There’s a lot of ground The Marvels is expected to cover — and judging by its recently released clip, it is starting the countdown to resolving Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ post-credits scene.
At this point, there is a lot that Marvel has consistently neglected to answer, especially the many mid-credit and post-credit scenes of Phase 4 and Phase 5 films and shows. Every new project is expected to resolve an existing mystery, and the questions that the fandom was hoping for The Marvels to answer include why Monica is pissed at Captain America, why the Skrulls are in the Captain Marvel sequel, and whether the film will introduce (or at least, tease) the X-Men, seeing as Kamala Khan and even Monica have been speculated to be mutants.
But an ominous line uttered by Monica Rambeau in a fresh The Marvels teaser seems to instead address Multiverse of Madness’ post-credits scene — even before it, not so subtly, teases the herald of the X-Men.
If the slowly fading “X” has taken over your senses, here’s what Monica says that is baking our noodles:
“There is a different reality bleeding into ours.”
Unless you were busy filling a petition against MCU’s monstrous use of CGI after seeing Strange’s third eye, you know the danger the mysterious Clea warns him about after she appears out of nowhere to seek his help — an “incursion” that has been triggered by the sorcerors universe-hopping antics in the film.
What is an incursion, you ask? In not-so-simple terms, it is a reality-ending disaster whereby the boundary between two universes starts getting destroyed, ending with both, or at least one of them completely perishing as a result. Sounds terrifying and yet, since MoM, Marvel has happily put the task of answering it on the back burner.
So, is The Marvels going to clear this up? Did Strange fail to stop the incursion, meaning that now, the wall separating Earth-616 from another reality has eroded to the point that its existence is felt in the OG MCU land? That’s what Monica seems to be saying… unless she is on a different Earth, and that one’s experiencing an incursion.
If the former is the case, then combined with that slowly-dissipating X, it could be the reality housing the X-Men. At the end of their reality “bleeding” into the OG universe, maybe we will be left with an Earth-616 that has absorbed some portions of the other existence — i.e., the mutants — while everything else of theirs is erased out of existence. Or Monica could have landed in a different reality — of which there are already rumors — but again, it could be home to the X-Men, and it is gradually eroding away.
Hopefully, it is either of the two because, between the yet-to-be-fully explained multiverse, the Sacred Timeline, the branch timelines, the time-traveling drowning in Bootstrap paradoxes, and outer space adventures, Marvel really can’t afford to add yet another brand-new mystery to the confusing mix.
