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Good news: The latestAvengersmovie is not confusing at all.
Its likeAugust: Osage County, only this time Benedict Cumberbatch has a beard.
What are the rules of time travel according to Bruce Banner?
First, lets explain why time travel is necessary.
The Avengers agenda inEndgameis as follows: Its the year 2023.
Hes back to suggest that the superheroes use his girlfriends dads technology to what else?
Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, a.k.a.
Professor Hulk, figure it out.
Okay, so say we believe the Avengers: Time travel is possible.
How does it work for the people actually traveling through time?
Well, the answer is both alarmingly simple and achingly complicated.
If it sounds a little murky, thats because it is.
What are the rules of time travel according to Tilda Swinton?
Deutsch, as in David Deutsch, as in the multiverse?
Are we talking about parallel realities?
Yes, we are, which is pretty standard comic-book fare.
Remove one of the stones and that flow splits.
She mimics plucking a stone from the timeline and a menacing-looking black line branches out from the original.
That, she says, is a parallel reality.
Welcome to the multiverse.
Strange indirectly approved the plan.
And so she tacitly agrees to go along.
The easy answer is: Because the rest of the movie happens.
Did Captain Americas decision to return to the 1940s contradict these rules?
Its sweet, but does Steves little time jaunt totally contradict everything that the movie has established?
And what about that TV seriesAgent Carter?
Has its plot been totally undone?
We can call them Young Steve and Old Steve.
Young Steve gets frozen in ice before the end of WWII only to wake up in 2012.
Oh, and at certain points in time there werethreeif not more Steves running around on Earth.
In 1970, youve got Young Steve in the ice, Time-Traveling Steve with Tony Stark,andOld Steve.
Then, in 2012, theres freshly thawed Young Steve, Time-Traveling Steve, and Old Steve.
What about the two Nebulas?
So whats the deal with these two Nebulas?
Grammatically this situation is about as confusing as it is paradoxically.
If her younger self has been killed by her older self, then how can her older self exist?
Wouldnt this all fall under the grandfather paradox?
According to Professor Hulks linear time explanation, no.
According to Tilda Swintons branch-reality explanation, no.
But the movie plays fast and loose with its logic when it comes to the Nebulae.
In any case, Nebula is one of the timey-wimey-est Avengers.
Is Gamora alive again?
Thanos infamously killed Gamora (Zoe Saldana) so he could get the Soul Stone inInfinity War.
This amounts to the reverse of the Nebulae paradox.
But, if future Gamora hadnt died inInfinity War, then 2014 Gamora couldnt be given this second chance.
Could this have caused a bootstraps paradox or an information paradox?
What happened to Loki and the tesseract?
Umm, we dont know.
This isnt readdressed, but it does, maybe, seem to create the most definitive branch timeline.
In terms of explanations withinEndgame, there are really only two that dont involve this being a mistake.