Looks good, but we all knew I was going to see BLACK WIDOW as soon as it came out anyway. I suppose that I should not hold out hope for an end-scene where Nat and Steve look over everything, just to make sure that the timeline is resetting properly everywhere. But surely Chris Evans can put on the dang suit just long enough to do that*.
Moe Lane
*As you all know: I decline to believe that Cap would leave behind somebody who he could save, particularly when he had time travel, all the Infinity Stones, and Mjolnir as resources. I also cannot conceive of a world where Steve Rogers would go stepping out with another man’s wife. Or break up her marriage. Or be able to HIDE inside of SHIELD for fifty years. What was he supposed to do, pretend that Zola wasn’t effing in there?
My own personal head canon is that Steve Rodgers lived out his life in a different timeline from the main MCU one, and so problems with how our timeline is preserved is that SR was never there to mess it up, etc.
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I mean, there’s no making sense of Endgame without parallel timelines anyway, right?
The problem with the alternate timeline idea is that he somehow then ended up in the main timeline again so that he could say goodbye, and give his shield to Falcon.
Cap’s send-off is sweet, and provides a way to let Chris Evans gracefully exit the role (which he wanted). But there’s pretty much no way to examine it without having to deal with a huge can of worms.
The 2015 version Thanos &co found their way from a different timeline to the main MCU one, right?
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I mean, how can you explain “older” Nebula killing “younger” Nebula except by invoking that they are from different timelines? And if Thanos (and his bunch) can cross between different timelines, why can’t Steve Rogers?
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Presumably the reconstituted Hank Pym was available so SR could bring plenty of extra Pym particles along on his stone return trip, and could’ve had some left over for for that “Old Cap” scene.
Steve Rogers delivered the items he was supposed to send back, and then went into the distant past instead of returning to the present. He “just happened” to show up at the appointed time and place as an old man, having lived out his life. The argument that Steve went into an alternate timeline would require Steve to go to that alternate timeline, live for decades with his wife, and then come using Pym Particles that he’d been holding onto for the last 65 or so years.
I just think that it’s beautiful that Kevin Feige managed to set it up so that we could have these endless continuity debates about the movies, too. Straight-up: genially* arguing about comic-book continuity is a time-honored geek tradition, but I didn’t think that it’d port over to the movies. And yet, it has. 🙂
*And sometimes not-genially, but luckily my readers are all functional adults. 🙂