Like that segment in Agents of SHIELD where Peggy Carter’s husband was someone who Steve rescued from Germany?
Or Peggy slipping into dementia and not recognizing that Steve ever came back, even though in the timeline you propose he wasn’t gone that long?
Or Sharon Carter trying to have a relationship with a man that she had to know was going to be her aunt’s husband?
Or how a secret organization, infiltrated by another, evil secret organization, wouldn’t have ever seen one of the most recognizable faces in the US and felt the need to do something about it?
Or, forgetting entirely about Steve, where the second, unbroken shield he gave to Sam came from?
Eh. (waves hand dismissively) I never watched the TV shows.
As for SHIELD and Hydra, well, Steve Rogers went down during the war. This guy who shows up at Peggy’s house is a decade older. Hair dye, false mustache, whatever. “Yeah, weird resemblance, huh? I get that all the time.” Peggy and Steve would make it work. He remembers how things ostensibly went down, as far as he and any Avengers-adjacent people knew, so the two of them can make sure that all outward appearances are as he remembered them.
The way movie time-travel works is that it has to work, because it already has worked.
As for his shield, I don’t even know how many he’s burned through in the past. I would be kinda surprised if he didn’t have the resources to obtain a spare at any point between 2011 and the day he hands it over to Sam. Old fart that he is, he’s still Steve Rogers. He probably remembers Steve’s gym locker combination.
Never mind what Banner said; that was all just handwaving. If you can go back in time and interact with it at all, then Steve can go back to be with Peggy.
Professor Hulk is a dumbshit. He fucked everything up and had to have his sciencey stuff rescued by Tony. There. I said it. The guy is probably having more fun, but he’s a doofus now.
The only vibranium outside Wakanda’s control at the time of Age of Ultron are Cap’s original shield, small museum pieces like the one in Black Panther, and the stuff that Klaue stole (which Ultron used for his robots).
So, if Cap was going to make a new shield, it’d have to be afterCivil War, as he wouldn’t have access to a source of vibranium before then.
… But that’s after his fight with Tony, so, at that point, he’s given the original shield back. If he wanted one, I’m sure T’Challa could have obliged, but, if he did that, why would he ask for it and then not use it?
Not to mention that Tony immediately identifies the shield Cap is holding in Civil War as the one Howard Stark created, which, if he’d managed to get a spare before Civil War, he shouldn’t be able to do with any certainty.
Well, why couldn’t it just be the shield he used to fight Thanos, repaired after their fight? It’s been several days at least between the battle and Tony’s funeral. Could very well be that Steve knew what he was doing. When he went back in time, he had the stones and Mjolnir with him, but not his shield. I have no doubt that the plan to send Steve back was a few days in the making, so Steve probably asked Shuri to repair his shield real quick, and then Steve left it in his quarters for his old self to find. Or, what the hell, maybe he handed it off to Old Steve Rogers himself, maybe ten minutes before he met up with Banner and Wilson to set off on his mission. Old Steve would certainly remember to make that appointment, because of course, he already did.
Cap does not tell Peggy about the HYDRA infestation in SHIELD, or somehow convinces her not to root it out.
He also doesn’t warn anyone that use of the Tesseract is going to attract Loki and the Chitauri, costing at least thousands of lives in the Battle of New York.
He doesn’t try to save Bucky.
He doesn’t try to abscond with Loki’s Sceptre after the Battle of New York to prevent the whole Ultron incident from ever occurring.
In fact, Cap does absolutely nothing of note for the next 70 years. No one notices that he is physically exceptional in any way.
Peggy ends up in hospital, and experiences dementia where she thinks he never came back (even though he was only gone a few years).
Cap does nothing to interfere with the events of Civil War, or Infinity War.
Finally, the events of Endgame play out, and as the pay-off for decades of inaction and millions of lives lost to prevent an alternate timeline from spinning off… he meets with his younger self, picks up a repaired shield, has a short conversation with Sam Wilson and hands the shield off.
… I don’t think I like that version of Steve Rogers very much.
One of the things that someone will have told Cap is that according to Steven Strange, out of at least fourteen million possible branching realities that Strange investigated, the only one that does not end with Thanos’ snap being irreversible is the one we watched. If Cap believes that, he won’t try to do anything to alter the reality that we previously watched him live through, to the very best of his ability. Hydra infiltrating SHIELD pales in comparison to the Snap.
And Peggy’s life remains unchanged from whatever is was… as far as 2011 Steve is aware. Old Steve remembers exactly how much contact he had with Peggy in the 21st century. He and Peggy could conceivably conspire to make her condition appear to Young Steve to be much worse than it actually was, in order to keep Young Steve on the track Old Steve remembers being on.
All this is in the service of accomplishing Steve’s two most important goals: ensuring the ultimate defeat of Thanos’ plan, and getting to spend the rest of his life with Peggy Carter.
A bit more pragmatic than idealistic, for Captain America anyway, but he’s been through a hell of a lot, and he’s going to take the course that best preserves the saving of countless lives. If he can do that and still be with Peggy, I’m all for it.
Maybe there’s too much risk. Steve might have thought all this through and figured it was too risky, that he might end up shoving his personal reality into one of the 14 million bad ones on his second trip through the 21st century… he may even have decided to chicken out and not do it while he’s tying his shoes that morning… but then Old Steve shows up on his porch with a grin and a wave, and Young Steve knows his plan worked out after all, so he hands off the shield and heads down to meet Bruce and Sam with a spring in his step and a song in his heart.
In, say, the universe that younger Nebula and living Gamora came from, it’s pretty obvious that there won’t be a snap because there’s no Thanos anymore.
In the new timelines from before the Battle of Titan, anything goes. Remember, Thanos himself tried to assert that he was inevitable… and it didn’t work out that way.
Cap ain’t gonna risk deviating from the timeline that ended up working out okay for the good guys in the end. If he changes things in, say, 1978 so that, for example, Peter Quill is not abducted later on, or in 2013 so that Coulson survives the Battle of New York, or anything else that fires up a new timeline that is different from the ones Strange investigated, there’s no way to guarantee that Thanos won’t ultimately win in that timeline. If Old Steve appeared to Young Steve before Young Steve went on that final mission, that’s really the only indication that Young Steve’s plan will work, because it has. That’s why I think that meeting must have taken place.
Then the Power Stone never gets found, and Thanos doesn’t win. Easy!
Don’t know why he’d need to intervene for that; Coulson lives.
Sure there are. Off the top of my head:
Kill Thanos
Intercept Gamora before she finds the Soul Stone
Warn the Dwarves about what Thanos will do to them once they forge the Gauntlet, so they won’t be compelled to do it.
Destroy the Star Forge so it can’t be created in the first place.
Defeat the Kree ship attacking the hyperspeed prototype, so that Mar-Vell can take the Skrulls beyond the Kree’s (and therefore Thanos’) reach, under the condition that the Tesseract goes with them (and is similarly out of reach).
Start work on extracting/destroying the Mind Stone as soon as Civil War ends, as opposed to waiting for Thanos to be on the doorstep with the Time Stone
Guard the Aether during the Convergence, so that it never leaves the place where it was hidden (a place only accessible every 5,000 years)
… And that’s just off the top of my head. Any of those would definitively stop Thanos. Most of them are trivially easy to accomplish.
A meeting strangely not depicted. And one for which there are three problems.
There’s no way to know whether it’s a stable time loop, or whether that’s a different Steve Rogers from a different time line, who managed to make all the right decisions to bring about this time line, where the other Steve might not,
If it is a loop, there would have had to have been a first Steve who went back without any guarantee. And, I agree, he wouldn’t have risked his own timeline without a guarantee, and
The two smartest people he knows, Tony and Bruce, have both told him that time travel does not work that way, an interpretation which should have been bolstered by not remembering having been beaten up by himself and having “Bucky is alive” whispered into his ear.
Huh? Korath knew it was on Morag, didn’t he? And therefore, wouldn’t Ronan know that as well? I dunno, I only watched Guardians twice, and not recently.
I don’t remember when Loki killed him.
That’s… not trivial. Having made a galaxyful of enemies, nobody manages to kill Thanos until Thor does it post-snap.
It’ll still be there. It’ll just take longer for Thanos to find it.
Will they believe him? I’m told Dwarves really are difficult to dissuade from a commission.
Good luck, Cap! You’re back in 1950 or so. Let me know when you manage to get off-planet. I think I will similarly dismiss the rest of the space-based options, since they’re outside Cap’s purview.
Whenever he gets the Time Stone, he can go back to whenever the Mind Stone is available.
I don’t know what that stuff is. If it’s from Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, or Winter Soldier, I never saw those three.
Strangely? It’s meant to be a surprise. Both for us, the audience, and for Sam. And also to prevent Sam and Bruce from trying to talk him out of it. Makes perfect sense to me.
Why?
As far as I know, time travel does not, in fact, work that way. This is a comic book movie. So we also have Paul Rudd getting super big and super teensy.
And that right there is the actual hang-up! Well done!
Honestly, this has been fun. Thanks for indulging my contrariness!
I enjoyed your contrariness, like the cut of your jib, etc. You should see Winter Soldier. The other two, eh. Iron Man 3 is much better than 2 but has a rescue scene that doesn’t work unless it’s a kids movie, but the lifestyle of The Mandarin is not something for kids? And the feminism is a little too pat and second wave too? The Mandarin is really the best thing about that flic.
Thor: Dark World was very-well summed up at the end of the play-within-a-play in Thor: Ragnarok.
I guess you haven’t been watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D?
Season 6 just started, at a point I think is post-first-snap, but Coulson did not get “dusted”.
Confirmed dead at the end of season 5, but something’s going on.
Someone in my Instagram feed made a very astute observation.
If Steve didn’t time travel back to the present, he had to give up all the modern conveniences he’s finally become accustomed to. Imagine, no personal computers, internet, cellphones, microwave ovens, etc. for 30-50 years.
