Full SPOILERS ahead for Avengers: Endgame!
Avengers: Endgame left audiences thrilled, astounded, weeping, and maybe a little confused. That’s what happens when you make an incredibly complicated, multi-tiered storyline with alternate realities and time travel.
It’s also what happens when you conclude one of the most beloved characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with an emotionally devastating scene that, if you think about it, kind of makes him out to be a selfish jerk.
But in order to talk about whether Captain America made the right choice in Avengers: Endgame, we’re going to have to talk about some HUGE spoilers, so buckle up! Here we go…
What Happened to Captain America?
At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Captain America volunteers to go back in time and put the Infinity Stones back where the Avengers found them. Why? Because they had to pull off a time heist, and steal the stones from different years to assemble the Infinity Gauntlet, because Thanos destroyed the Stones in the current timeline.
Bruce Banner explained that going back in time doesn’t change the future, but The Ancient One clarifies that going back in time does create alternate realities in which the time travel does have a ripple effect. So in order to save their own timeline, without dooming any others (because every timeline needs the Infinity Stones), Captain America had to put the stones back right where they found them, before anybody noticed.
Banner sends Captain America back in time, and tries to return him to the present, but it doesn’t work. That’s when Cap, Bucky and Falcon see that Cap was already there, sitting on a bench, now an old man. He stayed in the past and, as we learn in a flashback, got his long-long-long-awaited dance with his true love, Peggy Carter.
It’s an emotionally satisfying finale, a happy conclusion to a life that genuinely deserved one.
But he may have broken more than he fixed.
The Good News
It’s heartwarming to think that Captain America went back in time and created another reality where he married Peggy, and that he lived happily with her in the background of the MCU all these many decades.
The Russo Brothers have already confirmed that this is what happened: (The film’s screenwriters, however, dispute that; for the purposes of this article, we’re going to go with the directors’ declaration as fact.) Captain America lived out his life in an alternate timeline, and came back to say goodbye and pass the mantle on to another.
So no harm, no foul, right?
The Bad News
Before they go back in time, Tony Stark makes Captain America promise that they’ll use the Infinity Stones to bring back the dead, not to change the timeline so they never died at all (which, presumably, the all-powerful Infinity Gauntlet could have done).
The reason he insisted is because Tony’s daughter Morgan Stark might never have been born, and erasing her – and anyone else who was born after the Snap – from history would be immoral.
Cap agrees, because it’s the right thing to do.
Then he went back in time and prevented two other kids from being born.
What did you think of Cap’s choice? Let us know in the comments!
For more on Avengers: Endgame, catch up on our review, how it may set up this classic Marvel villain for Phase 4, all the Easter eggs we caught, our biggest question about Black Widow, what’s next for the Endgame cast, a recap of who lived and who died, and our breakdown of the film’s rules of time travel.
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