Disclaimer: If you have not seen Avengers: Endgame, DO NOT READ THIS. This article includes major spoilers and should be avoided at all costs.
Endgame has been billed as the essential finale to the vast majority of our beloved Marvel heroes. However, we are talking about a comic book universe where literally anything can happen (and often does), so even though most of us are okay with saying goodbye, some of us will be stubborn and look to the future for other things, whether or not they ever happen. Even if they don’t, there’s always the notion that they could. Now that we’ve dabbled in time travel, a whole new realm of possibilities has opened up.
Time has always been an interesting and fascinating place of sandbox playtime for science fiction. Even within Endgame, dozens of time travel-based movies and shows get referenced by the characters. There are typically always two concepts on how it might work:
- Traveling back in time changes one’s future, i.e. Back to the Future. One must be aware of the butterfly effect in that changing something simple can lead to drastic changes in the future.
- Traveling back in time does nothing to one’s future and instead creates a branching timeline as best demonstrated by the Ancient One in Endgame.
Bruce Banner states that the second one is fact (although he really wouldn’t know — none of us does). But it’s the one we’re working with in the movie. Likewise, the Ancient One confirms this is what would happen. Why removing the Time Stone and never bringing it back would cause a split in the timelines. Within the past, at that point, it would diverge. Dr. Strange would never be able to use it to stop Dormammu, thus allowing Dormammu to roll into our universe and end it. This branching concept is what allows for so much more playtime in the Marvel universe with characters who are seemingly gone.
There are two major places the timeline has branched. The first is smaller, but intriguing. When Steve, Tony, Bruce, and Scott return to New York to steal the Scepter (which carries the Mind Stone) and the Tesseract (carrying the Space Stone), things don’t go as planned, all thanks to angry Hulk and a set of stairs. The result is Loki once again getting his hands on the Tesseract and billowing out of existence on our planet. This forces the team to abandon their current plan and go back even further to get the stone.
So, what happened to Loki?
In our current timeline (as I’ll be referring to Endgame’s timeline), Loki is — I guess I’ll finally have to say it even if I’m still not sure I’m buying it — dead. But by removing himself from our timeline, he’s created a new one. One where he may very well be alive and kicking. At the most, it’s one where he’s not in Asgard jail when The Dark World happens, and assuming he doesn’t return to supplant Odin, which would put him right back on the same time path as ours, he might end up surviving. It’s possible he’ll do something different, given that he’s holding the Tesseract now rather than spotting it in the Asgard vaults and stealing it later.
The second branch is much larger and leaves us with almost everyone intact, the only exceptions being Nebula and Gamora. When Nebula’s memories get shared with Thanos due to past and present Nebula’s minds using one network, Thanos makes a decision: To leave his current path behind and forge an entirely new one. Using our time travel technology, he does exactly that. He leaves that point in time to jump ahead to where we are now.
So now what happens to that timeline split?
In that new timeline, there is no Thanos. He has removed himself from that place in time, creating a brand new branch where he never continued to conquer planets. He never finds any of the Infinity Stones. He doesn’t kill any of the giants to get the gauntlet. He doesn’t massacre Thor’s people — including Heimdall and Loki. The entire team of the Avengers is alive, including Black Widow and Vision. There is never any snap. True, poor Steve never gets that life he’s always dreamed about, and maybe Tony and Pepper don’t go on to have that adorable daughter. But for those of us looking for a window into a world with Vision and Scarlett Witch, one with Loki antics (that cheeky bastard has two stones now), and one in which Black Widow isn’t a sacrificial lamb, this is it.
Will the filmmakers ever do this? Who knows? It wouldn’t be difficult to pull off; they’d simply have to pick up where they left off, in a way. Show Thanos’s ship dipping out of existence in time and then give us that black screen with a bit of text:
5 YEARS LATER
IN A NEW TIMELINE
Or something similar. You get the idea. Or create an instance in which our timeline needs a specific hero — let’s say Vision — and realizes the Thanos removal branch. We already have Infinity Stones and time travel; why not have timeline jumping? Maybe our newest Captain America jumps timelines to borrow Vision, or means to go back in time to do something and accidentally skips over to the new one and ends up helping Vision. The possibilities are endless.
This wouldn’t necessarily be needed to drag certain people back into the light — go ahead, give Tony that cabin and family and let him stay out of the way — but it would be excellent for other characters. Ones that fans have been clamoring for regarding their own movie. We all know we’d pay to see Vision star in his own movie. We’d pay to see Black Widow do some super cool spy stuff with maybe a little spice thrown in (we’ve seen her beat the crap out of aliens in Avengers, so we’re certainly not restricted to just human bounds). Hell, I’d pay to see a Hawkeye movie after seeing him go John Wick-Batman, and he’s one of the survivors.
Whatever the future holds, the point still stands. Time may be wibbly-wobbly stuff, but in the world of Marvel that means it’s putty in our hands — and it can be whatever we make it.
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