones are put back in their proper places in the timeline, how did he know when to "stop" looking for positive outcomes? What was his rationale for "this is good enough"? If he had looked through 15 million possibilities instead of 14, could he have perhaps found a couple dozen more where they won without Tony having to die for it? Or even set things up just differently enough during the fight on Titan so a random neuron in Thanos's brain fails to fire the notion of "OK, my work's done, time to destroy the Stones!" and they could have kept the original Stones AND somehow defeated Thanos? It's a mindboggling amount of possibilities to work with, and he didn't say whether the "One" was the very last possibility he was willing to live through, or if it was possibility No. 45820, so figuring out how he determined "This is it, this is the one path I'm choosing out of an infinity of them" is fascinating to me.
  • As established by Strange's solo movie, the holders of Time Stone cannot see the future past their death. In all but one of the possible futures that he peeked into, he could only see up until the point of his death, and nothing more. Except the timeline of the Endgame movie, in which he could see past his dusting because he (along with all the others) are resurrected by the Avengers's successful attempt to undo the Snap. Furthermore, looking farther down this future, he would see that Thanos will eventually be Snapped to dust by Stark, which logically would be the best outcome he could hope among all the other futures in which he couldn't see more past his death.
  • And yes, he could have possibly searched for longer, assuming there are infinite possible futures. However, Strange only has so much endurance, and fourteen million searches on their own seemed to already be taking a toll on his mind and body. The important point is he searched as well or better than anyone could expect, and found a way to win (i.e. to undo the Snap and kill Thanos). That it took him so many tries also underscores perhaps the more important part of the millions of tries. Rather than whether that one future was the best possible one or not, avoiding the worse futures was more important as it became clear from the sheer number of possibilities he searched that the odds were INCREDIBLY in Thanos's favor.
  • A good portion of even those futures where Strange could see that the snap was undone probably ended in Thanos regaining the gauntlet, and dusting the entire universe.
  • It's implied that those fourteen million possible futures are every possible future. There's no future where they undo the snap and Tony survives.
  • No, that was not implied. In fact, Strange only stopped looking because everyone came up to ask him what he was doing. Presumably he was trying to find some impossible future where everyone survived, but couldn't.
  • Wordof God seems to imply, though not explicitly, that the 14 million realities was an exhaustive glance at most possibilities. In universe though, this doesn't make a ton of sense, though given the sheer number of variables involved, many of which have nothing to do with who chose to fight Thanos or go back in time. To give you an idea using just one possible variable, consider that there's a bunch of potential realities where Thanos got snapped (Wordof God says he was on the chopping block too) and the Avengers simply gather the stones in their own timeline without conflict. If that's the case, even assuming that the snap elemenates a victim's subjective experience of the world and is for all intents and purposes a death (as opposed to trapping a victim in the soul stone or otherwise separating their mind from their body), if Strange kept looking he probably wouldn't be able to tell which realities were most likely to happen because he'd experience his revival in any of them.
  • To the above, if Thanos did get killed in the snap then the Stones would presumably be eliminated as well (anyone snapped has everything they're wearing turn to dust too, even powerful artifacts like the cloak of levitation). It wouldn't really make fixing things any easier.
  • Supposedly Strange's "win" condition was a world where the stones were also destroyed by Thanos to prevent them from being abused like that ever again. It basically unfolds as, Thanos performs the snap. Thanos destroy's the stones. The surviving Avengers kill him. Tony invents time travel and they get alternate universe stones. They undo the snap. Alternate universe Thanos follows, and Tony uses the stones to kill his entire army. Steve sends the stones back, leaving their universe with the stones in an unusable form. This removes the threat of Thanos, and removes the threat of the stones with minimal casualties discounting the dusted who are reformed. They might have been able to stop the use of the stones and defeat Thanos conventionally, but he'd lay waste to earth as a result and millions could have died. Where as by letting him dust half, then bringing them back before quickly dusting his own forces before he could attack Earth in earnest, it limited the casualties to Stark, Vision, Widow, and a couple wizards and Wakandan's in the final battle. And likely people that gave into despair during the timeskip but that's still far less then if Thanos had killed half of Earth's population manually and if that happened those people wouldn't have been able to be revived.
  • What he saw was apparently that the timeline in which he sent a message to the Ancient One by giving up the Time Stone was the one in which everyone came back, while he could find no possible timeline where they defeated Thanos before he wiped out a large portion of the universe's population, as at that point there were only about three billion people left before he had wiped out half.

Where did Rhodes get the new War Machine armor?

• We see Rhodes having ejected out of his armor to save Rocket and then Scott jumping in to rescue them from the water. The next scene has Scott bursting out of the compound with the three of them safe in his hands and Rhodes in the War Machine Mark 3 armor. How?
  • It must have been stored in an underground vault that they opened up on the way out. They are standing in the wreckage of the Avengers building, after all.

Tony's Stark Arc Reactor

• At the end of the movie we saw the wreath with Tony's first arc reactor as a funeral. Where's Stark's body? Did he get cremated?
  • Hard to know since the movie didn't show.
  • Maybe Tony, being a man of science, had a will that said his body should be donated to scientific research?
  • Or maybe there's still enough residual palladium in his bones and soft tissues that his remains had to be disposed of as a toxic hazard.
  • Yikes!
• In the opening, Tony says his ship's almost out of power. He's still clearly wearing his reactor — why not use it?
  • Presumably the ship was too badly damaged for them to successfully make whatever modifications would be needed for it to use the arc reactor as a power source. Not to mention it would do nothing to actually fix the engines.

Cap takes the long way home

• After restoring the Infinity Stones to their place in the timeline, Cap decides to wait for the present day instead of popping back to the future. But surely the past he goes back to is an alternate timeline? Even if he restores the Stones properly, too much else has changed. He can't "wait" for his original timeline if it's not connected to the one he's in.
  • The writers and director have given differing Word of God on the matter. One says the whole thing was a Stable Time Loop; the Peggy we saw in previous movies was always married to a Steve Rogers who came from the future, and he took The Slow Path back. One says that by staying in the past Steve created an alternate timeline and only returned to the main one after Peggy died (him appearing on the bench rather than on the platform was Rule of Drama).
  • Steve and Peggy's history being a Stable Time Loop doesn't make much sense, given the events of Agent Carter, where we see Peggy mourn for Steve, eventually move on, and start to have romantic feelings for someone else. By the end of the series it's 1947, so if we assume the Stable Time Loop explanation to be true, that means Steve didn't return to Peggy until two years or more after his "death". Why would he let Peggy mourn for her for such a long time and take the risk of her finding a new love (which is exactly what happened), when he could time travel to 1945 and return to her immediately after the events of The First Avenger? It makes much more sense to assume that he did return to 1945 and created a new timeline. Furthermore, the way time travel is explained to work in this movie means that any time someone travels to the past and does something there, a new alternate timeline is created. So a Stable Time Loop isn't really even possible in this setting.
• To put it another way: Steve was supposed to return to the time machine platform thing when he was done, very specifically no matter how long it took him. So he should have popped there even after the 30/40 years with Peggy, right?
  • The time travel system has a GPS that allows them to hop to other places and times without a receiving platform, such as when Stark and Rodgers retrieve the Tesseract from the 70s. Probably what happened was that Old Steve programmed the GPS to send him to that bench rather than the receiving platform.

Bringing the Stones back in time but not at the same place

• While they have to bring the Stone back to the time they took it, why would they need to bring it at the same place? The Time Stone they have to because the Ancient One lend it but why going back to Vormir to have it back in a soul pit or infuse the Reality Stone in Jane? Would settle the whole why Captain retired himself in the past the good guys there is no conflict now that the Stones are back and ready for use for the good guys, he can make a better alternate timeline by making sure the Power Stone is already in the Nova Corp's hand and giving the Soul Stone to Captain Marvel. Makes no sense they treat the situation the Stones were in was the best or necessary they gathered dust, won't even change their future it'll just make a better past.
  • Because they're trying not to change the past and derail other timelines.
  • Why the hell not? The dark elves almost destroying Asgard and Ronan's blood crusade feels like thing you don't want people to live through. The only thing the Ancient One said would derail the timeline in a clearly poor situation is not having the Stones that can shape the universe not putting a woman back in a coma otherwise reality breaks down. Forcing Captain America to pilot a spaceship to Vormir and the Power temple is pretty risky too as he doesn't know how to do that so the Avengers are gambling a lot anyway for the sake of keeping a timeline they know is kind of shit.
  • As the movie, via Banner/Hulk, explained, they can't change their past.
  • It's not about changing their past it's about making the past where Captain America bring the stones back better.
  • Thing is, they can't really know it is "kind of shit" since they also don't have any alternatives except the Ancient One's warning that not returning a Stone to its proper place and time can have serious consequences. For example—if they don't return the Tesseract, Captain Marvel won't exist, and the Avengers won't band together. If they don't return the Aether, the Dark Elves will still attack Asgard under the assumption it's still there, and they'll just retreat and go into hiding again instead of being destroyed (which would lead to a whooooole new mess when the Odin of that new reality died and unleashed Hela.) If they don't return the Time Stone, Dormammu takes over. The Scepter is a big question mark because removing the Mind Stone from play in 2012 removes the Twins, Ultron, Vision, Sokovia, Lagos, Vienna, and the schism between the Avengers, but it could also have repercussions if Thanos comes looking for it. OTOH, the Orb and the Soul Stone are a non-issue now, since the reality they came from doesn't have a Thanos anymore... but Ronan was already on his way to Morag, and would've likely killed Quill if he found a Ravager there but no Power Stone. And then he would've continued to attack Xandar through some other means until one side or the other wore out. If Cap returns the Orb to Morag, Quill gets to steal it, there's no Gamora to run into, Rocket catches him and delivers him to the Ravagers, and... then who knows what would happen. And who knows if Ego comes looking for him after that. It's really impossible to tell, even for the audience, let alone the characters, so it's likely they'd just choose the path that would affect the timeline the least.
  • We know it can be less shit because Captain America is there with the Stones and knows some of the threats. It's a defeatist notion to think a first draft should be the final version because you can't improve anything and if Captain America abided by it he would have let Red Skull win the first time because he might make it worse, there is no difference between trying to change the past and making a better future when you time travel except you have more info.
    • Tony Stark died to bring about the outcome of that "first draft" reality. The whole team promised Tony that nothing they did to undo the Snappening would disrupt the timeline in such a manner that its current state - by which, Stark meant his own five years of married life with Pepper and the very existence of their daughter Morgan - could be imperiled. Pretty much any of the changes to history you describe could have ripple effects that would negate Stark's happiness or erase his daughter from reality. Steve Rogers keeps his promises, especially to his fallen comrades. End of debate.

Snap-Unsnap-Snap

• So is there actually a limit to what the Snap can actually achieve? When Hulk performs his Snap, he undoes the deaths of those who were dusted in the first Snap, but not those who were killed before it. But when 2014 Thanos obtains the gauntlet, he changes his plans and now intends to use the Snap to not just get rid of half the Universe, but all of it. So, if the gauntlet is capable of affecting the entire Universe, why wasn't it able to undo all of the other deaths?
  • The only death it explicitly won't undo is Natasha's and that's part of the deal of the Soul Stone. You can't use the Stone to undo the sacrifice, otherwise there would be no sacrifice.
  • If Natasha is the only death he can't undo, why didn't Hulk bring back Vision, for example?
  • Again, Natasha is the only death we explicitly know that Banner can't undo. He tried and failed. Now that he didn't bring Vision back means one of a couple of things: thatimplicitly he can't do it and that the Gauntlet won't undo non-snap deaths. Or second that he could have but didn't try for some reason. Possibly because he was concentrating on the goal Tony gave him "Undo the snap, don't change anything else". It could be that he was trying to bring Nat back while the Gauntlet fried his arm and settled on just undoing the Snap when he finger-clicked himself.
  • Three possible reasons: One, like you said, Hulk focused on the Snapped victims and didn't think of anyone else. Second: they deliberately focused on the Snapped victims because, if you start bringing your friends back, it puts you in a morally and ethically awkward place if you don't bring back other victims of Thanoss quest; and if you do do that, where do you stop, considering he halved the population of whole planets? Third: Vision was "killed" when the Mind Stone was torn off his head, effectively ripping a significant part of his brain apart; since they didn't finish decoupling Vision from the Stone, and a good part of his personality was still tied to it, it may be difficult if not impossible to have "Vision" without a Mind Stone in his head, and naturally you can't just create another Mind Stone willy-nilly. And in the MCU, there's no indication that the Mind Stone in the Gauntlet would give Hulk the omniscience necessary to "just know" how to magically repair the husk of Vision they already have with full brain circuitry and preserve his original personality.

Shot Through The Heart, And I'm To Blame

• How is Nebula still around at the end of the movie after killing her past self? The Ancient One's explanation of timelines would mean that there would be some big problems there, and she clearly knew more on the subject than anyone else.
  • That's not how Quantum Tunnel time traveling works. This is pointed out several times in the movie itself. Killing a past version of yourself won't change the present timeline. How many times does this have to be repeated?
  • To wit: Hulk states that if you, present you, travel to the chronological past, you are still experiencing a present from your perspective, no matter what. Any actions you take in the chronological past can't affect your personal past; at best, and if your actions are significant enough to cause an actual difference in events you'd be creating an alternate timeline (it doesn't seem to be a "butterfly effect" kind of thing where stepping on an ant would cause a significantly different timeline.) What the Ancient One says is exactly in line with this, but she also says that taking a Stone out of its proper place (i.e. "a significant enough change") wouldn't just create an alternate timeline, but it would screw over said timeline, because she knows very specifically that the Time Stone is and will be needed to keep Dormammu at bay. Bruce and the AO are on the same page about the nature of time travel and the creation of alternate timelines, they were only arguing because she didn't want to risk losing the Time Stone. So taking BOTH explanations into account? When 2014 Thanos traveled to "our" 2023, he created an alternate timeline in which he vanished forever in 2014, taking all his forces, Nebula included, with him. Since it's an alternate timeline, whatever happens to him and his cohorts will not have any effect on "our" set of characters, because the Thanos and Nebula from "our" timeline never disappeared in 2014 and went on about their business.
    If you want to visualize it, think of Nebula as the traffic on a highway. There's just the one highway, and all traffic goes through it. But then there's some construction work on the highway, and one of the lanes splits off into a side-road. There's now traffic on the highway and the side-road. But no matter what happens to the traffic on the side-road, like a crash, the highway traffic doesn't stop. It remains unaffected. For most of the Infinity Stones, the side-road just merged back onto the highway and it was like nothing happened. For the 2012 Tesseract, one road of its traffic split off and was never seen again, but the rest of it went on. For the 2014 Thanos et al, that side-road crashed, but the rest of their "highway" went on to appear in Guardians Vol. 2 and Infinity War.
  • It may help to think of it as traveling to alternate universes that are nearly identical to the prime universe except that the timeline hasn't advanced as far, rather than as time travel. Nothing that the Avengers do in those alternate universes affects the prime universe's history because they're not traveling into the past of the prime universe. They are traveling into entirely separate quantum universes that closely resemble the past.

Biological loophole

• The Gauntlet's power only possesses a recoil effect when all six Stones are used in tandem, and presumably after a command that impacts the whole universe. Also, sufficiently powerful beings can withstand such a force, albeit with crippling injuries. Is it too much to imagine nobody thought of even temporarily altering the Gauntlet wielder's biology to become tougher than the Hulk or even Thanos and then carrying out their will without suffering any backlash?
  • So to keep the wearer from being affected by the energy of the Infinity Stones, they should fix that by channeling more Infinity Stone energy into themselves? That won't work out well.
  • That doesn't mean that's the only possible route, especially if they played it smart with the extra Pym Particles. Send Okoye into pre-Killmonger Wakanda for a couple of heart-shaped herbs, for example. Borrow some relics from the Sanctums like they did with the Time Stone. Take a sample of super soldier serum from the Starks' car before the Winter Soldier does them in. Pick up Thor five seconds after he takes a few inches off Thanos and let him go at it. The point is that while combining as many power sources as they can get their hands on is preferred, more importantly, the result has to hold out long enough to survive the strain from using all six Stones.
  • Because they didn't really know what was required to wield the Infinity Stones until after they built the Gauntlet, and at that point, they already have someone strong enough to survive. The Pym Particle supply was only enough to get each Stone and return, that's it.
  • Their priority was getting the Stones and getting their thing done, then sending the Stones back. They were not focused on doing a 100% completion run and using every possible loophole available to optimize themselves and avoid any possible negative impacts of what they were about to do.
  • Remember: When you mess with time, it tends to mess back. They needed to fulfill the mission with as few jumps as possible. They could already have damaged other timelines with the jumps they made causing unexpected things to happen just to retrieve the Stones; attempting to gather other enhancements with more jumps is too big of a risk.
  • Unless they dissect Thanos they can't be sure what is needed to survive the Stones. Gamma radiation seemed to be the way to go but that is in and on itself a dangerous procedure.
  • Using a single Stone definitely also takes a toll on the user, just look at the finale of Guardians of the Galaxy. Most of the times we see the Stones being used by normal people they're used as a power source to some device (the Eye of Agamoto, Loki's Scepter, etc), rather than on their own. So, we can assume those devices somehow lessen the effects of using the Stones (and possibly also limits their power). The Gauntlet, on the other hand, seems to only have the purpose of allowing the Stones to work together, not to lessen their effects. Thanos is simply so strong that he can use a few Stones at the same time and brush off the consequences (and could also use the full set twice, without taking as much damage as the Hulk did in one use).

Astral Projection Confusion

• When the Ancient One does her conscious separation thingy to Professor Hulk, why does only Banner have an astral projection? Shouldn't the non-merged Hulk have an astral projection as well, since he and Banner are different consciouses in the same body?
  • Hulk isn't really two people, Hulk is just another side of Banner.
  • It's all but outright stated that Banner and the Hulk underwent a Split-Personality Merge during the five year Time Skip.
  • Banner is the astral projection because he's the rational part of the whole thing, while Hulk is the repressed anger.
  • He's also the original. If Banner's soul is going to have a shape, it's going to be the same shape it was before the Hulk even existed.
  • On a meta level, it's probably also the writers' way of letting Mark Ruffalo appear in the Grand Finale of the Thanos story-arc without CGI alteration. Given that Original Hulk needed to appear extensively in the Avengers Tower and 2012 battle scenes, it's only fair to let Original Bruce make an appearance too.

Why take the stairs?

• The Hulk is an unstoppable Person of Mass Destruction, as has shown to be able to jump up (and down) buildings with almost no effort at all. So...why exactly doesn't he just jump off Stark tower and meet his fellow Avengers at the bottom, rather than piss himself off by taking the stairs?
  • Hulk wasn't the smartest, so he likely just went along with what they said and wasn't able to come up with something else.
  • A. Just because Hulk can survive jumping from the top of a 100-story skyscraper doesn't mean he wants to, and B. doing so would make a crater of the street below, which might be acceptable during a battle, but afterward is the kind of thing you want to avoid.
  • C. The citizens of New York City have already had enough terrifying shocks for a lifetime that day, and most of the ones who were cowering indoors from the chaos probably haven't yet realized the Hulk was on their side in this fight. Having the Big Green Guy plummet into the streets just as they're warily emerging from shelter isn't going to do anyone any good. D. Being alone in the aftermath of a big fight is one of the few things that the other Avengers know about, that's calmed the Hulk down in the past. They haven't come up with the "lullaby" tactic yet, and don't realize that trudging down dozens of flights of stairs will anger Hulk further, rather than make him bored, weary, and ready to change back into Banner.

Did anyone know where to find the Reality Stone?

• Was anyone present at the planning session aware that in 2014 the Reality Stone was being housed with Tanaleer Tivan at Knowhere? Seems like it would have been easier just to send a larger contingent to 2014 and try to steal it from Tivan's collection. Not that plucking it out of Jane would have been particularly difficult but stealing it from Tivan would have been less disruptive to the effects of the timeline.
  • It also would've been a lot more difficult since none of them actually knew the specific location where the Reality Stone is being kept. Considering Tivan's collection consists of hundreds if not thousands of artifacts and creatures, they'd be spending forever trying to find it. Meanwhile, in 2013, Thor definitely knows the exact location of the Reality Stone: inside Jane.
  • Thor might've also had an ulterior motive not to mention the Collector's acquisition of the Aether: he wanted to see (or at least eavesdrop on) his mother again, and to test his worthiness by calling for Mjolnir.

Tony retires to continue his favorite hobby

• We know, from Iron Man 3, Civil War, and specifically this film, that even when Tony wants to stop, he is psychologically incapable of it. He has to keep solving problems, and part of this reflects in how he went from the Mark L suit in Infinity War to the whopping Mark LXXXV in Endgame in just five years. In Iron Man 3 we're also told that he built that film's 35 new, hyper-specialized suits, to cope with severe PTSD. Is that the same case in Endgame? If you confronted him about it between the events of The Avengers and Iron Man 3, he could claim that he was an Avenger, so building all those suits was a requirement of the job, but that excuse wouldn't fly at all for Endgame's five-year time-skip. He has a family, he's not involved with the Avengers anymore, and he's probably not going on missions either. But instead of focusing his anxiety on any other technologies, he continues to build suits for himself and Pepper, and even built specific Thor-compatible features into them. Was he actually retired, and kept building suits to fend off his trauma even if he didn't think he'd ever use them, or was he planning to come back and see his former friends again at some point?
  • Honestly, if anything, he's slowed down. The newest suit in Iron Man 3 is the Mk. 42 — while in Avengers, a year or so earlier, he was at Mk. 7. So 35 new suits in five years is practically just tinkering around compared to 35 new suits in one year when he was at his worst. Not that the LXXXV is super different from the Mk. L — Tony might've considered fairly minor tweaks and upgrades to be worth bumping it to the next Mark. As for Thor-compatible features, he's probably had those in place for a while, and remember his suit is nanotech and able to make new stuff on the fly, so he didn't necessarily have to know he'd be using it to have it in the fight.
  • Tony is one of the most paranoid characters in the entire MCU second only to Fury. He worked on the suits as a defensive measure, in case aliens or other bad guys invaded his farm and he needed to bust it out to protect his family. It's basically his version of having a gun underneath the bed at all times.
  • Also, he never designed anything to be Thor-compatible: Thor's lightning has been able to power Tony's suit since the very first time they met. Go back and watch their fight in The Avengers (2012).
  • The Mark 85 is clearly intentionally designed to take advantage of the effect accidentally discovered in the first Avengers film. In Avengers the lightning bolt did damage and charge the Mark 7, the Mark 85 has a special receiver that opens to facilitate the charging and use of power.

Where'd the dusted go?

• Were people who were dusted killed or simply dis-integrated and then reintegrated by Prof. Hulk's anti-snap (like a Destructive Teleportation device), or are there souls in the MCU that were put into their proper bodies upon returning?
  • Probably just nonexistence. They were erased fully and wholly and regenerated when it was undone. They were nothing, literally vanished.
  • Only asking because how MCU handles souls is somewhat ambiguous. The Soul Stone may be a perfectly metaphorical name, and nothing in the MCU suggests that it works like it does in the comics. However, stuff like the astral projection magic in Dr. Strange kind of confuses things.
  • Word of God has said that the souls of the dusted were imprisoned inside the Soul Stone, then put back after being unsnapped.
    • Which means Clint was literally, as well as figuratively, holding his wife and children when he awoke on Vormir with the Stone in his hand. Poetic, that.

Does time travel always create alternate timelines in the MCU?

• The way the Ancient One explained time travel made it seem like the stones create one single measurable reality, which seems to indicate that as long as the stones are in place an Alternate Timeline can't be created by disturbances to the past. Because the stones were taken out of place in Endgame we can't really learn what time travel is like when the stones are left alone, but the Ancient One's words seem to suggest if the stones are returned to the exact point that they were taken you can create a Close-Enough Timeline that would prevent there from being alternate timelines. Does that mean that Steve didn't return the stones exactly where they belonged or was Marvel being inconsistent with their own interpretation of time travel or regardless of what Steve did there were always going to be alternate timelines?
  • The Ancient One doesn't seem to have a problem with alternate timelines - just the idea of condemning one timeline for the sake of another. She doesn't want to give up the Time Stone to Bruce because it's needed for Strange to save their reality in five years. It's only important that she still have the Time Stone at the point it was originally needed - because then Strange will need it to give it to Thanos and ensure things happen as they're supposed to again. The stones are important but what Cap does in his spare time isn't. So once he's given the stones back, he can do whatever he wants. And some people do subscribe to the theory that Peggy's never seen husband was actually Steve all along.

Cosmic repercussions for Earth getting snap-happy

• The Avengers were able to detect and study the cosmic shockwave produced by Thanos's first snap, and concluded that it was the same kind of energies from his second one. Then Hulk snapped (presumably bringing everyone in the Universe back, not just Earthlings) and then Tony snapped, which could have also reached far into the cosmos depending on how exhaustive his "get rid of Thanos and his mooks" command was. That's three out of four massive cosmic events that originated from Earth! If a group of Earthlings could examine the resulting shockwaves, would other, far more advanced civilizations take notice, too? Would interstellar empires like the Kree or the Sovereign want to annihilate Earth to (ahem) avenge their own losses, and to prevent anything else like it from happening again? After all, they wouldn't necessarily know it was all Thanos's fault, all they'd know is that Earth was ground zero. The only way to spread the word about him is by having Captain Marvel explain things everywhere she went, and any space-faring enemies she made in the last 20 years are unlikely to take the word of an Earthling about an Earth-based catastrophe.
  • Most cosmic civilizations are going to realize that the original event was caused by Thanos, since wiping out half the population is his known MO, so no need to take revenge on the Earth for something that wasn't their fault (especially considering there aren't going to be many civilizations in a position to retaliate with half their people dead). As for afterward... why would they? Earth is the reason everyone was brought back to life, and the reason that Thanos is no longer a threat. Furthermore, even if they did think Earth was responsible, why would they want to antagonize the planet they think wiped out half the universe? If anything, they should be more wary of attacking Earth now, since they also wouldn't know that Earth no longer has all the Infinity Stones.
  • It probably wouldn't be hard for any civilization capable of identifying the Snap to also identify who exactly caused it. And if they got any surveillance on Earth after that fact, they probably realized the earthlings actually saved their loved ones, and that the items used to cause the whole situation are gone. So they have no reason to try to take revenge, nor to try to acquire the gauntlet for themselves.
• How about the other way around? Quite a few space-faring people were joining the Avengers against Thanos, so no doubt word will spread around the cosmos that "C-53" isn't as backward a planet as they thought. Some alien cultures may be intimidated, others may be grateful, but others might see Earth's achievements as a challenge...
  • Like who? We haven't seen any civilization that would attack Earth just for a "challenge" in the MCU.
    • Let's not exclude the possibilities about another greater threats that can be established in the future. Marvel Cinematic Universe is not over yet... and maybe we'll see who exactly will challenge Earth next.
  • Whomever it might be, apparently they'd have to be the sorts not to be phased by fighting a planet whose protectors, in the space of five years, managed to kill Thanos twice. That's bound to discourage the riffraff at least.
  • And, frankly? "They're a challenge!" is a daft motivation for whatever the next big bad is. Thanos was interesting and compelling because he had an understandable motive beyond, "Big guy want big fight!" The MCU will likely not make the mistake of dumbing down whoever comes next.

Why was Tony caught by surprise by the Hulk in the lobby?

• So right up until the point where Scott burrows into Tony's chest arc reactor in the lobby, Tony and Scott have not yet made any changes to events or interacted with anyone. Notably they did not send Hulk down the stairs - this was something that originally happened, and 2012 Tony was right there in the lobby, as we see in this scene, to witness Hulk rampaging through that lobby and causing a scene. So my question is why was Tony not aware of this and was not being more careful to get out of Hulk's way before he makes it down the stairs? Surely they should have ruled out that moment for getting involved with events as they would be nuts to risk dealing with an angry 2012 Hulk, which Tony should know would happen.
  • He forgot. Simple as that. Human beings are not perfect creatures who accurately recall every vital detail down to the second.
  • Fairly important detail though, considering that HYDRA were trying to seize the Tesseract at that moment. If nothing else, that incident would have been discussed between Tony and Steve at some point after Pierce was exposed, and it seems hard to believe that they would forget the moment was interrupted by Hulk trashing the lobby out of nowhere.
  • Not really. If they were talking about how Pierce was HYDRA, then that is the more important detail of that event. Hulk smashing open the door behind them would barely rate as an afterthought. Even if he did recall it, it's also possible that Tony just misjudged the time. Or maybe he judged the time correctly, but due to the butterfly effect of the future Avengers merely being there, it happened earlier or later than expected.
  • Tony was busy thinking of shawarma in the original timeline.
  • Memories of past events, especially ones from years ago and/or involved a lot of adrenaline first time around, tend to be more like highlight-reels than exact replays. Even if Tony recalled how a grouchy Hulk burst out of the elevator shaft - and he probably would remember that'd happened, if only because he presumably snarked to Pepper about Banner ruining his property-insurance rates when she'd tallied up the repair-bills for Stark Tower - he surely wouldn't recall the precise timing of when it occurred. JARVIS would've known precisely, but the AI's demise may have erased or scrambled that information, so even asking FRIDAY for details during the time-heist's planning sessions wouldn't necessarily help.

Natasha, Daughter of Ivan

• In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Arnim Zola identified Natasha as "Romanoff, Natalya Alianovna". According to Russian naming convention, her middle name is invariably a Patronymic, based on that of her father, which must be Alian (the name literally means "[daughter] of Alian"). This means two things: She was adopted and Ivan was her biological father, or she was an illegitimate child and had the patronymic (in this case based on the name of Natasha's maternal grandfather) and surname of her mother. The second seems more plausible since she mentions having no father figure at all.
  • She says she 'never knew her father', implying that she's talking about biology, but Red Skull used the name "Ivan", which is the name of her adoptive father. Did she just happen to have two dads both named Ivan? Because that's a weird coincidence.
    • That may be true in the comics, but it's unknown if that was also the case in the MCU.
  • Or maybe Nat's had sooooooo many conflicting aliases, cover stories, and files collected about her, by so many different agencies, that cyber-Zola didn't have the correct information. Her true paternity might be something that never got documented by HYDRA or SHIELD. Stonekeeper-Schmidt is more likely to have the correct information as to her father's identity, given his presumably-supernatural access to information about those petitioning to claim the Soul Stone.
  • Also, it's possible that Zola had access to the actual files, and knew her actual father's name, while Stonekeeper-Skull saw her soul and who SHE sees herself as. She had very little connection to her father, so sees herself as "Natasha, daughter of Ivan". Similarly, he might see Quill as "Peter, son of Meredith" or "Son of Yondu."
  • Looking up Russian patronymics, they are legally required, and can be assigned any if one's father's name is not available. Since her father's name wasn't known, she may have been given the patronymic Alianovna simply to fulfill the name requirement.
  • Maybe Ivan was her mentor in spying, someone she came to see as a father (Gamora isn't a biological daughter of Thanos) but, since he was a super spy, Natasha never learned his real name. And Alian was either her biological or adoptive father, hence the patronymic. Come to think of it, the killer ballerina school might have given all its alumnae a patronymic, say, from the headmaster of the school, since they were supposed to be a group of top-secret spies. Aliases are part of the job.
  • Or maybe "Ivan" is used figuratively to mean "Russian military", because Natasha was reared as a ward/property of the Russian state authorities.
  • Black Widow reveals that Natasha was conscripted into the Red Room in infancy, and never knew her biological parents' names. The closest thing she ever had to a "father" was Alexi (aka Red Guardian), who assumed that role during a three-year undercover mission as a sleeper-agent "family" in Ohio. Unfortunately, the Red Room's director, General Dreykov, isn't given a personal name in the film, so there's no telling whether he was "Alain" or "Ivan".

Captain Suburbia

• Just a really, really trivial question: whose house was it at the end, when we see Steve and Peggy dancing together? On the one hand, it feels like it has been some time since Cap came back to the 40s, and the two of them are enjoying some "catching up" time after moving into the suburbs. It would definitely fit with the notion that the two of them can have the regular, low-key lives they fought for, especially true if you interpret the ending as Cap closing a time-loop where he laid low for 70 years. On the other hand, the door is open, implying that Cap JUST came in to reunite with Peggy for the first time, which makes for a dramatically powerful and appropriate scene... but since Peggy is with the SSR/early SHIELD, would she have a house in the suburbs instead of an apartment in the city? (Unless a plain, ordinary house in the suburbs is part of her cover.)
  • You sorta answered your own question. An apartment, especially an 'appropriate' one for whatever cover Peggy may be given, is going to be somewhat on the tiny side by definition and not exactly secluded. A normal house is larger (and thus has more room to hide things), has room for the rather important car, and is easier to pay for discretely if SHIELD handles housing. All this is assuming Peggy even needs a cover, which in all likelihood she wouldn't. She's supposed to be rather high up in SHIELD, so she's not going to be a field agent, so that means she's not spying, so she doesn't need a cover beyond a vague "I work in an office".
• In Agent Carter, Peggy does go through different addresses - a tiny apartment in New York, a room in a hotel, one of Howard Stark's houses and then a place in Los Angeles. None of which affect her ability to do her job. In the series, we see her reporting to an office, so she can live wherever she wants as long as she gets to work on time.

Was the last snap even necessary?

• While very cathartic and poetic, it doesn't make sense why Tony snapped Thanos and his forces away. The movie does block them together during the fight so that their placement on the field creates the tension needed for a "him or me" moment once Thanos grabs the gauntlet. But once Tony had the stones couldn't he have just flown them away at supersonic speeds to simply remove them from the battlefield? Even if he couldn't, given that many of the heavy-hitters on screen can fly (and in Strange's/Wong & company's case warp things really far away) it's insane that no one found the time to fly the gauntlet to the moon or halfway across the world and remove it from the battle.
  • Considering just wearing the Stones was clearly negatively affecting him, it doesn't seem likely Tony would've been able to get very far before the energy to "light up a continent" took its toll on him.
    • Remember, Tony's version of the gauntlet was designed with Earth tech, not godly Dwarf tech. On top of THAT, it clearly hurt Hulk just to wield, and Hulk was implied to be largely immune. On top of THAT, Iron Man wasn't wearing either gauntlet at all. At best, he was bearing a jerry-rigged back-up. The moment the stones came on line, he was already dying.
  • Additionally, Thanos's forces were far from beaten at the time. Heck, we outright see Rocket was going to get eaten by a leviathan had Tony not done the final snap. The longer the fight went on, the more casualties there were going to be on the side of the heroes. Tony also had the assurance that what he was about to do was going to be the one thing Strange could find that assured complete victory.
  • That's why Strange gave Tony that "1" sign. Tony was probably planning to do just that: take the gauntlet and send it back, keeping up that hot potato game they had been playing so far. Strange however probably saw with the time stone that they would be unable to keep Thanos from getting the stones otherwise, so he gestured to Tony that yes, sacrificing his life to snap Thanos&co out of existence really was their one in 14 millions chances to win. Could be that it would only delay the inevitable, that Thanos's forces would have eventually overwhelmed the Avengers and ravage Earth before going back on his search for the gathered stones after that, or that he'd be intercepted before flying away, or even that someone else would find the stones and do damage on their own.
  • Not to mention that there's one more huge reason why 2014-Thanos and his agents have to die: thanks to hijacking 2023-Nebula, they now know exactly how to retrieve the Stones from the past. Even putting the damn rocks back when/where they came from can't keep the Infinity Stones away from Thanos now, because he wouldn't hesitate to go back and retrieve them again, regardless of how many tries it takes or how many other ruined timelines it spawns.

Clint escaping house arrest

• How exactly was Clint able to leave his farm, travel all the way to Japan, don a new alias with different fighting styles, and start killing random Yakuza members without tipping off U.S authorities? Sure, they have the immediate aftermath of the Snap to deal with, but a former Avenger leaving a place he's supposed to remain and suddenly killing people in a foreign country seems like a pretty big situation to deal with.
  • The death of half of all life in the universe and the subsequent fallout of that is a much bigger priority than someone escaping house arrest. Besides, Clint's a master assassin, SHIELD agent and former Avenger. The only reason he hadn't left already is because he had no reason to.
  • Also, assuming his deal was roughly the same as Scott's, then his house arrest would have ended shortly before the Snap anyway.
  • If Clint went AWOL immediately after his family vanished and didn't contact the police or a neighbor first, it may well be that the authorities think he got Snapped too. Natasha and her close associates know he's alive, but could've held back that information because they don't want to betray a friend and aren't particularly averse to his vigilantism.
  • Furthermore, as said before Clint has been a top SHIELD operative for years; he would not be suspected of all the cartel and Yakuza killings since he of all people knows how to cover his tracks. He was apparently not leaving witnesses— he's just been going around leaving piles of bodies everywhere with many of his victims not even able to unholster their guns. The reason why Natasha and Rhodey know it's him is because they both 1) know Clint is alive, 2) know his family was snapped, and 3) know his handiwork. These are things the authorities that put him under house arrest, or at least the ones left, might not know. Natasha and the rest of the Avengers would certainly not let anyone know where he was— Rhodey admits that even though he can find Clint and knows where he's been, he doesn't WANT to know where Clint is. There's no implication Nat had trouble locating him when there was hope his family could be brought back. If that chance hadn't come up, he'd have kept on going until someone got lucky and killed him.
  • Clint and Scott agreed to house arrest so they could be with their families. Clint could have escaped extremely easily if he wanted to but he wanted to be with his family. Once they were dusted he split and there was nothing the government could do, if they even wanted to. It even took Nat 5 years to find him.

Strange's knowledge of everyone

• How exactly did Doctor Strange know about the existence of the Wasp, the remaining Asgardians on Earth plus Korg and Miek, and those who died in the Battle of Wakanda, and where they happened to be when the Snap happened? The Ravagers and the Masters of the Mystic Arts make sense because Star-Lord and Strange have connections to them, but literally no one who died on Titan has any knowledge of who Hope van Dyne is and that she was working with Scott to get Quantum particles, that some of Thor's people made it to Earth and are in fighting shape, or that there was a separate other battle happening in a nation that has only recently begun opening itself up to other countries, and just so happens to have a bunch of other super heroes plus Groot on it.
  • Besides using the Time Stone to learn all about them, Strange clearly has other magical means of observation. He knew Loki was on planet shortly after he arrived, and it's not like he or Thor were openly broadcasting their presence.
  • Other Masters of the Mystic Arts, who weren't snapped, could have easily kept up with current events in the meantime and heard about the Asgardians and the Battle of Wakanda. So when Strange comes back and starts organizing things, they could easily go, "Hey you know who else would want in on this?"
  • Strange presumably viewed Scott's role in the "golden path" series of events as he was searching for the winnable scenario using the Time Stone. He wound back the one-in-14-million timeline to just before the Snap and noted which events were crucial to its reversal, including who'd been involved in the Quantum Van experiment that got Ant-Man trapped. From there, he could easily learn of the Wasp (although why Ghost was left out, that's another question).
  • Even simpler explanation: "Mr. Stark? Mr. Stark?! Hey, Doctor Strange, where's Mr. Stark? Is he back on Earth? Can those sparky doors of yours get us back there? I bet he's back home in New York, he'll know what to do next! Mr. Quill could come too; he'll look like he belongs on Earth ... aw, please, we gotta find Mr. Stark!" Cue sling-ring to the Avengers' New York office, a location with which Parker and Strange are both reasonably familiar; cue flood of simultaneous videophone calls by confused un-dusted supers and their associates. Cue hasty conversations with Sam and Wanda in Wakanda, Nick and Maria in the streets below, and Valkyrie in Norway, followed by equally-hasty up-links to the Ravagers via relay subspace transmission from the Benatar (still shrunken in Clint's pocket) and to Carol via space-tech-upgraded pager's signal under Nick's instructions. By the time Strange pops back to Kamar-Taj to arrange instantaneous transport for all-of-the-above plus, secondary calls are headed out to allies (Maria calling her old boss Pepper) and coming in from old SHIELD contacts (Bill Foster among them, a link to the Pyms). Strange pops himself and the Peters back to Titan to pick up the other Guardians and whatever heavy weaponry they've salvaged from Titan's accumulated war junk, slings them all to Avengers H.Q. upstate, and gets this party started.

Outriders in the base

• How did a bunch of Outriders manage to get into the tunnels of the Avengers base after most of it got blown to hell and back by the Sanctuary II? Was there a back entrance that Thanos didn't blow up?
  • Considering past Nebula wasn't charred vapor, probably.

Help from other planets

• Thanos's snap didn't just kill half of all life on Earth, it killed half of all life in the universe. Why then, didn't the Avengers try to get help from other planets? Captain Marvel was helping other planets, but wouldn't it make more sense for all of them to work together to bring everyone back?
  • How? And with what? The only thing that could've brought everyone back was the same thing that killed them all: the Infinity Stones. And Thanos destroyed them a few weeks after the Decimation. Until Scott's return gave them the idea to use time travel, there was no way to bring everyone back.
  • Besides what could those other planets have done? Even if they had their own Stark-level super-scientists, even if they all got together to create an ocean of Pym Particles and a giant tunnel, the "Heists" required precision and stealth, and even then many of them failed or almost did. And even IF you could get all those pieces working, you'd have to spend time convincing those planets to help out a bunch of people they've never met, for unclear stakes—for instance, what if they don't want to keep what they have, but do a cosmic reset? The narrative would have gotten bogged down by characters and circumstances we, the audience, have no context for and shouldn't be expected to care about.
  • Indeed, calling in help from other planets would have most likely entailed informing the wider universe - a wider universe that's every bit as grief-stricken and outraged as Earth about the Decimation - of precisely how Thanos finally got his mitts on the complete Gauntlet. In which case, they'd be inviting the more vengeful of the lot to come work out their anger on the surviving Avengers, Asgardians and Terrans, vigilante-Barton style, for having effed up so badly at stopping the Mad Titan the first time around.

Why didn't Nebula die?

• Nebula was shot by her older self. That means the younger Nebula was killed before she had a chance to grow into the older Nebula. In other words, the older Nebula should have died the moment she pulled the trigger. But she didn't. Why is that?
  • That's not how this version of time travel works. Going back in time effectively splits that timeline into a parallel reality while the prime timeline is completely unaffected. Hence Nebula could kill herself without repercussions because it wasn't truly her past self.
  • The film made it pretty clear their time travel is more like dimension hopping.

Killing past Thanos necessary?

• Was killing past Thanos part of Strange's plan? Surely there's a timeline when Nebula returns safely before he notices her, and then they do the un-snap safely?
  • Even if she had managed to return safely, Thanos still had access to future Nebula's memory, and thus what they could glean from her about the Avengers' time machine. It might take a while for them to create a time machine of their own, but it seems that Thanos following them back was going to happen no matter what.
  • That's not really certain. Time travel through the quantum realm required four breakthroughs: Pym Particles, the shrinking technology to use them, Tony's model for navigation, and the actual navigational bands that anchor the user to a target. It's reasonable to infer that Thanos's science team extrapolated the tech that Nebula carried with her (which the Russos basically confirmed), but not that they could have achieved all of the above from watching her memories. Also, the entanglement only works if both Nebulas are present to access their respective memories; if "our" Nebula had returned before getting captured, they would've gotten some random memories about Rhodey and maybe the boardroom meeting, but they wouldn't even know that time travel was a thing, let alone find anything useful to let them work out the science. Even of they HAD thought of downloading everything right away, the most they could have gotten would've been the minor assistance she provided during Clint's trial run. Everything else about time travel tech would have remained a mystery to them.
  • Present Nebula was never going to be able to return safely. She was discovered the instant she went back; Thanos didn't wait until the last second to disable her on accident, he did it that way on purpose so that Rhodey wouldn't notice anything wrong. Then he had as much time as he needed to reverse-engineer the time tech (helped by Present Nebula's memories) before sending Past Nebula back. Furthermore, the effect would have been the same no matter which time period Nebula had chosen to go back to, since she was in Thanos's service during all of them. The only way to avoid all that would be if Nebula had never gone back in time at all.
  • Thanos wasn't watching them as they were about to leave. But regardless, simply what if Nebula left first?
    • Its possible that out of the millions of time lines Strange looked through, only a few got even as far as the characters unlocking time travel and choosing the proper teams to get the proper stones (heck, most timelines probably didn't even get as far as the rat hitting the correct buttons on the quantum tunnel device). Strange may simply have not found a timeline where Nebula was able to return to the present before Thanos could capture her.

Hank Pym's phone number

• More of a minor question, but how did Captain America know and/or get access Hank Pym's business phone number in the 1970s?
  • He doesn't need to. A military base has secretaries and receptionists; all he has to do is call the main number and ask for Hank Pym, or look it up on their internal directory.
  • Doesn't the lab itself have a phone that other personnel in the building can call?

Letting War Machine Go

• Did Thanos and Ebony Maw never consider kidnapping War Machine alongside Present Nebula to prevent him from assisting the Avengers in the future? It could've aided them on their end to cause confusion and prevent the Avengers from undoing Thanos's work immediately. Because then the Avengers would have to use more Pym Particles (if they had any more from 1970) and go back to 2014 to rescue them both, and then be taken down by Thanos's armies.
  • Kidnap him how? The only reason they were able to grab Nebula was because Thanos had some way of remotely deactivating her.
  • Also, kidnap him why? They don't know anything about any of the Avengers until after they have Nebula, and they only have Nebula after Rhodey has gone home. This entire question hinges on Thanos having information he could not possibly have.
  • Considering the plan is have alternate Nebula sneak in pretending to her her counterpart, Rhodes not returning would just tip the Avengers off that something was wrong. Alt-Nebula could try to bluff that something happened to him like Natasha but considering she does her best to avoid interacting with anyone presumably she's afraid she doesn't know enough about them to convincingly pull it off.

Chekhov's gun: a revolver in chapter 1, a semi-auto in chapter 3

• So what exactly was the "Instant Kill Mode" supposed to do when Peter was still wearing the Spidey suit that didn't have the spinning, razor-sharp Spider Limbs of doom?
  • With the web-shooters. Some webs can produce electrical shocks; turn that up high enough, and you'll stop someone's heart. Exploding webs that turned up high enough could produce enough concussive force to liquify some of your vital organs. There's a "venom web" setting, suggesting they can poison someone. Karen has no problem murdering even without stabby robot legs.

Teleporting Hulk

• How is it that 2012 Hulk goes from standing around in a power circle with the 2012 Avengers to beating the shit out of a car seconds after the 2023 Avengers arrive? Bear in mind that it's shown that they arrive DURING the power circle moment, and that he starts jumping around in the air and onto random buildings/aliens after being told to "smash".
  • Do they actually arrive during that moment, or an indeterminate time immediately afterward? If it's the latter, that's plenty of time for Big Green to smash through some chitauri troops on buildings before landing on the ground to jump on cars. If memory serves, the original film even had a moment when he was falling to the ground and causing chitauri ships to crash into him.
    • Yeah, they arrive during that exact moment. You can see the 2012 Avengers all standing there from an above shot, which then pans to show the 2023 Avengers materialize on a street nearby.
    • No, it doesn't pan, it cuts, which could imply any amount of time passing between the two events.

Who is 2012 Cap contacting?

• When Past Steve sees his future self, he immediately uses his earpiece to contact his fellow Avengers to tell them he has eyes on Loki. Yet when we see the past Avengers, they don't so much as acknowledge Steve's transmission, much less respond. So if he wasn't contacting his fellow Avengers, who might Past Steve be contacting, why didn't they respond immediately to the news that Loki may have escaped?
  • You have the events a bit out of order. "Our" Cap takes the Scepter from the STRIKE Team and starts making his way down, then Tony and Scott try, and fail, to retrieve the Tesseract. When the scene transitions back to Cap, he's trying to raise these two on the comms when he runs into his younger self—who then says he has located Loki, and the scene stays with them until Current Cap wins the fight and leaves. We can thus assume that the SHIELD Ops in the lobby ran an all-points call on Loki's disappearance, 2012 Cap received it, and then responded to it when he ran into 2023 Cap. We didn't transition away from the Cap vs Cap encounter because a) everyone downstairs is kinda busy and b) why would we ever transition away from Cap vs Cap for an unnecessary scene? For all we know, SHIELD sent a bunch of agents to 2012 Cap's location right away and 2023 gave them the slip before they got there.
    • Which would be easy enough, since 2012-Cap called in backup to the floor of Stark Tower where the fight started, not the floor both Steves ended up on after they fell off the walkway.

Why don't you just explain it?

• Why is it that everyone (minus Professor Hulk) didn't try to explain to their past selves and other heroes what's at stake in their own dimension and why they need the Infinity Stones of their timeline to help undo their mess? The 2012 Avengers and the 2013 Asgardians would be perfectly fine with allowing their future selves to take Loki's scepter and the Tesseract, and the Aether and Mjolnir respectively, knowing it was for a good cause. Explaining what's going on just seems more beneficial than trying to work around themselves to steal it and put them back.
  • They're trying to disrupt things as little and as seamlessly as possible. Talking to them past selves and telling them about the future is going to massively disrupt things.
  • As Cap on Cap showed, even convincing their past selves they weren't Loki pulling a massive trick would be extremely hard to do.

Mordo and too many sorcerers

• At the end of Strange's film, Mordo said he wanted to cull the sorcerer population, yet we see so many of them in the final battle. Did he get Snapped away, preventing him from going through with his plan?
  • Probably the likeliest outcome, yeah. Alternatively, if Mordo was spared by the Snap, perhaps he saw no reason to achieve his goals, given that most of Earth's population was dead, Strange and possibly other sorcerers included.
  • If he wasn't Snapped he likely just decided that they had bigger problems in the aftermath of half of the world randomly dying. Plus it probably took plenty of sorcerors too.
  • Mordo was always talking about "the bill coming due," and "there is always a reckoning," for the way the sorcerers abuse their power. So assuming he wasn't vanished, maybe he considered the snap as the comeuppance he was always mentioning and decided to leave things alone for the time being.

Underwater earthquake?

• During the holo conference after the time skip, someone mentions an earthquake under the ocean, but Okoye brushes it off as no problem and not needing to do anything. Isn't an underwater earthquake what causes tsunamis?
  • Sometimes. It depends on a lot of factors, so it wouldn't neccessarily cause one. It is just an anomolous earthquake that is in no way Namor related and won't play into a Phase Four or Five movie featuring him at all.
  • The point of that scene is that Nat is overreacting to everything. She sees a minor natural event and wants to deploy the Avengers over it. It's how she'd been dealing with the trauma over the last five years.

2012 Thor's voice/personality

• Is it me, or does 2012 Thor sound/act less like he did in Phase 1-2, and more like he was at the beginning of Ragnarok? Because the 2012 Thor was much more of a stoic, Comically Serious Shakespearean-esque warrior hero rather than the lighthearted, casual Thor that we saw in Phase 3. And the 2012 Thor of this movie seems more in line with the latter characterization than the former, even though he shouldn't be yet.
  • Even in his first two movies, Thor Odinson was a bit of a lighthearted frat-boy demigod; he just hid it behind some faux Shakespearian language. Remember that his first appearance in Thor was him soaking in the crowd's adulation during his coronation, and he faced a rock giant in Thor: The Dark World by quipping "I accept your surrender."

Do Infinity Stones operate on their users' wishes?

• If Bruce Banner's words "Everybody comes home" before the Un-Snap are any indication, then the Stones must be working under directives their users give them. When Tony Stark gets onto them, he never makes any indication of what exactly Infinity Stones should do under his command: he just snaps Thanos and his army out of existence. Tony could do a lot worse than just snap the Mad Titan and his forces, indirectly causing a lot worse situation. Did the Stones worked based on his thoughts?
  • ... Obviously? It's not like Thanos ever had to verbally tell the Stones what to do when he used them. Plus Bruce said "Everyone comes home" before he put the Gauntlet on.
  • Between the Mind Stone embodying thought and the Soul Stone embodying spirit, why wouldn't the Gauntlet intuitively discern every nuance of what its wearer wanted it to do?

Cap's Temporal Suicide?

• Wait, so from the perspective of those left in the present, didn't Captain America just commit suicide to get to his own personal heaven with Peggy? (Only thing bumming me out is the fact that I have to live in a world without Captain America.)
  • He did not commit suicide, he simply chose to live somewhere his friends couldn't see or contact him, because that was the time and place he felt was his real home, and that's where his true love lived. It's the equivalent of moving to some remote location with no phone lines or internet, not suicide.

One in 14 million?

• Is it just me, or doesn't the one in 14 million figure seem rather low? Going from who is snapped out of existence (at a 50%) chance, we have the following outcome:
  • Alive: Iron Man, Captain America, Rocket, Hulk, Thor, Nebula, Captain Marvel, Rhodes, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Pepper, Okoye, Ant Man, Wong, Valkyrie and Hogan.
  • Snapped out of existence: Spider Man, Doctor Strange, Quill, Drax, Groot, Black Panther, Shuri, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Bucky, Sam Wilson, Mantis, Scarlet Witch, Hank Pym, Hope Pym, Janet Van Dyne, Hawkeye's family (4)

• That's 36 characters. Assuming that exact configuration is the only one that will lead to success, we're dealing with a 1 in 68 billion scenario. And that's ignoring team configurations for the trips to the past, which adds another load of probabilities. It also ignores the scenario where Quill doesn't lose his temper with Thanos, where Nebula doesn't end up connecting to past Nebula, and anything that could follows. And where the mouse doesn't go over the right buttons. So let's bring that number down a bit. Valkyrie, Hogan, Wong, Okoye and Maria Hill aren't necessarily important enough for the plot for it to matter whether they survive or die from the snap. Pepper is in too as important, since Tony would lose it completely without her. We're now down to 1 in 2 billion. Pepper is important, because Tony wouldn't have been capable of getting his shit together and helping out without her. Let's for the sake of argument say that Hawkeye's family doesn't matter here either, and that it didn't matter if we had Rhodes or Sam Wilson alive (or both), that bring us down to a 1 in 89 million scenario. As for the rest, them fucking something up must have been inevitable, because they appear too useful at face value. So, ignoring Quill's temper, Nebula's connections, a random mouse and team configurations for the time travel; are we dealing with a case of Writers Cannot Do Math or six different win scenarios with that particular team where the other five are left for fanfic writers to speculate about.
  • 14 million scenarios are what Strange saw - not every single possibility. Tony snapped him out of trance before he could see anything more, and after that they just decided to go with one winning scenario he saw. Also, The Ancient One noted back in Doctor Strange (2016) that one can't see past their death, so Strange wouldn't see anything between being snapped and resurected - all that he'd see is that there is a scenario where said resurrection happens.

  • All he can control is his in the next few minutes.

-By setting it up so that snap occurs when Ant Man is in the quantum realm he sets up time travel.-He has to give up the time stone so they get the time stone later.-He has to mention the "1 in 14 million".

Given these actions how can he control who get snapped and who doesn't?

Why a gauntlet at all?

• With Thanos makes sense, he may talk a good game but his ego is by far the biggest in the MCU (including the actual Ego) so it would appeal to him the idea of wearing the power to alter the universe on his hand, but the Avengers saw the damage it did to him, why did they make another gauntlet? Through the Tesseract, the Scepter and the Eye of what's his name the Avengers have seen other devices that allow someone to use the power of the stones without ill effect. The Avengers had no idea at the time that Nebula was an infiltrator, why didn't Bruce and/or Tony come up with something else, or more likely, devise such a device before the Time Heist? Not to mention something that couldn't be easily stolen before they put the stones back.
  • They were trying to replicate the Gauntlet because that's what was used to wipe out half the universe. So they want to do the same thing so they can be certain they can undo the effect. And why would they be concerned about it being stolen? As you said, they didn't know Nebula had been replaced, nor did they consider that Thanos would follow them from the past.
  • Their understanding of what happened and thus how to reverse it relies on what Thanos did. They know that he wiped out half the universe, using the six Infinity Stones, by snapping his fingers wearing a gauntlet. This is pretty much the extent of their knowledge. They would strive to reverse it the same way because they know that works. Strictly speaking, yes, a different device could have done it, and even a different hand gesture could have done it. But because that's the way Thanos did it, that's the way they have to reverse it because that's as far as their understanding goes.

Why didn't Nebula escape?

• To an extent it's understandable why Nebula wanted to warn Clint and Natasha, although at least as far as she knew, Thanos didn't know where the Soul Stone was. Why didn't she, at any point before physically being on Thanos's ship, transport back to the present? If she had it wouldn't have mattered what Thanos knew, he couldn't do anything with that knowledge if he couldn't swap past Nebula for present Nebula.
  • It's implied that Thanos had some way of remotely keeping her from doing that.

Ageless Marvel

• It's been about 30 years since the events of Carol's movie, yet she doesn't show any signs of aging. What gives?
  • She's powered up by an Infinity Stone, plus Kree blood. Either of those could easily explain slowed or stopped aging.
  • The short hair she had at the end did make her look older, however.

Settling New Asgard on Earth

• Why is New Asgard in Norway, or on Earth at all? At the end of Ragnarok, Thor sets course for Earth, but shortly thereafter (very shortly, going by the scene transitions, so the ship was cosmically next to Asgard's former location) the immigrant ship is attacked and sheared in half by Thanos. Even if it's obvious the remaining half was functional enough to keep its passengers alive and transport them somewhere, wouldn't it make more sense to make an emergency settlement in the closest habitable planet, rather than trave across whole realms just to keep Thor's course setting?
  • Thor can control the Bifrost with Stormbreaker, so it's no problem to move them. They settled on Earth because Thor, their king, was on Earth and he made the decision.

Why can't the good guys fix Nebula?

• In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, she mentions that her robot parts cause her constant pain. That being the case, when she turns good, why don't any of the good guys try to fix her somehow? Tony Stark could make some replacement parts that don't hurt, for example.
  • How do we know he didn't?
    • Speaking of which... Nebula's parts are clearly made from extra-terrestrial materials. Even with his knowledge of cybernetic reconstruction (if there is any at all), Tony - nor the remaining Avengers, for that matter - couldn't simply make reliable parts for her, because: 1) Earth's metals are fragile in comparison to their alien counterparts, 2) there is no indication that parts made of vibranium couldn't be painful to Nebula - and thus be compatible with her cybernetics, and 3) any tinkering with her might shut her down for good. Who knows, maybe Thanos had installed several precautions that prevent any unauthorized modifications and repairs to Nebula's systems?
    • Not to mention how experts on installing replacement cybernetics in Luphomoids aren't exactly someone you look up in an Earth medical directory. What are the odds she'd even survive such a refit, given that her body chemistry, response to anesthetics, and basic physiology is alien? Nebula may be a cyborg, but she's still got enough organic parts to eat, breathe, and so on ... parts, that could easily expire during such an ill-considered procedure.
  • Well ok, but it seems unlikely there are no good guys in the entire MCU who could help her. For instance, is there no one in the entire universe who has some sort of healing or regeneration type powers they can use on others?
  • At the moment, none that we know of.

Tony Stark and Infinity Stones

• Whenever a powerful character gathers all six Infinity Stones and attempts to use them in unison, he/she has to deal with tremendous amount of pain and the surge of cosmic powers that can "light up a continent". Even with the Infinity Gauntlet specifically designed to handle the Stones, this issue is still prevalent - as Thanos and Professor Hulk found out the hard way. When it comes to Tony Stark... it's getting ridiculous. He's an ordinary human - albeit Badass Normal one - who gets Infinity Stones for a brief moment... and he knows for certain that these universal artifacts will kill him. How the fuck is he able to supress the colossal amounts of pain and keep himself from screaming on top of that? How much willpower it would really took to keep himself calm and do the snap when GODDAMN POWERS OF THE UNIVERSE are coursing through his veins and armor?
  • His armor was probably injecting copious amounts of nanite painkillers into his system while he had the Stones on.
  • You can see the lines of energy from the stones spreading through the armor's surface and eating away at it — it seems that the body suit he was wearing gave him more insulation and protection than the smaller gauntlets that Hulk and Thanos used. Either way, you can clearly tell he's in pain right up until the snap.
  • What Tony is trying to do is far less than the (whole of sentient life in the universe)that Hulk and Thanos were snapping, He is "only" snapping an entire army far less so that could be why there is far less power backlash.
  • Because he's Iron Man. It really is as simple as that; Iron Man is an epic hero capable of withstanding agony far beyond the limits of normal men.

Why does he need a ride?

• Stormbreaker can literally take Thor anywhere in the universe, given that it can summon the Bifrost. With that in mind, why does he need to hitch up with the Guardians at the end of the movie? Sure seems to be slower than the latter option.
  • Who said he NEED a ride? He doesn't want to be alone while he gets his head on straight, so he bum around with the Guardians until he figure out what else to do with his life.
  • It's the same reason why Carol would go around in spaceships when she can FTL on her own: sometimes you just want to kick back and give yourself a mental rest while traveling, even if your body doesn't need it. Also, the Bifrost needs a destination, which Thor doesn't have.
  • Not to mention that the Bifrost is dangerous. Back in Thor, Heimdall said that if left open long enough, the Bifrost would destroy all of Jotunheim. His exact words were "To leave the bridge open would unleash the full power of the Bifrost and destroy Jotunheim with you on it", so assuming that this hasn't been retconned, traveling the universe via Bifrost from planet-to-planet would risk blowing up whatever planet he goes to because of this. Thor is certainly cautious, so he'd definitely not take that kind of risk since it threatens innocents if he does so.
  • Thor may also feel he owes the Guardians a favor after everything that's happened since they met, although he's reluctant to come out and say he's joining them so he can pay back that debt.

What "rough spot"?

• While trying to help get Thor out of his alcoholic funk, Professor Hulk mentions that he was once in a rough spot himself, and that Thor helped him. My question is, what's he talking about? Sure, he was trapped on an alien planet for 2 years, but his Hulk persona was happier than he ever was in Earth previously, and while Banner was a little freaked out, he got better relatively quickly after Thor and Valkyrie decided to take the trip to Asgard to stop Hela and head back to Earth. So what's the Prof going off of when he says Thor helped him?
  • The original Hulk persona, maybe, but Professor Hulk is a humane, rational being horrified by destruction for destruction's sake. Treating his 2-year stay at an arena, killing people left and right for no reason, as a "rough spot" feels like a massive understatement.

No ants?

• Did Scott Lang never consider the idea of summoning ants to help with the Time Heist? Getting to the Tesseract or giving past Tony a heart attack with would've been very helpful rather than flicking Scott and having to do both of those jobs himself.
  • IIRC ant control device wasn't part of the Ant-Man suit and was instead worn under helmet, around one's ear. Scott did not need for it during Hank and Janet's experiment at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, so he probably didn't take it with him.
  • Also, as Hank points out in the first movie, while ants can do a lot of things, they're still ants. There's a limit to what they can do. They wouldn't know what part of the arc reactor to sabotage, and note that Scott has to shrink down further than normal to get into it. Also, Ant Man can kick the Tesseract's box away with a full-sized-human-strength kick, again, something the ants would simply not be able to do. And in either case, Scott would have to be directly controlling the ants anyway, so he's still doing both jobs himself.
  • Hank and Hope were hiding from the law until very shortly before they were Snapped, so Hank probably called the entomology department of his favorite local university and asked them to take charge of his colonies rather than try to maintain them on the move. Scott is only familiar with the four species of ants Hank kept at his home, and he doesn't have time to go searching for carpenter or fire ant colonies in the woods and fields around Avengers HQ.

Why doesn't Widow or Hawkeye blow their brains out?

• Is there some rule that says the death MUST come from being tossed over the cliff? Because both characters are armed with weapons that can perform instant suicide.
  • Yes. You have to go over the cliff.
  • At the bottom of the cliff there is some kind of ritual sacrifice spot with patterns and all, so apparently you need to die at that spot for the sacrifice to work. Seems like the Soul Stone has a flair for theatrics.

Just what "other threats" was Captain Marvel dealing with?

• Carol's explanation for why she hasn't been on Earth for the past few decades is because she was dealing with threats on planets that didn't have heroes like the Avengers to protect them. That's all well and good, but... exactly what threats was she dealing with that were so incredibly dangerous that she prioritized them over dealing with Thanos? Thanos is a known galactic warlord who routinely conquers entire planets to slaughter half of their populations and is actively seeking out the Infinity Stones to kill even more people. One would think that he'd be on her radar.
  • Notice that, just as soon as she enters the atmosphere, every last gun on Sanctuary II defies Thanos's direct command and fires up at her. It's abundantly clear from this that Thanos has tangled with her before and she's considered a Number One, Drop Everything Else, Highest Priority Target, and he's just as big a priority to her. Unfortunately, space is big enough that she can't be there every time he attacks, or maybe she learns of an incursion too late to do anything but watch his ship take a jump point to the other side of the galaxy, or maybe, and equally likely, she's had to make some very difficult choices about saving one world at the expense of another. Even if she CAN fly faster than light, it takes time for a distress signal to reach her, and she has to make sure that the giant blue blobs that erupted from a bunch of random flowers don't actually eat the side of the galaxy she's on before she blasts off to the one planet being attacked by Thanos.
  • Note that before Infinity War, no one seemed to know that Thanos was actively searching for the Infinity Stones; even Thor, who is implied to be well informed on galactic matters, was only aware that several of the Stones had recently emerged, but he didn't know one person was behind it all. That seems to have been the main reason why Thanos used flunkies like Loki or Ronan, as this would make it seem there are people after one or other individual Stone, but no one would realize there's one person interested in gathering them all. Presumably Thanos hid behind these flunkies exactly because he didn't want extremely powerful heroes like Captain Marvel become aware of his plan and try to stop it. As for him being a warlord slaughtering halves of planetary populations, yes, that would make him a notorious villain, but it's a big universe, and there might numerous other equally notorious criminals Carol has to deal with. Also, it's perfectly possible Thanos hasn't been doing his planetary cullings for a while, so he wouldn't draw attention to himself and his Infinity Stone plan. It could be that the last massacre he did was the one on Gamora's planet, and since then he's been operating in the shadows to gather the Stones.
  • Possible but not likely. Endgame introduces him and his children mid-massacre in 2014.
  • She did say "universe," not "galaxy." Assuming that's not just hyperbole, it's entirely possible she had no idea what was going on in the Milky Way.

Final battle swinging

• In that enormous shot of all the heroes charging into battle, what are Spider-Man's webs clinging onto? It looks an awful lot like how the early PlayStation games handled his web swinging.
  • There are several aircraft in the sky above, he could just be using them as anchor points.
  • In the shot, his web is connected to Giant-Man's hand.

No healing for War Machine

• As they demonstrated with fixing Ross' spine in Black Panther, the Wakandans have a proven ability to repair spinal injuries. Why did the Wakandans not at least offer the same treatment to Rhodey while he was in Wakanda? He had survived the battle & subsequent snap and had been fighting on their side, it seems really shitty that they needlessly left him paralyzed and needing Tony's exoskeleton just to move around. Especially as they had five years to do it.
  • Fixing Ross happened immediately after the injury. Wakanda was still secretive, and not opening itself and its technology up to other countries when Rhodey was injured; by the time it was, years later, it was likely too late to do anything about Rhodey's injuries.

Tony Stark's age

• So this is a pretty minor thing, but does is Tony Stark's canonical birth year of either 1970 or 1971 too early? Robert Downey Jr is actually a few years older than that, but it means that in the first Iron Man (canonically set in 2010), Tony would be around 40. It also means that in 1991, he would be 20-21, but he seemed at least a few years younger than that when we see his younger version in Captain America: Civil War. It's not too far out of the ordinary, but if it had been a few years later, it would have made more sense.
  • The opening of his first movie established that Tony became CEO at age 21 and it established a 1991 death for Howard.
  • The first Iron Man is somewhat shaky on things due to it being the first film back when they weren't even sure if the MCU as a big spanning universe would even work or if they'd even get past that one film. As such things don't quite line up with later films, SHIELD being implied to be a recently created agency when it would later be established as being around for decades being a notable one. So yes it seems Tony is older than the first movie seems to portray him as and they later adjusted him to being closer to Downey's actual age as the universe was properly established and it was clear he'd be playing him for multiple films.
  • Those two things are established in IM1, but it also establishes there was a period between Howard's death and Tony's takeover where Stane was in charge. It could have only been a few months, but that's not what the movie implies.
  • Likely a retcon. The opening sequence seemed to imply that Tony's parents' death in 1991 happened only shortly after he graduated from MIT at age 17, which would suggest a 1974 birth year for Tony and imply that he didn't become CEO until 1995, with Stane being the head in the interim. However, this SHIELD file that Steve is shown looking at in a deleted scene in The Avengers lists Tony's date of birth as May 29, 1970, and keeping with his age of 17 when he graduated, lists him as graduating from MIT in 1987, four years before his parents died in 1991. Iron Man 3, further complicates this as the post credits scene has Tony mentioning that he was 14 in 1983, which would put his year of birth in 1969. That would contradict the opening of Iron Man as it would make him 22 when his parents died, unless his birthday was after December 16, which shouldn't be possible as Iron Man 2, which takes place around Tony's birthday, as well as The Incredible Hulk and Thor, which are said to take place at around the same time, clearly don't take place during the winter. This may be handwaved as just a slip of the tongue, as Endgame ignores this continuity issue and goes back to what was established in the Avengers deleted scene by having Tony's mother be pregnant with him in 1970. When inputting the date for going back to 1970, Tony and Steve enter 04 07 1970, which in dates would translate to April 7, 1970, a little under two months before Tony's birth on May 29, matching with Howard's description of how far along the pregnancy is. This means that according to this timeline, Stane would have only been head of Stark Industries for at most about five months as Tony would have had to become CEO before May 29, 1992, his 22nd birthday, for him being CEO at 21 to still be valid. The aforementioned SHIELD file indeed mentions that he became CEO in 1992.
  • Maybe Howard had voluntarily relinquished the CEO position to concentrate on his work for SHIELD and/or his own personal projects, letting Stane run the administrative side of things in his stead? Pepper pretty much ran Stark Industries as proxy even when Tony was nominally its CEO, because Tony had so many other interests; like father, like son.

Completely different outfit

• Why isn't Shuri wearing the same clothes she wore when she was snapped in Infinity War? There's no chance that she would have time to change after being brought back by Hulk, given that she and the rest of Wakanda only had a few minutes to get ready to go through a large portal to try and kill Thanos again.
  • In the same time frame, armies of ravagers and asgardians donned armor, equipped themselves and mustered by portals, Valkyrie changed outfits and found a pegasus from somewhere and Pepper armored up and flew from wherever the cabin was. Shuri is not the most troubling one there. It must have been more than a few minutes basically with the cuts and the fighting more time based in 'reality' appeared onscreen.
  • Actually... not as unlikely as you might believe. From the moment that Banner snapped, Doctor Strange was probably already contacting Wong to get everybody together. Shuri had about half an hour to change and gear up. And it's unlikely it took very long for Wakanda to get its forces mobilized. Plus, Shuri was never intending to fight in Infinity War. Here, she is jumping head-first into the fray.
  • Looking at the film's time stamps, 15 minutes of screen time pass between when Bruce snaps his fingers and when the first portal opens up. The amount of time passing in-universe between the events might be somewhat longer.
  • In Black Panther, Shuri invents a nanotech suit for T'Challa that gives him his Black Panther outfit in seconds. There's no reason she couldn't have given herself such a suit, or otherwise made nanotech that lets her quick change.
• The real outfit question is actually Steve Rogers. When the two Steves meet and fight, Past Steve is wearing a clean and whole version of his Avengers costume. Complete with cowl. And Future Steve came dressed in same (Sans Cowl). But that's not what Steve wore at the end of Avengers. By the end of the movie Steve's outfit is covered in cuts and bloods, and he's ditched his cowl long earlier. He also seems to be wearing a whole and clean costume earlier during the redo of Loki's "I'll have that drink now" scene, although in the original film, he's still in his dirty, damaged uniform during that scene.
  • In The Avengers, though his outfit was dirty in the immediately preceding scene when Hulk saved Tony, his suit was clean in the scene where they confronted Loki, so the error was one that was present in The Avengers, unless he decided to clean up to look more intimidating to Loki.
  • Possibly Fury had backup clothing among the supplies SHIELD brought along to clean up the mess after the battle. Past-Steve changed outfits so his injuries wouldn't be as apparent, and wouldn't distract rescue crews from helping civilian casualties, first.

Past Nebula’s ignorance

• When Thanos comes to the present, Nebula meets up with him and just throws away the golden headpiece she took. My question is, why? She CLEARLY still had work to do in acquiring the stones. In fact, going further, she decided to alert Thanos that she got the Stones right after swiping them from Hawkeye. Why didn’t she just play friendly to keep the gauntlet, and wait until she was out of earshot? Then she could’ve just sat back and leave Clint confused on which one of them to trust. That would be like walking into a war zone and just erecting a carnival out of the ground to give away your position. In fact, it would have been better to keep the headpiece, as the present Nebula didn’t have it, and THAT gave more reason for confusion. Instead, she goes in as herself, sans the headpiece, gives away her allegiance, and gets killed as a result.
  • She had no reason to assume anyone had survived when she took the plate off. As for alerting Thanos right in front of Hawkeye, she had him at gunpoint and also didn't know that her future self and sister would suddenly show up. All these precautions would require her to have read ahead in the script.
  • If there was no reason to believe that anyone was still alive, then Thanos would not have sent Outriders to the caverns of the New Avengers Facility. And it’s not like THEY can get the gauntlet; all they’ve been shown to known is “kill”. Sure, he may not have known that Hawkeye was down there in the first place, but, assuming everything is in real time, Nebula was sent down there RIGHT AFTER the Outriders were sent. Besides, holding Clint at gunpoint wasn’t really doing anything. If Gamora and Present Nebula never intervened, they probably could’ve had a fair fight. But you don’t just give away your position like that. You’re basically asking to get attacked if that happened. She only put him at gunpoint AFTER she told Thanos she got the Stones. It makes no logical sense to me.
  • It makes plenty of sense — the Outriders go in and kill whatever's in there, then Nebula comes through, sweeps the place, finds the stones and finishes off anyone who survived. Saying having Clint at gunpoint "wasn't really doing anything" is nonsense. She had him, on the ground, at gunpoint, one twitch of the finger away from killing him. She had him at a clear disadvantage, and only didn't kill him right then because her other self showed up.
  • Maybe 2014-Nebula took off the headpiece so the Outriders wouldn't attack her, too. They seem to be pre-programmed monster attack dogs, not rational beings, so may only spare a select few subjects for whom they have extremely specific visual recognition cues, including 2014-Nebula's lack of a headpiece.

Worlds that benefited from the Snap

• While the Snap is treated as a catastrophe and rightly so, there may have been some worlds that had to adjust to the event, so what would happen to them if the Snap restored everyone and everything they'd lost? Would it be better or worse?
  • If a planet is more sustainable after the Snap, then clearly things would have been worse after the Snap was undone. The point isn't that resource scarcity doesn't exist, it's that life can't be callously boiled down to a numbers game.
  • Captain Marvel says that loads of other planets are doing even worse than Earth, so it stands to reason that a world benefitting from the Snap is an extremely rare one. Even so, after it's undone, Captain Marvel can probably help with reconstruction efforts.

The Ancient One in New York

• The Avengers assume that in 2012, Strange already had the Time Stone and was already living in the New York sanctuary. That makes sense given the information they have to work on. But at the time the Sorcerer Supreme was the Ancient One as we see in the movie. However, Doctor Strange (2016) establishes that she lives in Kamar-taj in the Himalayas and that the New York sanctuary is guarded by another sorcerer (whe see Kaecillius kill him) so how come she was there when Hulk arrived?
  • She was preventing the Chitauri from damaging the Sanctum.
  • She lives there, but she's not jailed there. She could have been in the middle of checking the Sanctums, paying a friendly visit to the local sorcerer, or even replacing him while he dealt with some personal issue or even a magical one. In any case, the Ancient One being at the New York Sanctum is not something that can be really considered unexpected or out of character.
  • Kamar-Taj is chock full of gateways to various places on Earth or beyond. Even without a sling ring, the Ancient One wouldn't have to do anything more than step through a doorway to go back up the resident NYC Sanctum-keeper.

Thanos doesn't try to stop Tony from snapping his fingers

• When Thanos realizes he's lost the Infinity Stones, he turns to look at Iron Man. It takes almost a half-minute or so between that point and Tony activating the Stones, catching his breath, saying his line, and snapping his fingers. Thanos is relentless in pursuing his goals, but in these critical moments he apparently just stands around looking shocked offscreen. Why didn't Thanos even try to tackle Tony and get the Stones back, or do anything at all to keep Tony from using them while Tony is trying to wield the Stones and is in no condition to fight back?
  • Because he knows he's a dead man. When Thanos realizes Tony has the Stones, they've already inserted themselves into Tony's armor, so there's no real way to get them out in time. If Thanos even tries, Tony will clearly just skip the line and snap immediately, because Thanos isn't close enough to close the gap in time to stop him.
  • Thanos is also pretty exhausted too, both mentally and physically. He's one of the toughest guys on the battlefield, but he's also been in the fight since almost the beginning and has taken several hits from the strongest Avengers. Then you factor in that he was 100% sure he'd won, and suddenly that was gone and the most powerful weapon in the universe was now with his enemy. He might have attacked Tony if he'd had a little more time to process it, but at that point shock and fatigue won out.

Communications in the final battle

• Now, this is extremely nitpicky. However, it sort of always bugged me. Falcon probably was on Cap’s communications channel because the earpiece probably vanished with Falcon. Of course, the spared Avengers could communicate because they needed to earlier in the movie. Spidey calling to Cap for help, okay, MAYBE Cap was nearby and heard his calls for help. Captain Marvel probably kept an emergency earpiece for when she needed to come back and assist the Avengers on Earth. However, there are two things that DON’T make sense with the earpieces. One: Pepper being able to communicate with Doctor Strange. When Thanos orders orbital bombardment, she asks “Is anyone else seeing this?”, which alerts Strange to the flood and takes him out of the battle. Second, Cap asks about the van’s location, and, of all people, VALKYRIE is suddenly on the line. Uh... when? How can she communicate? Since when did Valkyrie and Cap set up a universal channel for them to talk to each other? Thor would’ve had no time nor reason to actually give her one. So... what exactly gives? It can’t have been that they were “conveniently close to each other.” No, Cap was stationed in between rubble, onlooking the battle, whilst Valkyrie was on the other side, in enemy territory, no less, to spot the van. This just makes little sense.
  • Strange and the Sorcerers were coordinating the arrival of everyone. They have magic powers. It stands to reason that they could have just conjured up some comm devices for everyone.
  • Valkyrie has been on earth for five years. You don't think that's enough time for someone on the Avengers to set up communication with her if needed? Spidey is wearing a Stark-made supersuit. Of course it's going to have radio and communications equipment in it. As for Strange? Energy is energy; He could just be able to tap into the communications frequency on his own.

Hiking up Mt. Soulstone

• In both Infinity War and Endgame, when someone goes to Vormir to fetch the Soul Stone, they have to hike up a cold, windy mountain and meet Mr. Don't-call-me-Red-Skull-I'm-just-a-tour-guide-now along the way. But why? Thanos and Gamora (from Infinity War) arrive via the Space Stone and Clint and Natasha (from Endgame) arrive in a spacecraft with atmospheric capabilities; why not just land near the peak and walk over? Or set the craft to hover overhead and rappel down to the sacrificial mesa?
  • Because none of them know what is actually required to get the Soul Stone. We don't know what Gamora saw on that map she found, but it seems like the map just pointed to the planet and the mountain in question without giving any further details. Nat and Clint were just following that trail. When they arrived on the planet, none of them actually knew what awaited them there. They didn't know about the sacrificial mesa, so they took the long way around, because for all they knew, the Stone could have been hidden in a cave or something, which they would overlook if they just landed on top of the mountain.

Valkyrie and Thor: equally irresponsible

• Thor appoints Valkyrie in his stead to rule the remaining Asgardians, arguing that he isn't a great leader since he spent the whole five years wallowing in self-pity. Okay, great, but didn't Valkyrie do that same thing after Hela beat her? That's where we found her at the start of Ragnarok. In fact, depending on how the weird quantum-time-difference between our world and Sakaar works, she was even doing it for much longer.
  • And? It doesn't change the fact that during the same five year gap when Thor was wallowing in self pity, Valkyrie was actually leading their people.
  • The main difference, is that Thor is their king who's supposed to rule and guide them, while Valkyrie is just a warrior.
  • While Valkyrie is "just" a warrior she is technically an elder. Old enough to remember Hela, and older then Thor who wanted to join the caste she was part of when he was a just a boy only to find they no longer existed. Valkyrie is also the last of the warrior caste who actually stepped up to lead the people when they needed a leader. When she lost her sisters she exiled herself affecting no-one. When Thor exiled himself it affected his people. So Thor, a King, passed the mantle, as Kings can to someone who acted as a leader for five years.
  • The fact that Valkyrie has that past of irresponsibility is what shows she would be a better leader than Thor. She went through that, was able to pull herself out of it and is now picking up the slack while Thor is figuring his own stuff out. That shows how strong a person she is, and why she is to be trusted as a leader. And of course she has a five year CV of being an interim ruler showing she's qualified for the role.

Thanos's scarecrow

• Where did Thanos get the armor for his scarecrow? In Infinity War, he took it off after getting the Tesseract and he subsequently destroyed the ship it was on. Did he have a spare set or did he use one of the stones to make a new one before destroying them.
  • As an established and successful galactic conqueror, he likely owns more than one set of armor. After all, what if one set gets dirty and he has to leave it at the space dry-cleaner's, but he's also got a planetary genocide scheduled for 5:30 that day? He gotta wear something to that, and his farmer Shrek cosplay simply won't do!

Remember where we parked

• This is probably a stupid question, but why did Hulk and Rocket need to hitch a ride in the back of a pickup truck to New Asgard? Couldn't they have just landed the ship a little closer? Y'know, like the Guardians did at the end of the movie when Thor was leaving Earth?
  • From a filmmaking POV, it's obviously Rule of Funny - as it makes for a funnier reveal that New Asgard is in such a place. In-universe, perhaps they didn't want to overwhelm the Asgardians by showing up with a ship.
  • The last time we know an unexpected spacecraft popped up to approach the Asgardian refugees, it was Thanos come to slaughter half of them. Even if they're a bunch of farmers and fishermen now, they're still Asgardians - aliens equipped with Magitek and many times tougher than humans - and probably quite trigger-happy about armed ships showing up unexpectedly and looming over their homes and families.

Forget the rat, Scott's Van is the real hero!

• So when we last saw Ant-Man, he was lost in the Quantum Realm which Hank, Janet and Hope dusted away leaving their van and the gateway to the Quantum Realm running on top of a parking garage. When we next saw Ant-Man, he was being spit out the back of his van that was related with the equipment and neatly parked in Scott Lang's cade at the U-Store-It Self Storage. How did the van get repacked and put back there? If it was the police, it would've been taken to impound and the high-tech stuff to either the government or the Avengers. Plus, there are hundreds of cars that was abandoned. Why return this one to the guy's locker? Assuming someone who knew it was Lang's van and he was Ant-Man, why did they return it to his storage locker? He was dead, he didn't need it anymore. Plus, how many months did Scott pay for, because why would they still have a dead guy's stuff for five years and counting?! Also, how is that van still running after being in storage for five years? That van shouldn't have turned over, let alone drive the whole country.
  • Older automobiles can be surprisingly durable and long lasting if you keep them maintained and replace internal parts frequently enough. The van probably wouldn't have been immediately good to go, but with a little work Scott, who's very mechanically inclined as his movies show, could easily get it running again with a couple hours work.
  • We never see any indications of how long the Quantum Van had been sitting in the storage locker. Could be, it was only dropped off at the U-Store-It a few months before the rat wandered by, and whomever put it there (Maggie? One of Luis's umpteen chatty relatives?) had kept it gassed up in the meantime.

Nathaniel Barton’s age

• Thor: Ragnarok takes place two years after Age of Ultron, Nathaniel was born at the end of the movie, Infinity War takes place not long after Ragnarok, he clearly looks older than 2 at the beginning which takes place during the end of Infinity War. That doesn’t add up.
  • According to the MCU timeline, Nathaniel is exactly three years and one week old at the end of Infinity War—born May 24, 2015; Snapped May 31, 2018. Based off of that, he looks (and speaks) like an average toddler.

Cassie's mom and stepfather

• Were Cassie's mom and stepfather dusted away in the snap?! And was Cassie fending for herself all those years since the age of ten?
  • We don't know if either of them was Snapped, but given that Cassie's still living in the same house and everything's in pretty great condition (considering the circumstances), it's very likely at least one survived, and probably both did. In fact, it was most likely them (or the surviving one) who collected Scott's stuff and Quantum Van and put them in storage under his name before the authorities could impound it. Unfortunately, we don't get to see them, since they're all so tight-knit, but it probably has more to do with economy of plot than any tragic fate (especially since, logically, both of them would've been back during the ending celebration).

Time Heist: Why not just get the time stone...?

• What we know about the Time Stone: 1, it can reverse time without ill effects on a local scale. 2, it can bring back Infinity Stones. Why not make the Time Heist easy by just stealing the Time Stone and using its reverse local time ability on the Infinity Gauntlet until you restore the original Infinity Stones. Then you can return the Time Stone to its original time period, use the original stones to reverse the snap, and then destroy those stones. Sure, a lot of character development doesn't happen, but you don't have to deal with Tony or Nat dying, the many thousands of soldiers dying, nor having to deal with 2014 Thanos.
• Sure, reversing the Stones destruction might resurrect Thanos, but if your prepared, then you can just have Captain Marvel and Thor with Stormbreaker among everyone else ready to cut off Thanos's arm and head again. Boom, bam, Thanos is dead again, Thor gets to restore his sense of self having defeated Thanos and saved everyone's lives, and everyone's resurrected with minimal loss of life.
  • And... how would they do this? None of the Avengers know how to use the Time Stone to any expertise degree, hell, the Sorcerers of Kamar-Taj barely knew how to use it themselves, and they've been guarding the thing for thousands of years. If they tried that method, there's a good chance that they would end up erasing themselves from existence, fracturing reality or any other horrible side effect as a result.
  • They could ask the Ancient One to do it for them. If 2014 Thanos can come to the main timeline using their machine, so can the Ancient One, and the Ancient One would know how to use the Time Stone. Thanos hadn't even touched the Time Stone before, yet he knew to be able to reverse time to resurrect not only Vision but restore an Infinity Stone. If not the Ancient One, then Stephen Strange. Heck, go back further and ask Agamotto himself. Lot less dangerous than the original Time Heist.
  • The Avengers have a finite amount of Pym Particles to use, only enough for one round trip, plus they only made the suits for themselves. They can't just bring any random people back with them. As for the plan the Avengers had, it was safe enough as is, and more importantly it worked perfectly. They grabbed all the Infinity Stones and brought them back. None of the Avengers could have known that the Soul Stone required a sacrifice, or that 2014 Thanos would follow them back. This entire plan requires them knowing what was going to happen in advance, which they had no possible way of knowing.
  • Okay, but they had enough Pym Particles for War Machine, Nebula, Captain America, Bruce Banner, Ant-Man, Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Blackwidow. And we saw Captain America and Iron Man get more Pym Particles by going back in time and nabbing them. More to the point, it isn't about knowing about future events, it's about being less complicated and the safest. It's just one person in one place in time, at any time. And it doesn't take much to realize this. "Wizard man knows a lot about Infinity Stone, American man saw Infinity Stone bringing back Infinity Stone. Get Wizard man to bring back stones. Wizard man can't do that? Get Wizard man's mentor, we have enough magic particles to do so."
  • Except if it doesn't work, then they just wasted a trip and several of their precious Pym Particles on a failed test that only gave them one Stone, leaving them needing to go back and get the rest anyway while leaving them with less resources to do so. And they know where all of the Stones are, so they might as well just get them all in one go anyway. That's the whole reason they specifically chose the battle of New York, because they knew that three Stones were in the city at one time, meaning it would be less of a trip. Just aiming for the Time Stone and nothing else would be more of a gamble than going after them all at once.

So where was Captain Marvel for 20 years?

• Thanos is one of the biggest names in the galaxy, and seems to have been for the majority of Captain Marvel's tenure as biggest badass in the cosmos. The last action sequence of the film suggests that not only was Carol more than a match for Thanos, but more than a match for his armada. While there wouldn't be a franchise if Carol nipped the problem in the bud shortly after leaving Earth, but how do we reconcile her overwhelming strength with the fact that an alien with ties to her power source, the Kree, and her homeworld was able to kick off a universal apocalypse without so much as a visit? The rest of the Marvel universe either doesn't know about Thanos or DO know but don't have the power to stop him. Carol could stop him and is, in theory, very plugged into the going-ons of the galaxy.
  • First, it's a bit inaccurate to say that Carol is more than a match for Thanos. When they got into a physical fight, he managed to toss her aside with relative ease, and it's only when she seemingly started absorbing the energy from the Infinity Stones when she was holding his hand open that she began to overpower him. Even at the beginning, when he's weakened and out of practice, he treats a full force energy blast from her as an annoyance rather than something that was hurting him. Secondly, there is evidence to suggest that Thanos and his forces have encountered her before. The Sanctuary II immediately stops bombarding the battlefield and focuses all its weapons on her the moment they detect her approach, directly disobeying Thanos's previous instructions in the process. Plus, Thanos doesn't show any sign of fear when fighting her head on, which was after seeing her annihilate his ship single handedly. That does suggest that they've encountered her before, and were at the very least able to drive her off or escape her.
  • In order to be inaccurate it would have to be shown that Carol was not a match for Thanos. In the movie she went toe to toe with him. Took a head butt at full range without moving and he needed an infinity stone to knock her out of play but even a blast point blank from an infinity stone stunned her and not do severe harm. There is no indication nor input from the writers\ directors that Carol was only matching Thanos due to getting power from the Infinity Gauntlet. If she had then the movie would have shown it, also if she had it would have affected her as previous use of the gems energies even with the gauntlet had strained and drained previous users. As for no fear as an indication of power level, as a true measure of power it could be summed up in action and reaction, not facial expressions. Action: the woman who took out his mothership that was destroying his enemies and saved his life from Scarlet Witch, was now engaging Thanos in close quarters. Reaction: after physical attempts to move her did not work, and Carol almost prying the Gauntlet from him, Thanos had to use the Power Stone point blank to get her away from him.
  • In the ambush on Thanos' garden, despite being extremely wounded and near-death from wiping out half of all life in the universe and then atomising the Infinity Stones, Thanos was able to react to and block a photon blast from Captain Marvel and tank a direct bullrush from her without any issue. He even started to slowly push against and overpower her leg with his severely burnt and shrivelled left arm until Bruce Banner with the Hulkbuster intervened. During the battle of Earth, Thanos was able to tank several attacks by Captain Marvel without harm, before catching her arm and easily throwing her away. Clearly, in a direct confrontation against Thanos, without any outside amps or enhancements, Carol is barely able to hold her own against Thanos. It is also stated to the Marvel Studios: Character Encyclopedia that Captain Marvel's body can absorb energy, which is further shown in What If... Thor Were An Only Child? and even her own solo movie, where she respectively absorbed Thor's lightning and drained power from a spaceship, causing devices to be shut down in the process. So, while not explicitly stated or shown, it is extremely likely that she had absorbed energy from the Infinity Stones when she got hold of the Nano Gauntlet in order to stand a fighting chance against Thanos, since she was clearly shown to be outmatched against the Mad Titan in their previous encounters.

Cap aging

• Why did Steve get so old? Unless the Super Soldier treatment wore off, he should have been virtually unchanged. Remember, the movie version of Steve is super-human not peak human like Earth-616 comic book Steve. He also stated that he has a system of regeneration which has been shown to take care of poisons, disease, and heal serious wounds in a matter of days if not hours. Even if he doesn't heal wolverine fast, his level of regeneration should have caused him to age much more slowly and at the least he should have only looked a few years older rather than decades older. What's up with that?
  • One of two reasons come to mind: 1) the serum doesn't work like it does in the comics, and it allows Cap to age naturally. Also 616-Cap has done some crazy things for a "peak human". 2) He was able to find a way to get the serum removed from his body, which is why he looks more like an older wimpy pre-serum Steve.
  • He's just extremely durable. Moreso than "peak human" but lacking something of a Wolverine-esque healing factor that actually prevents complete breakdown. His body can still weather, it's just that process is insanely slow for him. Between when he came out of the ice and the end of Endgame only about 11 or so years had passed (~2011 to 2023) and his very-durable body is only in its mid-20s or so, at its very prime. By the time he returns from the past he had lived well over 100 years unfrozen and constantly aging. Even as able as he is that much biological time passage will probably have affected him (and even then, he still only looks as if he's in his 70s).
  • Counting the years Steve was frozen he'd be nearly 200 at that point. The Super Soldier serum is effective but it has it's limits, and even that can't keep him going forever. Even Wolverine's healing factor starts to give out on him after awhile as shown in the Old Man Logan story. Which is also about when he's over 200 years old so it lines up about right.
  • There's another, more radical possibility: Rogers may have aged, not so much because the serum "wore off", but because he subconsciously wanted to grow old in synch with Peggy. Remember that the MCU super-serum's effects are influenced by the inner nature and emotions of the person who uses it. The former is demonstrated by the differences between how Steve and Red Skull were transformed, and the latter by how Banner's transformations were emotion-induced. Back when the serum made Skinny Steve into Captain America, he most wanted and aspired to be the kind of soldier who could defend his country and his fellow citizens, a wish that persisted throughout his superhero career. Once he reunited with Peggy, he set that yearning aside and longed only to live out his life with her. Aging alongside her was part of that, which the serum bore out.

Why return the Soul Stone?

• At the end of the movie, Steve goes back to return all the Stones to their proper places in the timeline so the timeline wouldn't split. This makes sense for most of them since they have strong effects on the timeline, though where the Power Stone came from is completely screwed up anyway with Thanos and a large amount of his army destroyed. However, since the Soul Stone was locked away in whatever mystical mumbo jumbo required it up until Thanos got it in Infinity War, all that returning the Soul Stone does is ensure Thanos's plan can succeed. By simply not returning the Stone, they create a separate timeline where the Snap will never be possible, but by returning it they only ensure his plan can actually happen.
  • The timeline they're returning the Soul Stone to is the same one they're retuning the Power Stone to, where Thanos vanished and came to 2023, so that won't be a problem.
  • From what the Ancient One said, the Stones act as foci for fundamental processes of the universe. So taking the Soul Stone and then not returning it almost immediately might cause everyone in that timeline to lose their souls, or something.

Ant-sized man sets off the alarms. Giant spaceship does not.

• So…FRIDAY has full control to the Avengers base's systems, but there's not a single notice to any of the heroes that the time machine is activated and a big ass spaceship just appeared in the middle of the base and blew out the ceiling? How come Sanctuary II's breach didn't trip the alarms? In Ant-Man, they were hypersensitive enough that Scott ended up tripping them even though he was the size of an ant. So why were there no alarms for severe structural damage, especially during the time they were in lockdown mode?
  • For starters, Past Nebula had infiltrated the building and could have turned off any alarms that FRIDAY set off. Secondly, even if FRIDAY had tried to alert the others, they were kinda busy focusing on bringing back everyone who had died five years ago. By the time FRIDAY's warning would come through, it would have been too late.

Why not undo the last five years when doing the un-Snap?

• Bringing back everyone who got dusted makes, but surely undoing the last five years of suffering that everyone who survived the initial Snap would've also been a practical idea, wouldn't it?
  • In Tony's case at least, he didn't want to lose his daughter and it arguably wouldn't be fair to erase everyone born in those intervening five years. As Cap said in the last film, they don't trade lives. Plus it's unclear as to whether or not they could rewrite history like that. From the way the Time Stone worked, it seemed to reverse the flow of time. Doing so for five years could potentially have disastrous consequences, and they don't fully understand how the Stones work. As Mordo told Strange, "You want to get stuck reliving the same moment over, and over, forever, or never having existed at all?" Trying to do the opposite of what Thanos did seemed like the safest option.
  • I don’t know how much the stones are capable of doing, but Banner could have used his Snap to simultaneously reverse time by 5 years (to right before the original Snap) and dust Infinity War Thanos and his whole army in Wakanda. Basically, everything that happened since just before the the climax of Infinity War would have never happened. Of course, they’d never do this because it would be too much like an “It was all a dream” ending, but it would at least get rid of all of those logistical issues of dealing with a post-Snap world that WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed going on.
  • Tony himself said "I gotta tell you my priorities: Bring back what we lost? I hope, yes. Keep what I got? I have to, at all costs." He's definitely not the only person who's had children born since the Snap who would likely be Ret-Goned by such a thing. The Avengers wouldn't bring back people at the expense of others. Plus Banner was already in immense pain just from having the Gauntlet on for a brief time before snapping. Attempting anything else could very well have killed him, if he even knew how to use the Stones in such a way. Not to mention the time stone seems to work by applying its power to a specific area and reversing time in real time. In order for the original Snap to be completely undone with no effects being remembered by anyone, Banner would need to set the stone's power to cover the entire universe and travel back five years in real time. That would probably be too dangerous and risk messing up reality in unexpected ways.

No portal for Captain Marvel

• Strange and the Sorcerers were able to open portals for people like the Ravagers. Why didn't they open one for Captain Marvel, who had to arrive under her own power? Given how she destroyed Thanos's ship in one shot, she would have helped turn the tide of the battle sooner. Was the 1 in 14,000,605 chance of winning dependent on her not arriving until later?
  • Carol is not exactly as known as someone with such Story-Breaker Power should be. The 2023 Avengers know her, but they're all busy following the Blip as Thanos attacks. Nick Fury knows her, but given SHIELD isn't a part of the ensuing battle and he only shows up in the funeral, he couldn't have done much after the Blip. Okoye knows her, but Carol's probably far from her mind as the Wakandan forces are back to full force and should be gathered for battle. And who knows if any of the Ravagers even heard of her, no matter if she's been in space for nearly 30 years? Thus the Sorcerers never had anyone suggest bringing basically amounts to a Physical Goddess to the battle, leading to Carol figuring things out by herself and taking some time to get to Earth.
    • They were able to open a portal for Hope, who also operated on a low profile. Plus Strange looked ahead to see the outcome, which would suggest that he at least would have known who she was through the Time Stone.
    • She's too busy doing whatever she does while Thanos is killing half of a planet's population.
  • Opening portals presumably requires a clear notion of where you want the portal to connect to. Strange may not have had a clear mental fix on Carol's location, particularly if she was journeying between worlds in deep space with no landmarks or coordinates Strange would be familiar with.

Why not time travel with shrunk people in your pocket to save Pym particles?

• If Hawkeye, Nebula, Black Widow and Rhodes were able to time travel with a shrunk spaceship they could later enlarge, could Hawkeye or somebody not travel with the other three shrunk in his pocket to save Pym Particles? Same with the gang going to 2012 New York.
  • It was stated in Ant-Man that while shrinking objects is simple enough to do, shrinking people is much more risky. The dangers would probably multiply when traveling through the Quantum Realm, and if anything goes wrong, the Avengers are lost in the void forever. It's far safer just to have one suit for each of them.

Thanos should have clearly seen that the gauntlet was empty.

Just after Tony extracts the Stones from the Nano Gauntlet, Thanos knocks him back, takes a moment to revel in his triumph (gazing at the gauntlet for a full five seconds), give his one-liner, and snap his fingers. The problem is that the revelatory shot of the empty gauntlet only works from the audience's point of view. Thanos should have been very clearly able to see that the sockets were empty. Yes, he's on the verge of the ultimate triumph, but it doesn’t make sense that the empty sockets just wouldn't register, not to mention the sudden absence of power.

• This Thanos (2014) has no experience with the full might of the six stones in a gauntlet.

What became of Natasha's body after she died on Vormir?

• After Natasha dies on Vormir, Clint returns without her body. If her body wasn't recovered from Vormir, where did it go? Gamora died at the same place in Avengers: Infinity War, and her remains were nowhere to be seen, so who removes the bodies?
  • Maybe Rogers retrieved Natasha's remains and buried them. He was returning a Stone, not claiming one, so he probably wouldn't have passed out and woken up in the water alone like Clint did.

New Asgard not in Wakanda

• Why did the Asgardians decide to locate New Asgard in the ass end of nowhere just to take up fishing? When they could just as easily decide that because Wakanda is more on their level technology-wise it's the only logical place to build their new settlement and the Wakandans and Asgardians obviously have a lot to offer one another. Compared to Norway who despite being the sources of their mythology doesn't give them anything more than a place to set up a very small, ordinary village.
  • Given that it was where Odin lived his final years, plus it was the site of the battle against the Frost Giants and where they hid the Tesseract, it may have been for sentimental reasons on Thor’s part. Plus Wakanda was dealing with losing their king and the heir, so the Asgardians might not have wanted to put additional burdens on them.
  • Just because Wakanda is opening up to the rest of the world about their advanced technology doesn't mean they're ready to start welcoming mass immigration, either. Several thousand years of isolationism isn't going to go "poof" just because half the world's population did so.
  • Odin specifically told his sons "Remember this place" during their final conversation with their father. Where else would Thor bring the refugee Asgardians, if not a place the All-Father implied was important?
  • And on a purely practical level, Asgard had a climate much like Scandinavia's. Wakanda's may simply have been too darned hot for Asgardians' taste.
  • Asgardians live for thousands of years. Human technology, though primitive by comparison, advances rapidly by their standards. That fishing village will be as advanced as Wakanda in a matter of decades, which isn't so long for someone with their lifespan to wait: even for the technophiles among Asgard's refugees, it's not a grueling exile to the Dark Ages, it's roughing it at a campground for a few weeks.

Dr Strange's Photo

• Right at the start, as they're looking through photos of the Snap's victims, Dr Strange comes up, but this is clearly taken after his movie, as he has his iconic beard and cape, and yet Tony Stark had no idea who he is. Did he just allow some official to take a mugshot of him, in his regalia, for their records?
  • Probably Wong showed up in the aftermath, asking what the hell just happened, and shared information about Steven with the surviving Avengers. Alternately, it was pulled off FRIDAY's video feed from the suit Tony wore on Titan.

Why not make new ones?

• Why couldn’t they reverse engineer the Pym particles and make new ones so they aren’t limited in their time jumps?
  • Scott has never even begun to understand Pym particles, he only knows what his suit can do. All existing knowledge of how to make the particles was dusted with the Pyms, and we can't expect even Stark to have that many physics-shattering breakthroughs in the first third of a movie.

The new shield

• Where did it come from?
  • The one at the end of the movie? Given Wakanda had opened its borders by then, it would not have been hard to make an exact replica.

Why does Steve not mention Bucky and Sam

• When Steve is leading the support group, why does the loss that he mentions to move on from losing any chance of being with Peggy beyond Foreshadowing for what he does at the end? Considering it's a support group for those who lost people in the Snap, shouldn't Steve be mentioning his two best friends who were both taken by it?
  • Foreshadowing aside, it could be a sign that Steven himself hasn't fully gotten over losing them either. When Scott shows a way to fix the snap he practically jumps on it.
  • The meeting probably started out with people naming those they'd lost in the Snap, so Steve may have already mentioned Sam and Bucky. Using Peggy as an example later in the session is a way to remind the group that, Snap or no Snap, grief has always been a trial for bereaved people, but most do manage to carry on nonetheless.

2014 Nebula letting the Avengers undo Thanos's snap

• When the Avengers return to the present time, why didn't 2014 Nebula bring Thanos to the future almost immediately after everyone wasn't looking? After they return, there's a scene of the original Avengers mourning Natasha out by the lake, then they put the Infinity Stones into their own gauntlet, then they start arguing over who should snap their fingers before Hulk makes it clear it should be him, and only then does 2014 Nebula start the process of bringing Thanos to the future. Why did she wait until the Avengers were on the cusp of undoing her father's work, something she should have wanted to prevent them from doing?
  • Probably a combination of factors, a prominent one being that Nebula needed time to figure out exactly what she needed to do on her end to allow Thanos and his forces to come through. Tony's design for the Quantum Tunnel is no doubt different to much of the technology she's used to, and she can't exactly ask anyone for help without raising suspicions. There's also the fact that the settings were set to allow a small amount of people to time travel, and now she has to figure out how to get a massive ship through, which would no doubt require completely different settings as well, so even with her enhancements, she probably needed time to figure out the Quantum Tunnel before that could happen.
  • She may also have been hoping for the chance to simply grab all six Stones and pop back to her own time with them.

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