At the end of IM3, Tony said he got Pepper sorted out. The whole plot was that Killian needed Stark to figure out how to stabilize Extremis after all, so he just completely removed it from her.
Tony Stark makes you feel
He’s a cool exec with a heart of steel.
As Iron Man, all jets ablaze,
He’s fighting and smiting with repulsor rays!
Amazing armor! That’s Iron Man!
A blazing power! That’s Iron Man
I think she said ‘I programed the auto pilot, all they have to do is not fall out,’ because Clint and Nat are basically monkeys in space.
I’d guess that, so long as they were where they needed to be the next time they became important, he was fine. If one was missing from a box for five minutes, no big deal. My main question is how he subtlely got the red Reality Ooze back into Jane back in Asgard. Of course, it doesn’t seem like Rocket was very subtle with getting it out in the first place.
That one’s not so hard - the ones that are complicated are the Teseract (cube no longer exists) and the Sceptre (also ‘gone’).
I guess he could prevent themselves from stealing them to begin with?
And what did it take to get Cap un-sceptered? (had to hit clint really really hard)
I could see Prof Hulk wandering off and Cap strolling around the corner, tossing the time stone in his hand, thanking The Ancient One for the loan.
Heck, that could be a whole freekin’ series on D+streaming.
No, it’s not that at all. Nothing you can do with time travel shenanigans can “fracture” a timeline. Once something’s happened, it’s happened - paradoxes are impossible. You go back in time and kill baby Hitler, then come back to where you started from, Hitler will still have ruled Germany until 1945, started WWII, and committed the Holocaust. You’ve just created an alternate timeline with no Hitler, which is great for the people in that time line, but nothing will have changed in the timeline you started from.
The reason they had to return the stones is that, without the stones, a lot of those possible alternate timelines turn out really, really terrible. The Ancient One wouldn’t give up the Time Stone, because without the Time Stone, Dormammu destroys the world in Dr. Strange’s solo movie. Similarly, Cap had to take Mjolnir back, because Thor needed it to fight Malekith and the Dark Elves in Thor II. They could have noped out of all of that, and nothing would have affected the world they live in - Dormammu would still be defeated in the history of their timeline, Thor would have had Mjolnir, etc. etc. But there’d be new timelines created, in which billions of people die.
Presumably, nothing. He’s technically being mind controlled by Future Cap, but all Future Cap wants him to do is let him escape with the scepter. He doesn’t have any further instructions or agenda for himself, so he just goes on acting as he would normally under the circumstances.
I just saw it last night finally. I really enjoyed it. I was pleasantly surprised about how the first hour of the movie was really an analysis of loss and how people deal with it. I didn’t expect that and enjoyed it.
Captain America was always my favorite MCU character and I really liked that he got his happy ending. I literally almost teared up seeing him finally get his long promised dance…but…the ending really does fall apart when you think about it for more than 5 seconds. Would Steve Rogers let history pass without him righting wrongs he knows will happen? If so that must be a nightmare for him.
I’m also not sure what to make of Tony committing genocide.
Still, in the moment, I really enjoyed the movie and kind of wish this really was the end of the MCU as it was a perfect send off.
No need? Clint was being controlled by Loki - that would be bad. Prev Cap was being controlled by Future Cap - should be no problem, if indeed there was control at all - Cap certainly didn’t intend to do anything to himself, assume intent matters.
I’m good with both of these - but we are still kinda/sorta back to the Thanos paradox - it happens, but it couldnt happen - one or the other has to be an alternate.
Steve would absolutely not sit around for that, and I suspect he did not.
Again, changing the past doesn’t change the present. Steve spent several decades in an alternate timeline, almost certainly fighting Hydra and getting the world ready for Thanos showing up in ~sixty years. And none of that changes anything for the timeline he came from, because as soon as he starts making changes, the timeline diverges. It doesn’t change anything in the future he came from, it creates an entirely separate and parallel future, one where everything unfolded just as we’ve seen in the movies to date, and another future where Captain America spent the entire second half of the 20th century uncannily predicting major threats and neutralizing them before they became full-fledged catastrophes.
Then, when he’s an old man, probably a widower, and has seen everything in that timeline through to the end, he activates the time gizmo he used to return to the past, and jumps back to his original future - the one we saw in the movie - and gives Sam the shield.
Not sure what you mean by the “Thanos paradox.” There aren’t any paradoxes in this movie - the way time travel works in this movie, paradoxes are literally impossible.
Rogers most certainly did not spent the rest of his life being Cap. He straight up told Falcon that he did what Tony said to do and “got a life” AKA he retired.
And that’s why he had to go to the past. If he stayed in the present, he never would have been able to give it up. In the past, even when bad things happen, he knows it will work out in the end.
Coulda sworn that Thanos started the final battle with no gauntlet at all … but that he ended up with the (first) Stark gauntlet that Hulk had already used. The same gauntlet that a bunch of heroes were kicking around during the final battle.
When it came time for Stark to lift the stones from Thanos … it was a “Stark gauntlet 1” to “Stark gauntlet 2” transfer of the stone-holding components. In universe … that’s no big deal, tech-wise.
I actually thought that kid was Evan Peters at the time, I was like ‘now what’s this going to be about.’
That’s correct. Thanos wouldn’t have gotten the actual Guantlet for a few more years.
I am not sure how you can say that he committed genocide. Did Thanos ship include the whole of the population of those creatures, or just the ones he enslaved/recruited/indoctrinated? There is nothing to indicate that he dusted more than all the ones attacking on the planet. Which would explain why alternate timeline Gamora survived, she was no longer in the attacking group.
//i\
Except that Thanos came forward in time and got dusted - he jumped from ‘GotG1’ to ‘Endgame’ - since he was dusted in Endgame - he didn’t go back. Similarly, Nebula was killed and can’t go back, nor did the rest of the ‘followers of Thanos’. Gamora from that timeline is an unknown, but is ‘maybe’ running around ‘now’ (even though a version of her died in IW).
Unless his ‘dusting’ was some how different than the other dustings in that they all got to go back to finish their density. Upthread, it was mentioned that ‘they used the same technique/imagery for the dusting, so dusted they are, not just sent back to whence they came’.
Or is that a fracture - ‘timeline we watched’ is intact - but there is another timeline where those event(s) never happened - aka ‘Back to the Future’, which supposedly wouldn’t happen with the return(s) of the stones and was also specifically ruled out in the movie universe.
Right. So, there’s the timeline we see in all the movies, where Thanos snaps away half the universe, then gets his head cut off by Thor. Then there’s another timeline where Thanos takes his flagship and all his generals into a time warp and is never heard from again. In that timeline, Thanos never acquires the stones never assembles the gauntlet, and never snaps away half the universe. In “our” timeline, all that stuff still happens exactly as we see it, because the instant the timeline bifurcates, there’s basically two different Thanos, in two different timelines, and nothing that happens to one Thanos has any effect on the other Thanos.
That was me. 
Returning the stones prevented the creation of six different timelines, one for each stone that was taken to the future. It didn’t prevent the creation of at least three new timelines: Steve being with Peggy, Loki escaping with the tesseract, and Thanos disappearing before he can assemble all the stones.
Old Thanos did all the stuff with the stones, the snap and getting his head cut off. New Thanos created an alternate timeline for himself when he jumped to the present day but Old Thanos still existed and all the things he did were still done. New Thanos never needed to go back, the stuff that was done by Old Thanos was done regardless.