Spoilers to follow.
Avengers: Infinity War left the MCU in a pretty dire state, but at least it gave us hope with that last-minute tease that Captain Marvel will be coming to save the day in Avengers: Endgame. And now that the sequel’s finally here, we know that Carol Danvers ends up helping out with more than just the heroes’ fight against Thanos.
If you’ll recall, the early Endgame trailers dedicated much of their runtime to Tony Stark adrift in space – with Nebula – as he monologued about food and water running out, and oxygen on the verge of being depleted, too. Clearly, though, Iron Man wasn’t going to die before he made it back to Earth and sure enough, subsequent previews revealed that he did, somehow, manage to return home. But how exactly were Tony and Nebula saved? Well, it turns out that just as the fans theorized, Captain Marvel came to the rescue.
Admittedly, it’s a pretty weak and all too convenient fix for the problem, and also too predictable, but it’s indeed what the Russos chose to go with. As we see right near the start of Endgame, things are looking pretty bad for Robert Downey Jr. and Karen Gillan’s characters, but just as all hope seems lost, Carol appears out of nowhere, like an angel from the heavens, coming down to save them.
Without much explanation of how she found them, why she didn’t find them earlier or even how she’s able to bring their ship back to Earth – aside from the fact that she’s just super powerful – we see Captain Marvel save the day by literally powering the Benatar through space and back home, bringing Tony and Nebula to safety and allowing them to rejoin the team for the rest of Avengers: Endgame.