As one of the millions of comics readers that bailed on the hobby thanks to silly gimmicks begun in the 1990s like variant covers, I gratified that the term is now being used to describe the bad guys.
Well, he can’t do anything about that in the first place. Per the rules laid out in Endgame, you can’t go to the past to change your present - you just create an alternate timeline. JFK’s assassination, the Stark murders, and all of that happen in the Sacred Timeline no matter what - Rogers can’t change that. But he could create an alternate timeline where all that stuff is prevented. Except that the TVA would prune it, so that it never existed. And I think that’s what actually happened - or will happened, or would have… look, tenses are hard in this context.
I think we actually need to go back and examine the idea that Steve Rogers was “supposed” to stay with Peggy. That’s not what the show actually says. When Loki us up before the judge, she says the Avengers were supposed to travel back through time - that is, the time heist was meant to go exactly as planned, with the Avengers moving up and down the timeline, stealing and replacing the stone with no one being the wiser - possibly including Tony Stark not dying (because Thanos wasn’t supposed to capture Nebula and use her time travel device to attack the Avengers) and a young Steve staying on in the present day to continue leading the Avengers. Loki escaping, Steve and Tony jumping again even further back, and then finally Steve going back to be with Peggy, are not part of the sacred timeline - they’re branches caused by Tony losing the tesseract.
Does that mean that the TVA pruned the past where Steve gets to be with Peggy? I don’t think so.
The TVA exists outside the Sacred Timeline, but it clearly has its own system of linear time. If it didn’t, everything would happen all at once and the show would be over in less than a nanosecond. Things happen in order - there’s six weeks between the start of the rogue variant’s killings, to Moebius deputizing Loki to hunt himself down. Mobius is hanging out in 1549 when he’s informed that they’ve just caught a newly divergent Loki in 2012. At the end of the episode, after all the events we see Loki going through in the TVA, we see a group of TVA agents investigating a new divergent timeline in 1858. This seems to indicate pretty clearly that divergences happen on the TVA’s timeline, not the Sacred Timeline. The divergence in 1549 happened shortly before the divergence in 2012, and maybe another day or so before the divergence in 1858. Which suggests that the TVA doesn’t know about any of the stuff that happens in Endgame after Tony Stark drops the Tesseract - from the TVA’s perspective, all those divergences are in the future. Since there’s zero chance that the Sacred Timeline survives this miniseries, it could be that Loki takes an ax to the whole thing before Steve’s divergent timeline with Peggy is spun off, and the TVA never has the chance to try to prune it.
Come to think of it, it would be a pretty awesome scene if, at the end of the series when Loki is making his big move to take down the TVA, it coincides with Thanos’ fleet time traveling to Avenger’s HQ, setting off the biggest damned divergence they’ve ever seen, critically splitting their attention at the worst possible moment.
The impression I got is that Loki escaping was the only part of that that was incompatible with the Sacred Timeline. The Avengers replaced the Infinity Stones in their rightful places, thereby preventing variants from developing, and Steve’s non-interference did the same. Thanos jumping forward is self-correcting because he gets defeated in the end. Loki is the sole loose end that the TVA needs to deal with.
It can’t be the only part that diverges - if Loki hadn’t gotten his hands on the Tesseract, Tony and Steve wouldn’t have been forced to make a second jump to the 1960s - they would have gotten away clean from 2012 and jumped straight back to the “present day” of Endgame. That whole part of the movie is a direct knock-on effect of Loki getting the tesseract and creating a divergent timeline.
If Steve was secretly present throughout the latter half of the 20th century and never did anything to fix the shit he knew was going horrendously wrong, alternate timelines be damned, then they’ve fundamentally broken his character. Peggy’s too.
But he leaves behind a divergent timeline where Thanos suddenly and completely disappears, and never comes back - that’s an absolutely massive divergence. And if that timeline was never supposed to happen, then Tony Stark was never supposed to die. Which means it’s another huge divergence.
That’s why it’s the one loose end the TVA needs to tie up - Loki’s escape is the only part of the Avengers’ time travel that doesn’t get corrected.
Steve presumably knows that if he alters the timeline, he risks a runaway butterfly effect which could risk everything up to and including the Avengers’ ability to ultimately defeat Thanos. Is it possible for Tony to become Iron Man if his parents aren’t murdered by Hydra? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t - so Steve’s best option is to let history unfold in the way that he knows it unfolded rather than risk creating a timeline where Thanos is successful because Tony Stark dies of shrapnel wounds in a cave in Afghanistan.
The “Thanos disappears in 2014” timeline was undoubtedly reset and folded back into the Sacred Timeline. Tony dying and removing Thanos in the process corrects the variant created by Thanos’ forward jump. It’s likely that Tony is supposed to die at this point in history anyway and that the TVA considers this version of events to be preferable to the alternatives.
But picking up Loki after he escapes with the tesseract doesn’t clean up the extra jump back to the 60s. They still don’t have a tesseract in 2012, and need to go further back to get one. None of the should have happened if Loki hadn’t gotten his hands on the one Tony dropped.
Which describes every decision every human makes, ever. Steve didn’t know that taking the super soldier serum wouldn’t kill him, but he did it because it was the right thing to do. He couldn’t know that storming that prison camp wouldn’t end up with him and all the prisoners getting killed, but he did it anyway, because it was the right thing to do. He couldn’t know that trusting Wanda and Pietro would work out, because it was the right thing to do. He couldn’t know what might happen when he travelled back in time to get the stones, but he did it because it was the right thing to do.
Yeah, save Bucky now, and maybe Tony Stark never becomes Iron Man and the Chitauri destroy New York. Or, save Bucky now, and Howard Stark becomes Iron Man, and by the time the Chitauri show up, his well adjusted son piloting his father’s Mark XCVI Iron Man armor cleans their clocks. Steve’s a military man. He knows the Earth is facing a war, and he’s got the best military intel on the enemy’s strategy imaginable. He’s not going to act on it to prevent millions of deaths, because some scientist he once knew talked to a monk, and they said it was a bad idea? Or, worse, because time traveling fascist theocrats showed up and intimidated him into staying home? No chance, no way.
This just doesn’t seem to fit at all with what we’ve seen of the TVA’s attitude towards variant timelines. The describe the sacred timeline as being created to literally prevent war between divergent timelines - which is precisely what Thanos did when he jumped forward in time to a point after he’d lost, so that he could kill the people who just defeated him.
And why is it likely Tony was supposed to die at this point? At this point, they’ve retrieved the stones and reversed Thanos’ snap. All that’s left is to put the stones back and go have some shwarma, until Thanos’ battlecruisers open fire. If Thanos wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place - and there’s simply no way that the TVA could be okay with what he just did to get there - what was Tony supposed to die from at this point?
If you look at their little wrist display doodads, there’s a red line on either side of the timeline, and a divergent line that threatens to cross that red line. If it gets too close, the TVA step in. If it doesn’t, the TVA make a decision to not interfere.
What Renslayer implied was that everything that happened with the Avengers was resolved, but there were loose ends. Cap going back in time and staying there might be one, but was possibly also resolved offscreen (some think they see Agent Carter in the background of one shot to explain that). Thanos himself is another, but he was killed, basically erased entirely by the Stones, so he’s arguably resolved via that. But Loki remains an outstanding problem, and that’s the story we’re following.
What we have to accept in order for the story to be consistent, is that what we aren’t being told doesn’t matter for the story we’re watching; assume that those things were addressed offscreen.
Having said that, I am still a bit unsettled that Gamora can be saved from the Soul Stone permadeath, but Black Widow can’t.
My impression about Steve’s decision to lie low in his life with Peggy was that he was simply tired about his role of saviour of the world at the cost of any personal life at all. He had just participated in saving half of the universe. I can understand that he thinks enough is enough and may I please have some life of my own. Let others carry the burden of saving the world. That’s what motivated him to pass on the mantle of Captain America, and explains why he wouldn’t change history any further: otherwise he might just as well have remained Cap.
Incidentally you might just as well wonder why none of the other Avengers felt the need to go back and change history. The answer in the context of this series is of course that the TVA pruned all those timelines.
He already knows that if he does nothing to alter the timeline, the Avengers will be victorious and Thanos will be defeated. Why risk a worse outcome?
A Steve Rogers who thinks he’s “done” isn’t Steve Rogers. No matter how much good he’s already done, he’s not someone who can just sit by when he knows people are suffering. That’s the absolute antithesis of his character.
My entire argument is that he did remain Cap - in an alternate timeline.
The Avengers didn’t feel the need to go back and change history because they can’t. You can’t change your current timeline by going back and altering the past. All you do it create a new divergent timeline.
Because a better outcome is possible. Because people right now (or right then) need help, and it’s not right to sacrifice their lives for the sake of people who haven’t been born yet. Because he isn’t a coward who will shy away from doing the right thing out of fear that it might lead to some unknown and unforeseeable consequence in the future.
And besides that, he’s already altered the timeline, because in the original timeline, Peggy went on to marry some other guy, and never saw Steve again until she was an old lady on her death bed. He’s already stepped on the butterfly the moment he went back to be with her.
I actually may agree with you here, but read it differently: Steve simply isn’t Steve anymore, the events changed him. Someone who always was a hero may find out he isn’t willing to be so indefinitely. That is not out of character, rather it is character development. Of course we can also discuss whether that development was adequately portrayed in Endgame.
The point about the difference in going back and creating alternate timelines versus changing the timeline you’re staying in is an interesting one. Could make an interesting discussion but would need a separate thread, I think.
Sure, but… it’s shitty character development. It’s Steve turning into a worse person, becoming more selfish and less caring.
And not just Steve, but Peggy, too - whom we know was active in US Intelligence this entire time. Is she cool knowing that the organization she’s in the process of founding is shot through with Hydra spies, and she can’t do anything about it because “the timeline?” Or does Steve just not tell her about that? Because Steve Rogers gaslighting his wife would also not be positive character development.
It’s literally the entire premise of this show.
Depends on who he is caring about. If Sharon is his granddaughter, then any changes he makes may jeopardize her very existence. This wasn’t someone arbitrary, this is someone that he knew and worked with, even if neither knew their relation at the time.
Would he be willing to sacrifice his “character”, and go into retirement, even knowing what would come, rather than sacrifice his own family?
I agree that Steve’s choice to get out of the game was a disappointment to me too, but I also can understand why he made that choice. And given that choice it seems a logical extension not to intervene in historical events.
Incidentally, but I do not know the MCU well enough, I’m not sure whether Steve actually has sufficient knowledge to radically change the timeline: he was frozen from mid-WW II to the nineties or so. And it appears top brass never trusted him with inside knowledge.
Thats why in my head canon, Steve chose the timeline where Thanos is going to dissapeer in 2015 or so.
Sharon can’t be his granddaughter, and nothing he can do in his past can stop her from existing. You can’t change the present by altering the past. If Sharon was his granddaughter, he couldn’t have met her in the main timeline - she’d only exist in the alternate timeline created by the changes Steve made in the past.
My whole point is that Steve never got out of the game, he just got out of the main timeline. He’s still Captain America in the alternate timeline he created when he stayed with Peggy.
The scene where he gets his clothes burnt off also felt like a reference to the scene where Thor gets his haircut in Ragnarok.
I don’t really want to get into the weeds with this, but I’m just dropping in to say that I think @Miller’s analysis is dead on. I’m not actually that confident that Loki’s show runner and writers are thinking that clearly about the situation, but I 100% agree that @Miller’s version of what’s going on should be the canon.