![]() Just a little earlier in Endgame, it was clear that the power of the Gauntlet and the combined stones could barely be contained by the Hulk’s gamma-irradiated physique, so if he couldn’t handle it, the minute Tony had to use it, we should have all been clued in to his imminent exit from the land of the living. The seeds of Tony’s death by Infinity Gauntlet have been teased since at least 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, when Ronan the Accuser disintegrated because he couldn’t handle the energies contained within the Power Stone, and was thus consumed. Of course, the destruction of the Thanos of “five years ago” in the “present” of the current MCU opens the door to all manner of headaches, but the simplest explanation here is that the Thanos that Thor beheaded early in the movie is still “our” Thanos, while the one defeated at the end of the movie is from a parallel universe, which might help explain why his demise doesn’t invalidate the next few years of the MCU. Tony Stark uses the reality altering power of the Infinity Gauntlet to wipe out Thanos, the Black Order, and their entire army, just as Thanos wiped out half of all life in the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. Since that didn’t happen, this implies that there are parallel branch universes that our heroes and villains are jumping between, but those branches are “clipped” (Steve’s word) when the Stones are returned to their place in the timeline. If he travels to his own future (the Endgame present) and dies before ever assembling the Infinity Gauntlet and snapping in the first place, then the Avengers’ original need to stop him would become irrelevant… only if this were a closed loop timeline. This parallel branches theory, which is alluded to in Tony Stark’s final voiceover about the multiverse, is perhaps better explained by Thanos’s time travel. We tried to explain all of the Avengers: Endgame time travel rules right here. Maybe that will help with the rest of this. So keep all that in mind as we sort out the events of the Avengers: Endgame ending. 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. 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 changed moments. Which logic does the time travel in Endgame fall into? Kind of both, but mostly the second. ![]() In this logic, you can never change the present and future of your own timeline, only the present and future of other timelines. 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. The second option is the branched parallel timelines logic. ![]() Everything that’s happened in the past has already happened, even if you didn’t know it until your current present. 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. Most time travel narratives featuring characters traveling into their own pasts follow one of two time travel logics. But you can’t really deal with the Avengers: Endgame ending without at least trying to figure out the headachey rules of time travel (which we’ll go into in much more thorough detail in another article).
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