Avengers Endgame (Contains ALL THE SPOILERS)

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 6:49 pm

So I saw Endgame on Friday and I've been waiting for everyone else to see it because there's stuff I want to talk about.

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IF YOU'RE READING THIS THREAD

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS

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But just so you have a final chance to realize that you're in the wrong place, I'm going to post the first thing I'm curious about in the next post.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 6:58 pm

Okay, so after Infinity War, I was pretty convinced that Doctor Strange knew that the Avengers had to lose - that Star Lord punching Thanos when they looked like they might pull it off wasn't the plan failing, but instead, the only way it could have worked. And with that being said, I was pretty sure that time travel shenanigans would ensue. On the way to the theater my 11-year didn't think I could be right since Thanos had the Time Stone, but hey, life finds a way.

So, to me, it feels like the Time Line alterations were inconsistent with the rules established in the movie. Most importantly, Thanos travels from a time before he had the Infinity Stones to the time after he already used them. In that future he was defeated and did not return back to his original time. So there should have been no snap; there should have been no wallowing in drama about how we're missing half of humanity for five years.

Now, I get that going back in time to before you had a baby would be kinda sucky (I'm a parent and the movie About Time already dealt with that pretty brilliantly), so I can understand how 'erasing the last 5 years' would have been...not nice.

I guess the movie would have been too short if they had gone back in time like the day after they killed Thanos, picked up all the stones, and showed up with their own Infinity Gauntlet right after he destroyed 'his stones'.

Am I imagining a paradox that doesn't exist? Did anyone else have a problem with that?

As far as the movie goes, I enjoyed WATCHING it - it was fun and well worth going to see. But now that I've seen it, I'd like to dissect it and see if it has enough substance to hold up to repeated viewings.

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 7:32 pm

deaddmwalking wrote: So, to me, it feels like the Time Line alterations were inconsistent with the rules established in the movie. Most importantly, Thanos travels from a time before he had the Infinity Stones to the time after he already used them. In that future he was defeated and did not return back to his original time. So there should have been no snap; there should have been no wallowing in drama about how we're missing half of humanity for five years.

Uh, no? Changes to the past don't alter the future. That was the rule established. The fact that 2014 Thanos (and his army) stepped through a time gate and never returned doesn't change the post-2014 (and post-snap) world.

Now, Nebula's cross-time fuckery? That might be a plot hole. But I'm not sure. I mean, Nebula's personality being on a cloud server kinda came out of nowhere, but whatever.

But Thanos was consistently written against the time travel as described.

I guess the movie would have been too short if they had gone back in time like the day after they killed Thanos, picked up all the stones, and showed up with their own Infinity Gauntlet right after he destroyed 'his stones'.

Am I imagining a paradox that doesn't exist? Did anyone else have a problem with that?

They didn't have time travel at that point. And, as the time travel rules in the movie established, they would have to do the counter-snap in the present for it to do anything.

Wait, no. They could have done that, and created a new timeline right there, just never "returning" through the time stream but living in the split-off line where everyone was brought back early. Eh. I'm gonna assume that the scene with the Ancient One, with a bit of Stark selfishness to support it, explains that.

rasmuswagner · Post by **rasmuswagner** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 7:34 pm

Also, the movie hooked me really early, with that tender moment of grief between Rocket and Nebula. Damn.

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 7:39 pm

Oh yes, it was great as an epic action popcorn flick. There were a lot of dumb things that will pull you out if you think about them for a minute or two though.

So, the way the time travel seems to work is that if you go to the past and change anything, it creates a new timeline branch. Anything that happens in that branch won't affect your original timeline, which is why murdering baby Thanos doesn't work. The past where you strangle him in the crib only affects the future in its new branch, and your own timeline remains unchanged. This is poorly explained in the movie. Also, it means that they created a bunch of new timelines when they went back to retrieve the Infinity Stones. Even after returning the Stones, they still talked to people, stole Pym Particles, let Loki escape with the Tesseract, and so on. There is now a timeline where Thanos and his army just disappeared randomly nine years ago, but I'm not sure anybody cares.

... and when Cap traveled to the past to live a happy married life, Old Cap shouldn't have been in this timeline. Some writer fucked up there.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 8:02 pm

I was taking Old Cap as a given...

But as far as choosing the future, once Antman came out of the Quantum Realm, there was really nothing preventing him from traveling back to an earlier time and communicating all of the time travel stuff to them...

His 2023 self would be in 2019, but there wasn't a 2019 Antman (since he was in the Quantum Realm) so even if he had a personal time loop he could have created an alternate 'real' timeline that either fixed things immediately post snap (possibly).

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:55 pm

Did anyone else take the three or four minutes of people being sad about Nat dying for a pee break?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 10:26 pm

I think the premise was "Create alternate timelines" not "change time" and I think that is one of the most interesting possible things they probably won't do going forward:

MUTLIPLE TIMELINES. There are different worlds, including the one where Captain America finds out about Bucky during the Battle of New York and Hydra thinks he is Hyrda.

There can be movies where Peter Parker just fucking rolled out of bed in highschool (a no Snap Thanos went forward in time timeline) and there can be ones where he time shifted out of existence for five years and his crush/date from Homecoming is five years older than him and has finished college and moved on but he's still in high school with people he's never met or starting college way behind.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Apr 29, 2019 11:44 pm

Kaelik wrote:I think the premise was "Create alternate timelines" not "change time" and I think that is one of the most interesting possible things they probably won't do going forward:

MUTLIPLE TIMELINES. There are different worlds, including the one where Captain America finds out about Bucky during the Battle of New York and Hydra thinks he is Hyrda.

There can be movies where Peter Parker just fucking rolled out of bed in highschool (a no Snap Thanos went forward in time timeline) and there can be ones where he time shifted out of existence for five years and his crush/date from Homecoming is five years older than him and has finished college and moved on but he's still in high school with people he's never met or starting college way behind.

They're supposed to be doing a Disney+ series about that. What If...?

Unfortunately, they only have so many movie slots a year. And they can't make alternate reality duplicates of their actors.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 12:05 am

hyzmarca wrote:
Kaelik wrote:I think the premise was "Create alternate timelines" not "change time" and I think that is one of the most interesting possible things they probably won't do going forward:

MUTLIPLE TIMELINES. There are different worlds, including the one where Captain America finds out about Bucky during the Battle of New York and Hydra thinks he is Hyrda.

There can be movies where Peter Parker just fucking rolled out of bed in highschool (a no Snap Thanos went forward in time timeline) and there can be ones where he time shifted out of existence for five years and his crush/date from Homecoming is five years older than him and has finished college and moved on but he's still in high school with people he's never met or starting college way behind.
They're supposed to be doing a Disney+ series about that. What If...?

Unfortunately, they only have so many movie slots a year. And they can't make alternate reality duplicates of their actors.

I mean they could probably do a lot more movies if they didn't have every actor in every movie and I'm not advocating more movies, I'm advocating better movies. Having multiple timelines means when it is time for your spiderman movie you can make whatever kind is going to be the most interesting, instead of whatever fits in the current plotline.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 2:16 am

I think the alternate timelines is interesting - having a world where there was no snap, and consequently all the characters we've lost, means that you can still tell those stories, but on the other hand, it means investing in a multitude of 'possible worlds'. Even if we know there are hundreds (or more) alternate realities including the one where I'm president of the United States, I have a lot invested in THIS reality. I'd expect Spiderman to care about his own.

I can't see Marvel ditching the universe they've created to focus on stories set in these alternate worlds EXCEPT as 'one-off' type 'what if' questions. But when Spiderman needs to join up with Captain America, it'll be the ones we saw at the end of Endgame.

SlyJohnny · Post by **SlyJohnny** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:17 am

The stones were the only thing that could change all timelines/the "core" timeline. Using the stones to change the future, and then putting them all back so that there was only one timeline (with one major change) was the plan. I dunno, it made sense to me.

SlyJohnny · Post by **SlyJohnny** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:19 am

It is a little weird that captain America has a relationship with a woman who'd otherwise have met someone else and had kids with them, though. I'm assuming those kids just vanished after being unsnapped...

Hiram McDaniels · Post by **Hiram McDaniels** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:50 am

Time travel as a plot device always bothers me.

I didn't really see a need for the 5 year time skip, other than explaining how Ant-man's van got moved and giving Tony Stark a daughter.

Thanos is a big dumb idiot if he thinks the universe is too small for all the people, and that eliminating half of them would alleviate suffering and free up resources rather than utterly devastating entire economies.

On the plus side:

Mark Hulkalo
The Thor abides
Captain Marvel being a fucking boss.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 8:03 am

SlyJohnny wrote:It is a little weird that captain America has a relationship with a woman who'd otherwise have met someone else and had kids with them, though. I'm assuming those kids just vanished after being unsnapped...

Captain America's creepy incestuous time traveling relationship is probably the weirdest thing in the MCU.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 11:03 am

SlyJohnny wrote:It is a little weird that captain America has a relationship with a woman who'd otherwise have met someone else and had kids with them, though. I'm assuming those kids just vanished after being unsnapped...

Nothing indicates Peggy didn't always have those kids with him under the hypothetical single timeline approach that is required for old cap.

Peggy is described as Sharon's grand aunt, which I think means that she was descended from Peggy's sister.

I think it is much funnier to imagine her literally trolling him every time in Winter Soldier that he comes to see her and she's literally hiding that they eventually get together and that he's alive off screen waiting until young him leaves to come in and be with his wife.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 3:14 pm

I Assumed they were using homestuck time travel logic. I.E. There's one "true" timeline and attempts to meddle in the time stream don't alter the true timeline they create doomed branching timelines, but you can still bring objects from a branch timeline into the true timeline without knocking it off course.

And returning the stones is just a way to trim the branches. Though killing Thanos obviously still left a branch hanging in at least one.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 4:46 pm

I guess if Thanos Prime used his snap and Thanos 2 invades a DIFFERENT timeline to 'start over', I don't see why he wouldn't have used the information he gained to simply 'do it right' in his own timeline. Like, why does Thanos 2 decide that 'fixing alternate universe prime' is better than fixing 'his primary universe 2'? That's the part that really doesn't make sense to me.

If the timelines exist independently of each other, he didn't need to do that.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 5:44 pm

If you're asking why he traveled to the prime timeline to get the stones instead of just collecting them the hard way in his own timeline well.. he couldn't. His timeline was now missing stones. He didn't know the avengers intended to return them after the fact.

So go to the "future" take the conveniently preassembled gauntlet, destroy the uni/multiverse.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 6:11 pm

shinimasu wrote:If you're asking why he traveled to the prime timeline to get the stones instead of just collecting them the hard way in his own timeline well.. he couldn't. His timeline was now missing stones. He didn't know the avengers intended to return them after the fact.

So go to the "future" take the conveniently preassembled gauntlet, destroy the uni/multiverse.

But if you can't change the future, then even if the Avengers did get all the stones, Thanos would know that he would ALSO get all the stones. Unless he didn't know how time travel works, but for a super-advanced alien with an army of powerful creatures at his command, it doesn't seem like he'd have been duped by it. If Thanos 2 hadn't invaded the future, he'd know that he'd get the stones.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 6:45 pm

Ok let's see if I can explain this more concisely.

You have timeline A. This is the Prime Timeline. Events in this timeline cannot be changed because they have already happened.

When you travel back through timeline A, when you make changes they don't alter timeline A, instead they create timeline B. The two then exist entirely separately from each other.

So Clint goes back in time to Voremir. He gets the soul stone. He then takes the soul stone before Thanos can find it and transports it forward in time.

This creates Timeline B in which the soul stone functionally no longer exists. It has in essence been wiped from timeline B. Thanos cannot simply wait 5 years and get it from the avengers because the future in which the soul stone exists is no longer Thanos B's future. His future is now Future B with no soul stone, so to get the soul stone he now needs to go to Future A where it does exist.

This calls back to a throw away line in Dr. Strange where he gets caught messing with time by the monks and one says "You're not manipulating the flow of time, you're breaking it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 6:58 pm

The fact that the time travel logic does not actually hold up to scrutiny should hardly be surprising, since the entire Thanos thing is predicated on the idea that halving the current galactic population would meaningfully affect the total galactic resources. Which... is really bizarre. The Earth's population was half of what it is today in 1972, which means that the people who were born before the last doubling are now 47 years old and some of them are still having kids today.

Putting any individual race onto a path to sustainability is in no way impacted by large scale mass murders. Halving the population can be undone by simple family reproduction in two generations. Over the long run, the Thanos snap wouldn't even be noticeable - since all of the people in question would be dead anyway in a hundred years.

Yeah, the time travel physics aren't kept entirely straight. But since the entire infinity war is based on literally nobody writing this thing understanding how exponential growth works, how is this remotely surprising?

-Username17

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 8:49 pm

I'm still sad movie Thanos wasn't literally courting Death, like comics Thanos.

But my understanding of the time fuckery was setting up alternate universes for a Crisis on Infinite Earths-style event down the line.

You have the Stones as quantum locks.
The snap and destruction of the Stones locked Universe A into a Bad End.
The time heist jumps into previous MCU references for Universe B.
Taking a Stone in Universe B creates another instance of that universe where there is no Stone and Bad Stuff happens. This is why Sinead O'Conor didn't originally give up the Time Stone.
This means Thanos B has to go to a universe where the Stones exist, which is Universe A after the time heist.
The Avengers movie fuckup creates two divergent points: Universe C where Loki gets the Tesseract in 2012 and Universe D where Steve and Tony get the Tesseract in 1970.
Once everything's said and done in Universe A, returning the Stones creates a time-locked, "proper" version of Universe B, Universe B'.
Since Thanos B crosses over from Universe B and gets snapped, he no longer exists in B'.

Getting the Stones for Universe A was for the moral victory of beating Thanos A and bringing back the "dead". Creating a Universe E with everyone back and no Thanos would be bad because nobody would remember, or something. It was also what Thanos B wanted to do, his Universe F would rewrite reality without the Universe A-vengers basically out of spite.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 9:02 pm

I may have to see it again, but how did Thanos travel from Universe B to Universe A. He had to jump forward in time, and he had Nebula (potentially including her downloaded memories), but did he actually have access to a time machine?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 30, 2019 9:34 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:I may have to see it again, but how did Thanos travel from Universe B to Universe A. He had to jump forward in time, and he had Nebula (potentially including her downloaded memories), but did he actually have access to a time machine?

She literally hacked their time machine and used it. If you mean "didn't he need something on his end" I would suggest that he probably told her to target him 3 months later and then used knowledge of the suit they had a chance to look at and nats memories of stuff to coat his entire ship.

As to Pim particles, I don't think anyone knows which side they need to be on or what.