WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME Across three hours of action and emotional pay-offs, Avengers: Endgame will probably leave you with more than a few questions. FINAL WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME When there’s time travel involved, everything gets muddled and those tricky time paradoxes have a way of sneaking up on you and breaking your brain — I’d be lying if I said I totally get how Inception works. The Marvel folks even poked fun at the concept by referencing a tonne of time travel movies and emphasising that the gang will have to strictly follow the rules of time travel, that is until Scott Lang realises, to his horror, that “Back to the Future is bullshit? !”. Now, this explainer of the time travel in Endgame is only the sense I’ve managed to eke, and it’s certainly not gospel. Surely the folks at Marvel, or the Russo brothers will start breaking it down soon — we hope. And I should say I went over it with increasing frustration for 36 hours, talking it out with everyone I know who had seen it, convinced it doesn’t make sense, that there was a plot hole or a paradox, until my colleague Sam van Grinsven came up with the only theory that we thought would explain it, based on what’s been revealed so far. So here goes. ABOUT TIME First some timeline establishing: Endgame opens in 2018, 22 days after Thanos’ “snapture” in Infinity War. When Thor decapitates Thanos and discovers the Infinity stones have been destroyed, it’s still 2018. Then Endgame time jumps five years to 2023. RELATED: Avengers Endgame review — Thrilling and poignant send-off RELATED: Avengers Endgame smashes Australian box office records At this point, Scott Lang/Ant-Man is released from the quantum realm, where he was trapped the whole time. But because time moves differently in the quantum realm, he had only been trapped, from his perspective, for five hours. (By the same logic, Janet van Dyne, who had been trapped in the quantum realm for 30 years, should only have aged 30 hours, though she appears to have aged 30 years — however, Marvel boss Kevin Feige has hinted there are levels within the quantum realm, and for narrative purposes, it made sense to have Janet come out as someone closer to Michael Douglas’ age than Evangeline Lilly’s age.) TIME LORDS In 2023, after figuring out how to “control the chaos”, the remaining Avengers decide to go back in time to steal the Infinity stones from various points in time, specifically: — Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk and Ant-Man to New York (space stone/tesseract, mind stone/Loki’s sceptre and time stone/Eye of Agamotto) in 2012 during the events of The Avengers — Thor and Rocket to Asgard (reality stone/Aether) in 2013 during the events of Thor: The Dark World — Rhodey and Nebula to Morag (power stone/orb) and Black Widow and Hawkeye to Vormir (soul stone) in 2014 during the events of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1. After fumbling the tesseract retrieval in New York, Captain America and Iron Man go from 2012 to 1970 from which they steal the tesseract (at that time in the possession of SHIELD) and Pym particles (we see Cap take four vials when they only need two for the return trip to 2023). TIME SPLIT When Hulk tries to convince The Ancient One to give him the time stone, she refuses, explaining that if she lets him take it, it would split the timeline in two — the original timeline would become one in which the time stone doesn’t exist from 2012 onwards, heralding disaster with the Sanctums unable to protect Earth. Hulk promises that once the Avengers had all six Infinity stones and unsnapped Thanos’ genocide, the stones would be returned to the point from which they were taken, reforming the split timelines as if the stones had never been removed. IT’S COMPLICATED It would’ve all worked, except in 2014, 2014-Thanos discovered the plan and replaced 2023-Nebula with 2014-Nebula on the return journey back to 2023. In 2023, 2014-Nebula opened the time portal and allowed 2014-Thanos and his army (not sure how that works when they don’t have any Pym particles) to invade 2023, just as Hulk successfully snaps back into existence all the creatures who had been erased by Thanos in 2018. Hulk specifically says he tried but he couldn’t bring Black Widow back from the dead. That would also be true for 2018-Gamora who died the same way on Vormir. When 2014-Thanos and his army are erased by Iron Man in 2023, it’s assumed that they’ve been snapped out of existence like 2018-Thanos did half the universe. But what if that’s not what Iron Man did? RELATED: Who is that random kid at Tony Stark’s funeral? ‘I AM INEVITABLE’ This is where I was really confused for a while. Because if Captain America went back and returned all the Infinity stones, and Thor’s hammer, to the moments from which they were borrowed (in 2012, 2013 and 2014), then the two split timelines would remerge as one (as The Ancient One’s little demo so insistently told us) and time would continue from those moments as if nothing had changed back then. Hydra would still steal the sceptre and create Scarlet Witch, Hela would still destroy Thor’s hammer and so on, until all the Infinity stones would once again be collected by Thanos who would snap half the universe away, and the Avengers would go on the time travel mission to reverse it. As Thanos said at the beginning of Endgame, “I am inevitable”. Except that 2014-Thanos has been snapped out in 2023, taking him out of the timeline, which in theory would change what happens from 2014 onwards. If 2014-Thanos doesn’t go on to amass all the Infinity stones, then he wouldn’t be on the Asgardian refugee ship to kill Heimdall and Loki, or sacrifice Gamora on Vormir. In which case, the events of Infinity War wouldn’t happen and those guys and Black Widow and Iron Man would still be alive, and old-man Captain America wouldn’t find Sam and Bucky by that lake. Uh oh. Paradox. Or worse, plot hole. ‘AT ALL COSTS’ But there is a way in which it could be explained. A way for 2023 to remain as is (with Iron Man etc still dead) after the timelines were remerged when Cap returned the Infinity stones. In this scenario, Iron Man didn’t snap 2014-Thanos and his army out of existence. He merely snapped all those 2014 characters, including the ones killed in the 2023 battle including 2014-Nebula, back to their place in 2014, effectively resetting them on their original paths? A path in which 2014-Thanos never finds out about the 2023-Avengers’ adventures in 2014. Marvel Studios has released the trailer for the latest movie in the wildly popular superhero series.... Marvel Studios has released the trailer for the latest movie in the wildly popular superhero series. There’s nothing in the mythology of the MCU that says the Infinity Gauntlet can only snap things out of existence completely — it does have a time stone so maybe it can also reset time to what it should be in 2014. It makes sense that Iron Man would see this as the only course of action because taking 2014-Thanos out of the post-2014 timeline completely would likely mean that his daughter with Pepper, Morgan Stark, may never have been born. And he said very clearly near the start of Endgame he would, referencing Morgan, “keep what I found, have to, at all costs”. The cost was his life (and that of Gamora’s, Black Widow’s, Loki’s and Heimdall’s) for Morgan’s. WHERE (OR WHEN) TO NOW? Of course, that’s all speculation. The Russos, Feige or Marvel could come out and say there are now multiple timelines or parallel universes or something completely different. The Russos have said we shouldn’t assume that just because the MCU has so far worked in a linear fashion that it will in the future. For one thing, with all the vanished now returned, they’ve aged only moments when those who remained have aged five years. That’s got to be reconciled in-universe, at least emotionally. Presumably, some of those questions will be answered in Spider-Man: Far From Home in a couple of months. Feige came out last week to confirm Far From Home is now the official end of MCU’s phase three and not Endgame as previously reported. And there are those confirmed movie and TV projects involving characters who remain dead — Black Widow, Vision and Loki. We assume they’re going to be prequels, but, hey, this is a superhero universe with time travelling and magic, anything could happen. Avengers: Endgame is in cinemas now Share your movies and TV obsessions (and time paradox theories) | @wenleima<doc-sep>Most people walk out of Avengers: Endgame with similar awestruck reactions: They pulled it off! There are character arcs and consequences! It’s a comic book movie that made death feel permanent in a way that large scope superhero projects are usually incapable of! Then, a few dozen hours later, there’s a normal moment of doubt: Did Endgame make any sense? I’m here to say: yes it does. [Ed. note: this post contains major spoilers about Avengers: Endgame] Time travel in Avengers: Endgame actually makes sense — it’s just incredibly convoluted. The short of it: Screenwriters Steven McFeely and Christopher Markus created a closed, time-travel system that allows the Avengers to mess with their own timelines without creating paradoxes. Some time travel movies spend their entire runtimes building on top of, then correcting, paradoxes. Endgame doesn’t have time for that nonsense. It’s a point made often in the film: we are NOT doing the Back to the Future movies. If the movie left you a little stumped, here are the rules of Avengers: Endgame time travel and why they work together to make everything possible without sacrificing the rules. Time travel in Endgame always goes through the Quantum Realm An excited Ant-Man/Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) shows up at Avengers HQ five years after the snap. Only five hours passed by his watch. Time works differently in the Quantum Realm, and so does space. The rules are different than in, say, Doctor Strange, which finds Stephen Strange wielding the Time Stone. The green Infinity Stone stored in the Eye of Agamotto just allows the user to slide through time, not to jump to different points in time. In order to move through time and space, the Avengers must shrink down to the Quantum Realm, then use the map Tony Stark developed (his “reverse mobius strip”) to send the traveler to a different part of the Quantum Realm, which will spit them out if time to a different physical location. Anyone who has watched enough time travel movies knows the base idea of quantum theory: that an electron is capable of being two places at once at the quantum level. That could mean multiple dimensions, string theory, or the Back to the Future II multiple timelines. Those can all be in play if we accept this base, non-scientific definition of quantum mechanics. The hand-mounted device that Tony Stark develops to navigate the Quantum Realm makes destinations out of probabilities, but the core, fictional quantum mechanics stay in place: there can be multiples of one thing existing at the same time e.g. a Captain America that fights a Captain America in 2012. Does real science back this up? Not in the superhero way, no. But the movie has its own playbook, too. Time travelers experience their own, linear timeline This one comes straight from Hulk, and it’s one of the core rules that Avengers: Endgame sets up with its time travel. When Rhodey and Scott Lang suggest they go into the past and stop Thanos from getting the six stones, Hulk replies: “I don’t know why everyone believes that, but that isn’t true. Think about it: If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past! Which can’t now be changed by your new future!” This means we should not expect any Back to the Future or Looper-style time-updates in Endgame. In Looper, there’s a terrifying scene where a Rogue Looper is mutilated in modern time as bad guys cut pieces off of him in the past. That sends a shockwave to the future and suddenly, future guy is missing all his fingers. That could not happen based on Avengers: Endgame’s rules. In the MCU, the past is cemented in time and forever exists to allow for a subject to jump through time. Captain America will always go into the ice and wake up later — that needs to have happened for us to be in this time travel situation in the first place. There are no fading photographs of Marty here. Reality is experiential for individuals, meaning a person’s perception of time is linear, regardless of how they jump around the timeline. We are not dealing with a human perspective of time There’s a very funny scene (that is also a great moment to take a bathroom break) in which Professor Hulk is testing time travel out on Scott Lang using the Quantum Portal in the van. Scott gets spit out as a teenager, then as an old man, then as a baby. A few scenes later, Tony explains that they accidentally traveled “time through Lang” instead of “Lang through time.” This suggests that time and the individual experience of time are two entirely different things. Scott wasn’t trapped in the Quantum Realm for a reverse number of years, or until he grew old; the changes were instantaneous for him. This means that, in the Quantum Realm, the “flow” of time is unlike on our plane of existence, and is not locked to an individual’s experience. So, to recap: The Quantum Realm is a middle ground that allows for travel through time and space. An individual experiences their own timeline linearly, but that’s not consequential to the timeline overall. At the point in the movie where we’ve learned these three rules, time travel still doesn’t make a lot of sense within the movie: How can you not change the past if you are in the past? It’s because we don’t have a reference for time that matters. Luckily, The Ancient One knows exactly what to tell us (and Hulk) back in 2012. Together, all six Infinity Stones create a stable flow of time Tilda Swinton’s The Ancient One, last seen in Doctor Strange, blasts Bruce Banner out of his Hulk body so they can have an Astral chat about why the brainiac beast can’t take the Time Stone out of the past to use it in the future. The Ancient One creates a thick, golden strand of light to represent the timeline, then gives this speech: The Infinity Stones create what you experience as the flow of time. Remove one stone and that flow splits. Now, this may benefit your reality, but my new one, not so much. In this new branch reality, without our chief weapon against the forces of darkness, our world would be over-run and millions would suffer. Tell me, Doctor, can your science prevent all that? Let’s use the Ancient One’s language here: there are not multiple “timelines” there are multiple “realities.” A branch reality can only split off the main timeline if an Infinity Stone is removed from that timeline and not replaced. In order to delete all the branch timelines that the historical stone disruption will create, Banner makes a suggestion: “We can erase it. Once we’re done with the stones, we can return each one to its own timeline the moment it was taken so, chronologically, in that reality, it never left.” Once again, “chronologically” and “that reality” are used separately because time doesn’t matter with regard to the human perspective. As long as six Infinity Stones simply exist in the same time together (regardless of location or being spread across the universe), they create that single reality. That reality isn’t a fixed one, either; it is all realities happening over each other, the quantum mechanics idea contained by some cosmic storytelling physics. Everything happened and is happening In a stable reality with a stable flow of time, all six Infinity Stones exist. Given the rules laid out in the film, it seems impossible that alternate dimensions exist in the MCU (in the science-fiction sense, like there’s a doppleganger world). Instead, all possible realities are squished together in one flow of time, happening over, under, and simultaneously with each other. That’s the power all six Infinity Stones have over the universe. If a stone is removed, a branch reality can be created, but that branch reality is unstable, dangerous, and is possibly unreachable from the Quantum Realm because it would be unmappable on Tony’s devices, which is based on a model of mapping Quantum Realm locations to places on the timeline. (People in the movie jump backwards and then to the present, no one is jumping to an undetermined future. Even Thanos needs to be lead from the past to the future) How would you map an alternate timeline that didn’t exist until you split it? You couldn’t. The six stones create “what [we] experience as the flow of time.” The stones braid multiple human-perspective realities together into a single flowing existence. A character’s death removes them from the main flow of time (note that Frigga, Thor’s mom, still needed to be visited in the past before she died on Thor’s human-perspective timeline). When Cap returns the stones across time, the rules disappear When our heroes jump back in time, then bring the six Infinity Stones forward to 2023, the past splits into alternate dimensions, threatening the integrity of the flow of time. Luckily, the Avengers win, allowing Captain America to take the stones (and, in theory, Mjolnir) back to where they were pulled out of the timeline in the movie. Once Cap misses his “timestamp” to return, remaining back in the 1940s, time travel is effectively impossible. Thanos destroys the stones in 2018 on “The Garden” planet, disrupting the uniform flow of time. Not only that, but the personal experiences of everyone left alive still happened (Thor still got a pep talk from his Mom, Tony still met his dad, Cap still went into the ice AND lived with Peggy during that time), but that includes their personal pasts. More importantly, our reality progressed without Infinity Stones to keep single dimensions happening over and in concert with each other. Nothing in this movie’s main time-travel plot is about “undoing” except for the magical gauntlet snap. However, once the Infinity Stones are destroyed and we hear The Ancient One’s speech, we know that not having Infinity Stones potentially altered “what we perceive as the flow of time” It’s very possible that time travel could have only been discovered by Tony Stark after the Infinity Stones had been destroyed or that the Avengers’ plan wouldn’t have worked if the stones hadn’t already passed through their personal, human-based timeline. Now that there are no stones, all the Endgame-specific movie rules don’t necessarily apply to the rest of the MCU. How the time travel logic plays out in Endgame Since the rules only apply to things in this single movie, let’s apply these rules to track what actually happened in Endgame: Did Steve Rogers really live out his days with Peggy? Yes. It looks like, from his age, that Steve just stayed with Peggy after returning the Stones. Wait, didn’t we see photos of Peggy with her kids? Were those Steve’s kids? Yes, Peggy had kids. No, they were not Steve’s — they were her other husband’s, who Steve rescued during the war. This still happened, just not in our “reality” since the story we saw from Steve’s perspective is linear and includes Peggy’s photographs of her children. So there are two Captain Americas alive in the 2010s? Yes. One is old and has had a full life with Peggy, one gets pulled out of the ice having lost Peggy. One inevitably becomes the other, but they both exist. Do the splinter realities the Avengers create by taking the Stones exist? Presumably parts of them do. Let’s say Captain America returns the scepter (Mind Stone) to the exact place he stole it in 2012. The Hydra agents in that elevator still think Captain America is secretly Hydra. Did Captain America fight Captain America? No, that part was probably deleted. But it wasn’t deleted because of anything a human did, it was deleted because all six Infinity Stones work together so all realities flow in an orderly fashion. Is Loki still alive? Yes. He used the space stone to teleport away in 2012, which we know is different from how things went for him at the end of The Avengers, when he was sent to Asgardian prison. Remember: we actually see Loki in that Asgardian prison in this movie as well, because both events happened.<doc-sep>
Warning: Not even time travel will save you from “Avengers: Endgame” spoilers if you continue to read this post. That’s just not how it works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or the real world. In “Avengers: Endgame,” the heroes who survived the events of “Avengers: Infinity War” attempt to undo the damage caused by Thanos and his Infinity Stones-powered “snap” in order to save their friends and the universe. Unfortunately, by the time the remaining Avengers track down Thanos, the now retired Mad Titan had already destroyed the Infinity Stones and their one shot at bringing everybody who was wiped out in the Decimation back to life. Or so they think. Thanks to Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, and his accidental imprisonment in the Quantum Realm, the team figures out that time travel is the key to setting everything right. Despite his initial refusal, Tony Stark’s brilliant mind can’t help but resolve the science and create the technology required to make time travel a reality. The Avengers’ time heist to collect all the Infinity Stones from the past is a go. But forget everything you learned from movies like “Back to the Future” or “Terminator” or even “Hot Tub Time Machine.” The MCU has its own rules about time and time travel as explained by the Hulk and the Ancient One during “Endgame.” Even more spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame” ahead. ‘Avengers’: Every MCU movie ranked in order of significance to ‘Endgame’ » × Watch the trailer for “Avengers: Endgame.” How is time travel possible? As explained in the “Ant-Man” films, the Quantum Realm is a place where the normal rules of time and space don’t apply. Scott spent five years in the Quantum Realm and for him it was just five hours. Janet van Dyne, on the other hand, spent 30 years lost in the Quantum Realm and it seems she experienced it as a full 30 years. There is clearly plenty that remains unexplained about this dimension. That said, it turns out individuals are able to enter the Quantum Realm at a specific place and time and travel through it to exit back to reality at a completely different place and time — so long as they have the proper equipment. In “Endgame,” the key components are Pym particles, which allow the Avengers to become so small that they are able to enter the Quantum Realm, and the special time GPS invented by Tony, which navigates each time traveler to the when and where of their destination. Does altering events in the past affect the future? No. According to Hulk, whatever you do while in the past can’t affect the events that have already happened in your timeline because that’s not quite your past anymore. So things like the grandfather paradox or the butterfly effect are not really concerns in the MCU. The Ancient One later helpfully creates a visual showing how going to the past and removing something like an Infinity Stone can cause timelines to branch out and create alternate, parallel futures. Think multiverse theory. If stealing the Infinity Stones from a specific time creates alternate timelines, how are the Avengers able to return to their future? That time GPS is really handy for navigating all possible time and space through the Quantum Realm, even between timelines. ‘Avengers: Endgame’: Who died and who survived? A guide » Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), left, Rhodey (Don Cheadle), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) in “Avengers: Endgame.” (Marvel Studios) Why does Captain America need to return all of the Infinity Stones? In order to retain the integrity of 2012 Ancient One’s timeline, 2023 Bruce Banner promised to return her Time Stone. This is because according to their conversation (with handy visual guide as mentioned above), returning each Infinity Stone to the exact moment in the timeline that they are stolen would make it as if they had never left the timeline. Meaning, the branched out alternate timeline would cease to exist. Returning each Stone is the only way to make sure that the 2023 Avengers don’t accidentally doom an alternate timeline at the expense of saving theirs. “Endgame” doesn’t quite explain how returning each Stone would negate everything a 2023 Avenger did in the past they visited, but it does. But doesn’t altering events in the past have no effect on a future? Supposedly.