Captain Marvel's cat goose explained: What's a Flerken?

By Jim Vejvoda

Warning: SPOILERS coming for Captain Marvel! To learn more about the latest Marvel movie, here's the timeline of this confusing object from Captain Marvel, an exploder on Captain Marvel's post-credits scenes, as well as Avengers: Endgame and each upcoming title, the MCU.

Anyone who has seen Captain Marvel know that the Goose cat not only steals his scenes in the movie, he also steals the cosmic cube. And that's because he's not just a tabby cat. No, it is revealed that Goose is a Flerken, an exotic species that looks exactly like a terrestrial feline …. but with very shocking and deadly differences.

Introduced in the pages of Ms. Marvel by the creators Brian Reed and Roberto De La Torre, the Marvel Comics equivalent in Goose's film called Chewie – yes, after Chewbacca's Star Wars, but changed to the film as a tribute to Top Gun and Carol Danvers' Military Aviation Background. Fun fact: Chewie was also a woman, not a he.

Chewie was Carol's pet, whom she supposed to be an ordinary cat. In the comics, Carol accompanied Chewie on her space odyssey and did not realize that her pet was different from what she had met until she met Rocket Raccoon. Rocket told Captain Marvel that Chewie was actually a Flerken and originally wanted to kill him, warning her that the Flerken was going to lay eggs. Carol should have listened to Rocket because Chewie later laid 117 eggs!

Although we have not yet seen Flerken eggs in the MCU, Goose has demonstrated other capabilities that are compatible with the representation of the alien species in comics, including the giant tentacles!

Flerken can not only get a lot of toothed tendrils out of his mouth that can catch and devour his prey, but also small pockets – seriously! – This allows them to teleport as well as store all kinds of objects, regardless of their size. That's why Goose could so easily hide the Tesseract, aka Cosmic Cube, to protect him from the Kree until the post-credits film hair-ball scene appears in the world where Goose coughs him like a ball of hair. The Tesseract will then remain in SHIELD's possession until Loki picks it up in the first Avengers movie.

Of course, as cute and harmless as Goose appears, Flerken – who also has a human intellect – should not be underestimated, as Nick Fury, who once had two eyes, had learned the way the hard way at the end of Captain Marvel. It remains to be seen if Goose will ever come back to the screen – assuming that the species has a longer lifespan than live cats in 1995 – but a creature capable of containing pockets in his mouth could s & nbsp; Prove useful when fighting against cosmic bad guys like Thanos.

What did you think of the goose? Let us know in the comments! And to learn more about Captain Marvel, check out our review, discover the most important WTF questions about the movie, dive into our summary of end credits scenes, find out why Nick Fury did not mention Captain Marvel before, find out what classic The Marvel character was exchanged for the movie and explains how the movie pays homage to Stan Lee.