Avengers: Endgame – The Timeline of Time Travel Explained

Scott Collura

Full spoilers follow for Avengers: Endgame, so if you do not want to know what's going on in the movie, snap your fingers and get out of here!

So now it can be confirmed. As we suspected for a long time, yes, the Avengers use the time travel to cancel Thanos attack heard around the universe. And while the circumstances of this time travel may be different from what many fans theorized, the end result is the same: the Mad Titan is defeated and all those who have been lost in the Decimation are fired, although After five years of non-life. -existence.

But how exactly does the journey in time in Avengers: Endgame? Basically, it is very confusing and it seems that the filmmakers deliberately avoid to explain it in depth, preferring instead to emphasize that this does does not work . That said, let's put on our quantum realm suit, adjust our time GPS and stick to the time!

The Quantum Kingdom

The key to time travel is revealed when Scott Lang escapes from the quantum realm, where he has been stuck for five years since the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Here, time works differently and, for Scott, it seemed only five hours ago. It therefore conveys this information to the Avengers because it is better at the "hold-up" part of an attempt, and needs a big brain to understand the "time" part of things.

In the beginning, Tony Stark is not interested. in pursuing the case, thinking that it was a foolish chance that Scott managed to break out of the quantum realm. So, Captain America and Black Widow appeal to Ant-Man for Hulk, who agrees to give it a go … even if it's not exactly his area of ​​expertise.

Time travel does not work that way!

"Professor" Hulk steps in to help understand how to use Scott's discovery to fend off the Avengers in the past. And while everyone has their own idea of ​​how to carry out their mission, Banner reminds the group that time travel does not really work like it does in movies such as Back to the Future or The Terminator (or Time After). Time or Somewhere in Time or Timecop …). War Machine suggests going back in time and killing Baby Thanos, a variation of the old Baby Hitler concept, but again, it's a "cinematic journey back in time". That's what we are told.

According to Banner, you can & # 39; Do not just go back in time and change the past to change the future. Because the future is already your past! You can not change the future, because if you did, you would not be the same version of yourself as you traveled back in time to make that change. You see, it's confusing.

Any change in history will create an alternative or divergent scenario. Say you killed baby Thanos. This will not affect the Thanos in the timeline of the MCU that has already seen it cause decimation. Instead, it would only create a parallel reality in which Thanos would have died baby. But the world of our heroes would remain unchanged. So, what to do then?

Time Heist!

Here's where we come to the time of the heist, Tony Stark can not stop and determine the operation of the trip in time when he has a few hours of free time evening. He joins his former teammates, who have already arrived there a bit, although Scott Lang increasingly avoids becoming permanently a child / baby / old man, and gets wet permanently along the way. The Hulk is smart, but Stark is necessary for this one.

Quite early, the plan is designed to return three teams at different times in time and space to retrieve each Infinity Stone dating from an earlier era than Thanos. The Avengers will take them back to their time in 2023 (five years after the break) and use them to cancel the Decimation with a new break. But as Ancient Ancient explained to Banner at the Battle of New York in 2012, removing one of the stones from their timeline would result in a split of the timeline into the aforementioned divergent realities. The fact that the stones are together, probably at the same time, if they are not in the same specific place, keeps the chronology intact. That's why, once the Avengers finish decommissioning in 2023, they'll have to give back to the Stones the exact moment they took it. In this way, the Stones will not really leave their respective past points, and therefore will not change the timeline.

And that's what Captain America apparently does with each of the Stones at the end of the movie, bringing them back to their rightful place in the movie. past. Although it makes a break of about 70 years along the way. Speaking of …

Splintered Timelines

Despite the goal of not altering the story, it seems that this is happening anyway, while the nebula of the present and its memories are mix with those of the nebula of the past. This allows the Thanos of the Guardians of the Galaxy 1 (in 2014) to see the future, including his own death at the start of Endgame and the Avengers' poisoning plan. And so, he travels into the future for Endgame's "present" in 2023, which leads to the film's final confrontation and the death of Iron Man as he destroys Thanos and his army.

But! How could the Thanos of the past be killed in Endgame, since he will never be able to find the Infinity Stones again, place them in the glove of the infinite and erase half of all life in Infinity War, which will lead the Avengers to the planned time accordingly? Unless this Thanos originated from a divergent chronology, created by the fact that the story was changed when the Avengers traveled in the past (and that Nebula inadvertently revealed the future to Thanos). What, Endgame, had told us previously, should not happen as long as the Infinity Stones do not leave their place in the timeline.

The same question applies to the Gamora of the past, who did not die on Vormir and who seems alive at the end of Endgame, while Star-Lord was preparing to fetch her in space (plot of Guardians, Vol 3?). If she lives in the present, how could her future self be dead in the past when Thanos sacrificed her for the Stone of Souls?

The Loki that escapes with the Tesseract just after the Battle of New York is another big question raised by the Avengers' time travel shenanigans, because not only has it disappeared into a portal with unknown points, also took the stone of space with him. That's why Cap and Iron Man had to go back even further in the 1970s to find another example of the Tesseract they could fly. But at the end of the film, when Captain America brings all the stones back to their place (off camera), he would have no chance to find the one that Loki had removed. We may learn more about it in the Disney + Loki show, but it seems that this is another divergent chronology.

And then there is Cape, who ends up living life with Peggy Carter in the past. This contradicts what we know to be Peggy's story in the MCU, because she married a man Cap saved during the Second World War, a man she had children with. If Cape and Peggy met in the past, this aspect of her story should be changed … creating a different timeline. (Although, yes, it can be said that Steve Rogers has always been the type with which she was married and that Peggy and he have hidden this information for 70 years .But in reality, it's a stretch .) And if a different timeline was created, how does Cap's older people return to the end of the film because it does not arrive on the Quantum platform from where it's gone? Perhaps the Tony Stark in this other reality has given him a sort of improved Quantum GPS device that allows him to go back and forth between realities.

The Bottom Line

So, what can we definitely say about time travel in Endgame? As Hulk points out, it seems obvious that changing the past will not change the future of the characters. But beyond that, it seems that despite all the efforts of the team, divergent deadlines have at least been defined. This brings us back to the beginning, when we said that traveling back in time in the MCU does not seem to make much sense. Or at least it does not make much sense in the film . But Endgame is a movie. And now, our heads are exploding.

What do you think of the position taken by the MCU over time? Chat with Scott Collura, editor, on Twitter, at @ScottCollura or listen to his podcast Star Trek, Transporter Room 3 . Or do both!