At the start of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a big problem that it needed to fix. But which solution was the right one?
At the start of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had a big problem that it needed to fix. Thanos had snapped half of the universe, and after killing Thanos, the Avengers and the rest of the people in the universe lived for five years before they figured out time travel.
While the most obvious way to defeat Thanos and save the lives of all the people who were lost was to just go far back in time to kill him, they didn’t take this approach. Instead, they went back to gather all of the Infinity Stones and then undid the snap that way. However, while this choice made sense in some ways, it didn’t make sense in others.
When you're introducing time travel into any narrative, things are going to get messy. The concept can be difficult to understand, and any story with this problem has to come up with its own rules of time travel.
The idea is that messing up the past can create alternate realities or alter the future, but since no matter what they did they were likely going to impact the future, it didn’t matter much anyway.
The simplest reason why it made sense to undo the Snap in the story was that it was Tony Stark who basically made the choice. He was the one who had to decide to help the Avengers again, and though it did seem strange he didn’t stay in contact with them, nevertheless, he was the one who invented time travel.
Because of Morgan, he wasn’t going to implement time travel unless his daughter would remain in existence.
While undoing the Blip wouldn’t have caused too many problems for the world if the Avengers had been able to fix the problem quickly, this isn’t how it worked out. Because the remaining half of the population was alive for five years, so much changed when everyone else came back.
People who had been the same age now had a five-year age gap, and this is just one of the more minimal issues undoing the snap would have created.
While it was basically like no time had passed for the people who did get dusted out of existence, the other half of the universe lived an entire five years of their lives. While this isn’t to say those five years would have been fun, there is something possibly unethical about erasing five years of so many lives.
It also would probably create an alternate reality anyway. The entire thing is so messy and hard to think through, but erasing five years of living for so many doesn’t make sense.
One of the strangest things about Endgame is how it ignores the central conflict of Captain America: Civil War. That movie was about the idea that the heroes possibly needed oversight before making world-altering decisions, but suddenly, the Avengers were just back to doing whatever they wanted.
This is especially rich of Tony Stark given he was the one all for the Accords.
When fans watched Avengers: Infinity War, it was a shocking moment when they saw Thanos win and turn so many of their favorite characters into dust. Because of this surprising and cinematic moment, there needed to be some sort of resolution in Endgame that felt just as big and satisfying.
Rewinding time would have brought people back, but it wouldn’t have had the same impact. Plus, it gave Iron Man his triumphant ending moment.
While it looks as if the impacts of the Blip might be explored more in Disney+ series moving forward, so far, fans haven’t seen much of it. The truth is that a lot can happen in five years. People would have moved onto new relationships, moved, etc. So, this would create major complications when everyone else came back.
The emotional impacts of losing people for so long only to have them brought to life again would be really intense, and this is something that is hard to address in a movie or even a television series. There’s also the tragic fact that some people who were snapped would come back to find their loved ones had died like what happened to Monica Rambeau and her mother, Maria.
While it’s true that Tony wanted to make sure his daughter still existed, he wasn’t the only person who would have had children in the five-year gap. Rewinding time would have made it so that lots of new children, and baby animals, too, would no longer exist.
It would have been difficult to imagine letting this happen, and it wouldn’t just be Tony who would lose a child he loved.
Because the gap between the Blip and undoing the Blip was so long, the world would have shifted drastically. On every level, things would have changed including food production, governments, and infrastructure. So, having the half of the population that was lost come back would be a nightmare.
New government leaders would be in conflict with the old who wanted their place back. There likely wouldn’t be enough food to feed everyone anymore, and the list of issues goes on and on.
While undoing the Snap would cause a long host of issues that the MCU can’t even possibly address, rewinding time might not have been any better.
Time travel itself is such an unstable idea that it’s impossible to say how rewinding time would have impacted the future. This action would have changed so much, too, so there was really no way for any plan to turn out without consequences.
