This would also mean, in order for the timeline not to be fundamentally broken, that our version of Steve would have always been married to Peggy, even if he didn't know it until this exact moment. That would make him complicit in the knowledge of all the horrific things happening to the people he loves during those years. Possibility 2 is that Steve did not create a branched timeline by going back, just lived his life as quietly as possible through the post-war years. Seriously, why would he bother coming back at all if he was so confident that the present day world didn't need him anymore? Why leave the timeline he made, especially if it really were so much better? What incentive does he have to go through the trouble? What About Option 2? Then, happy and old, Steve miraculously jumped back to our timeline unassisted, which ought to be impossible, and for no real reason, just in time to pass the shield on to Sam. In the process, he erased the entire life that he knew Peggy had without him, including her husband and the kids she had while he was in the ice. Possibility 1 is that Steve did create an alternate timeline that we just never got to see where he and Peggy were married, possibly went off and were superheroes together, stopped HYDRA from infiltrating SHIELD, rescued Bucky, prevented Howard Stark's assassination, and negated the need for the Avengers entirely. In the interest of mitigating the confusion here (and make no mistake-this is confusing as hell) let's break it down. We'd be seeing a different timeline all together. His reformed existence in the past should have changed events to the point that the movie’s present day would be different not only for Steve but for everyone. If Steve had actually created a branched timeline, he wouldn't have been an old man in our present. Steve changed his own past, and the past of Peggy Carter, by being present for those 70 years he originally spent frozen and marrying her-which, for whatever reason, allowed him to still exist as an old man in the main timeline he left-our present. ![]() Or, rather, he should have made a new one, but somehow didn't. ![]() That was his mission.īut in the process of closing off all the potential branches, Steve apparently made a new one. A few of those branched timelines definitely still exist-an alternate 2014 where Thanos brought his forces to Earth years earlier than he originally did, an alternate 2011 where Loki escaped with the Tesseract after the end of Avengers 1, and so on-but the ones that were taken care of, were handled by Steve. If the Infinity Stones weren't placed back in the exact places in the exact moments they were taken from, the MCU would be dealing with a bunch of branching timelines where various characters and entire movies either couldn't exist or would be completely doomed. As explicitly stated, by Endgame's own rules, you cannot change the present, you can only create new timelines-i.e. Let's take a look at Endgame's time travel logic first. Or, maybe it would be, if it worked at all either in terms of Steve's thematic arc throughout his MCU tenure or by the rules that Endgame itself established. We even get a little flashback of Steve finally sharing his dance with Peggy back in the '40s (or maybe the '50s, after the war) in what is obviously intended to be a very romantic, fulfilling coda to his story. This results in him showing back up in the present not by taking the quantum portal, but by walking (or maybe he took an Uber? Who knows) to a bench about 50 feet to the left of the portal, returning as an old man who has lived an entire life in the blink of the audience's eye. He gives the Stones back, sure, and returns the Mjolnir he's been using to Asgard, apparently, but then he decides to take a detour and go live a full life with Peggy Carter somewhere in the past. The real problem is that Steve doesn't actually succeed at his mission. Steve does this completely alone for some reason, which also doesn't make a lot of sense, but we'll let that slide for right now. You know, to avoid all the branched timelines that the Ancient One warned Bruce Banner about with the help of their handy cosmic infographic. Steve Rogers finished out his tenure as a main line MCU hero by not only wielding Mjolnir and surviving a truly brutal beating by Thanos, he also (apparently) volunteered to be the person to deliver the Infinity Stones back to their respective points in the timeline. ![]() Now Playing: Avengers: Endgame Ending Explained! (SPOILERS) By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's
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