Avengers 4 theories based around Doctor Strange’s mysterious plan are coming in thick and fast, which is unsurprising seeing how the Sorcerer Supreme’s lines about multiple futures in Avengers: Infinity War might as well have been specifically designed to provoke fan speculation. Still, few seem as thoroughly thought through as this lengthy new Reddit post.
As with so many theories for next year’s release, this one involves the manipulation of time. User LA-Confidential starts off by setting the scene in the wake of Thanos’ recent victory, before pulling the rug out from under the Mad Titan.
“The Gauntlet is a wreck, but he can still use it to harness the Infinity Stones – after the Snap, he used them to restore his homeworld to the bucolic paradise he remembers. The Gauntlet might not be capable of another Snap in this state, but restoring Titan shows Thanos can still control the Stones and is still massively dangerous. So it’s a surprise to him when Titan suddenly reverts to the desolate ruin it was at the end of INFINITY WAR.”
How could this happen? Apparently a certain Stephen Strange had a little something to do with it.
“That’s part of Doctor Strange’s plan. We saw in DOCTOR STRANGE that he can cast a spell on the Time Stone to impose an infinite time loop, represented as a green energy ring rotating around his left wrist. No matter what happens, it always resets to the point in time when the spell was cast. The Stone and the spell on it keep working, even after Doctor Strange gets (repeatedly) killed. This point is important, and ties in with Strange’s later reminder to Ebony Maw that spells he casts on the Time Stone will persist even after he dies. When he finally gets Dormammu to relent and releases the spell, the energy ring on his left wrist isn’t seen again.”
LA-Confidential goes on to argue that while we do see Strange’s face, torso, and right arm in the final third of Infinity War, the camera seems unusually evasive of his left hand, suggesting a similar time loop plan is in the works. But while this trick may buy the Avengers some time, a long-term solution is still needed, and here’s where the popular theory of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes journeying back to the events of the previous films comes into play.
“Unfortunately, Thanos is a smart fella and he’ll deduce pretty quickly what’s going on, just as he deduced how to use the Stone to turn back time in the first place. Once he figures it out, he’ll just break the spell and that’s that, so there’s very little time to act. That’s where the time travel in the movie comes in, driven by Ant-Man, who has discovered how to use time vortexes in the Quantum Realm to get where and when you want to go. The Avengers need to go back to various points in time where they know Infinity Stones were available, scenes shown in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER and THE AVENGERS.”
But if this gives you hope that such slain characters as Loki and Heimdall could be making a return, the theory goes on to stress that the changing of history will be kept to a minimum.
“They’ll need to go undercover (or masquerading as their younger selves) to avoid changing history, because they need to have history happen exactly as it did, up until the time loop. With the one difference that Infinity Stones are taken out of the timeline and collected for one task, taking down Thanos before he breaks out of the loop or repeats the Snap. The Avengers would be able to use time travel to confront Thanos the instant the time loop resets, and if they win, will be able to return the Stones back to the exact instants in history they borrowed them.”
LA-Confidential continues by suggesting several more ideas – from a new vibranium gauntlet, to a fix for Bruce Banner’s transformation troubles – but the main meat of the argument is really this elaborate ploy. Honestly, while there are always holes to poke in time-bending plotlines, there are certainly quite a few credible elements to this theory that build on previous speculation with some interesting new ideas.
Of course, we’ll only know how many of these predictions hit their mark when Avengers 4 comes out on May 3rd, 2019.