We’re in the timeline where Thanos won. He said his new plan was to destroy the entire universe and create a new one where superheroes never existed.
I’d be curious to see how GotG plays out though in that timeline. It’s quite possible, if not probable, that without Gamora around, the Guardians never form, Ronan gets ahold of the Power Stone, and destroys Xandar.
Woah, dude.
Fair enough. I think people will be watching these movies for a long time, comparable to Star Wars or Star Trek. I expect many, many kids that grew up with these movies will be fans for life, just like I’m a SW and ST fan for life having grown up with those movies (and TV shows).
No, they established that if something important comes from the past, it forks the timeline. Putting it back prevents the forking. Whether you choose to put it back is a moral question, not a law of the universe.
OK, so if the suits alone were enough to pop around the timeline where/whenever they wanted, then why do they need the big platform thingy?
Dunno. Maybe they need it to charge up the Pym particles so they’ll work for time travel.
Actually, I think I can do better than that.
The time travel devices allow not just travel up and down the time stream, but also across interstellar distances, and between divergent timelines. That’s a lot of location variables. The platforms serve as signposts. They upload a five-dimensional location matrix into the time travel devices that allows the time traveler to return to their origin point. Once this data is uploaded into the device, the beacon isn’t necessary any more: it’s not broadcasting through time to the traveler, and it’s not an anchor that pulls them back, it just determines that one particular point in time/space/timeline and stores it on the time travel device for later use. It’s also possible to change the data slightly if the traveler wants to come back in a slightly different place - say, on a bench fifteen feet away from the platform.
but is there cake or is there not?
But they couldn’t simply “put it back”. Each time they took a stone, the timeline branched. Things happened that didn’t happen in the so-called “main timeline”. Steve fought Steve, Loki escaped, a baseball glove went missing, etc etc.
When are you supposed to “put the stones back” in that timeline so it doesn’t fork? And what happens to the things that happened in the movie? Does Thanos stay dead forever in one timeline, even if the stones are returned? If so, then that timeline stayed forked. Or do those events simply “never happen”? Obviously not, as NewGamora is running around from the timeline she came from.
And that goes without explaining whether OldSteve actually lived through the last 50 years of the main timeline, or whether he jumped over from a parallel timeline, and if the latter, does that timeline continue on after he left?
The movie explicitly says that small changes don’t cause forks, so the baseball glove probably didn’t cause a new timeline, nor did any of the times a stone was borrowed for a few minutes before being returned to its original place. That all comes, in-universe, from a literal time wizard, so that’s canon. Loki escaping almost certainly is a major enough change to cause a new timeline - Steve v. Steve happens as a direct result of that escape, and is part of the same branched timeline. Interestingly, this is also a timeline where the major Hydra infiltrators in SHIELD thing that Steve is one of them, which will make a for a very interesting version of Winter Soldier in that world.
The timeline where Thanos dies early remains forked - returning the stones won’t undo that, and there’s no way to un-branch that timeline without somehow resurrecting Thanos.
The window for returning the stones is, apparently, “Before anyone does anything important with them.” Presumably, they could have jumped back to medieval Norway, taken the teserract from the tomb Red Skull found it in, back in the first Captain America movie, and then return it a week before the Nazis kick in the front door without branching anything - assuming it was unmolested for all those centuries in the original timeline, at least.
He jumped from a parallel timeline, and that timeline still exists at the end of Endgame.
So we’re in a timeline where superheroes don’t exist, but we have vague memories of them so we make comics and movies with fictional heroes.
(But I can live with that, because we have cake.)
Ronan didn’t realise it was an infinity stone until after the guardians took it to the collector. Most likely, Ronan stops trying to look for it when he realises Thanos has disappeared and Quill ends up back with Yondu. Ronan probably still tries to attack Xandar but fails.
The machine was what let them time travel. The wrist bands were what let them control the time travel.
Tony Stark and Steve Rogers weren’t just time traveling when they went from 2023 to 2012 and from 2012 to 1970. They were time traveling the whole time from when they left 2023 until they returned to 2023.
To use an analogy, the machine was the motor and the wrist bands were the steering wheel. You don’t just use the steering wheel when you switch from one road to another one. You have to steer all the time, even when you’re just driving down the same road. And you don’t just need the steering wheel; you need the motor to make the car move so the steering wheel can have an effect. If the motor dies, turning the steering wheel won’t get you anywhere.
I don’t think that works with what we saw on screen. When they start the time heist, they have just enough Pym particles to get everyone to the time and place they need to be to steal the stones and get home. When the plan goes wrong, and they lose the teseract, Steve and Tony use their “return home” particles to instead go to 1970, specifically because that particular base at that particular time had both an Infinity Stone, and a supply of Pym particles. If the device is a steering wheel, and the platform is the engine, getting more Pym particles in 1970 wouldn’t help - they’d have no way to get them to the “engine” to power additional jumps. The device Stark invented has to be the primary driver of their time jumps.
I also want to say that I am 100% adopting this as headcanon.
I guess it’s the same question as to why on Star Trek they had to beam back up to the transporter room instead of just being beamed directly to the bridge or briefing room or wherever.
Nah, we’d all be worshiping Thanos, setting up shrines to Thanos, thanking Thanos on a daily basis. That was the whole point after all - a grateful universe worshiping Thanos. He stated that was his ultimate goal in both movies.
We are in that universe. But Thanos wasn’t his real name. We all (are supposed to) worship him under his other name.
Wiki sez: “Thanos is a Greek masculine given name, a short form (hypocorism) of Athanasios, the masculine form of the word Athanasia (Greek: “Immortality”).”
So his name reflects the fact of his existence, as a guy who continues to exist? Just the mere fact that he, uh, is, and that he’s got a name that refers back to it?
Pfft, it’ll never catch on.