Falcon and The Winter Soldier (spoilers)

[Werthead]

52 minutes ago, RumHam said:

That doesn't mean that removing a stone is the only way to create a new branch reality.  The Loki 2012 timeline proves this, as no stone was taken then and that timeline continues. I'd also argue the "multiverse" stuff they seem to be getting into suggests a timeline is created every time we make a decision. All these alternate realities they're (presumably) going to be playing with weren't created by removing infinity stones. 

The Space Stone was removed from where it was supposed to be, it was just removed by Loki rather than someone else. Where it was removed to is the question we're going to get addressed.

It may be a semantic point, but a Multiverse (which they keep teasing but also keep avoiding) can be seen as not a place where a new universe is created every time you make a decision, but where every single probability, no matter how small, is accounted for in a separate parallel universe already. So you don't create a new universe when you decide to have brie rather than cheddar for lunch, but there's already a universe where you had brie rather than cheddar on that particular day.

 

"Chronologically, in that reality, it never left" doesn't mean negating the timeline, in my opinion. Just that as Banner leaves with the stone Cap appears to return it and the timeline carries on as if the stone was never gone. So no risk of not having it to save the day if some interdimensional entity attacks. 

 

Quote

However ... disappearing Thanos’s sounds an awful lot like what Banner warns Scott against thinking: you can’t strangle baby Thanos because you can’t change your past. So, you can’t replace a stone and remove a Thanos either surely? Once you’re stuck with a Thanos army, you can’t ‘undo’ that, otherwise they would’ve just undone the whole thing.

That's a good point and I think the answer there is that we don't know because they didn't go there. If we take Banner's analysis, which the Ancient One (with 700 years of studying the Time Stone behind her) concurs with, that timeline would cease to exist because it would have been undone and Thanos and his army would vanish (or they'd become the Thanos and his army already defeated in Infinity War). My feeling is that this would not affect the 2023 Endgame timeline because it would only come about due to Thanos's actions, so the memory would remain (though whether that means Avengers HQ would instantly be rebuilt and none of the people would have any reason to be there is another question).

Probably best they avoided getting into that particular debate at that point. Disappearing Thanos's army with the Infinity Stones probably overrides any other space/time effects then caused by Cap returning the Stone to Morag.

Quote

 

The real question is what happens to main reality now that they don't have the stones to protect themselves since Thanos destroyed them.

I wonder if that's why the multiverse presthe umably starts to break down?

 

Someone upthread said the Infinity Stones technically still exist, they've just been dispersed into atoms, and they still exist in space/time (since at any point the Avengers can go back and get them again). But yes, they could say that the absence of the Infinity Stones could cause whatever problems are convenient for the plot at hand.

[mormont]

Aspiring writers, this is why you never introduce time travel into your stories. Because from then on, nobody will discuss your actual plots, they'll just argue about how time travel works in your universe. :p

[Werthead]

3 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

@Werthead Actually, better evidence against your point: Gamora still exists. So nullifying alt-2014 people doesn’t work.

Ah, reasonable point and we can conclude that Gamora will still play a role in events.

That might be covered by "using the Infinity Stones to dematerialise Thanos and his army" contingency though. That also preserves past-Gamora in some fashion.

Something I found amusing is that after spending a whole movie proving that everyone vanished by the Infinity Stones can be brought back, that means that Thanos isn't necessarily dead then, he could be reformed in some fashion using some derivation of Infinity Stone technology. I bet they've got that in their back pocket for a few years down the line. If the MCU's popularity starts dipping they've got a "smash glass to summon back Thanos for Avengers 7" get-out clause.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

I have 8 notifications, mostly from this thread. What have I done? 

(It's like when you make a strong political argument on FB calling out all your conservative friend's bullshit and log on and you're like an IG model and dear god I don't want to have to fight a million putties, not that anyone here is one).

10 hours ago, DMC said:

Right, the point is that guns vs. whatever Hawkeye uses in his "arrows" (which sometimes includes explosives btw) is not going to improve that power imbalance.

No, it won't. Just saying if I can't miss, I want to be like the black solider in Apocalypses Now who kills a guy with his grenade launcher just by hearing his voice in the dark. Bad ass fucking scene.

Also, I have a grenade on my desk. I still can't figure out what country it's from, but I don't think it's ours. 

9 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Hulk vs bullets, arrows and artillery shells is a bit of a wash. The only question is how much you want to piss him off.

Well yeah, I used Hulk as the example because WTF is a sniper with no other powers than deus ex machina athleticism when needed going to do against him? Wasn't the whole point of the topic that the powers of these characters are so uneven?

5 hours ago, 3CityApache said:

Wasn't the tv series actually trying to answer this very question?

It's a possibility that I may have overlooked. I watched it and liked it a lot, but I also didn't always give episodes my full attention (think like having the TV on while replying to a ton of emails, for example. You think you still got it all, but just a few minutes of distraction may have caused you to miss something important).

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The only way to stop Dr. Manhattan would be to convince him to stop.

Not exactly. Convincing him would be an avenue, but he could be pretty unreasonable in the source material until something finally clicks for him. What largely stopped him from preventing everything that went wrong was him deciding he simply didn't care about humans anymore. 

But if we're picking comic book characters to fight Mortal Kombat style, no one beats him. Superman would be a fly on his tail if he wanted him to be.

[DaveSumm]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

"Chronologically, in that reality, it never left"

I think this is the key phrase here, it serves no other purpose other than to differentiate the MCU timeline from this particular Ancient One’s. So I think there’s two things going on: there’s a multiverse full of realities. Separately, removing a stone causes a branch off that reality, which isn’t the same thing as a regular reality in the multiverse. It’s the dark branch that we see on her PowerPoint presentation, whereas I imagine other actual realities are just other orange lines.

So my basic head canon is now: Avengers go back in time and across to different realities. Diagonal travel. But they have a GPS so they know how to get back to their own reality AND how to return the stones to the correct realities. All of this obeys the laws that Banner laid out: you can’t change your past in those realities because they aren’t your realities. Cap then uses the GPS to travel to 1940’s MCU, which invokes Novikovian self-consistent time travel: you can’t change your past still, hence Cap has always been there (marrying Peggy and having kids, as per her line “you came back to me” in Winter Soldier).

Which still leaves the moral issue: why do the Avengers not give a shit about these realities? A Loki with an infinity stone, a Hydra who think Steve is a member, a Cap who knows Bucky is alive? I actually realise rewatching it that there’s no dialogue to imply that these realities don’t continue to exist, I just assumed they can’t because of the way they were behaving in them.

I LOVE talking about time travel, but it’s way off topic so I’d be happy to start a different thread, unless everyone’s exhausted?

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

The Space Stone was removed from where it was supposed to be, it was just removed by Loki rather than someone else. Where it was removed to is the question we're going to get addressed.

Loki only moved it through space though, it's still in that timeline. 

[SpaceChampion]

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

@Werthead Actually, better evidence against your point: Gamora still exists. So nullifying alt-2014 people doesn’t work.

So perhaps the timeline isn't nullified, but the two timelines are merged.  They both happened.

[DMC]

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

She also says "The Infinity Stones create what you experience as the flow of time," and removing one will automatically create a new branch reality.

Banner then says that returning the removed Stone to the very moment it was removed eliminates the branch and that branching timeline is negated ("chronologically, in that reality, it never left"). The Ancient One agrees with him.

Right, I'm not disagreeing with either of these, just the suggestion that removing the stone would somehow necessarily "kill" a timeline/reality.  While I could understand getting that impression from her powerpoint with the stones encircling the timeline and the her making the "branch reality" black, it's not what she said.  And in fact her statement I quoted rather clearly implies the reality without the time stone would still exist, it'd just be much worse off.

6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Because that was done after Thanos and his army was removed, it was a moot point (and everyone retains their memories of the battle because the timeline restoration can only do so much). It also means there is no alternate-2014 with no Guardians, no Thanos, Loki and Hemidall surviving etc. It was undone when Cap returned the Stone to Morag.

Well, this is where everything gets muddied.  Logically, it would makes sense that you could negate the reality if you returned the stone to Morag after Rhodey/Nebula took it but before Thanos abducted that Nebula.  But, as mentioned, this would necessarily mean there's no 2014 Gamora in the main timeline.  Moreover, logically it'd mean Stark didn't die because Thanos et al. never came to the main timeline. 

As stated, the more you delve into the repercussions of the time heist, the more muddied everything gets.  The only way to explain your way out of it is indeed saying there are somewhat infinite "multiverses" that account for all these possible eventualities.

[DaveSumm]

50 minutes ago, SpaceChampion said:

So perhaps the timeline isn't nullified, but the two timelines are merged.  They both happened.

I don’t see that they need to merge; there’s a reality minus a Thanos, and the MCU has a surplus Gamora. They both continue on in this fashion.

[Jaxom 1974]

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I think this is the key phrase here, it serves no other purpose other than to differentiate the MCU timeline from this particular Ancient One’s. So I think there’s two things going on: there’s a multiverse full of realities. Separately, removing a stone causes a branch off that reality, which isn’t the same thing as a regular reality in the multiverse. It’s the dark branch that we see on her PowerPoint presentation, whereas I imagine other actual realities are just other orange lines.

 

So you're suggesting it's a multiverse...of madness...?

3 hours ago, RumHam said:

Loki only moved it through space though, it's still in that timeline. 

Wait.  You're trying to say Loki in 2012 didn't teleport away with the Tesseract when no one was looking?  Because that's what he did.  It's why Cap and Tony had to go to.find.thr Tesseract in 1970...

[RumHam]

Just now, Jaxom 1974 said:

Wait.  You're trying to say Loki in 2012 didn't teleport away with the Tesseract when no one was looking?  Because that's what he did.  It's why Cap and Tony had to go to.find.thr Tesseract in 1970...

He used the space stone to teleport through space. He did not travel through time with it, or to an alternate timeline/reality. So the stone remained in that timeline, it was just somewhere else. 

[Kalbear]

Loki did teleport away, but it is still in that reality. Just like thanos teleported away from titan to earth. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

14 minutes ago, RumHam said:

He used the space stone to teleport through space. He did not travel through time with it, or to an alternate timeline/reality. So the stone remained in that timeline, it was just somewhere else. 

But that isn’t what happened in that timeline originally.  Therefore new timeline created from the point Loki stole the Tesseract because the Tesseract isn’t taken to be stored in the vault on Asgard.

[Jaxom 1974]

14 minutes ago, RumHam said:

He used the space stone to teleport through space. He did not travel through time with it, or to an alternate timeline/reality. So the stone remained in that timeline, it was just somewhere else. 

Ah. The way things were worded it seemed that you'd been saying he escaped and left the Tesseract.  If I implied time travel was involved with his escape, that wasn't intended. 

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that isn’t what happened in that timeline originally.  Therefore new timeline created from the point Loki stole the Tesseract.

This is my view as well.  Whether it traveled in time or not, it was taken away from the point it was meant to be at.  

Truly, a multiverse of...madness...

[RumHam]

6 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

But that isn’t what happened in that timeline originally.  Therefore new timeline created from the point Loki stole the Tesseract because the Tesseract isn’t taken to be stored in the vault on Asgard.

Oh I totally agree. Werthead I think was suggesting that only removing a stone created a branch reality. This can't be because loki only moved a stone and we know he made one.

[DaveSumm]

4 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Oh I totally agree. Werthead I think was suggesting that only removing a stone created a branch reality. This can't be because loki only moved a stone and we know he made one.

I would argue that that reality always existed, and now it has a rogue Loki. I don’t think anyone ‘makes’ timelines.

[RumHam]

6 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I would argue that that reality always existed, and now it has a rogue Loki. I don’t think anyone ‘makes’ timelines.

Yeah you arr right that was sloppy wording. The avengers created it when they went back in time to 2012. Prior to that it did not exist.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

24 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

I would argue that that reality always existed, and now it has a rogue Loki. I don’t think anyone ‘makes’ timelines.

How?  The Tesseract is not in the Asgard Vault for “reformed (ish)” Loki to steal and give away to Thanos on the Refugee ship.

Therefore... new timeline. 

[briantw]

53 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Oh I totally agree. Werthead I think was suggesting that only removing a stone created a branch reality. This can't be because loki only moved a stone and we know he made one.

The way time travel is explained in Endgame, effectively any change they make won't impact the MCU timeline, but will create an alternate timeline.  This is why they can't just go back and choke baby Thanos in his crib, because that would create a splinter timeline but has nothing to do with the infinity stones.  

[DaveSumm]

13 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

How?  The Tesseract is not in the Asgard Vault for “reformed (ish)” Loki to steal and give away to Thanos on the Refugee ship.

Therefore... new timeline. 

I think this is all very Back-To-The-Future ish and Endgame goes out of its way to avoid that. All the creating and undoing of timelines. In the many-world theory, there are an obscene number of other realities that already exist, and I’m positing that the Avengers visited one such reality to try and steal the space stone. Loki escapes with it, and as far as the inhabitants of that reality are concerned, that’s just what happened. Nobody created it, nobody can undo it. You could argue that the Avengers created the circumstances by which that reality differs significantly, but ultimately that’s just semantics - it’s not really any different from saying Tony ‘created’ the MCU timeline by becoming Iron Man. It’s just some stuff that happened.