Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread

You're making that up.

 

How does not answering question answer a question?

 

Seriously, check the design. It's been discussed here and I thought it was common knowledge.

 

it's one thing to expect me to take the writers word over the directors, but now you expect me to considet online discussions as canon?

 

I never said that. C'mon now

 

That's not an explanation, it's just a description of a thing that can't happen. A bootstrap paradox is like climbing a fence by standing on your own shoulders. It's nonsense and has no basis in science.
If you go back in time and play 'Johnny B Goode' to Chuck Berry's less famous cousin Marvin, you haven't created a bootstrap paradox, you've just moved information from one universe to a nearly identical universe where Chuck Berry would have come up with the song on his own very soon anyway, you just got there first, or he'd already written it and his next words to Marv where "how the hell did you get my song so fast?!" The song didn't come out of nowhere, it just came from a different, but nearly identical Chuck Berry. In short, it's not non-linear causality, but linear causality across five dimensions.
This is also explicit in the movie as it's the whole point of Stark's time-space GPS device. Navigating tangential temporal nexuses so you not only land when and where you need to, but are also to return to when, where and *what* you departed from.

So just like it's presented in Endgame: they're not altering their past because the second they reach a previous point in time they're altering the flow of time by their very presence and creating a branch, right down to the planck scale. This is *repeatedly* spelled out in the movie, as is the explicit refutation of pop-culture representations, yes including Bill & Ted too.

As for the Ancient One, she's talking about the horrible consequences of a universe loosing an infinity stone, thus making it vulnerable to outside sources. Hence: nasty branch reality. The difference between this and Thanos 86'ing the stones comes down to the first law of thermodynamics. The stones weren't really destroyed, because they can't be. Nothing can since the matter and energy of the universe is a closed system. All he could do, as he said was reduce them to atoms, thus rendering them unusable. But as atoms, they still exist.
What the Ancient One described wasn't destruction, but their total removal from the space time continuum, like say if a traveller from a different time "borrowed" one and neglected to return it.

If he could sit back and let all that horrible crap happen, then he wouldn't be Steve Rogers. That much at least is irrefutable.

 

None of this is based in science. Unless you've come back to the past having invented a time machine. Tell us your secrets!

That would only be true IF there are multiple universes and not self consistent.
In my fictional version of time travel, which is different than your fictional version of time travel, the universe can be self consistent, like Back to the Future.
All of this willy nilly alternative time line stuff... PFFT.

 

Canon is what's in the actual film, not what a participant in its creation says in an interview. Again, film is a collaborative creation. You can't judge it as if it were prose, treating the writers as the only creators that matter. The script is not the film; it's just the instruction book for creating the film. You can't live in a blueprint.

The writers say one thing, the directors (who outrank them, by the way) say another, the producer is agnostic. That's not unheard of, to have different participants in a collaboration disagree on how they interpret it. Was Rick Deckard a replicant in Blade Runner? Was Number Six in The Prisoner the same person as John Drake from Danger Man? Both cases where different participants in the work's creation insisted on contradictory answers to the question. And I wouldn't be surprised if they maintained the controversy on purpose, because anything that keeps people talking about your creation is a good thing.

 

Again, nothing in the movie ever actually says that traveling back in time creates an alternate universe. The movie says that removing an infinity stone from the timeline creates an alternate universe and that you can't change your past and therefore Back to the Future (and various other time travel movies) are wrong. That's it.

You may interpret events as implying that time travel creates alternate universes, but we really don't know if that's true based on what's written in the film itself and we really don't know exactly how Steve understood what was said to him (which we probably didn't even see in its entirety).

Also, for the record, the Ancient One never says a thing about a branch reality which is missing, say, the Aether or the Tesseract, being bad. The only justification she gives for not wanting to live in a reality without the time stone is that she would personally no longer have access to her great weapon if she needed it to defend Earth from boogedy boogedies. If that's the only reason the time stone needs to go back, then the other stones are debatable at best and the soul stone in particular would likely never even be missed.

And in regards to the shield: Cap getting a new shield from his past really isn't a problem. All you have to do is imagine a single adventure somewhere with the Black Panther (aka T'Chaka) where he proves himself trustworthy (as that's literally what cap does) and the door is open. Or you could just as easily imagine Howard Stark held some Vibranium back/melted down some other old prototype of his to make a new shield. Heck, for all we know Old Cap could've literally just been waiting at T'Challa's doorstep after the battle and asked him for a new shield and a ride to the time travel machine and also, I want this to be a surprise, so don't tell anyone I'm coming.

 

It means they themselves don't know, or just don't give a crap. I wouldn't be surprised if they never applied a tenth of the effort we're all putting into the whys and hows of Cap's ending. (Not a criticism; it wasn't all that important to the story being told.)

 

When you have a pair of screenwriters who have publicly declared their narrative intent and also have written/producer multiple other stories involving both Cap and Peggy that contain information that is entirely consistent with that narrative intent, I don't see the logic in discounting their comments even in a situation where the people responsible for visualizing their narrative intent have a differing viewpoint.

 

On the contrary, Tony specifically name-drops the "Deutsch Proposition", better knows as the "Many-worlds interpretation".
The nature of this concept means that the universe "splits" every time any particle interacts with another with a less than a 100% certain outcome, which as you can imagine would happen so frequently every moment across the entire universe as to be functionally indistinguishable from infinite. The *vast* majority of those divisions would be so minute as to be impossible to quantify, but they're mathematically very real.

So yeah, since as far as quantum physics is concerned a person is just a clump of billions of billions of billions of subatomic particles, the femtosecond one such cluster arrives at it's new space-time coordinates, it is functionally in a new, damn near identical universe. That said clump hasn't even kissed his teenage mum yet is irrelevant, the dye is already cast.

Again, all of this was explicitly stated as the reason they needed a method of navigation through the quantum realm or they'd never be able to get back. Remember that with the quantum tunnel, getting there is the easy part, getting back to where you departed from would require precise multi-dimensional calculation, or an astonishingly fluky rat.
It's also why altering past events has no impact on the present, because it can't. Your past is as real and tangible as your present and future; time is just how we perceive our finite path through a medium of infinite probabilities.

Nebula didn't vanish when she shot herself because her past didn't include a visit from future Nebula. If it had, she wouldn't have been there to shoot herself. Past Nebula's universe split from the one we saw back in GotG the instant the Avengers exited the quantum realm on Morag. It may have only become noticeably different when we saw characters interact with each other in new ways, but the divergence had already occurred.

 

David Deutsch himself responded to the movie by saying that there is no 'Deutsch Proposition', so however you prefer to interpret that line it is essentially invented technobabble that can mean whatever the writers want.

Having it refer to the Many Worlds Theory in a form where essentially everything that can happen does happen in an alternate universe also wouldn't make the movie 'logical' or simple because the whole 'trimming the branches' plot makes absolutely no sense in that context. And it also makes no sense to explicitly spell out that removing a Stone causes an alternate timeline because under the many worlds theory literally anything you do would cause an alternate timeline. If that was what the movie wanted to be, the stone plotline should've been more along the lines of 'If the infinity stones aren't all present in the timestream at all times, there is an increasing risk of terrible catastrophe'.

 

Staring to deeply into the time travel mechanics in Endgame is like looking at the time travel mechanics of Doctor Who.

Time travel gets the story going. It’s not going to be logically consistent. That’s not the point. The point is to get them on an adventure that will solve the problem and celebrate the previous movies.

Carry on.

 

For the purposes of Cap's overall narrative, the question isn't specifically "how" he could have always been Peggy's husband, but whether or not he "was", and from an outsider's perspective, it is more logical, narratively satisfying, and thematically consistent if the answer to that question is "yes".

 

"Traveling back in time creates an alternate universe" and "you can't change your past" go hand-in-hand.

It is not in any way more logical, and clearly it's not considered 'more narratively satisfying' by everyone.

 

No they don't. It's already been explained multiple times by multiple different people how, so I don't see any point in repeating it again, but ignoring the obvious possibilities doesn't make them go away.

 

Exactly. Even if the actual act of traveling back through time didn't create the alternate reality, the moment the time travelers changed ANYTHING they created an alternate reality. Hawkeye created an alternate reality by removing his son's baseball glove. The 2012 team created an alternate reality as soon as they started interacting with 2012. Steve and Tony created another alternate reality when they traveled back to the 1970s. This is nothing radical or revolutionary. The Ancient One confirmed the existence of the multiverse and alternate realities back in the Doctor Strange movie. I have no doubt that the What If? show coming to Disney+ will confirm this.

 

Yes, they do. If you allegedly can't change your past, but then you time travel back into your past, it's not your past anymore. Because you've changed it just by showing up.

Ha! Good one!

Unlikely.

 

Directors>Screenwriters = Always