Next year’s Avengers 4 exists at the intersection of several different superhero storylines, allowing for some elaborate storytelling and perhaps even more elaborate predictions of what stories could be told.
This new fan theory, for instance, finds a way of linking the ‘90s-set action of the upcoming Captain Marvel to the journeys of Doctor Strange and Loki – a pair who’ve each spawned their own wave of speculation thanks to the recent Avengers: Infinity War. While the Sorcerer Supreme’s claim that there are many different potential futures – only one of which sees Earth’s Mightiest Heroes defeat Thanos – seemed practically designed to spawn theories, the initial scene of focus in this new Reddit post is Loki’s death sequence.
User SpiderGoat99 points out a few suspicious elements from the scene where Thor’s brother misguidedly tries to come at Thanos with a dagger, but his main point here is the familiar-looking effects by which the weapon first appears.
“If you look carefully as the Dagger materializes in Loki’s hand there are “Green Flames” or green highlighting as it comes into being. These green flames or highlights are quite similar to the green flames which emerge when the Time Stone is used by Dr Strange and later also by Thanos.”
The Redditor goes on to argue that this dagger was the product of your average Avengers 4 theorist’s favorite plot device, time travel, with Strange allegedly using the Time Stone to transport the weapon into Loki’s hand from the future as part of his mysterious “end game” plan.
“Later still, Dr. Strange confronts Thanos on Titan for the Time Stone… Thanos retrieves the time stone but Dr. Strange has previously removed it from the Eye, off camera. Could not find Dr. Strange removing, or hiding, the stone in the deleted scenes. This scene is missing for a reason. This missing scene implies that not only did Dr. Strange remove the Time Stone from the Eye but that he has also used it again.”
An impressive maneuver, perhaps, but the theory then goes one further. Drawing on the recent Captain Marvel trailer as evidence, SpiderGoat99 speculates that Strange’s tinkering with the timeline introduces a whole lot more than a simple knife into the past.
“There is a brief shot in the trailer where a ship materializes over the Earth seemingly out of nowhere. The ship materializes with Orange Flame\Highlights. Now if we are following the current MCU timeline then we could assume this could be the work of the Soul Gem. This is mistaken, however, because the original color for the Time Stone, in the pre-MCU timeline, was … Orange. Thus the trailer for Captain Marvel is potentially indicative of an altered time-line, a time-line where Captain Marvel now exists. This points back to the inexplicable presence of the pager in the hand of Nick Fury at the end of Infinity War, indicating the timeline has been altered during the events of Infinity War. i.e. We have not seen the pager nor heard of Captain Marvel in any of the previous movies.”
Whether you buy into this reasoning or not, you’ve got to hand it to the theory for the way it manages to tie up so many of the loose ends left by Infinity War. We’ll see what answers Marvel Studios has in mind for the many questions it’s posed when Captain Marvel comes out on March 8th, 2019, followed by Avengers 4 on May 3rd.
