The one thing about Endgame I canât get past, the one thing that first WandaVision and moreso The Falcon & the Winter Soldier made brutally, abundantly clear, isnât even Steveâs super shitty ending, itâs that the Avengers made things infinitely worse by reversing the Blip.
Itâd be one thing if theyâd made the Blip never take place, or restored everyone one millisecond after they disappeared â things they absolutely could have done, by the way â but they didnât. They brought them all back five years later. Itâs insane. Itâs sociopathic.
First of all, a lot of people didnât disappear that day. They died. People who got hit by suddenly driverless cars, people who went down on pilotless airplanes, people skydiving when the instructor disappeared, people whose doctors crumbled to dust mid-surgery, babies who wasted away in their cribs because their parents got Snapped. None of those people got restored in the Reverse Snap. They just stayed dead.
Second of all, everyone got brought back right where theyâd disappeared. Which is fine in theory. Except isnât it pretty lucky no one was sitting in that chair when Monica got restored? And also that apparently no one had moved that chair in five years? So what if you were on a plane thatâs no longer in the air? What if you were on a boat thatâs no longer in the middle of the ocean? What if you were skydiving and now thereâs no parachute? What if you were on the top floor of a building thatâs since been demolished? What if you were in your car in the middle of the freaking freeway? Thatâs thousands more deaths, conservatively.
But forget about all those dead people for a sec. TFatWS makes it explicit that the world is in complete chaos because of the Reverse Snap. People are displaced, families have been torn apart, people are angry and scared and no one knows what to do. Itâs so clear that if the Avengers werenât going to undo the Snap completely â if they werenât going to undo it at the moment it happened â then they shouldnât have undone it at all. That it would have been kinder, better to have let the Snapped stay Snapped. Not just for the sake of the people left, but for the people who disappeared.
Imagine the absolute hell of materializing five years in the future to find someone else living in your house, someone else married to your spouse. To find out your baby died or your mom or your partner. And by the way you have no credit, you have no money, no job history, no possessions, nothing. But good luck trying to rebuild your life and all! Aren't you glad we brought you back? You're welcome!
If the MCU ended with Endgame and no one ever had to think about the ramifications, then fine. Whatever. Itâs a happy ending. What a cool final battle!
But it didnât end there. And as such, itâs not a happy ending. Itâs deranged. The Avengers are villains.
And itâs just so weird that no one in-universe seems to acknowledge this. That what the Avengers did was bad. That all this chaos, all this suffering, is entirely their fault.
âYeah, things suck, but I sure do hope Captain America 1.0 is having fun on the moon! Man, we all miss Iron Man!â
I donât know how to deal with that. I donât know how we, as an audience, are supposed to reconcile with that. I donât know how they think they can make that decision seem heroic when every subsequent movie and show just makes it retroactively worse.