Endgame in words!
Endgame like any other movie dealing with time travel can be a little confusing when it comes time to wrap things up. The more you think about how time travel works in this movie, the more it makes your head hurt. But, since you’re already here at this article, it’s probably too late for you anyway. Fortunately, the time travel elements only directly affect the endings of Thanos, Tony Stark, and Steve Rogers, while whatever is next for Thor, the guardians of the galaxy(the Gamora problem notwithstanding, which we’ll get into), and the rest of the gang is relatively straightforward.
But you can’t really deal with the Avengers endgame ending without at least trying to figure out the headachey rules of time travel. Most time travel narratives featuring characters traveling into their own pasts follow one of two-time travel logics. The first logic is that time travel is a closed-loop and that anything you change through traveling back in time will have always been changed. Everything that’s happened in the past has already happened, even if you didn’t know it until your current present. The second option is the branched parallel timelines logic. If you travel into the past, every change you make will create a new branch of the timeline that exists in parallel to the “original” branch. In this logic, you can never change the present and future of your own timeline, only the present, and future of other timelines. Which logic does the time travel in Endgame fall into? Kind of both, but mostly the second.
The fact that the Infinity Stones are stolen from the Avengers at various points in the timeline, even if they are returned, implies there are multiple timelines that were created from those changing moments. In other words, parallel universes would branch out from Steve, Tony, and Scott’s jump to Battle of New York in 2012; Steve and Tony’s jump to New Jersey in 1970; and from Rhodes, Clint, Nebula, Scott, and Nat’s jump to 2014. So keep all that in mind as we sort out the events of the Avengers: Endgame ending.
Thanks for reading!
Signing off
Dibyadyoti Sarkar
