Given your near flawless, near 100% accuracy in predicting these things, you're probably right.
The 'Branched Timeline' approach isn't in any way consistent with or a satisfactory conclusion to Steve's story as plotted out across all of the films in which he's thus far appeared, whereas the Closed Loop approach that Markus and McFeeley have stated was their intent is both of those things, which is why I believe that there's a higher likelihood that Doomsday - which McFeeley co-wrote with Michael Waldron - will take the Closed Loop approach over the Branched Timeline one, although I do acknowledge that I could be wrong.
We'll find out in December.
The time stone shenanigans imo are pretty much all localized magicification of causal entropy.
There was no time travel.
Strange reversed the things that happened.
He let the broken cup fly back together.
It doesn’t get more “a wizard did it” than that.
There was no time travel.
Strange reversed the things that happened.
He let the broken cup fly back together.
It doesn’t get more “a wizard did it” than that.
I always thought the end of Doctor Strange felt like a Steven Moffat DW episode
In movie directors do outrank writers.
No, there's really not.
There's really not much chance of Doomsday even being relevant to any of this at all. Endgame was the actual time travel movie. Doomsday may technically involve time travel to let characters cross universes, but it's not set to be a time travel movie. Realities colliding and collapsing is a very different sort of story than the time heist and it's doubtful we'll even see anyone try to travel to their past, let alone get a further explanation of how that works that's somehow clearer and more indisputable than the actual time travel movie that was focused on the concept.
I thought so too. This whole concept of trying to apply hard SF to time travel is a bit of a black hole anyway because, if time travel to the past is possible then it will almost certainly require understanding that we don't have right now and would be nothing like we can can imagine or understand at the moment. The only requirement for a time travel story aside from being an engaging story is that it does its best to remain internally consistent. I'm not entirely sure that Endgame does without some kind of effort to fill in the blanks. The entire time travel theory as explained in the movie was written to serve the needs of the story and try to balance the story with what we knew about the MCU. As for different Time Travel rules in different MCU projects (Ms. Marvel and Doctor Strange, for example), I'm fine with that as they could be explained away fairly easily. And multiple versions of time travel can exist simultaneously within a comic book universe anyway.
Actually there's a lot of solid theoretical physics about how time travel and retrocausality would work. I've got a number of theoretical papers on my computer that I've downloaded and used as reference in my Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations novels and other time travel fiction.
You see, it's not true that it would require understanding we don't have, because the laws of physics are universal constants, so that if we know what those laws and their governing equations are, we can apply them to hypothetical situations and calculate how they would manifest. This is the very foundation of science, the ability to use what we know to predict things beyond what we know, which allows us to test the validity of theories by seeing if their predictions match experimental results. So far, the predictions of General Relativity and quantum mechanics have been consistently confirmed by countless experiments and everyday applications (GPS calculations depend on relativistic effects, for instance), so we have high confidence in their accuracy, and simply have to apply those equations to situations such as time travel through a wormhole or closed timelike curve to calculate how they would play out.
There's even a theory, favored by John Cramer, that quantum phenomena depend on retrocausality, in the form of advanced waves propagating backward in time from future events, which is how the photons in slit experiments can seem to "know" in advance which slit they'll pass through or whatever. I don't think it's been confirmed by experiment yet, but if it did turn out to be true, it would mean that phenomena propagating backward in time are not only possible, but fundamental to physics.
It is absolutely possible to write hard SF about time travel, since the very idea that the flow of time is not absolute is grounded in relativity, as are mechanisms for time travel such as wormholes. One of the definitive examples is Timemaster by Robert L. Forward, a physicist-author who based his novels on his own theoretical work, making them just about the hardest hard SF out there (though far from the best-written, unfortunately). Gregory Benford's Timescape is similarly based on its author's own theoretical research into tachyons, though I've always found its interpretation of how tachyons would travel back in time a bit hard to swallow. I've done several of my own hard-SF time travel stories, which can be found on my Patreon; two of them are also in my print collection Aleyara's Descent and Other Stories.
The main thing that theory states about time travel is what I've been saying, that it's impossible to erase or alter an event that's happened. The Novikov Self-Consistency Principle states that time travel would be constrained to situations where the travelers create their own past rather than altering it. For instance, it's entirely mathematically valid for a particle to fall through a wormhole into the past and thereby knock itself into the wormhole, but completely invalid for the particle to fall through the wormhole and knock itself away from the wormhole, because that creates a paradox, i.e. something that can't happen because it's self-contradictory.
The only way such a thing could happen is if an alternate timeline were created in parallel with the unaltered original. But there are two schools of thought on this in quantum theory. One is that a time traveler would be constrained to create their own timeline, because by going back in time, they entangle the past with the future they came from, thereby guaranteeing that they will only be able to measure/observe that future rather than another one. The other is that an entity traveling back in time would be required to follow every possible path, thereby creating multiple timelines at once, including the unaltered original. So physics allows for a single consistent timeline or multiple parallel timelines, but does not allow for a timeline being erased or rewritten.
However, the Many-Worlds Interpretation seems to be giving way to the idea of Quantum Darwinism, that different potential reality states compete to spread outward through the universe and only the most stable state wins out, so multiple realities only exist on a microscopic level and are swamped by a single dominant reality once you get to the macroscopic level. So that would seem to suggest that the only possibility is self-consistent time travel, a la The Final Countdown or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Which is exactly my problem with most fictional time travel, since it's usually based on premises that contradict themselves if you really delve into their internal logic. Even if a story applies its putative rules consistently, the rules themselves rarely make any real sense or hold up to detailed analysis.
No, it was grounded in the aforementioned theoretical physics work, which also happened to serve the needs of their story. The filmmakers didn't make it up from whole cloth, they did their homework and consulted with experts to get the physics right (allowing for dramatic license). This knowledge is out there for anyone who cares enough to look for it, and the makers of Endgame deserve lots of credit for being among the few filmmakers who actually did care.
Who saw Avengers Doomsday today?
bsky.app
Every Film Now (@everyfilmnow.bsky.social)
‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ was originally set to release today (May 1, 2026).
bsky.app
Who saw Avengers Doomsday today?
Every Film Now (@everyfilmnow.bsky.social)
‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ was originally set to release today (May 1, 2026).
Maybe we could shift over to that quantum reality?
It will at least have to involve time travel in some form since we know the FF are coming forward from their universe's 1960s, and Steve Rogers will be coming forward in time since he's crossing over the 616 universe just a few years older than he was in Endgame, rather than the old man we saw in Endgame.
"Time travel" moving forward though is something we could theoretically do today. That's what happened in Project Hail Mary (and happened with Steve already through hibernation*). Maybe the FF have been traveling close to the speed of light for example.
*Not something we have the technology for, of course.
In fact we do it effortlessly!
Daylight Savings Time proves that time travel has no positive outcome.
True!
It's something we already do constantly, at the rate of one second per second.
I just rewatched Thunderbolts* and decided that I really hope we see more of Mel. Even if she never takes up the Songbird persona, she is clearly already on a similar arc as her comic counterpart.
Another Mel fan! One of us!
I won't lie, between my adoration for Geraldine Viswanathan and the character sharing my first name, I'm wildly biased but I think she's a great character and we need to see more of her everywhere.