How Does Endgame Work? [Massive Spoilers]
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How does the time travel work in Avengers Endgame?
It makes sense to search for structure, but that structure might be very unlike our universe. The rules could stated as “whatever works best for the plot” or “whatever seems narratively satisfying”. Those are reasonable rules, but they aren’t ones that I’m that interested in. So let’s assume that there are fixed rules unrelated to narrative.
Science is the study of the best explanation, and this is no different. So let’s dream some up and compare them to the film:
The “Back To The Future” Method (BTTF)
Much as the film lambasts other time travel films, it eventually becomes a fairly down the line example of the genre. In films like Back To The Future are the protagonist is like a train carriage — if they go back and change something, it’s like one of those track switches; they can’t get back to their original station. If you start at London, got to Edinburgh and then switch the tracks, you can’t get to London any more.
The rules might be summed up like this:
You can only travel to your past and your future. You can only travel along your timeline.
Choices you make affect your future.
If you travel back into the past and change something you will not be able to return to your original state.
Small changes leave the world unaffected.
Changes take time to enact themself in the future — a photograph of a loved one who might cease to exist fades slowly, not immediately.
Some parts of this explanation fit Endgame — there is a focus on getting the infinity stones back to their original places in time — but many do not. We are shown no attempt to get back the tesseract after Loki steals it in the past, nor does any character seem interested in doing so, despite understanding the rules of time well enough to traverse them. This moves us on to some big questions.
What happens to Thanos? Is he dead? Or does he get zapped back in time? What about Gomora? Honestly, we don’t know. The only information we have are the films themself and we’ve already the rules kowtow to narrative. However, to bend my own rules slightly, I bet you a fiver that Gomora is in the next Guardians of the Galaxy film, despite being dead in the original timeline. We can argue about Thanos, but Gomora not being able to be sacrificed for the Soul Stone would, under this set of rules, massively alter the universe.
A more obvious flaw is implied — the characters (who again understand the universe well enough to do lots of very technical stuff) make no attempt to just steal or move one stone such that Thanos can’t get it. They make clear that ‘what has happened has happened’.
The “Back To The Future but Only For Infinity Stones” Method (BTTFBOFIS… OFIS)
Were I to be a cynical commentator I would suggest that the whole ‘return the stones’ arc was suggested just so Cap could get back with Peggy (which causes us a whole load of problems but we’ll get to that). But I’m not, the universe stands apart from narrative, perfect and… inevitable.
The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton’s character) tells Hulk that they cannot give him the Time Stone because they need it to fight threats in that time. Far be for me to point out that it will get destroyed in ~7 years anyway, but there also seems to be something about the universe being sustained by the Infinity Stones. This is tricky, because again, they get destroyed, but I think I remember Thanos saying he reduced them to atoms. Their power may still exist in the universe but just not in such a concentrated form. Regardless, characters are very clear on the point that they have to be put back or something awful will happen.
Why is this true of infinity stones but not all the other characters? I think the above paragraph satisfies me — the ancient One using her line drawing magic suggests that without them timeline will wither and fail. It’s not clear if this will affect ‘our’ universe, but to avert untold suffering here only to cause it elsewhere is hardly a great victory. So, the rules:
The present is immutable — changing the past will not change it.
You can travel back to your ‘original’ present.
Removing Infinity Stones creates new timelines which are changed by the past and new alternate futures
This seems like it works pretty well. It does ask some hard questions, what happens to the past? What happens to the universe in which Loki steals the Tesseract? It doesn’t affect ‘our’ universe, but what happens to it?
The main problem here is Captain America, because his change in the past has affected the present. He went into the past and stayed there long enough that he was in the ‘our’ present but old. That wasn’t the way it was originally. If he can do that, Loki’s (and likely Gomora’s) changed pasts ought to have travelled into the future too.
Which means we must resort to magic — perhaps Captain America asks to be sent across to his original universe at the end of his life to say goodbye to those versions of his friends. Perhaps, since time travel allows you to return to your ‘original’ present he time travels back across after Peggy’s death. Though here he’d need a gate, which there isn’t (note this would all be fine if he’d returned to the platform as an old man rather than being sat on that bench).
Except that above paragraph is nonsense. I’ve chosen an explanation I liked and then I am bending the facts to fit it. To briefly wax serious, this is tremendously poor science, if you get to invoke bending the rules anywhere you don’t have a coherent explanation. Notably, even some of the earliest theories of evolution did this same trick — Lamarck thought that simple organisms evolved into complex ones but that simple ones appeared from nowhere. Well why not have them all appear from nowhere, then? If your explanation invokes magic/rule bending/ hand waving anywhere it invokes it everywhere.
You don’t get to say, “Captain America did something magical”. If you think you do, there is no point reading this article. There is no set of rules to be understood.
Conclusion
So yeah, I don’t know what the rules are for time travel in Avengers Endgame. I can think of no set which describe all the events of the film. When looking at a film, this is okay — we acknowledge that really the assumption that there is a coherent set of universal laws is unreasonable in the case of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — that’s not what it is trying to achieve. It’s rules are largely narratival and on that level, Avengers Endgame was tremendously. But it is illustrative — were the MCU the real world, we would have to keep looking for the rules and admit that as far as things were currently concerned, the best answer we have is “I don’t know”.
