A viral post on Reddit is questioning Doctor Strange’s actions during Avengers: Infinity War, and his claim that the heroes only defeated Thanos in one of over 14 million possible futures.
“They beat Thanos on Titan 14,000,604 times. Dr Strange was actually looking for the one time they lose,” the post boldly theorizes. This claim accounts for Strange’s suspicious behavior during the terrific battle on Thanos’ home planet of Titan, between the Mad Titan and Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Strange himself.
According to this Reddit user, Strange knew that giving away the Time Stone, and consequently losing the battle on Titan, could be the only way the Marvel heroes wound up winning the whole war. Or Strange could have actually just been evilly plotting to take control of the multiverse all this time, by convincing Tony Stark he had to die for the universe to be saved, and therefore depriving the world from one of its most worshiped Avengers.
The comment section was quick to tear the evil Strange theory down, but the take that the Avengers could have actually killed Thanos right there on Titan was worth some attention. One user criticized the assertion that the Time Stone was given up “for free,” by reminding the original poster that it was actually done in order to “spare Tony’s life,” so that the tech genius could eventually invent time travel and subsequently revert Thanos’ actions.
Others argued that the reason Strange gave away the stone so easily was because he saw that if the Snap didn’t end up happening, then the emergence of the Celestial Tiamut (introduced in Eternals) would have occurred much earlier, meaning Sersi and the gang possibly wouldn’t have been able to stop it like they did in the Chloé Zhao-directed film.
Another theory reminds people that the Time Variance Authority was still a thing during Infinity War, and therefore any scenarios that deviated from what was always intended to happen in the Sacred Timeline would have been wiped out anyway, rendering Strange’s fourteen million predictions essentially useless.
All in all, considering the effort put into the recently released movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to show that the Stephen Strange from the 616 universe is one of the few versions of himself that is actually a good person, the evil Strange theory part of the post doesn’t hold much water.
Now that the MCU’s next phases have been laid out, and two new upcoming Avengers movies have been revealed, who’s to say what the future holds, and what turns Doctor Strange’s character might still take. Maybe this Reddit user will be proven right all along.