The final fate of Captain America in Avengers: Endgame has proven to be a source of confusion for viewers, fans, and even the filmmakers.
While it seems that most of the people who want to see the movie have seen it, based on box-office figures, there are still people out there who wish to see the movie who have not yet. (My mother is one of them, as it happens.)
So in the interest of fairness, we’re putting in some spoiler space before we get down to whether or not Endgame’s ending for the star-spangled Avenger was a total assassination of the character of Steve Rogers.
SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME LIE BELOW HERE! EVERYTHING WRITTEN AFTER THIS PARAGRAPH ASSUMES THAT YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE OR DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE SPOILED FOR IT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED…
As a reminder: the only way for the Avengers to safely be able to pull the infinity stones from the past—what Scott Lang referred to as “time heists”—to use to restore everyone (and then fight Thanos, though that wasn’t planned) was to then go back in time again and put everything back where they found it. Captain America took on that task, returning the stones, and also returning Mjolnir to Asgard in 2013 so Thor could continue to wield it in The Dark World.
(Parenthetically, there’s a couple of untold stories there that are worth telling. First of all, he had to inject the aether back into Jane Foster, which can’t have been any fun. Secondly, the guardian of the soul stone on Vormir is none other than the Red Skull, his mortal enemy from World War II.)
But then, rather than come back to the present like he was supposed to, he decided to go back to just after World War II and have the dance he promised to Peggy Carter at the end of The First Avenger. He then lived a life with Peggy, and then showed up as an old man shortly after he went back in time to bequeath his shield to the Falcon.
The question this raises is: did Cap create an alternate time track—as described by Bruce Banner to the other Avengers and as later discussed between Banner and the Ancient One during the 2012 Time Heist—where he lived his life with Peggy, or did he live his life in secret during the mainline timeline without letting anyone know who he was?
The evidence provided in the movie itself points to the latter, mostly by omission, as it’s never specified. Having said that, it’s easy enough to interpret the former, given that Loki stole the Tesseract and disappeared and Thanos, Nebula, Gamora, and a bunch of Thanos’s lackeys all popped from 2014 to 2024 to fight the Avengers and were all (save Gamora) dusted by Tony Stark. Both of those happenings created alternate time tracks, since in the mainline MCU, Loki and the Tesseract were brought back to Asgard in 2012 (not to mention Captain America never getting beaten up by his future self) and Thanos went on to gather the stones and dust half the universe.
So which is it?
Co-director Joe Russo said to Entertainment Weekly:
If Cap were to go back into the past and live there, he would create a branched reality. The question then becomes, how is he back in this reality to give the shield away?
But then we have co-scripter Christopher Markus to Fandango:
I do believe that there is simply a period in world history from about ’48 to now where there are two Steve Rogers. And anyway, for a large chunk of that one of them is frozen in ice. So it’s not like they’d be running into each other.
Finally, we have MCU overlord Kevin Feige, who was asked during a Reddit AMA if he could give a definitive answer to this conundrum, and all he said was, “Yes.”
Bastard.
The thing is, the intent of the screenwriters was that he was living in the MCU this entire time as Peggy’s secret husband, and the evidence in the movie itself points to that—and ultimately, that’s what we have to go on. The text is what matters, not what the creators say on the Internet after the fact (SEE ALSO: Dumbledore’s sexuality).
And if he has been living in the MCU this entire time and not saying anything, as the screenwriters posit, then they, at best, have absolutely no understanding of the character that they’ve written as a main character in five movies (Markus and Stephen McFeeley wrote all three Captain America movies and the last two Avengers movies), or at worst, have absolutely destroyed that character for the sake of a clichéd, offensive, largely theoretical happy ending.
At least the was-here-all-along theory doesn’t entirely shitcan the Agent Carter TV show. Markus said that Rogers showed up in 1948 or so—which tracks with the late ’40s cars we saw outside their house when they were dancing—and the two seasons of the show took place in 1946. One does feel for poor Agent Sousa, though…
Still, it is a reduction of Peggy Carter from the bad-ass we met in The First Avenger, who was later established as co-founding S.H.I.E.L.D. and being its director for decades, into simply a prize for Rogers to win after fighting the good fight.
But if we buy this notion, that Steve Rogers was Peggy Carter’s secret husband from 1948 until her death in 2016, it causes all kinds of significant character problems for the sentinel of liberty. Let’s take them one by one…
- Cap let S.H.I.E.L.D. continue to run with Hydra moles throughout. Rogers learned, in graphic detail, in The Winter Soldier (written by these same two guys) how much Hydra had infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D.—the organization that his wife ran, that his wife co-founded, and which was her life’s work. Are we supposed to believe that Captain America would just sit idly by and let his wife be made a total fool of (and let lots of people die) by allowing Arnim Zola’s long con to happen unchallenged and destroy that life’s work?
- Cap let Bucky Barnes be brainwashed into a Soviet assassin who killed tons of people, including Howard and Maria Stark. We’ve already seen that Rogers would break the Avengers and give up being Captain America in order to protect Bucky in Civil War (written by these same two guys). As established in The First Avenger (written by these same two guys), Bucky was his best friend and protector throughout their childhood. Are we supposed to believe that Rogers would just let his bestest buddy in the whole entire world be a Soviet assassin who would go on to kill tons of people, including Iron Man’s parents, for decades without trying to do something about it?
- Cap either let his dementia-ridden wife think that the de-iced Steve Rogers was really him, or he and his wife had her pretend she had dementia so he wouldn’t ask too many questions about her hubby. As we saw in The Winter Soldier (written by these same two guys), Peggy Carter was suffering from some serious dementia in her old age, and her responses to Rogers were those of someone who hadn’t seen him in decades, which doesn’t track at all with her being married to him all this time. Plus if she really had dementia, there’s no way she would be able to keep who her hubby was secret. Which makes you wonder if they were doing it as an act, which is unimaginably cruel and despicable.
- Cap let all the awful things that happened between World War II and the present day happen. Are we supposed to believe that Captain America, the greatest hero the country and the world has ever seen, the guy who was deemed worthy by Odin’s enchantment to wield Mjolnir, as seen in this very same movie, would just sit around and let President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. get shot? Would let 9/11 happen? Would stand around while the U.S. engaged in horrid conflicts in Asia and Eastern Europe throughout the latter half of the 20th century? Really?
If this is an alternate timeline, it’s way more fun. It has so many more story possibilities than turning Peggy Carter into a trophy for Rogers to win at the end, albeit at the expense of her life’s work being destroyed by Hydra while her husband stood by and did nothing about it.
If he goes full-on let’s-change-this-for-the-better—which is actually in character for the guy we’ve seen played by Chris Evans in more than half-a-dozen movies, not to mention in character for the 80-year-old comics character he’s based on—then there’s all sorts of fun to be had. First, he’d tell Peggy about Zola’s plan and lock him down, keep him from destroying S.H.I.E.L.D. from within. Next, he’d go to Siberia (or wherever) and free Bucky, keeping him from being the Winter Soldier. He’d use his wife’s status as a S.H.I.E.L.D. director to do things like tell President Kennedy to have a canopy instead of driving in the open air and suggest that Dr. King have stronger security and that President Bush actually pay attention to his briefings about al-Qaeda.
He’d also make sure that Henry Pym doesn’t quit S.H.I.E.L.D. in a huff (especially since there won’t be a Hydra mole pissing him off, as seen in Ant-Man), and work with him to be able to jump through the quantum realm to his original timeline so he can give Sam Wilson the shield in 2024.
And then he’d still be Captain America, instead of a lying, indolent, murdering sack of shit.
Let’s hope a future movie or TV show actually addresses this once and for all. And if it does, that it’s in a way that is actually true to the character of Steve Rogers.
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing about pop culture for Tor.com since 2011. He recently chronicled all the call-backs to previous MCU movies in Endgame. Keith writes the weekly “4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch,” which looks back at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic book. (He’ll get to Endgame some time in October, based on the current schedule.) He’s also a novelist of some 25 years’ standing, with his output in 2019 including the novels A Furnace Sealed, Mermaid Precinct, and Alien: Isolation, as well as stories in the anthologies Thrilling Adventure Yarns, Brave New Girls: Adventures of Gals and Gizmos, Unearthed, Footprints in the Stars, and Release the Virgins!
It has to be an alternate timeline. Yeah, you have to do some handwavy science maybe, but that’s easily done.
Because otherwise it’s just not right.
I veer on the alternate timeline clarification by the director, because as you’ve noted it’s out of character for him to just let bad things happen while hiding out and more importantly, it breaks the rules of time travel as established by the film itself. You don’t need to do any handwavey science, alternate timelines are what changes to the past are said to create in the film itself.
Per the rules of time travel in the movie (which are actually the right, physically valid rules as opposed to the self-contradictory fantasy that earlier movies have brainwashed us to expect), it’s impossible to change your original timeline no matter what you do. Either you change things and branch off an alternate alongside your own, or you participate in a causal loop where everything you do in the past was part of the original history all along. (Indeed, there’s even a version of the theory saying that both those outcomes are required to happen simultaneously in branching tracks, which is really the only way to explain the inconsistent temporal logic in last season’s Agents of SHIELD, where they spent all season insisting the characters’ actions were all feeding into an unbreakable temporal loop but then they let them break it at the end anyway.)
So if Steve was back in the past of the main timeline, either he didn’t intervene because he knew he couldn’t change anything no matter how hard he tried, or else he tried to change things and consistently failed because his actions turned out to be part of the original events all along.
Still, as you say, it’s extremely difficult to reconcile that idea with what we saw of Peggy Carter in TWS. So I think the only way it makes sense is if it was an alternate timeline. Which is also the simplest explanation for where Cap got that intact shield he gave to Sam at the end.
The problem with the alternate timeline theory — which is otherwise perfectly plausible and compelling — is that Steve Roger’s reappearance in the present is filmed *completely differently* than you would expect from that. It, and it alone, is what drives the ‘long way round’ idea from the movie itself, but it implies it so heavily and so strongly it’s difficult to reconcile with the much more logical and consistent alt-timeline idea.
The new alternate timeline is the one with two Steve Rogers. So does he thaw himself prematurely and have a team-up? Or maybe he waits until 2011, thaws his other self and then has a really good excuse to retire.
sells a lot of tickets no matter what![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
This is gonna be the new “How did Batman get onto the bridge to light a burning bat signal in DKR” or “Aquaman speaks to fish” thing, isn’t it? Nerds are gonna be fighting over this for so long that it’ll be the thing they complain hardest about when the inevitable Big Bang Theory reboot in the 2030s parodies it about nerd arguments.
I love me some nitpickery and backstory speculation, but sometimes I think William Shatner had a point.
So, I really felt that Steve going back to Peggy was *Steve* being the prize for *Peggy*. I’m slightly more okay with the alternate timeline where Steve is able to a)bust Hydra before it gets a good foothold in Shield and b) prepare for Thanos in that timeline from the standpoint of Steve’s Moral Quandry. But that means that Original Peggy doesn’t get to be with anyone since there is no Sousa in the MCU, which makes me sad, and that Other Peggy doesn’t get to be with her own Other Steve, she’s with Original Steve and Other Steve is still in ice.
(suddenly imagines Original Steve thawing out Other Steve and Other Peggy and the rest of the Other World gets to have TWO Steves which isn’t the worst.)
@7/random22: I think you’re being unfair to Keith. This isn’t some minor technical quibble, it’s a significant flaw in storytelling and characterization. As it says right there in the headline, if Markus’s claim is correct, then it badly undermines Steve as a character, not to mention the underpinnings of the whole MCU.
@8/EllenW: Why wouldn’t there be a Sousa in the MCU? Agent Carter was developed and produced by the very same people who wrote every single Captain America movie and the Thanos duology. It’s the only Marvel TV series that had one of its characters, Edwin Jarvis, actually appear in an MCU movie. So it stands to reason that Sousa would be just as real in the MCU.
random22: I have a life, thanks, and it’s one that involves creating fictional characters and stories and also commenting on other people’s fictional characters and stories. And when one of those characters is mistreated by the two guys who’ve been writing him, I think it’s worth mentioning.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
As always, you don’t have to agree with the points made in the article, but if you want to engage in the comments, we ask that you be civil and constructive, and avoid being rude, snide, or dismissive in your responses. Here are the guidelines.
Random22 I really don’t get comments like yours: if you don’t like the discussion don’t even enter it
For my money, Steve living in secret through the mainline MCU without interfering can be easily justified. He knows the course of his current timeline gets the universe past the snap by the absolute narrowest of margins. He can’t risk changing that outcome by doing something like exposing Hydra early. Because of who he is, I imagine it eats him up to let bad things happen but he accepts it as the price he has to pay.
More importantly, I want Steve and Peggy to be happy together so badly that I will accept any plot contrivance that enables it and to hell with any unfortunate implications!
Pretty sure it’s an alternative timeline, regardless of what Russos/Markus and Faige say to us because they are concealing spoilers. The reason is that they admitted that Loki escaping in 2012 already created an alternative timeline, based on this, it will also follow that Steve Rogers reappearing in the past to spend his life with Peggy created another.
Otherwise we wouldn’t have already announced What If? Series on marvel streaming network!
@8 Since I watched Agent Carter, I actually was far happier for Peggy than for Steve. It was her happy ending. Also, for some reason I felt that Steve didn’t return right back to Peggy, he timed it to several years past his disappearance. So Agent Carter -1946-1948 already happened with Agent Sousa and all. We already knew that he doesn’t end up with Peggy anyway.
Whoop. Stop right there. If Captain America is helping out after 1948, he’d likely help Harry Truman get a civil rights agenda through Congress and nip the Korean War in the bud. Then what happens? Maybe a more reactionary Republican gets elected in 1952? Like, maybe Strom Thurmond turns Republican earlier than he did and becomes president? Or Stevenson wins two terms and, the pendulum being what it is, Nixon gets elected in 1960.
Whatever, I’m pretty sure a post-war USA with a Steve Rogers active from the get-go sees JFK and MLK as elder statesmen getting interviewed by Gayle King in primetime specials in 2019.
Attempts to make things better can make things worse even without time travel.
well, if he changes some things (like saving Kennedy), a lot more would change, so, for example, the 2001 attacks on the US might not happen
I prefer a Law of Conservation of Time which would confine all of their shenanigans to a single ‘Timeline B’ that the stones are lifted from then subsequently returned to. So, in this case, Steve stays behind in that timeline and doesn’t change things because he knows everything has to play out so that the stones will end up where they need to be to get stolen (which means Hydra must exist to nab to staff) but the payoff is that Universe B doesn’t have a Thanos either. So Steve minimizes his impact to a timeline he knows that as a result, will never experience the Snap.
They are probably being vague because in the back of their minds Captain America 4: Age of Steve Rogers is still a movie possibility if they ever decide to park a Brinks Truck in Chris Evans’s driveway.
@17 JFK and MLK would be over a 100 and 90 respectively, I believe. So unlikely they would both be alive in 2019. (Unless Steve convinces Wakanda to come out into the open much sooner and share their technological advances)
The part that I didn’t like about this cop-out happy ending for Steve Rogers is that in the MCU he only lived in the modern era a few years, and then went right back to the 1940’s and lived through the rest of the 20th Century and beyond, which seems strange to me for the character.
It has to be an alternate timeline. There are ways for Steve to get back to the original timeline. The film’s rules suggest that jumping forward, even after creating an alternate timeline such as when Loki escapes, takes the jumper to the original timeline. All of the heroes return to their original timeline after taking the stones. It stands to reason then that after Peggy and Bucky both die of old age in the Other Timeline, that Steve could leap forward one last time and return to the original timeline. He could then take off the quantum GPS Tony created and avoid being pulled back to the platform, opting instead for a quieter reveal rather than sending his friends into a panic at his sudden aging. I mean honestly, Banner probably would have panicked like he did when Antman showed up as a child on the platform. Who’d want to deal with that?
I want to believe that Steve could go back to make a better world. That Captain America, without having to deal with alien invasions and disasters caused by Tony Stark, plus knowledge of future events could genuinely improve humanity’s existence. Since the movie doesn’t contradict me, that’s what I choose to believe happened.
@15 That is the theory I’m going with currently. Steve Rogers would want to make sure that Thanos cannot wipe out half the universe, so he is not going to interfere with events that already happened from his perspective. I’m not quite sure how it tracks with Peggy Carter’s actions after Steve’s initial disappearance, though.
Do we know definitively that Cap didn’t change the timeline regarding HYDRA and Bucky and so forth? Unless and until someone in a post-Endgame movie/tv show makes reference to the events from the earlier movies, it’s conceivable that Cap did change the past and those events no longer happened.
As for Cap allowing the assassination of JFK and MLK and 9-11, maybe those events didn’t happen in the original Marvel timeline and only occurred in the new timeline as a result of the butterfly effect from Cap’s time travel. (e.g. maybe in the original time line Lee Harvey Oswald was recruited by HYDRA and lived out the rest of his life as a low level HYDRA operative in the Department of Agriculture, but in the new timeline Cap prevented HYDRA from reestablishing itself, so Oswald never became a HYDRA agent, and instead followed the path that in our timeline led to him assassinating the president.) Cap can hardly be blamed for failing to stop an assassination or terrorist attack that he didn’t know was going to happen.
There’s no contradiction between Russo and Markus… there is a period of time with two Caps, and that period occurs in an alternate timeline. We can safely imagine that he may have used his knowledge (of HYDRA etc) to make that timeline even better than this one! This leaves the door open for all kinds of new Steve Rogers movies, if they want. Aside from the one about him returning all the stones in Endgame. ;)
Alternate timeline. The plan was:
1. Deliver the stones plus hammer.
2. Return.
What happened was:
1. Deliver the stones plus hammer.
2. See Peggy, team up, get married, fix SHIELD, prevent assassinations, save the earth from whatever new threats come up, have kids and grandkids, get a boat, outlive grandkids because you are super enhanced.
3. Return.
So there’s really no contradiction.
Zodda: I don’t believe for a nanosecond that the Cap we have been watching all this time in general and in Civil War in particular, would allow his best friend to be brainwashed and tortured for decades. I don’t believe that anyone who wasn’t a sociopath would live with a woman as her husband for decades and never once tell her that her life’s work was being undermined by Nazis.
Seriously, how can Steve and Peggy be happy together when he lies to her constantly?
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The article and the comments seem to predicate on a theory that Steve doesn’t tell Peggy anything. Consider the possibility where Steve goes back, tells Peggy everything and why it must not be changed no matter who much the desire to do so because the consequences of changing it are worse. the article also doesn’t account for how much Steve changes in the 5 years after failing to stop Thanos plus all the events that occur that we do see. I can see post endgame Steve saying, I did my bit for queen and country
But the Russo brothers did say that there were two time lines.
“If Cap were to go back into the past and live there, he would create a branched reality,” Joe explained. “The question then becomes, how is he back in this reality to give the shield away?” Source: https://ew.com/movies/2019/04/30/avengers-endgame-russo-brothers-captain-america/
Getting back is a no-brainer with his easy access to Hank Pym, Stark father and son, etc. courtesy of Peggy and SHIELD. He just needs to ask them, as a favor, to figure out how he can return to the old time line after Peggy dies.
Knowing Cap, he will rescue Bucky, stop HYDRA, and other important things that will make his timeline a lot nicer but duller one than the Marvel one.
krad: I have to concede it sounds a lot worse when you put it that way. I hereby change my headcanon to alternate universe where Steve and Peggy live a long and happy life together fighting everyone everywhere and after her death Steve returns to the prime universe via unknown means to hand off the shield.
Again, the final shot of Endgame made me so happy that I will engage in whatever doublethink is necessary to hold onto that feeling.
Whether or not you think it’s acceptable, there is a five year period between the last two movies where Steve Rogers may have become a somewhat different person. We only see a glimpse of him in the counseling session and dropping in on Natasha, but he doesn’t exactly seem to be the same old Cap. A lot of things changed around him and changed him. I don’t find it hard to believe with all that he went through, he might have gotten a little bit of Tony Stark in him (let me have my life, I’ve done my part) just as Tony got a little of Cap in him at that last moment when he activated the Infinity Stones and sacrificed himself.
I vote for same timeline (not alternate) and that Cap went back in time knowing his work was done and his noninterference was a choice because as a mortal, he couldn’t know what affect his actions would have. It’s like the question of whether you would go back in time and kill baby Hitler. How do you know you wouldn’t have made things worse? Imagine a Stalin-led Soviet Union with nothing standing in its way in Europe (as one permutation). It’s something like those discussions theological types like to have about how god can see everything but would choose to do nothing because humans have to have free will.
“If I see a situation pointed south, I can’t ignore it.”
–Steve Rogers, Captain America: Civil War
That’s all the evidence I need to believe that Steve couldn’t sit on his hands for 70 years.
@31 – Just want to point out that your quote was already quoted in the article :)
I definitely think that Cap absolutely would have told Peggy everything, probably right after that dance. I could see them deciding, together, to not mess with the timeline.
But I like my first post’s idea better.
I’m inclined to believe the directors over the scriptwriters, and if they say it’s a branched timeline, it is. After all, the directors have the final say (barring the studio) on how the movie is cut, and how what was written and shot gets assembled, even if they don’t say the branched timeline on screen.
And also, there is NO WAY Steve lived through all those decades without exposing HYDRA, saving Bucky, etc.
@5 – Theo16: Retiring after his other self is thawed is my take.
@26/bguy: “Do we know definitively that Cap didn’t change the timeline regarding HYDRA and Bucky and so forth? Unless and until someone in a post-Endgame movie/tv show makes reference to the events from the earlier movies, it’s conceivable that Cap did change the past and those events no longer happened.”
Don’t forget Professor Hulk’s whole spiel about how that conventional Back to the Future view of time travel making an event “no longer happen” is total nonsense, both in the MCU and in actual theory and logic. “No longer” means “at a later time.” How can the same moment in time be later than itself?? It’s meaningless. If there are two or more versions of the same moment, then by definition they are simultaneous, in parallel to each other. So the only possible way to “change” an event is to create a parallel version that exists alongside it rather than “replacing” it. Endgame is one of the few movies to get that right.
So no matter what, the original MCU timeline still exists, exactly the same as it was before. The only two possibilities are the ones enumerated in the article — Steve was in the MCU timeline all along and let all the bad stuff happen, or he was in an alternate timeline where his presence made things go differently.
@30 & 33: I don’t agree that Steve changed in that 5-year gap. What was the first thing we saw him doing after the time jump? Helping people. Supporting people in need. He didn’t change one bit. Only his methods changed, not his character.
Simply existing in the past creates an alternate timeline even for a split second. Existing for 70+ years you would impact things significantly even if you were trying not to. Anyone not born yet is highly at risk of not being born as they were in the original timeline. Very few stories get that right.
Keith, you said what I have been saying for weeks, but far more eloquently. The Cap I have admired since I was ten years old (I have been reading comics since the days he was first thawed from the ice) would never have sat back and let things happen without doing his best to make the world a better place. For him, being able to fight the good fight alongside his beloved Peggy would have been all the reward he needed.
@38:
‘“No longer” means “at a later time.” How can the same moment in time be later than itself?? It’s meaningless.’
I think you are getting bogged down in semantics. Change “those events no longer happened” to “those events didn’t happen” if that sounds better to you.
“If there are two or more versions of the same moment, then by definition they are simultaneous, in parallel to each other.”
But there aren’t two or more versions of the same moment if a time traveler changes the past. If Cap goes back in time and exposes the HYDRA infiltration of SHIELD, then the events we saw in Winter Solider just flat out never happened, and you only have one moment.
“So no matter what, the original MCU timeline still exists, exactly the same as it was before. The only two possibilities are the ones enumerated in the article — Steve was in the MCU timeline all along and let all the bad stuff happen, or he was in an alternate timeline where his presence made things go differently.”
I feel like we missed a step in your argument there. Why exactly do you think that Steve being in the MCU timeline all along and making changes to it is impossible? What makes that any less probably than branching timelines or time being immutable?
I would think that there would have to be an alternate timeline involved. Where else would Steve have gotten a completely undamaged vibranium Shield to pass on to Sam Wilson?
@41/bguy: I’m not getting “bogged down,” I’m explaining the rules of time travel that were actually used in the movie, which also have the advantage of being scientifically correct for a change. Endgame made it quite clear that the usual time-travel-movie fantasy of the past being “overwritten” is not how it works in the MCU. Changes to the past can only create a parallel branch. They cannot replace the original version of events in the main timeline. If you didn’t get that, then you need to see the movie again. You’re unthinkingly assuming the usual, wrong movie version of time travel applies here too, and they went to considerable lengths in the movie to make it clear that it doesn’t.
“Why exactly do you think that Steve being in the MCU timeline all along and making changes to it is impossible? What makes that any less probably than branching timelines or time being immutable?”
Whaaaa?? The reason it’s impossible to change the original timeline is because the only possibilities are branching timelines or a single immutable timeline. Again, that is explained in the movie itself as the time-travel model they are using. It’s true there for the same reason that the existence of Asgard or the Quantum Realm is true there — because that’s what they explained is real in the movie, so that’s what’s real in the movie. The fact that it happens to be scientifically valid in reality too is just a bonus.
I’m going with the alternate timeline where Steve and Peggy get together and they fight Hydra, etc.
How he got back to the “original” timeline isn’t so hard as you think. Remember the Quantum Realm? Turn right you get original timeline, turn left you get the alternate. All Steve had to do was re-enter the Quantum Realm and turn right at the proper time. He had the Quantum GPS already, so he’d only need Pym Particles, which wouldn’t be hard if we posit that Pym stayed with SHIELD the whole time.
Also, would add that Steve showing up on the bench a few yards from the time platform thingy tells me he came back before he left so no one would see him appear, changed from the quantum suit to regular clothes and was hanging in the shadows waiting to go sit down on the bench.
Another thing that I found interesting in that last scene with Bucky and Sam was that when Sam went to approach Steve, Bucky nodded his head like “its OK” for Sam to go forward. In the movie theater, I said out loud “he knew”. Bucky knew what Steve was doing when he left to return the stones and he knew Steve was gonna turn over the shield to Sam. He let Sam have his moment on purpose. Thats a lifelong best friend move.
You gotta take this theory just one step further: when he goes back and talks to Peg, she’s now aware that *her* Cap is still alive under the ice. She’s clearly doubling SHIELD’s efforts to find him. Old Steve can help, he’ll have a pretty good idea where he put the ship down. They’ll Dethaw him early. Now this young Cap is the Cap Peggy fell in love with, fully optimistic having just defeated Red skull and Hydra, without at least a decade of the mourning, fighting and losing that Old Cap has gone through. It’d be out of character for him to get in the way of their relationship and he’d just be happy to live in a universe where Peggy is happy.
But of course we know old Cap marries *someone*, someone he doesn’t want to talk to Sam about. Who might that be? Who might Sam be upset about Cap being with? Well, my theory is… SAM’S GRANDMOTHER
@45 Wow! That does not go in the direction I expected at all, but feels really plausible. Well done!
Alternate timeline. Definitely.
@44 I agree that Bucky knew. My headcanon is that Old Steve has actually been back a while and briefed Bucky at some point on it. Probably didn’t tell Bucky “Oh and by the way you’re going to turn to dust but it’ll be ok we bring you back after 5 years.” though.
@Keith I share your puzzlement with the scriptwriters seeming to forget the Captain America they had written for 5 previous movies. The alternate timeline vs. current timeline thing is a big one, but at least it goes away if you just insist (as I do) that it is an alternate timeline and Steve Rogers didn’t just leave Hydra, Bucky and all of the other terrible things alone.
A smaller one, but one that cannot be explained away, is how they characterized 2012 Cap when he and Post-snap Cap fought in Stark Tower. Yes, 2012 Cap assumed he was fighting Loki. But when he knocks Post-snap Cap down, and then says “I can do this all day.” that was WRONG. Steve Rogers doesn’t taunt people he just knocked down. He’ll warn them to stay down, but the “I can do this all day.” quote is after he GETS knocked down. That could have been a very simple change in how the scene was written/shot. Post-snap Cap knocks 2012 Cap down and says “Stay down. I’m not Loki, but I AM leaving.” and 2012 Cap stands back up and says “I can do this all day.” Post-snap Cap could still be out of breath and say “I know, I know.” Still funny.
But they messed it up.
@43:
“I’m explaining the rules of time travel that were actually used in the movie, which also have the advantage of being scientifically correct for a change.”
A character in the movie said those were the rules of time travel. That doesn’t mean that character is correct. (Remember Bruce Banner helped create Ultron, so he is hardly infallible.)
“You’re unthinkingly assuming the usual, wrong movie version of time travel applies here too, and they went to considerable lengths in the movie to make it clear that it doesn’t.”
Are insults really necessary?
And anyway you are incorrect on my view of how time travel works in the movie. I actually did take away from the movie the same view you did, that in the Marvel Universe, trying to change the past creates an alternate timeline. However, Krad’s article presupposes that that is not the case and that Captain America was still in the same timeline the entire time. (Otherwise there is no character assassination of Cap with the ending because there is no reason to think that he didn’t do all the things that Krad wanted him to do and it just created an alternate timeline when he exposed HYDRA and saved Bucky and JFK and MLK.) Thus if we start from the proposition that there is no branching off into alternate timelines (which again is a necessary premise for Krad’s entire article) then why is it impossible that Cap could have overwritten the past?
“The fact that it happens to be scientifically valid in reality too is just a bonus.”
This is the part of your argument I was actually interested in and was hoping you would elaborate on: why the branching timelines theory is the scientifically valid one.
I’m on the fence about this one. The writers’ preferred option is that it’s a time loop: he had to go back because he always had been back.
We hate those.
For this to be true, it needs one of two things: as KRAD proposes, Roger’s character suddenly shifts from active to passive, allowing events to unfold as they did before, or something much more depressing is taking place. This alternative has everything happening as it did *despite* Cap’s best efforts. He’s a superhero, but he’s just one man. Despite knowing Bucky is out there, he never finds him. He warns Howard and Maria an assassin is after them, but doesn’t know the exact location they’re killed. They change their planned route, but like Franz Ferdinand they end up encountering Bucky by accident. Rogers confides in his wife Peggy about HYDRA, but all they are able to accomplish is ensure parts of SHEILD remain pure. He tries to warn MLK, but they don’t trust him. He tries to stop Oswald, only to realise to late there really was a sniper on the grassy knoll (who happens to be Kennedy from a dark future timeline). Maybe the only reason Regan survived being shot was because Rogers was there, unable to stop him being shot, but stopped him being killed. Maybe the some of the warnings about 911 to the White House came from SHEILD, and they trusted people to do the right thing, so didn’t intervene personally (4 planes, one man), but were ignored.
But it was awfully convenient for Fury and Coulson to happen to be in all those places at the right time…
Rogers is just one man. He couldn’t be everywhere. Expecting him to have that much impact on the time line is asking a lot.
Mom the other hand, the directors have said he went to an alternate timeline. In that scenario, I don’t see Roger’s being mean to his younger self, so we get an infinite loop of timelines. In each permutation, and old Roger’s defrosts young Roger’s, towels him off, perhaps sends him on a few adventures with the Avengers, and then sends him back to create a new timeline with notes on where Old Rogers messed up, and suggestions on how he could improve things even more. Notes like: Yondu’s a bit rough, but a nice guy. Make sure he doesn’t kidnap Quill. That sort of thing.
My problem with the argument as posed is that it assumes Steve either has to be taking public, heroic action, or quietly sitting back on his ass doing nothing. There are tons of things he could have been doing all along while keeping incognito: taking up Sam Wilson’s mantle and working with soldiers who have come back from WWII (and the Korean War, and Vietnam); marching with the Civil Rights movement; helping to further women’s rights and gay rights, etc. Hell, just being a straight white male ally for most of those things in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s would have been unusual and welcomed. The stuff with Hydra and Bucky sucked, but he knows how it turned out. He doesn’t need to try to go back and change it.
The Steve I saw back in the first Captain America movie isn’t out for glory or trying to change the world; he just doesn’t like bullies. It’s not hard to find ways t fight them without being an actual literal superhero. Personally, I love the idea of Steve doing his part without trying to change the history he knows happened.
As for the modern-day reunion with Peggy with dementia, it is impressive how well that scene works if you read it as Peggy reliving Steve coming back in 1948.
I personally think that Bucky Barnes really was dead in the comics until one of the bad guys (red Skull, yeah?) pulled yet another Cosmic Cube, Make Cap Unhappy, “reality alteration” move. That’s how we got The Falcon too. So… must have affected the Cinematic Universe, too.
So, tell me, how many characters am I allowed to substitute with Life Model Decoys (robot duplicates) to fix this plotting?
Or… there’s a thing where going back in time means that you don’t remember anything that happened after, say it’s 1948, specifically so that you don’t alter the timeline. Either because that’s how it works or because you choose to do that. So then… Time Traveller Cap stays out of changing history because he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.
Captain America going to Asgard prior to The Dark World is interesting since Chris Evans made a cameo in that movie (Loki disguised himself briefly as Cap).
I think it *has* to be an alternate universe scenario, regardless of what the writers might say, because if it weren’t, the whole climax of the movie wouldn’t make any sense. Consider that Thanos dies twice in the movie; once by Thor at the beginning, and once by being Snapped away at the end. The Snapped-Away Thanos had to come from an alternate dimension, otherwise there’d be a paradox where Stark killing Thanos meant the original Snap didn’t happen because Thanos was dead before he could accomplish it, meaning that Endgame wouldn’t have happened and there wouldn’t be a Future Nebula to go back to the past to tip off Thanos in the first place. Also, pre-GotG Gamora ends up staying in the present despite her death directly leading to the Snap, so that Gamora must be from an alternate universe as well. All the evidence points to true time travel being logically impossible no matter what theories the characters have in-universe (presumably Cap didn’t actually need to return the Stones, though that may have ended up with a bunch of alternate universes where the Stones just vanished), and the Quantum Realm travel simply happening between alternate (but similar) dimensions at different places along their respective time tracks.
@48/bguy: No insult was intended. It’s hard to step back and think about the meanings of words and concepts you take for granted. That’s why so many time travel stories cling to the bogus, self-contradictory model — because their writers haven’t ever stepped back and looked closely at what the concept of “change” means and how it implicitly entails the passage of time, and why it’s therefore contradictory to talk about changing time itself. The problem with taking things for granted is that you don’t even realize you’re doing it, so most people rarely stop to think about the basic definitions and implications of the words they use every day. And time travel is so counterintuitive that it’s especially hard to recognize why our conventional expectations don’t apply.
The problem with most time-travel stories is that they assume the time traveler’s subjective perception of the order of events is more “real” than the way the rest of the universe experiences it, which is dramatically satisfying but absurdly solipsistic. Objectively speaking, if a time traveler goes back and relives a past event, that event is not happening a second time; it happens once but there are two copies of the time traveler there, because that individual’s worldline looped back on itself. So if there are two versions of that event — one without the time traveler’s intervention (“before” from their perspective) and one with their intervention (“after” from their perspective), then objectively they happen at the same time, and if they happen differently, that requires them to be in parallel to each other. It only looks to the time traveler like one has “replaced” the other, because that’s the order the time traveler experiences them in as a result of looping back on themselves.
@50/hummingrose: You make some interesting points, but still, as Keith said, it’s hard to believe that Steve would just let Bucky be tortured for decades or let SHIELD be infiltrated by Hydra. Yes, he knows those turned out okay in the end, but he also knows that they entailed enormous suffering and loss for decades before the end. If he could have done something about that, he would have tried. Either he tried and failed in the MCU timeline, or he tried and succeeded in a different one.
@53/MisterKerr: ” (presumably Cap didn’t actually need to return the Stones, though that may have ended up with a bunch of alternate universes where the Stones just vanished)”
Yes, that was explained in the rooftop scene with the Ancient One. Returning the Stones wasn’t about “fixing” the timeline; it was about making sure that the inhabitants of those parallel timelines that resulted from the changes would still have access to the Infinity Stones when they needed them to prevent Malekith, Ronan, Dormammu, etc. from killing huge numbers of people. The fact that events were changed in the past means those timelines were split off permanently. Even a small difference still creates a new branch, and the people in that branch are real and their deaths would be real. So it would be cruel to leave them without the Stones that could save them from horrible fates.
So Steve returning the Stones to those other universes was an act of compassion, of being a good neighbor, not some trick of temporal bookkeeping. His timeline didn’t need him to return the Stones, but the inhabitants of the other timelines did.
Put it this way: how could the world ever learn from mistakes and progress if every terrible event was prevented by a superhero? And at what point would Cap’s well-intended “fixes” cross the line into Thanos-style supervillainy?
If he indeed resides in the same timeline he by definition cannot change anything that happened for fear that it changes the outcome of the infinity war snap. I would say he was bound entirely by uncertainty and realistically unable to do a damn thing until everything played out the way it was supposed to and he appeared on the bench to hand off the shield. For someone like Steve Rogers, it must have been excruciating to watch it all happen.
Since I don’t want to pay for a story about a character who’s as likeable, trustworthy, and heroic as The Goddamn Batman, I won’t buy any MCU movies or print tie-ins from here on.
But I was losing interest already, because the writers wouldn’t let the characters just relax and be friends onscreen before they started Civil War, which robbed that plot arc of a lot of its emotional impact.
@53: So the question is how did Cap know that returning the Stones would be an act of compassion specifically for the timelines where they were taken, and not create yet another alternate timeline where they were returned, leaving the “original” ones where they were taken (not to be confused with the actual original MCU timeline) intact, with Dormammu, Ronin, etc. wreaking havoc? Logic would dictate that you can’t really return to a specific timeline at any point before you (or anything from that timeline that influenced your own) left it, necessitating the alternate universe explanation to avoid paradoxes. I guess at some point Cap figured out how to target exact timelines in this manner (meaning that old Cap had to arrive in the future in the brief window between when young Cap went back and Sam looked over at the bench); otherwise, taking the Stones back wouldn’t be an act of mercy for those timelines where they were taken, just for the ones where they were taken and returned, which arguably didn’t *exist* until Cap actually traveled to them…?
Chief O’Brien was right, I *hate* temporal mechanics…
@58/MisterKerr: The thing is, if Steve returns to one of those timelines after its creation, then presumably his return is simply part of its events. A new timeline only branches off if you make something happen differently than it did before, if there’s a contradiction introduced. The simplest interpretation is that Steve simply came back and returned each Stone briefly after it was taken. So everything in each alternate timeline happened the way we saw it in the movie — time travelers arrived, Stone removed, etc. — but presumably just after those events, Future Steve popped back in and gave back the Stone that was just taken moments before. Since it doesn’t contradict anything within that timeline, there’s no need for it to branch off yet another timeline.
@ChristopherLBennett – why Bucky, more than all the other people in the world who are suffering and dealing with loss? Yes, Bucky is his very good friend. (I won’t go into whether they are anything more than that.)
But it’s one thing for him to prioritize finding Bucky after the end of Winter Soldier – something he specifically took time off from for Ultron, and presumably other Avengers-related shenanigans we don’t see – and another thing to launch what would pretty much have to be a one-man excursion into the height of the Soviet empire to find a frozen experimental subject who likely doesn’t remember him. Yes, it sucks, badly, for Bucky in the interim. But of all the people in the world, Bucky is one of the few who he knows will survive and recover.
There really isn’t any reason to believe that Steve was there all along, that theory relies on people having preconceived notions of time travel from other media that are in direct contradiction with the rules established in this movie. It only works because people make an assumption which the evidence does not back up.
Also there is no particular reason why Cap would have to put the Stones back exactly where they were taken from, just the correct time and reality would do. There were already too many changes made to those timelines for them to return to their original courses so putting the Stones back exactly would be pointless. Putting the Aether back into Jane is stupid and putting the Soul Stone back in that test on Vormir is actively cruel.
One thing that should be said about Cap living in an alternate reality however is that he would be leaving the himself of that timeline frozen in the ice, when that Cap thaws he’s going to be pretty miffed that some other him from another universe popped in to to have a full life with Peggy while he was gone. Then he’ll end up jumping to another parallel world to another iteration of Peggy. Then the Cap from that timeline… well you get the idea. Or our Cap could prematurely unfreeze the other him and they Both marry that Peggy.
@61/ChocolateRob: Exactly. Like I said, it’s not about putting time “back on track,” it’s just about making sure the people in those timelines still have the Stones so they can fight the bad guys with them. It doesn’t matter if the circumstances of how they got them are different, as long as they have them.
Although the flaw in that logic is that neither Malekith, Ronan, nor Loki would’ve been as dangerous without their respective Stones in the first place. (I’m referring to the Tesseract in Loki’s case, in the timeline where Tony took it from Camp Lehigh in the ’70s.)
I don’t think there’s a character assassination at all going on. The problem with every example given is that A) relies on Steve having impeccable knowledge of past events, and B) somehow being able to act without severely damaging the timeline as we know it. It’s fun to think of Steve diving out in front of Kennedy and catching the bullets on his shield, but how can we (or he) know whether this is ‘good’? Perhaps in this hypothetical timeline, JFK goes on to start a nuclear war or something along those lines.
It goes even deeper than this: people have brought up Bucky’s decades-long torture, and how it doesn’t make sense for Steve to let him be tortured, yet it isn’t clear whether Steve would know where Bucky was, nor (even if he freed him from Hydra) it isn’t clear how he could help him. It isn’t like he has Wakana to rely on in the 60s, for example. Stopping the Starks from dying might mean that Tony never develops into the man he needs to be in order to protect the world, and so on.
I mean, I’d venture that this is quite literally written into the fabric of the plot; when they reverse Thanos’ snap, they don’t turn back the clock 5 years, even though those 5 years have been painful and horrible for so many, because for all that suffering, good things have happened too. Steve isn’t god, he can’t possibly foresee what would happen if he messed around with nearly a century of history, even to correct wrongs. And he knows it, which is why he’s willing to sit things out, IMO.
@54 The problem is, returning the stone to the alternate timeline just creates a second branch, there’s a branch where there’s people left without an Xstone and end up screwed because of it. Returning to the timeline isn’t actually compassionate, because nothing has changed, save that you now have two timelines where the stone is present, and one where it’s not.
However, the way the movie talks about it– especially the scene with Bruce and AO, it’s my understanding that it is possible to return the stone to the timeline and ‘repair it’.
@63/xomic: I don’t agree that returning has to create yet another branch. As I said, it only creates another branch if it contradicts what already happened. We didn’t see what happened in those new timelines after the Avengers left, so we don’t know that Steve didn’t return the Stones just a little bit later. Just because that event came later in Steve’s and our subjective perception of chronology, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t “already” part of the causal sequence of events in those timelines.
Here’s a graphic that shows the idea more clearly: https://imgur.com/4L6tN5u
@64/chris Right, but by definition the same is true of the “original” timeline as well. There’s nothing in the movie that suggests that this would be otherwise. In the original timeline, the stones briefly disappeared before returning. No branching what so ever.
I know people will point to thinks like Loki escaping, but it seems to me that given Steve steps onto that time travel pad with A) Thor’s Hammer, and all the powers that go with it, and B) a suitcase full of infinity stones, he had both the means and motivation to hunt down and correct aberrations like Loki escaping. In the “original timeline”, in the aftermath of the movie, which we don’t see, Loki disappears– but later turns up in a closet, somewhat dazed. Everyone shrugs this off because it’s Loki, but in fact he’s only there because Steve tracked him down and brought him back.
In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say this seems likely what actually happened; Tony’s Arc reactor blew a fuse, and he had a heart attack. Thor saved him. Later, Tony finds that one of the fuses had fallen out of alignment (or whatever) and blames it on the battle. But, in fact it was always caused by Antman. That’s why Tony seems so certain he’ll survive the experience, because he already had the experience, he just didn’t understand the cause of it.
So, let me get this straight: if I understand correctly, these are the rules of MCU time/dimensional travel:
1) *Any* travel into the past isn’t literally a trip to the past of your own timeline, but a trip to (and possibly creation of) an alternate timeline that matches yours precisely up until the point you emerge in the past.
2) Travel to the future from your current point is controllable, taking you back to your original timeline, the future of the timeline you traveled back to, or possibly even a third timeline that you originally had no relation to (like, for example, how past-brainwashed Nebula and past Thanos (and possibly his forces) could arrive in the climax of Endgame in a timeline they had no prior interactions with).
3) Once you are aware of a timeline, you can travel to it, as long as you travel to a point in time after any other travel from your timeline to that one has occurred. This can include a point that is considered in the past from your current timeline, as long as it’s in the future from any other interaction between your timeline and that timeline. (This is how Cap returned the stones to their “original” timelines without splitting off even more timelines.)
Also, not actually a rule, but 4) Some combination of Tony/Dr. Strange/Bruce/Ant-Man/some other MCU Smart Guy(TM) figured all this out, which is why they were able to accomplish everything they did (and presumably why they had to undo the Snap from the current point in time, to avoid even more alternate timeline shenanigans). Cap also figured this out, which is why, when he decided to live out his 1940’s life (creating an alternate timeline in the process where he may or may not have saved JFK or Bucky or whatever else people speculate about), he couldn’t return to the original MCU to explain himself until a point after his younger self had left back into the past.
Does that sound right?
If those rules are correct, that also means that we’re dealing with (at least) three timelines in Endgame:
Timeline A: The main MCU timeline, where all the movies happened the way we saw them. There was no time traveling happening anywhere, no stable time loops, nothing of the sort. Thanos collects the Stones a la Infinity War, Snaps, destroys the Stones and gets murdered by Thor. Five years pass, Ant-Man pops out of the Quantum Realm, they decide to implement their time travel plan.
Timeline B: The “past”, aka the timeline the A group travels to in order to collect the Stones before the Snap. Cap-A fights Cap-B, Tony-A has a heart-to-heart with Howard-B, Loki-B escapes with the Tesseract, and eventually they accidentally bring Nebula-B back to Timeline A, who paves the way for Thanos-B to invade A during the climax (and subsequently get killed by Tony). (There may or may not be more than one Timeline B variation, I’d have to watch the movie again to pick it apart, but for the sake of argument let’s say there’s only one).
Timeline C: After Cap-A pops back into Timeline B to return the Stones, he then jumps back to the 1940’s and creates Timeline C, where he lives with Peggy for decades. This is the timeline we see near the end of Endgame when Steve and Peggy finally have their dance. Nothing else is really known about Timeline C (including what happens to Cap-C), but Old Cap-A (who spent ~70 years in timeline C) pops back into timeline A right after young Cap-A heads into the past (because Cap-A knows that trying to reach timeline A before that point would be impossible and just create yet another timeline), quickly sits down on a bench, and hands his shield off to Sam.
@66/MisterKerr: “1) *Any* travel into the past isn’t literally a trip to the past of your own timeline, but a trip to (and possibly creation of) an alternate timeline that matches yours precisely up until the point you emerge in the past.”
No, that’s overthinking it. Going back in time creates a new timeline branch going forward due to the alterations you cause; it isn’t retroactive. It’s the same single timeline up to that point, then it forks into two parallel ones, the unaltered one and the altered one. See the chart I linked to above.
On point 2, Past Nebula came back with the Avengers because she stole 2023 Nebula’s suit and its homing device for going back to where it came from. She then opened the portal on her end to let Thanos come through.
On point 3, yeah, that sounds about right.
On point 4, physicists like Igor Novikov and David Deutsch already figured out the theory in the ’80s and ’90s, which is how the filmmakers were able to get it right when they asked real scientists how it would work. All the Science Bros has to figure out was how to put it into practice using the Quantum Realm and Pym technology. And Steve knew it because he paid attention to Bruce’s explanation.
As I have said before, the character dialogue in Endgame makes it clear that this is a multiverse cosomology where there are infinitely many timelines. Each decision leads to a new branch. This means that there is no true timeline at all ever, and your actions can never truly affect anything (or, as a superhero, save anyone). Your only manifestation of free will is to control your own solipsistic universe. So they did not just assassinate the character of Steve Rogers. They made the entire concept of a superhero meaningless.
So basically Steve Rogers did exactly what Bruce Wayne did at the end of the Nolan trilogy, sans the mucking with the timeline and I couldn’t be happier.
@69: I disagree with that notion. Just because a multiverse exists doesn’t render superheroes meaningless in this universe. That’s like saying a local brave firefighter isn’t a hero because there’s a similar city on the other side of the world that burned down. Likewise, if you have Timeline A and Timeline B, just because in Timeline B Bob died, saving Bob in timeline A still has meaning to Bob-A. Just because meaning is subjective doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
@61. ChocolateRob: “our Cap could prematurely unfreeze the other him and they Both marry that Peggy”
Peggy was in a poly-marriage?
Seems like a lot of this discussion was hashed out already in the review threads back when the movie came out. Maybe this will be one of those perennials that linger till Disney+ does a story that resolves things. Think there are some rumors of Evans doing some work for them, but perhaps that’s for the Bucky/Falcon series.
My headcanon says Cap went over to the timeline vacated by Thanos when he came forward in time. There, he was the greatest hero of the 20th century. He also launched various cultural trends, possibly even rap/hip hop.
What would really interest me is an explanation of how he gets to Asgard or Vormir. When he sees the Red Skull as the guardian, he tosses him over the cliff for lying to all the gullible people who took him at face value and sacrificed a loved one.
Here’s the way I choose to look at it: the past that Cap could have changed, between 1945 to 2010 or whatever? Nothing that happened during that period is remotely close to Thanos as a threat. He has to keep everything the same to preserve the timeline in which Strange’s one good outcome is possible.
If he changes one thing, that butterfly effect could lead to an outcome in which the snap cannot be reversed for whatever reason.
@64 ChristopherLBennett: The link to the chart’s just giving me a 404 error
First off, the time travel rules explained by Hulk and elaborated further by no less than the Ancient One(with visual aids) indicate that it can only have been a separate timeline. Every instance of time travel creates a new one except if the point of divergence was completely averted(i.e. stones being returned at the exact time they were taken).
As for what Steve did while he was in the past.
1) I don’t think it would have been hard for him to free Bucky. Or eventually, his other self.
2) The infiltration and subversion of SHIELD can be averted rather simply by executing Zola rather than recruit him. It was the presence of such a high profile member of Hydra that allowed them to gain a foothold to begin with.
3) I think he’d draw the line at getting embroiled in the Cold War. He knows it will fizzle out eventually anyway. Plus a lot of America’s actions then weren’t exactly above reproach.
The more I think about it, the better the argument I can come up with Cap going to the past being a good moral decision. Cap is a man of duty, right? So let’s say he makes the decision to go back and be with Peggy. He’s married now, so his new “duty” is to his wife and family. Any time he gets the idea that he needs to go gallivanting off to stop an assassination, he’s got Peggy there to remind him that his first duty is now to the family (Said in the nagging voice of Frozone’s wife, “I AM YO WIFE! I AM THE GREATEST GOOD YOU ARE EVA GONNA GET!”).
Though he’d probably go sneaking around her back every once in a while, listening to the police scanners and stopping local crimes (like Mr. Incredible and Frozone – 2nd “Incredibles” reference I’ve made in this comment). He’d justify it by saying that the little crimes probably weren’t all that history changing, and he’d feel guilty for a few minutes afterward, but when he sees it doesn’t really do anything to alter the major course of history (or make Peggy disappear out of any of his photos), then he figures doing that every once in a while is okay. Plus, we saw how bossy Peggy could be to him in the first Cap movie (and to every other male figure she encountered in the films and her own series). So, her keeping him in check from doing anything too rash, being his new “commander-in-chief” (if you get my drift), makes sense. Heck, that’s probably why he went to the past in the first place, needed someone to look up to he could take orders from.
What a good soldier!
@73. Gaz: “If he changes one thing…”
Dancing with Peggy, then marrying her? Old Man Steve was not married to her in the original timeline. He was still a block of ice. At the end of Endgame, Cap went a did a What if…? That’s all.
Also, I do disagree a little with the author on the bit about Cap being an inhuman monster by choosing Peggy, though. Though it’s hard to believe Steve would turn his back on his duty, they make it pretty clear in the film itself that the Snap traumatized him enough to make a big life-changing decision. And that’s strengthened both by the conversations he has with Tony about settling down and raising a family, the support group at the beginning (everyone discussing what/who they’ve lost, and him putting a brave face on it), and especially the quiet scene where he ends up in Peggy’s office in the past and is obviously longing to be with her again (plus, carrying her picture around with him the entire movie).
My take was that it wasn’t out of character, but that the subtext of the movie showed that he felt like a soldier who had never had the chance to come home from the war, and when he was finally given that chance, he took it. Even ignoring stuff like the JFK assassination could make sense, since he’d lived in the future, learned about what happened in the past, and was just treating the events as if they were a part of history, with him being a passive observer this time. Also, I don’t jive with the “Peggy is now just a trophy” idea. They both loved each other, and she made it abundantly clear in the Agent Carter series that she wasn’t over him. Unless the author sincerely believes that every woman who decides to get married and settle down with the man they love is now automatically a “trophy.”
@74/MisterKerr: The link’s fixed.
@69/Walker: It’s a common misconception that multiverse theory requires every conceivable outcome to occur. It doesn’t. It merely says that multiple realities can exist, that the universal wavefunction is a superposition of multiple causally independent measurement histories.
After all, the idea that every single decision can go either way is simplistic. If you have a specific reason to turn right at an intersection, you’re not going to randomly turn left. A given decision is influenced by multiple prior causal influences that shape its outcome, so it’s usually going to be constrained to turn out a certain way. Even a flipped coin or a roulette ball has its path influenced by the physical factors acting on it, factors we can’t measure in advance but that are still present. Truly random outcomes are rare.
@75/Already: “3) I think he’d draw the line at getting embroiled in the Cold War. He knows it will fizzle out eventually anyway. Plus a lot of America’s actions then weren’t exactly above reproach.”
You remind me of the “Captain America, Commie Smasher” comics they did briefly in the ’50s, which didn’t go over well and which were ignored when the “Cap frozen in ice since WWII” idea was introduced in the ’60s. Later on in the ’70s, they revealed that the “Commie Smasher” Cap had been an impostor whose McCarthyist paranoia got so extreme that the government ended up stashing him (and his impostor Bucky) in suspended animation, and who eventually revived and became a villain. https://www.looper.com/150187/the-strange-deaths-of-captain-america/
@78/Johnathan: I don’t think Keith was proposing that Steve saw Peggy as just a trophy — he was complaining that the writers reduced her role in the film to the equivalent of a trophy for the male lead. We can only speculate about the thinking of fictional characters when they’re off-camera, but we can speak directly about how the characters are portrayed and used within the narrative itself.
However, I agree with the earlier poster who said that it felt less like Steve claiming his prize and more like Steve giving Peggy the happy ending that she’d been deprived of.
My personal HeadCanon, and that’s all we’re discussing here anyway isn’t it?
But my personal HeadCanon is that Steve went back to 1949 found Peggy got married, and became her biggest support and the “Ace up her Sleeve”.
Peggy is working her way up the SHIELD ladder eventually becoming director. Steve is helping her raise the kids, couching Baseball & Soccer. Steve helps Peggy make strategic decisions regarding SHIELD and they groom the right people to take leadership positions. They prevent Hydra from getting a director planted.
He could try to expose Hydra, but with more and more countries getting Nukes and the Cold War tensions ensuring that the Doomsday Clock is always 2 minutes away from destroying the world. Working behind the scenes to prevent Hydra from getting too much power and causing world war 3 is a full time job.
Every now and then, when a nuke ends up in the wrong hands, or a super power experiment goes wrong Steve suits up and saves the day.
Steve steps in in the Cuban Missile Crises. Dumps a couple of nukes overboard before they reach Cuba. Peggy convinces Kennedy to remove American Nukes from Turkey.
He tries to save Bucky but he never finds him, they have him “On Ice” most of the time. He tries to save Tony’s parents, but he has to choose between Tony and his Dad. He saves his friend because if he doesn’t there’s no Iron Man. If theres no Tony, who will he save the world from the Chitauri invasion?
He’s active, and he does a lot of good. Just doesn’t want the spotlight. That’s never been something he wanted or was comfortable with.
Steve going back in time and living a life of his choosing does not equal him living a life that’s out of character.
@50 – hummingrose: But Spider-Man’s old power/responsibility adage is true for Cap too, and it not only applies to his superpowers, but to his knowledge of the future. Cap can do so much more than any other person, that even if being a straight white ally to civil rights movements or a PSTD counselor for soldiers are great things, he would not limit himself to that when he can, and must (according to his values), do the other things.
Even if he didn’t have superpowers, he would not leave Bucky to be tortured and used as a weapon for decades, or Peggy’s life work perverted by HYDRA.
@76 – Jonathan: He’s married, and thus cannot do hero things? You do realize he married PEGGY CARTER, right?
Johnathan: You’re missing the point — by being with Peggy and not telling her about Hydra, he’s undermining her life’s work. There’s no way that he would continue to live with Peggy as her husband and just let her be made a fool of, just let everything she and Howard Stark built come crashing down on the Triskelion by Arnim Zola’s long con. That’s not a happy ending, that’s a sociopath hiding the biggest secret of all from the woman he professes to love.
And that’s not even getting into him just sitting around while his best friend is tortured and brainwashed into an assassin….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Banner also said they can’t change the past to create a new future because the future is their past. Maybe Steve tried repeatedly to change history yet was continually thwarted.
You’re also ignoring the idea that the events we saw play out in the MCU were the *best possible scenarios* of the timeline.
Maybe Steve had to let Kennedy get shot because the alternative was that DC gets nuked. Or maybe in the MCU Kennedy was assassinated 3 weeks earlier at another event. Maybe allowing Hydra to suborn SHIELD was the result of Peggy acting to stymie Zola’s takeover attempt, which would have resulted in a Man In The High Castle scenario.
There are plenty of ways to spin this so that both Steve and Peggy are the real unsung heroes of the world, steering history so that for the most part it ends up being okay by preventing far worse things from occurring.
I don’t know that it is out-of-character for Steve Rogers, the guy that Chris Evans played in these movies, might step down and retire from the Captain America role. The tension between Steve Rogers and Captain America was pretty integral to MCU Rogers. It was believable enough to me that he has done his service, and he would retire from superheroics. Not to say that he would stop being a good person or trying to make a difference, in other ways. Given the reality that Evans wants to be done with the role and will age out of it eventually anyway, it seems reasonable that they would give him this out.
The implications of the time travel and the timeline stuff are way goofier of course. I don’t love the implication that Peggy Carter was married to Steve Rogers all along either–though I don’t think that the screenwriter saying that is what intended is what matters, no one cares what screenwriters say :). If Carter, Sousa, and Rogers were living in some polyamorous relationship for the duration of the 20th Century that would be a fun wrinkle though.
Within the logic of Endgame, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that Rogers would avoid trying to change the timeline. The very nature of the Endgame story showed that while they were able to change their fate, it came with a cost. They were incredibly lucky that they were able to restore half the universe with relatively few casualties; it seems plausible that Rogers wouldn’t want to risk mucking up that victory by meddling further with history.
@83/trike: I think it’s simpler just to believe the directors’ statement that Steve and Peggy got together in an alternate timeline. It requires far fewer handwaves to justify that version. And trying to retcon Steve into the entire past of the MCU would require changing the intent of quite a few story points, which I think would undermine a lot of those stories. The reunion of Steve and Peggy in The Winter Soldier is more poignant if she hasn’t been living with him for the past 60-odd years. The infiltration of Hydra into SHIELD and other walks of life is scarier if they’ve actually been doing it in secret rather than being systematically kept in check by Steve and Peggy at every turn. The version where Steve was there all along, keeping things from getting worse, weakens the stories as they stand, and however clever it may be to play the game of rationalizing that scenario, it’s just not satisfying or desirable on a dramatic level.
@84/Colin: What keeps getting lost here is that under the movie’s time-travel model, Steve can’t alter his own history, no matter how hard he tries. That history exists, period. If he changes anything, that automatically creates a separate branch alongside the unaltered original. So any decision not to change things is arbitrary. He’s not protecting his own timeline by being passive, because his own timeline is not in any danger of changing. All he’s doing is determining his own path through the multiverse — whether he stays in the timeline he came from and remains passive, or splits off into a different one where he can make a difference. Either way, the original timeline is unaffected. So he has no reason not to make the personal choice to help where he can, to create an alternate timeline where some things turn out better.
And the idea that he tries to make changes and is prevented doesn’t work either, not in this movie’s model of temporal physics — because we’ve already seen that time travelers can quite easily make changes that branch off new parallels. In fact, even though the Avengers tried to make minimal changes, they couldn’t help making some pretty big ones by accident. So it doesn’t fit the movie’s logic to suggest that Steve could somehow be unable to alter his own history. By the movie’s own rules, if he goes into the past at all, there are going to be unintended consequences that split off a new history. So it just doesn’t make any sense that he doesn’t end up in an alternate path.
@85
Keith was operating under the screenwriter’s assumption that Rogers existed in the native MCU timeline as Peggy Carter’s husband. Whether that makes coherent time-travel sense or not, if it’s possible it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that Rogers (or one version of Rogers) might live out that life without making waves.
Time travel inherently doesn’t make sense, so I usually look at what the implications of time travel is on the characters, rather than try to figure out if it works–because it never does. So I look at whether this idea of Steve Rogers retiring from being Captain America makes sense. And for this version of the character, it sort of does.
@86/Colin R: I think that Keith was not so much “operating under” that assumption as explaining why it makes no damn sense. If he had been part of history all along, it’s not plausible that history would’ve turned out the way it did.
“Time travel inherently doesn’t make sense”
No, the usual fictional model of time travel, where a single timeline can be “changed,” is what doesn’t make sense. The physically accurate model used in Endgame (and a very few other movies like Star Trek (2009) and maybe Source Code) makes perfect sense, because it’s completely self-consistent and free of contradiction. If there are two different ways a single event unfolds, then they unfold in separate, independent timelines, and thus each single timeline’s history is perfectly consistent and logical. In this version of time travel, there are no paradoxes, no moral dilemmas, no risk of any reality being “erased.” That’s why most time-travel stories favor the more fanciful model, because paradoxes and dilemmas and risks are dramatically interesting. But this model is far, far simpler and more straighforward once you get the hang of it, and it allows for telling stories that avoid all that confusing baggage. Which is why it worked for Endgame — because the story and the problems they had to solve were already complicated enough without the further complication of a mutable reality.
I understand that model of time travel is handier for resolving internal storytelling contradictions, but I don’t really feel like Endgame time travel was free of dilemmas or potential moral consequences. If traveling through time involves creating new timestreams it’s still going to involve unintended consequences. Like say, creating timelines where an unreformed Loki is running around with a Tesseract.
It’s interesting to wonder what happens in the timeline where Thanos just disappeared in 2014 though.
@88/Colin R: True, but that’s just the same kind of dilemma you’d face in any other story — the kind where the unintended consequences are to the future (i.e. what Loki does next now that he’s escaped) rather than to your own past. Yes, chronologically speaking, the change was in the past, but only in an alternate past, so from a causal standpoint it’s still a “new” series of events.
@64/@79: OK, so according to your chart, my timelines were mostly right; you just split them up more than I did (one separate timeline for each trip into the past). I guess my only remaining question is why did Steve wait ~70 years living in timeline 5 before hopping back to the main MCU timeline to tell everyone what happened? Was there some sort of time travel logic reason, or did he just forget until he was that old? I can picture it now: he was just puttering around the house in Timeline 5’s 2023 when suddenly he thought, “Oh, yeah! I should probably go tell everyone in that other timeline where I’ve been for so long, I guess. I’ll probably also give this universe’s shield over to Sam, because the Steve Rogers of this universe got thawed out 70 years ago and both he and I have been living in a polyamorous marriage with Peggy/got thawed out recently and he now has to live through the pain of losing Peggy just like I did (sucker!)/is still frozen but I swiped his shield/got thawed out recently but went back in time to make his very own ‘lived with Peggy’ timeline.”
@90/MisterKerr: To clarify, the chart is not mine; I just found it online. I don’t know who created it, since the link doesn’t seem to have any attribution or user info.
I am just not seeing how “great responsibility” translates to “must save Bucky from being tortured,” I guess. I’d also note that Steve is not the guy who figured out how time travel works and, as far as we know, is operating under the rules as Bruce explained them, which come down to “you can’t change your own past.”
Also, as ChocolateRob noted, if Steve goes to a parallel dimensio, there’s going to be a Capsicle hanging out on ice waiting to be found. If MCU Steve becomes the Captain America for that dimension, what happens to the frozen one? Does MCU Steve try to wake him up early? (In which case, why would Peggy choose the Steve from the future instead of the younger, less well-traveled Steve?) Does MCU Steve leave him there with the knowledge that he’s basically stealing frozen Steve’s life and that that one will wake up in a world where another Captain America has existed for the last 70 years? Or does he take steps to make sure frozen Steve is never found? (Dark Cap!)
To add to my previous comment, it’s one thing for him to beat up his prior self when the fate of the universe is on the line. It’s another thing entirely for him to screw with an alternate Steve’s life so he can have a happy ending with Peggy. The only timeline he could possibly be comfortable doing that in is his own.
The problem with using time travel in a branching multiverse is that you never actually prevent the disaster you traveled back to fix, only create yet another branch where things were fixed. So in the original timeline, nothing ever changes, and nothing you do really matters. Kind of robs all the meaning out of a narrative, and takes the stakes out of the story.
@92/hummingrose: I don’t really see the problem. Any career Captain America had in the ’40s, ’50s, etc. would be long over by the time 2012 rolled around. Even with supersoldier serum, we can presume he had maybe only 4 good decades in him before he slowed down and had to retire, so he’s still out of the picture by around 1990 at the latest, and that means the board is still clear when young Cap is thawed out about 20 years later. And then Old Cap can be a mentor for Young Cap, the Bruce Wayne to his Terry McGinnis, except it’s the same guy and he’s not as grumpy.
@94: I think that’s the whole point of the movie, though. They couldn’t go back and prevent the Snap, or any disaster, from occurring in their timeline (otherwise they would’ve just gone back and bumped Thanos off in the past, or told past Thor to aim for the head, or whatever), but they could undo the damage in the present, which is what they ended up doing. The only reason they had to go into the past at all is because that’s where the tools (i.e. the Stones) were that they needed in order to fix the present. They weren’t trying to change history, only borrow something that they needed.
@95: I don’t know how I’d feel about that if I were Young Cap in that situation. “Hey, Steve, sorry you were frozen in ice for seventy years, but don’t worry; I’m an alternate you from another dimension who totally married your old girlfriend and had seventy great years with her that you’ll never have. Oh, well, have fun fighting supervillains! Call me if you need some tips!”
@97/MisterKerr: Well, it’s not as if Thawed Steve had a chance at a life with Peggy anyway. That was long gone by the time he woke up. At least he could take comfort in the fact that a version of himself had that life — and, more importantly, that Peggy got the happy ending she deserved. Because he’s not the kind of guy who’d only think about his own feelings. If he were that selfish, Erskine would never have chosen him to begin with.
I think even Cap would have a hard time forgiving an alternate version of himself who knew where he was, knew that he could be thawed out, and did nothing about it in order to make time with Peggy. That’s selfish.
Yeah, I’m gonna need an explanation about what happened to PopsicleCap in Timeline B, because it doesn’t jive with his character that he’d leave himself like that. Maybe “our” Cap found a reality where their Cap died instead of ending up frozen?
@100 – It’s not a different reality, just a different timeline.
I am becoming partial to the headcanon that the Steve dancing with Peggy is a thawed-out original Steve (which therefore also means branched timeline). What “our” Steve does with the rest of his life is a good question.
I think that the conclusion of Endgame is an excellent example of Postmodernism thought. Journalist Matt Ellis recently described in an article published on fangraphs how postmodernist views have affected baseball in such areas as uniform design and even roster construction, As he describes it, “Postmodern thought might be skeptical of big grand narratives or concepts like absolute truth, and have a difficult time conceiving of actual history in the era of hyper-networked, globalized digital economies.”
In a completely postmodern line of thinking there is no absolute, Steve Rogers was always who he is and is who he always was. Don’t worry about what any script writer or producer says., whether there is one multi-verse timeline or many is irrelevant because you will realize that truth was “whatever he was saying now, which might sound different, but is the same thing he was saying then, you see, because what happened is actually what he meant all along.”
@102: Ooh, I like that idea, that Cap-A (from the MCU timeline) thawed out Cap-B (from the alternate timeline) in the 40’s and Cap-B ended up with Peggy while Cap-A continued to do the superhero thing. That way Cap-A was *choosing* to do the altruistic thing knowing that Peggy would be happy and taken care of, instead of the other scenario (where Cap-A lives with Peggy for 70 years and thaws out Cap-B in the 2010’s), where Cap-B is kinda forced to do the altruistic thing and just be OK with it.
Though I think it would be cool if Cap-A thawed out Cap-B in the 40’s but they *both* lived with her, just making sure that only one of them was seen in public at any time for propriety’s sake, though that opens up a whole new can of worms about the morality of one woman being married to two men who just happen to be the same man from alternate dimensions. But hey, even Cap liked America’s a$$… (and that’s as far as I’m going down that road…)
@101/Austin: Fiction has always used terms like “timeline,” “reality,” “universe,” “dimension,” etc. interchangeably when talking about alternate versions of the world and its history.
@102 & 104: The problem with the idea of finding Steve decades earlier is that the technology wouldn’t have been available that far back. A sustained search of the ocean floor would probably have been impossible back when it had to be done by people in diving bells rather than by robot drones. Even the Titanic wasn’t found until 1985, after decades of searching. Now, Steve might’ve known the general area where he went down, but would he have memorized the exact coordinates?
The MCU had technology in the 40s that is somewhat different than we have now. I don’t think that’s an insurmountable problem, especially if you have access to time travel.
@104: MisterKerr: ” But hey, even Cap liked America’s a$$…”
That’s a legitimate road. If the idea is to give Peggy a happy ending, why not do it times two. She could’ve handled them both, I’d guess. And there could be two public Caps in this world because Thanos is already gone from it, so no threat of a Snappening in it’s future.
Another wrinkle in Endgame‘s conception of time is the scene with Ant-man returning as younger versions of himself. How did that happen? And does any of that violate the rest of the rest of the scheme?
@105 Steve memorized the location of Hydra’s locations from looking at a map for five seconds while in the middle of rescuing Bucky and then escaping an exploding building. There’s a location map on the plane when he’s going down. You think he wouldn’t be able to get close enough to find the plane?
Also, I never had the impression that the plane was on the ocean floor – it looked like it was trapped in the ice up top.
Idea for Captain America 4 (or more, set in alternate timeline). He begins changing the timeline in his new 1940s. He rescues Bucky but the people who have him get away. They become aware that he’s from the future and that there is a frozen version of him still trapped in the ice because Steve hasn’t recovered frozen him yet. The bad guys recover Frozen Steve and begin brainwashing him to become new Redskull.
I think we are getting rather far afield of the point, but if I recall correctly, @108, col. Phillips already had a list of secret Nazi bases, they just didn’t know which were Hydra bases, and Steve was able to point out the correct 4. If Steve really did locate the bases just from seeing dots on a map, that’s pretty much impossible, because each dot would cover an area of hundreds of square miles. “There’s a secret Hydra base somewhere in a 50 mile radius of this thumbtack” is a lot less plausible then “You know that map with 15 bases located on it? I know which 4 are Hydra.”
So, no real problem that he wouldn’t know where his plane crashed.
(And that’s not to begin to cover the problems involved in knowing his exact position based on dead reckoning from the starting point, when he wasn’t watching the airspeed or compass the whole time, in a plane he’d never flown before, with no navigation or pilot training.)
Let’s face it, they were willing to screw up years of good storytelling for a trite ending that no one, Steve fans, Bucky fans, PEGGY FANS, Sharon fans were happy with. The only good thing was Sam getting the shield.
a) Bucky and Sam will probably get into trouble in their series and Steve has to de-age via the Quantum Machine to save them.
b) it has to be an alternate timeline where Steve kicked ass and saved Bucky and this was maybe a timeline shown him by the Ancient One where Other Steve died in the ice.
c) Bucky being COMPLETELY left out of Endgame, after being more of a motivation that anyone, (even Peggy) in four films – even to say to Steve in the battle ‘it’s my turn to save you’ too afraid of even the implication of them being more than friends, Disney?
d) all the heteronormative endings of Endgame – Scott and Hope with kid cameo, Pepper and Morgan and Happy as substitute Tony cameo, even the Wakandan Royal Family cameo, Clint and his family cameo, topped off with Steve and silent Peggy cameo – we don’t see a single ‘chosen family’ of Avengers, as Steve, Sam, Bucky, Wanda and Sharon would have been. That lame ass attempt at diversity of a meaningless character who is gonna date a guy played by Joe Russo is supposed to make up for that?
e – you want the best ending possible? Steve went to get the Soul Stone, but instead of giving up Natasha (so she could be fridged for the sake of Clint’s family cos she was poor single gal) Steve gave up Cap and went back to Skinny Steve, and then fought Thanos (same ending wielding Mjolnir) Then Steve and Bucky decide to retire to Wakanda with Wanda, and Sam gets the shield, and Sharon and Sam team up.
I think the idea Captain America would hook up with a fake peggy in an alternate timeline is even worse. I can also believe Steve Rogers tried his hardest to change things but failed and events became as they were in the “real” timeline because if he changed the past he already changed the past.
@112/CT Phipps: She wouldn’t be a “fake” Peggy. She’d be the same Peggy up until the moment Steve came back and changed things, in which case the one Peggy (and her universe) would branch into two. So they would both be equally the “real” Peggy, the same Peggy that Steve had shared experiences with back in WWII, because her split into two copies didn’t occur until 1948.
@@@@@#79/ChristopherLBennett:
I never said that Keith proposed that Steve saw Peggy as just a trophy, but he did imply that the writers of the film were treating her as a prize for him. My argument is that I disagree with that notion, and that Steve and Peggy ending up together was wish fulfillment for both of them, without destroying either of their characters. I agree with you and the previous commenter, @@@@@#8/Ellen W, that the ending can be considered a “prize” for Peggy, too, as it’s sincerely what she wanted.
@@@@@#82/KRAD: May I call you “KRAD?” I like that name.
I respectfully disagree that I’m misunderstanding the point. Perhaps I was too flippant in my previous response, where I imagined a comical scenario of Cap living a secret life of listening to radio scanners behind Peggy’s back. My argument was intended to point out that there’s an alternate way of looking at Cap’s decision to be with Peggy that doesn’t automatically make him some kind of amoral/immoral person who would just sit around and do nothing while the world burns.
Let’s say he did go back and tell her everything he knows. Then it would be both of their choices to let history play out like it had once before. That would negate the argument that Cap just lets Peggy be seen as a fool along with allowing her life’s work to be destroyed, because it would be her choice as well to let certain things happen, such as letting Arnim Zola infiltrate SHIELD.
She would do this with Cap alongside her, reminding her that even though it’s painful to let some bad things happen, it will preserve the timeline so that the best possible outcome will happen in the future (the outcome that undoes Thanos destroying half the life in the universe, which is arguably more important than Peggy’s pride at having been a founder of SHIELD). He would also remind her that preserving this timeline allows them to be together (an outcome that they both want), and altering it might prevent him in the future from coming back to be with her at all.
Using this same logic, he could tell himself that Bucky ends up okay and happy in the end, and that saving him early might jeopardize that (along with eliminating the happy Peggy/Steve timeline). In the same way that saving himself early from the ice might jeopardize that happy ending, or stopping the JFK assassination or the Cold War.
Consequently, even if old Steve and Peggy decided to let Peggy play senile with the younger Cap in the future (in Winter Soldier), they would do it with the knowledge that it would preserve the happy timeline, and that whatever discomfort the younger Steve might feel temporarily would be overshadowed by him ultimately getting what he wants later. You could also argue that they did this with the hindsight of old age, where their experience of having lived together for decades as a happy couple overcame any misgivings they might have towards temporarily deceiving the younger Steve. This doesn’t necessarily make them “sociopaths,” but rather people who had the end in mind – looking at the bigger/longer picture.
I’d recommend rewatching the Peggy deathbed scene. Watching it while knowing what happens at the end of Endgame and paying attention to the dialogue almost convinces me more that the writers (Markus and Stephen McFeeley) had the “happy ending” in mind for Steve the whole time.
Peggy Carter Deathbed Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG_bk2LXCLw
Peggy says to him, “I have lived a life, my only regret is that you didn’t get to live yours.”
Perhaps she’s trying to inspire the young Steve to make the decision later to go back to the past?
Steve says, “For as long as I remember, I just wanted to do what is right. Guess I’m not quite sure what that is anymore…and I thought I could just throw myself back in. Follow orders. Serve. It’s just not the same.”
To me, that indicates the possibility of self-doubt, self-analysis, and introspection from our young Steve Rogers, and not that he’s just always going to be the good little soldier who will forever deny his personal feelings.
He reiterates what he cares about most with his last line to her:
“I couldn’t leave my best girl, not when she owes me a dance.”
She’s actually pretty lucid during most of the conversation. She loses her memory near the end, and mistakes him for the young Steve, but that may be due to the fact that she’s about to die. That is, if how this scene played out can still be considered strictly canon after Steve goes back in Endgame. And if the scene does replay the same way as it originally did; if the Steve that old Peggy has become the most familiar with is the older Steve, then being bewildered by suddenly seeing the younger Steve in front of her while on her deathbed makes sense. Heck, my 95 year-old grandmother thinks I’m my brother on the phone all the time (even when I point out to her that I’m not).
Also, he had the Infinity Gems with him when he went back in time. He could’ve used the Soul Stone and the Mind Stone to implant in his and Peggy’s mind (with Peggy’s consent, of course) exactly what they needed to do and say to preserve the happy ending timeline (before returning the Stones), or he could have looked into the Time Stone (as Dr. Strange did) to see all the possible negative outcomes to avoid, then memorized those with the Mind Stone.
@@@@@#82/KRAD: cont’
Going against the theory that Cap would automatically change every bad event in the past, Steve himself once said, “Every time someone tries to prevent a war from beginning, innocent people die. Every time.”
That was his whole argument in Age of Ultron, and in Winter Soldier (when Fury showed they had the preventative technology to wipe out potential threats with their new helicarriers).
Steve would probably also remind Peggy of how much good her work ends up doing, despite SHIELD ultimately being overrun by Hydra. The creation of SHIELD led to the creation of the Avengers, which led to the ultimate demise of Thanos. Also, account for the fact that SHIELD is inevitably rebuilt as a more covert ops organization in the Agents of SHIELD series (if we’re allowed to consider that as canon). Plus, there’s the advantage of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Allowing Hydra to infiltrate as it previously had allows Peggy and Steve to keep an eye on them and keep them in check (as other commenters have pointed out). It also allows them to keep notes on their dealings for the future. Say, after old Cap comes back and gives Sam Wilson the shield, maybe he later reveals to him or the Avengers about other previously unknown Hydra agents or plots that had remained undercover. Revealing this information after his younger self had gone to the past wouldn’t change anything, as it is now an unknown future to him.
@@@@@#82/KRAD: cont’ again
I also respectfully disagree that his choice to return to the past and be with Peggy is out of character for “the 80-year-old comics character he’s based on.” Captain America from the comics isn’t just some monolith who’s always been a two-dimensional American Flag for 80 years (even though that’s the stereotype of him from the 60’s cartoon). He’s had growth and change and made unexpected decisions at times, depending on the writers.
Mark Millar notoriously made him an uber-edgy, hyper-antagonistic soldier for his run on the Ultimates and in the original Civil War event in the comics.
Steve Englehart had him become disillusioned and give up the mantle of Captain America in Captain America #180-184.
Mark Guenwald had him do it in #332.
Even Stan “The Man” Lee had him quit for a time, waaaaay back in Tales of Suspense #95.
(For more information on Steve Rogers quitting being Captain America, consult this local article: https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/12/17208184/avengers-infinity-war-captain-america-civil-war-who-is-nomad)
Those examples still had him go on crime fighting, but in different ways.
@@@@@#81/MaGnUs: Yes, he can still do hero things, even those he’s married. My comment about comparing him to Mr. Incredible was meant to be a fun poke at domesticated superhero life.
He and Peggy could still have gone on secret missions together, similar to how he was a member of the Secret Avengers and acted as more of a spy than as a soldier after becoming Director of SHIELD in the comics (see the Ed Brubaker run on Secret Avengers from 2010 to 2015).
To me, Steve going to the past shows us he felt like his work as the public Captain America was done.
He’d already beaten the biggest enemy and won the most important war of his life – bigger than Hitler and World War II; bigger than Lee Harvey Oswald or Stalin or the Cold War (and not just “bigger” because Thanos is so tall, amirite, ladies? ;) ).
Besides, when he started out as the First Avenger back in World War II, he was the only special one of his kind fighting for the good guys. He wanted to be just like Bucky and the other guys: go to war, fight the good fight, then come home and raise a family. By the time of Endgame, plenty of other people had now stood up to take on the mantle of “Avenger” and help in the fight. People even more powerful than him. He saw that he wasn’t as needed as he once was, or that someone else could step in and fill his shoes (i.e. Sam Wilson).
His decision to me shows growth in his character. It would require a ton of patience, and a lot of trust between him and Peggy. It might require him being a different kind of soldier than he had been, but a soldier nonetheless.
Theory: Steve Rogers would have met the ancient one, while returning the time stone. They may have had a conversation with Steve about what he might do and determined a course of action involving absolute minimum interruption of the ‘prime’ timeline. As far as dementia goes for an older Peggy, that’s just an all around difficult situation, so we can’t rule it out as being a simple and straightforward explanation for how older Peggy responded to Steve.
All just conjecture, much like everything else we’re engaged in outside of the movies
@@@@@119/Grsndjammer:
That’s a good possibility! That he went back and consulted with the Ancient One.
“and the two seasons of the show took place in 1946.”
Actually season 2 is set in 1947. It’s established in the first episode of season 2; they flash the date on screen.
I could be wrong, but it seemed like The Ancient One actually said that the branched timelines only happen when you remove an Infinity Stone, because what we perceive as time emanates from the stones? It was an odd line, which I only noticed during my second viewing.
I understand wanting Steve and Peggy being together at the end, and I also understand wanting the reveal to be the last thing in the film, but I would have liked them to have filmed a scene or a series of scenes explaining how all this fits together that would be shown throughout the end credits. I know they felt not having any end credit scenes gave this film a sense of finality, but having scenes that further wrap up the film wouldn’t have contradicted that – and could even have featured fun cameos by the other characters considering all the time travel / timeline wonky-ness.
As someone who hated this ending and largely all of Endgame, I have to say does it matter either way? Both are horrible endings for Steve.
A time-loop as supported by the writers and the fact we see an aged Steve with no return through the means of the platform or pim particles, destroys Steve’s character in all the ways Keith pointed out. A time-loop is also inconsistent with Peggy’s narrative and scenes in Winter Soldier and with the Sharon Carter flirtation in Civil War.
But an alternate-universe, while nicer in that it allows Steve to act and be with Peggy, is not great either. Why are heroics in the past instead of the present and a long-life fixing your past a peaceful happy end? There is no consideration given that he’s replacing himself or doubling himself, creating a timeline with two Steves, and making himself in that world redundant. Why does an older out of place Steve stay and deserve to end up with Peggy? Why does a Steve who has spent 13 years in the 2010s beyond suddenly feel like he’ll be more at home in the 1950s beyond? There is no consideration that this means he backtracks to a past point, leaving this timeline’s Bucky to save an alternate. Bucky of this timeline will still have all the effects of being the Winter Soldier, but Steve will make only himself feel better getting to save him earlier. Leaving the reunion he’d made with him in this timeline and the same with the older Peggy. So no Peggy won’t have lost her family she had without Steve, the life she lived and was proud of, her legacy that guided him when he woke up, but it is something he’s willing to throw away for himself. That he does not tell his friend Sam he was off to live til old age in the past without ever knowing if he’d see him again. It’s still destructive, just not in a conventional way. They are having their titular iconic American hero embrace a do-over concept, the ideal past as the key to his happiness/goodness.
Basically, the writers don’t understand the temporal mechanics they were writing about.
You cannot explicitly state (twice no less) that you cannot do a Back to the Future in this (MC)universe, and then do just that at the last minute. It breaks the internal logic of the universe, and therefore the universe itself.
Now, I understand they had bonafide scientific advisers to help during the scripting, but not during the interview, and that all the scripting was done long, long before the interview. This doesn’t precisely excuse the mistake in my books, as the concepts are fairly simple at the level they were working, but it does make the mistake… a little less serious of an offence. Kind of like the difference between murder and manslaughter.
It may well be that the way time-travel worked in the original script was traditional BttF style time-travel, and they intended Cap to go back like that all along (this is actually more damning for the writers as it means they were either plain incompetent at continuing a consistent personality for Cap, or committing deliberate character-assassination), or Markus forgot everything he’d learned from the scientific advisers, or Markus wasn’t really involved in the storyboarding and just there in name/spirit (pretty much as damning as the other).
Anyway, if I have the films internal logic and the directors agreeing on something, I’m inclined to ignore a writer’s on-the-spot brain-failure as being just that.
So: Cap spent an unspecified time in a separate universe. How, then, did Cap get back to hand-off the shield to Sam? We just don’t know (and I don’t really care all that much), but an educated guess says Hank Pymm, one of the Starks, or one of the ‘tears in reality’ mentioned by ‘Nick’ in the Spiderman: Far From Home trailer.
@123/Berthulf: I don’t think the writer was proposing a BTTF-style “rewritten history” model, but a 12 Monkeys-style self-consistent loop in which time-traveler Steve had already lived out his life with Peggy in secret. That’s just as consistent with plausible physics as the alternate-timeline model; all that matters physically is that a given measurement history (“timeline”) be self-consistent, so it can have a time travel event within it as long as it’s a closed loop.
So it’s not really a question of the time-travel theory, just of Steve’s characterization, as Keith says in the article. It’s implausible that the MCU’s history would’ve played out the way it did if Captain America had been living in the MCU since 1948. That’s why the alternate-timeline theory is more palatable — because it allows Cap to remain in character, as well as requiring far fewer contrivances and handwaves to reconcile with MCU history as we know it.
Here’s an interesting Endgame to play. It pretty clearly lays out the time travel movements, although his claim that the original Cap never returns to his starting timeline is questionable. In fact, he asserts that the reality we see in the film is a branched timeline.
Alternate Timelines
Chris Evans his own self was asked about this conundrum at the ACE Comic Con, and he basically said that he had no frapping clue…….
https://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/avengers-endgame/66147/chris-evans-captain-america-timeline-confusion
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The movie was idiotic and Cap’s forced retirement was done because Feige insisted on giving Tony the ultimate sacrifice ending. Which makes no sense.
Cap has virtue. Cap, for better or worse, is the moral center of the MCU—-just as much as Tony is the branding center of the MCU. More importantly, Tony has a wife and child at this point. Tony “daddy issues” Stark wouldn’t allow his child to grow up abandoned. Cap saved Bucky and has no one left to lose. Off all possible characters who should have died, it should have been Steve. Also Steve’s character arc has been about getting over the past, more specifically Peggy, not succumbing to it.
I had this favorited for months but only just now got around to reading it and all the discussion. I can’t beat a dead horse though, but it was enjoyable to read :)
Lisamarie: thank you!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Steve of “Endgame” was in an alternate timeline once he had decided to be with Peggy . . . and then crossed over to the original timeline to hand his shield over to Sam? Seriously? We’re expected to buy this crap?
@130/Lee Jones – or you buy the equally unpalatable alternative where all the films are occurring in a timeline already altered by Steve’s time travel, an so all of the events are a result of Steve’s inaction, or numerous failures on his part. Hence the critical article, as neither option is particularly attractive.
This is why I regard this movie as crap and another example of the deterioration of writing in the MCU franchise. It’s so obvious here, yet the media and a great deal of the fandom are still pretending that the MCU is at the top of its game. It was at the top of its game back in 2014.
krad
Keith, you’re always talking about character assassination, like there’s such a thin line. Maybe it’s time you stopped doing that. Characters are selfish at times. And as much as I hate Steve Rogers for abandoning Bucky and Sam, and for leaving Sharon after having kissed her, I must concede that he has earned it.
Plus, if he kept changing things in the past, what good would it really do? Either, he’d create ANOTHER alternate timeline, or he’d rewrite this one so badly that the events of Endgame might never play out. There’s no easy answer to his actions and I think you should stop looking at things in such a black and white perspective.
It’s frankly galling that you are more concerned with how Steve’s image looks, than the fact that he has flirted with the niece of his lover. I hated how the Russos tried to set them up, and I must admit, this is probably the best way they could amend that terrible wrong.
That’s just what I think.
@133 / XXX – it’s not about what the character deserves, it’s about what’s consistent with the character.
@134/WillMayBeWise
I really don’t think it’s too inconsistent. Cap tried moving on, but it became apparent that he never would. He was always trapped in 1944, waiting for that dance.
If the Russos had put him with Sharon Carter, it would have been a different story, not a better one. But it would have solidified Cap accepting his loss and embracing the present. Instead, he did the opposite. He clung to the past and rejected the present. He couldn’t move on. So he moved home.
Maybe the real issue is that the Russos need better writers.
The dance has nothing to do with what I was talking about. I’m talking about the notion that Captain America would just sit idly by and let the organization the woman he went back to dance with founded be corrupted from within by Nazis, I’m talking about the notion that Steve Rogers would sit on his ass while his best friend from childhood — the same one he broke the Avengers to defend — be brainwashed into a Soviet assassin.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido