Endgame: A Moment of Appreciation for Doctor Strange’s Character Continuity
Minor-y spoiler-y, but not too bad. Major warning for my brand of sense of humour and my inability to choose between American and British spellings.
Anyway, I was appreciating @ririsasy’s Every Doctor Strange Appearance in Endgame and the analysis there when I noticed something I hadn’t before in the Great Purple Vortexes of Awesome (that’s their official name in the comics, probably).
Take a close look at the spell. We can’t really get a HD look at this spell yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to interpret the pixels to the best of our ability. It would be putting the ‘obsessed fan’ title at risk.
At the beginning of what the audience sees of the spell, Doctor Strange floats into frame. All Outriders within his target area are floating within purple beams of light before quickly being followed by these bright tendrils coming from the ground.
Within a couple seconds, these white light tendrils have fully elongated and grabbed onto the Outrider above them.
And finally, when Doctor Strange lands, the Outriders are pulled downward to the ground. What I had not noticed before while watching the film in theatres is that the Outriders are not slammed into the ground to kill them. Instead they’re being pulled into some sort of portal to who-knows-where. I would assume another dimension where they can’t harm others.
That rumbling after? Those are portals closing and the ground fixing itself.
And by the time the portals are closed, it’s as if the ground was never disturbed in the first place.
What does this mean? It means throughout the entire Infinity War, including the battle in Endgame with plenty of Outrider fodder to toss around, we as an audience never actually see Doctor Strange kill on-screen.
For those of you who live fulfilling lives outside of fandom don’t remember, in Doctor Strange’s origin movie, he ends up killing a man in self-defense.
This used to be a person’s astral body. And this is why you don’t stick forks into sockets.
After checking on his enemy and finding that, yep, he killed him, Doctor Strange is pretty upset about it. And he has no interest in ever repeating that again to the point that, at first, he rejects the Ancient One’s initial offering of becoming Master of the New York Sanctum.
Source: theavengerscast on Instagram
Somehow, against all odds in his position as a Master of the Mystic Arts, every action we have seen from him on-screen follows this mantra. The most damaging spell he ever uses against Thanos in Infinity War was this lightning-bolt thing (some fan theories think it might be the Bolts of Balthakk, but I like to call them the Sweet Lightning Lava Bolts). Considering Thanos was crushed by a boulder the size of a building at the beginning of the fight on Titan, I am not too worried about Thanos’s health here.
Endgame follows this trend with the scene identified above and his role in the latter part of the fight on being a protector for the whole field by keeping floodwaters back after severe damage to the surrounding landscape.
This character continuity is awesome. His mantra of “Do No Harm” has developed into a key part of Doctor Strange’s personality in the MCU and makes him very unique in that regard.
One of my greatest hopes for future appearances of Doctor Strange under various directors is that this remains a core part of his personality. While he understands the necessity of self-defense, because he has so many tools in his multi-dimensional toolbelt to deal with his enemies in other ways, I hope he continues to use his creativity and abilities to save others (and the universe) without killing and with as little physical harm as he can viably get away with. I hope that, should he be in a corner where major physical harm and/or killing is the only way out, he still continues to display regret at the outcome in some manner. I also hope that, should he ever be in a team situation where someone asks him to kill an intelligent being, he outright says ‘no’.
In the end, it was a great thing to realize in such a small section of onscreen time and it makes me very excited to see where Doctor Strange goes in Phase 4.
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