Avengers: Endgame

"The Avengers: Endgame"

Starring: Fucking everybody

With special appearances by Robert Redford, Renee Russo, Haley Atwell, Tilda Swinton, Hugo Weaving's replacement and pretty much everyone who was in that second Captain America movie.

I could only put off doing this recap for so long. Before I start, I should point out a couple things. I've been reading a lot of Marvel comics lately and generally expanding my knowledge base on this universe. This mostly improves my ability to recognize nods and the basics of some characters because the more I read, the more it becomes obvious that the entire concept of canon is vague and variable. Also, the early years of Marvel contained a LOT of hilariously campy shit that was clearly meant for children. Anyway, the plot of this movie in particular is, like, one part Infinity Gauntlet, two parts Age of Ultron as written by Michael Crichton and one part fanfiction all thrown in a blender and pureed with a whole lot of "how can we find a way to work in these specific characters because these are the actors we have available."

Chrissy: And figuring out how to close out character arcs for the ones who aren't continuing in the series, i.e. Steve and Tony.
Diandra: And Natasha because I guess we can't have too many women at one time. Though considering "WandaVision" centers on three powerful women, maybe that is changing in spite of all the whining from the dudebros. I doubt that will stop them from complaining about the next "Captain Marvel", but...
Emilio: Or the next "Thor", which has Jane's Thor.
Diandra: Considering that one is directed by the same guy who did "Ragnarok"...yeah, I expect it will be a testosterone fest that they will have no problem with, ultimately.

Anyway. I'm sure there will be plenty of time to discuss the broader Marvel universe and comics and whatnot in what will no doubt be the longest recap I've ever written, so...let's get to it.

Chrissy: We who are about to die...[holds up beer can]
Emilio: [bumps his beer can against Chrissy's in a toast]
Diandra: The movie hasn't even started and we're already drinking?
Emilio: We can pace ourselves.
Diandra: You really have only just met Chrissy, haven't you?
Chrissy: Trying to say something?
Diandra: Trying? No...

We open with...Clint teaching his daughter how to shoot a bow and arrow. Right. Because he wasn't in the last movie at all for reasons. He has an ankle monitor because somebody said something about him cutting a similar deal to the one Scott made. The two boys are over by a picnic bench playing catch and Laura is setting up lunch. She asks Clint and the girl if they want mayo or mustard and the girl quietly questions why any sane person would put mayonnaise on a hot dog.

Chrissy: The same kind of person who puts ketchup on eggs.
Emilio: [coughs] [looks guilty]
Chrissy: Really, dude?
Diandra: Yeah, he's a heathen.

Clint mutters that her brothers probably do and calls that he and the girl will have mustard. While she's figuring out whether the boys really are heathens, the girl shoots a bullseye, high fives her dad and goes to retrieve the arrow. Laura calls that lunch is ready if they can take a break over there and Clint turns his back on his daughter to answer. When he turns back, there's a cloud of dust where she used to be. He looks around for her for a few seconds and turns to call Laura...who is also now gone. As are both boys. Because somehow the random 50% Thanos snapped out managed to include the entire Pym/VanDyne and Barton families.

As with before, there is no music. Just a low rumbling noise as he runs around trying to figure out where they disappeared to. That sound continues as we smash to the Marvel title card and switches to what the subtitles refer to as "psychedelic rock" music. This is possibly what is playing in the ship returning from Titan with the only two survivors of that group from The Snappening: Tony and Nebula.

Chrissy: Oh, dear god, is that what we're calling it now?
Diandra: Why not? I kind of like it.
Emilio: You could acknowledge that you've already seen "Far From Home" and go with The Blip.
Diandra: No. That only works from the perspective of the people who lost five years, which hasn't even happened yet.
Emilio: Well, we've lost four years and 2020 might count as two, so...
Diandra: Dude. This recap is already probably going to be the longest I have ever written. You want to start making it longer with political tangents already?

Anyway. Tony is teaching Nebula to play that game where you flick a folded paper "football" across a table through someone's finger "goal". Except she's not understanding and snatching the football before it reaches her. He patiently explains that she doesn't need to do that and sets up for her to flick it back. It hits him in the elbow and he encourages her that that was "close" and lets her do it again until she gets it through the goal and they are tied with one point each. She says she wants to try again, so we flash quickly through them each making shots and missing with him seemingly missing on purpose until she scores and he can declare her winner. He shakes her hand and congratulates her on a good game while she blinks in confusion and agrees that it was "fun," whatever that means. Humans are weird.

Chrissy: Already moved on to adopting another protege, huh?
Diandra: I will not call you daddy.
Chrissy: You must have just decided to play Nebula, because that was definitely not Stephen talking.
Diandra: Yes, I am Nebula and I'm not even going to dignify the rest of that sentence with a response.
Chrissy: You're right. It's probably the other way around there too.
Diandra: [loud, exasperated sigh]

Sometime later, Tony turns on the recorder in the half-destroyed remains of his helmet and we get the monologue message to Pepper that was used in the previews to tease the possibility that he would die very early in the movie. He looks like death warmed over and like he's lost a lot of weight. He says he doesn't know if she'll ever see this and he can't really bring himself to acknowledge the possibility that she may not even be around TO see it. He's been on the Guardian's ship for more than 20 days and "if it wasn't for the existential terror of staring into the literal void of space, I'd say I'm feeling a little better today." We flash back on Nebula using some sort of laser on the wound Thanos gave him as he says he's gotten over the infection thanks to the "Blue Meanie" who is very practical and "only a tiny bit sadistic" so he thinks Pepper would like her.

Chrissy: How do you feel about adopting another android?
Diandra: Hah. You know...I just realized that's why him half adopting her makes sense. All his kids so far except Peter have been machines.
Chrissy: And the sadist part is definitely a bonus.
Emilio: Aaaaaand there it is.

We get a flashback of them working to repair the ship as he exposits that the fuel cells were cracked so they had to reverse the ion charge (and possibly the polarity) and they were able to fly it for about 48 hours. But it ran out about a thousand light years from Earth still, so. We see him offering Nebula food, which she pushes back to him as he says the oxygen is going to run out in the morning. "Don't feel bad about this," he says, forgetting that she TRIED TO STOP HIM AND WHY THE FUCK WOULD SHE FEEL BAD?

Chrissy: Well, if you had agreed to do that one thing I kept begging you to do, I might not have run off after Doctor Copperfield.
Diandra: This is about the strap-on again, isn't it? Also, don't ever use that as a nickname again. It's terrible.
Emilio: It's kind of perfect, actually.
Chrissy: Right? Emilio gets me.

He changes his mind, deciding she should probably grovel for a couple weeks, then "move on with enormous guilt."

Chrissy: Or you could get rich selling vaginal steamers or some insane shit like that.
Diandra: I feel like Pepper is one of the romantic interests who could totally take over the superhero gig. Like Peggy taking over Captain America in the universe where Steve Rogers dies.
Emilio: Wouldn't Rhodey do that?
Diandra: Oh, right. My point is, Pepper would probably be baffled by the luxury bullshit Gwenyth sells rich people.
Chrissy: But not too baffled because her boyfriend constantly proves rich people will buy stupid, expensive shit.
Diandra: True.

He mutters that he should probably lie down for a bit but first he wants to make sure she knows that when he falls asleep for what will likely be the last time he will dream of her as always. And he's totally fine. He turns off the recorder, pulls his jacket over himself and curls up right there on the floor. Nebula finds him there, checks to see if he's still alive and carries him over to the captain's chair. This whole scene could totally play like he's dead, but... After a solid minute, light shines on his face and there is some sort of explosion outside the ship. He jolts and opens his eyes, squinting at the bright light approaching the ship until Carol comes into focus. She smiles like the angel or possibly even Jesus she is emulating here.

Back on Earth, Steve is shaving his beard off because one movie of him being scruffy was enough, thank you. He is staring at his reflection in the mirror when the mirror starts rattling and there's a loud rumbling outside the new Avengers building. He, Natasha, Bruce, Rhodey and Pepper run out to greet the Guardian ship Carol has flown all the way home and sets down on the lawn. Steve runs up to help Tony stumble out, taking over from Nebula. "I couldn't stop him," Tony mutters. "Neither could I," Steve says. Tony says he "lost the kid" and Steve points out that they lost...a lot of people. Tony starts to ask something, but is interrupted by Pepper running up and sobbing on him. Rocket, who has appeared out of nowhere, joins Nebula on the loading bay door and they just silently hold each other's hand.

Inside, the Earth team begins the exposition dump while pictures of the casualties of The Snappening appear on the holograph screens. Or at least the major players. Bucky, Fury, Stephen, Selvig, Sam, Wanda, Hope, Hank, Scott...because they don't know what happened in the last Ant-Man movie yet. Natasha says all the governments kind of crumbled, but they still managed to take census of who was left while they were scrambling to fix the mess and determined that Thanos did, in fact, eliminate exactly half of the population. Tony has been watching the screens, but looks away when Peter's face appears. Carol is staring at a picture of Nick Fury and looking about as devastated.

Tony asks where Thanos is now. Steve says they don't know. He just disappeared through a portal. The exposition fairy calls his attention to Thor, sitting over in what might be the next room, sulking, and he asks what's wrong with him. Oh, nothing. He only lost his entire family and most of the rest of his planet. Rocket says he's pissed because he thinks he's failed. Which, you know, he did, but he's not exactly the only one, so... Tony just blinks at this talking raccoon and mutters "until this exact second, I thought you were a build-a-bear." Steve is like ANYWAY, they've been trying to find Thanos for the past three weeks using whatever tech they can to search space from Earth, which...yeah, that doesn't have a very long reach. He starts his next sentence with "Tony, you fought him..." and Tony interrupts to say no, he didn't. Thanos "wiped my face with a planet while the Bleeker Street magician gave away the store."

Chrissy: I mean, technically there were a few other people involved there, but they weren't doing all that much.

In conclusion, he says Thanos CAN'T be beaten. Steve just keeps pressing on, asking if he gave any sort of hints where he might go. Tony just makes a rude noise.

Chrissy: Yes, he mentioned this one planet he would love to visit again one day as he was DRAGGING A MOON OUT OF THE SKY TO THROW AT ME.
Diandra: Look, I'm TRYING here. I even shaved!
Chrissy: Oh, right, you're going to be Steve now, aren't you?
Diandra: I see no reason why not.

Tony does a call back to the vision he had a few years back - during the whole Ultron thing I think - that prophesied all of this. Or a dream anyway. Steve says he needs Tony to focus now. Tony is like 'oh, you NEED me now, do you? Where the fuck were you when I needed YOU?! Huh? That's right, you LET ME DOWN AND HERE WE ARE.' He starts banging things around on the table and ripping the IV out of his arm and raving about how he SAID they needed a giant shield around the planet whether it took away some of their freedoms or not. Yeah, but you gave up on the giant shield thing and went with a mutant registry instead. Steve tries to rein him back in by reminding him that that plan didn't exactly work and Tony reminds him of the "we'll lose together too" line from...whatever movie that was. I'm not looking it up. Except when they lost he WASN'T THERE. But hey, they've always been about doing things after the fact, right? That's why they called themselves the Avengers. Rhodey tries to get him to sit back down. Tony keeps rambling, tangentially noting that Carol is awesome and they could really use her new blood because they are a bunch of "tired old mules."

Emilio: Well, you are an ass, so...
Chrissy: Watch it.

Tony rips the arc from his chest - which remember is just decorative housing for his nanosuit since Iron Man 3 - and slaps it in Steve's hand. He says if he does manage to find Thanos, he should put that on and hide. Then Tony collapses and we flash to Rhodey stepping out of a room where he's laid out on a bed with Pepper hovering beside him. He says Bruce gave him a sedative, so he should be able to sleep that off now. Carol says right, they can keep doing what they're doing for him and she'll make sure she brings back a Xorrian elixir. She starts walking away and Steve asks where she's going. "To kill Thanos," she says.

Emilio: I mean, that is why Fury called her.
Diandra: Yeah, but it's an Avengers movie, not a Captain Marvel movie, so...
Chrissy: So it shouldn't be a surprise that they're gonna totally neuter her.

Natasha chases after her and says they usually work TOGETHER here. Well, that's kind of what Tony was just saying was the problem at this particular moment though. Steve says off-Earth might be more Carol's turf, but..."this is our fight too." Rhodey asks if she even knows where to find Thanos. Carol thinks she knows people who might know. Nebula appears in the corner and says that she can tell them. Apparently any time Thanos was tinkering with her machinery he rambled about his Great Plan and she asked where they would go once he finished the plan. He would always say they would go "to the garden". The others are like oooooookay, and where is that? Rocket pulls up a hologram of the Earth and says when Thanos snapped it created a massive power surge the likes of which no one had ever seen before. And two days ago there was an identical surge on another planet. The hologram zooms in on said planet.

Chrissy: This is WAY more useful than that "to the garden" shit. Why didn't we just lead with this?
Emilio: Because Nebula needed more character development.
Diandra: Yeah, but I'm not really sure why since she will get absolutely none of the payoff she did in the comics.
Chrissy: Which is why you let her use the gauntlet at the end in your fic, right?
Diandra: Hold that thought for, like, two and a half hours because if I get into that now we'll never get through this thing.

Realizing what the team is thinking now that they know where Thanos is because he used the stones and they acted like a homing beacon, Bruce points out that they can't just rush in there "shorthanded" as they are. Carol doesn't see a problem with just going in there and taking them and using them to bring everyone back. Steve doesn't either. Natasha thinks they should try no matter how crazy that plan might be. Bruce - ever the pessimist - asks how they know this plan will end any differently than the last one did. Carol points out that last time they didn't have HER, so...you know...

Emilio: Valid.
Diandra: I mean...yes.

Rhodey bristles and asks just where she's been this whole time anyway. She points out that there are a lot of other planets in the universe and none of those other ones have a dedicated team of superheroes. Rhodey doesn't quite know how to respond to that.

Thor gets up from where he has apparently been eating for the last several minutes and walks right into Carol's personal space. He holds his hand out next to her head and Stormbreaker shoots into his hand, blowing her hair. She doesn't even blink. He stares for a few seconds and she narrows her eyes. "I like this one," he finally declares. Oh, well. As long as she has YOUR approval.

Smash to opening title card and Alan Silvestri's Avengers theme.

And then Bruce, Nebula, Steve, Nat, Thor, Rhodey, Carol and Rocket are taking off in the apparently newly repaired Guardian's ship. Those last two are obviously the ones flying. Rocket turns and asks which of them HASN'T been in space. Everyone but Thor raises their hand. He warns that they'd better not throw up on his ship just before Nebula announces that they're approaching a jump. Everyone braces and they shoot through one of those space portals and arrive directly at the planet the signal came from. Which has faint rings, but looks very Earth-like. Carol flies down by herself to do recon as she is the only one who doesn't even need a shuttle for that. Presumably they are hovering over the exact coordinates the pulse came from and she's not just blindly searching an entire planet for one guy.

Chrissy: You do remember this is a comic book movie, right?
Diandra: Yeah, yeah.

While they have some time to kill, Steve looks at his ancient pocket watch with a picture of Peggy in it. Natasha promises this plan is going to work. Steve grumbles that it has to because he doesn't know what he's going to do otherwise.

Carol returns and announces that she doesn't see evidence of any sort of armies, ships or satellites. No defense systems. He's alone down there.

On the planet surface, we get artistic shots of Thanos that don't show his face as he picks fruit from a garden and limps up some steps to a little hut. He's still wearing the gauntlet, which appears to have become welded to his arm. We can see the difference between the two hands as he cooks food in a pot over the fire, basically only using his right, ungauntleted hand. He sits and we finally see his face, which is scorched on the side with the gauntlet like it burned that whole side of his body. He hears a noise in the distance and looks up just as Carol blasts him with a giant bolt of energy and flies into the hut. She jumps on his back and puts him in a stranglehold. The Hulkbuster bursts through the floor where the cooking fire was. Rhodey blasts through a wall and grabs Thanos' good arm. Thor bursts through the opposite wall and whacks off his gauntlet arm with Stormbreaker.

Chrissy: Oh, NOW it occurs to somebody to do this.
Diandra: Nobody told me portals could do that!

Steve, Natasha and Rocket come through the front door of the hut. Rocket turns over the dismembered arm and notes that the gauntlet doesn't have the stones on it. Steve asks where they are. Carol gets impatient when he doesn't answer immediately and growls at him to ANSWER. He grunts that the stones were useless after he used them to "correct" the universe. Bruce snaps and starts beating Thanos, knocking Carol off apparently though it's not really clear what happened to her there. Natasha asks again where the stones went. Apparently that power surge two days ago was caused by him using some sort of self-destruct feature built into the stones in the MCU so they couldn't just keep using them over and over again like they did in the comics. The process nearly killed him, but ultimately his plan succeeded permanently. And now he uses a line from the comics: "I am inevitable."

Rhodey goes right to denial. He must be lying. The stones are somewhere in the hut. Nebula appears from somewhere just then to note that lying is not one of her father's many horrible traits. Thanos greets her and starts sort of apologizing for treating her so badly when Thor just...chops off his head suddenly. Nebula wipes blood from her face and everyone else just sort of looks at the decapitated corpse like '......the fuck, dude?' Thor mutters that he went for the head this time and stomps out of the hut to somewhat heroic fanfare.

Smash to black. The words "five years later" appear slowly across the screen.

We pan across some familiar sights in New York, but they look basically the same way they do in post apocalyptic movies. Deserted ships in the harbor around Liberty Island. Empty stadium. And then we go into some sort of government building where a sort of grief support group is meeting. In a cameo appearance, Joe Russo talks about going on a date the other day for the first time in five years.

Chrissy: I suppose this is what cameo appearances are going to look like from now on now that Stan is gone.
Diandra: I still really like the idea that it should be Robert Downey Jr. doing random cameos in different disguises from now on.
Chrissy: I feel like that would be a little too fourth wall breaking and if they're going to go there it should be Ryan Reynolds.
Emilio: Those both sound awesome and I would be fine with either one.

Joe is sitting next to Steve, who prompts him to give some details when he complains that he couldn't find anything to talk about but the same old comparing notes about how different things have been since The Snappening. "He cried as they were serving the salads. I cried just before dessert." But they're seeing each other again anyway, so it must not have been a total disaster. Steve is like 'that's great. Good job, buddy!' like I guess he became a counselor in the last five years. He rambles about how they all have to take baby steps and jump without knowing where they might land and finding purpose and becoming whole. And then he starts talking about being frozen in 1945 after meeting the love of his life and everyone in the room probably bites back a groan of God, Not This Again. The upshot is: "you gotta move on." And now that they are all that is left in the world, they need to make the most of it "otherwise Thanos should have killed all of us."

Chrissy: Yikes. Up until just that moment I was gonna say he should get a job at Hallmark, but now I'm thinking he would be rightly rejected.

[That last paragraph edited because apparently I had Joe Russo confused with Kevin Feige and nobody corrected me so I didn't notice]

Meanwhile, in a San Francisco self storage, a rat crawls around inside the Cucaracha van Scott et al were using. It walks across the control panel for the Time Tunnel machine, which roars to life and spits Scott out of the back of the van. He looks around at all the boxes and crap marked Lang and tentatively calls for Hope. Eventually, he realizes he needs to get the attention of the security guard to come let him out.

So he is wheeling some of his stuff back to his house through the dystopian streets and blinking in confusion at all the missing posters tacked to light posts. Eventually he comes upon a big memorial thing by the bay with giant slabs covered in names. The tops of the slabs identify the names as "The Vanished" and now I'm wondering if I should be referring to the snap as The Vanishing.

Chrissy: I mean, that would probably be less ridiculous, yes.
Emilio: Referencing a better movie, maybe, but The Snappening is funnier.
Diandra: See? Emilio gets me too.

When he realizes what he's looking at he starts frantically looking for Cassie's name. Instead, he finds his own name.

He forgets completely about his wagon of stuff and runs to the house, banging on the door. A teenage girl comes to the door, stares at him like he's a ghost and then cries "Dad?" and hugs him.

Meanwhile, over at the Avengers complex, Natasha is making herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich apparently mid-briefing. They're using the same hologram communication thing they've used in at least one movie before. Rocket is in one panel with Nebula. Two other panels have Okoye and Carol. Rocket is talking about checking out a "warship" Carol found which turned out to be an "infectious garbage scow". The camera moves and suddenly we can see a fourth panel with Rhodey next to Carol as she shrugs and says they were closer to it. Rocket is like yeah, thanks. I wish this communication system had the ability to pick up scent so you could also benefit from the lingering smell of that mission. Natasha is like ANYWAY. She asks if Okoye checked out the "tremors". Okoye says it was just a subduction under the African plate. So...normal earthquake stuff. Natasha asks how they're handling it anyway. Okoye - who is calling her Nat now - gently reminds her that they don't "handle" earthquakes under the ocean.

Nat asks if Carol is coming back next month. Carol's like um...nah. Probably wait for the next solo film. Rocket somewhat awkwardly points out that her hair has been massively shorn since the last movie in a move that simultaneously pissed off all the dudebros for whom her only purpose was to be hot and convinced some lesbians that she was one of them because stereotyping I guess.

Chrissy: Those two things are DEFINITELY related.
Diandra: What, the dudebros were pissed because it made her look like a lesbian stereotype? Yeah, probably.

Anyway. Something about her finding time to do that but not being able to grace them with her actual presence, I guess. Carol snaps at him that she's covering a LOT of territory out there because it's not just Earth that has been affected, so they might want to get used to not seeing her. Nat sighs and concludes the meeting by reminding them that this channel they're using is always active and they can contact her anytime.

Three of the links close, but not before Carol can stare at Rhodey pointedly. He stays and Nat belatedly realizes she never asked what he's doing. He says he's in Mexico where bodies that seem to have been cartel were found all crammed in a room. "It's definitely Barton." He talks vaguely about what Clint has been doing these past few years and how he's not sure he wants to find him anymore. Nat just gets tears in her eyes, asks Rhodey to find out where he's going next anyway and jams a bite of sandwich in her mouth. Rhodey sighs, nods and closes his link. She breaks down a little before Steve's voice comes from the doorway, trying to cheer her up by joking that he would offer to cook her dinner, but that might just make her more miserable, so... She composes herself and asks if he's come back to do his laundry or something. He says yeah, but he can multitask and visit her too. He says he saw a pod of whales in the Hudson river on his way in. With fewer ships, the water is cleaner and they're thriving. She threatens to hit him if this is headed for him telling her to look on the bright side of the whole Snappening thing.

He apologizes and sits at the table with her. She shoves the other half of her sandwich at him. He just stares and talks about how he spends all this time in group telling people they need to move on, but here they are. She asks who would do what she's doing if she "moved on". He wonders if anybody actually needs to do whatever she's doing. She reminds him that she had nothing before this job and this weird little "family" they formed. She thinks it all made her a better person and she's trying to hang on to that even though half of them are gone. "I think we both need to get a life," Steve announces. She snorts and invites him to go first.

A monitor blings and she opens the alert to a security camera video pointed at the front gate of the building. Scott is rambling about how they might not remember him or even recognize him, but they met at an airport a few years ago and can someone let him in?

So sometime later, Scott is pacing the floor muttering to himself until Steve is like hey, uh...buddy..."are you okay?"

Emilio: Why do people always ask me that?

Apparently Scott's been trying to figure out how to broach this bit of exposition. He asks if either of them know anything about quantum physics. Nat is like 'about as much as can be expected given I'm written by English majors who think saying people have multiple PhDs makes them sound smart.' He says okay, so while the whole thing with Thanos was going on, he was in the quantum realm, which is a sort of microscopic universe. "Hope, she's my...uh...she was my...she was supposed to pull me out." Except she (and both her parents, not that we care about them in this movie) were snapped out of existence, trapping him inside. Nat reflexively apologizes for what must have been a really awful five years for him. He's like yeah, funny thing. The writers decided to change the rules of how time works down there between movies so it was really only five hours. But we're justifying it by saying the rules are "unpredictable", so...

Chrissy: They work however we need them to to service the plot.

Diandra: That, yes.

He notices the half a sandwich Nat didn't finish and makes a beeline for it because he hasn't eaten for...hours, which I suppose calls to mind the fact that they never addressed just how Janet was able to find food down there because even if we ignore her obvious aging and apply this new formula for translating real world time to quantum realm time, she would have been down there for days...weeks...possibly more than a month.

Chrissy: I think we went over this in that recap and decided you were thinking too much.
Emilio: Yeah, you're not supposed to THINK when you're watching these movies. Didn't you know that?
Diandra: [grumble]
Chrissy: That being said...did you come up with a fix for this in your fic?
Diandra: No, I used a formula similar to the one in "Inception" to figure out the time dilation between the real universe and the mirror universe of Soul World. I didn't really address the quantum realm beyond 'hey, this machine might let us travel through time!' But I might have fixed it by making Janet younger. Because it bothered me that they changed the rules of something they knew would be important between movies like that. Like, the whole thing with Thor's eye or the SHIELD acronym were one thing, but this creates a much bigger plot hole that can't just be glossed over like this and why am I getting sucked into a long ass argument when we're only a half hour into a three hour movie?

Gah. Moving on.

Steve tries to get him to focus back on the conversation. Around a mouthful of sandwich, Scott repeats that time works differently in the quantum realm and if they could just figure out a way to navigate it...maybe they could figure out how to emerge from the realm at a totally different point in time than they left. Say, before Thanos fucked everything up. Steve is like 'so you're talking about time travel.' Scott says no, that would be ridiculous. But when he tries to think of a better definition, he deflates a little and admits that yeah, that's exactly what it is. He grumbles that he knows it's a crazy idea. Nat thinks she left crazy behind a long time ago when she started getting emails from a talking space raccoon, so she's willing to entertain any possibility at this point. Scott is like 'great...so is there anyone else we should be talking to who could help with this?'

Somewhere in Georgia. Er..."upstate New York". Tony comes out of a lakeside house and claps his hands, announcing that it's time for lunch. When there's no response he sits outside a child's tent and calls "Morgan H. Stark."

Chrissy: Well, that's one way to drop exposition quickly.

A little girl wearing an Iron Man Helmet and one gauntlet comes out of the tent and threatens to disintegrate him. The helmet is the wrong color, which he explains by telling her she shouldn't be wearing that because it's an anniversary present for mom (i.e. not his). He pulls it off and fixes her hair while he offers her a lunch of crickets. She's like 'yeah, you're funny, daddy. Ha.'

Chrissy: You're already taking after your mother.

He asks where she found the helmet anyway. She says in the garage. He asks if she was looking for it. She says no. He concludes that she likes spending time in the garage then and mutters that it doesn't matter because "mommy never wears anything I buy her."

Chrissy: Just because I refused to wear the lingerie that is clearly for you or the strap on that is also clearly for you...

He's carrying Morgan back to the house when Steve, Nat and Scott arrive. He looks...less than thrilled.

We skip right to him pouring what looks like chocolate milk into some glasses while Scott rambles about how he knows it sounds crazy, but... Steve starts to play the same card Natasha did: pointing out that he's seen far crazier than this and... Tony strings a bunch of appropriately sciency-sounding words together, the upshot of which is that time travel in this particular reality works - or doesn't work as the case may be - the way it does in the book "Timeline", meaning even if you can travel back in time, it is impossible to return, send a message or alter the future in literally any way since you will be on a completely different track. This is simultaneously both the most scientifically feasible of all theories of time travel and the absolute worst theory to use from a narrative standpoint for exactly that reason. As far as I'm concerned it has only been employed well in one story: "Bring the Jubilee" by Ward Moore.

Chrissy: That's the version of time travel used in "11/22/63", isn't it?
Diandra: Er...yes and no. As I recall, actually, that book might be closer to the way time travel works in the Marvel comics. Characters can create parallel universes by changing things, but they're not stuck in them. They return to the original, altered timeline.
Emilio: You read a lot of time travel stories, don't you?
Diandra: That obvious?

Anyway. Scott argues that he came back, so it must be possible. Tony says no, he "accidentally survived" in a "billion to one cosmic fluke". As did Janet. And Hank. But that's cute that they think they can pull off this "Time Heist" because really no, they can't. Steve and Nat plow ahead: if they can retrieve the stones from the past, they can recreate the gauntlet and undo what Thanos did. Tony is like 'maybe, or we could just make everything even worse because THAT'S USUALLY WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MESS WITH THE SPACETIME CONTINUUM.' Steve doesn't think so. Tony snarks that he really misses Steve's optimism sometimes, but there really isn't any safe, realistic way to make it work. More likely, they would just get themselves killed. Scott thinks they could adhere strictly to the rules of time travel like avoiding meeting themselves or killing their own grandfathers or...whatever.

Emilio: Going on dates with their mothers?
Diandra: That should go without saying.
Emilio: It SHOULD, and yet...

Tony is like 'why is this idiot still talking?' "Are you seriously telling me that your plan to save the universe is based on the plot to "Back to the Future"?" Scott snorts and says no in the usual way of somebody who is only now realizing how stupid the plan sounds and trying to cover their embarrassment badly.

Chrissy: Like trying to blame a fart on a dog?
Diandra: That's the analogy I was trying to come up with. Thank you.

Nat cuts in that they have to "take a stand". Tony is like 'oh, you don't remember doing that already? Yeah, it didn't work.' Scott turns serious and says he sympathizes with Tony not wanting to risk his wife and daughter in any way, but...a LOT of people lost somebody in The Snappening and they miiiiiight have found a way to bring those people back. Can't he at least entertain the possibility... Tony says nope. He can't.

Morgan comes running out, vaulting into Tony's lap and announcing that mommy sent her to "save" him. He gets up and makes his way toward the door, saying he's really glad to see them, but... Steve stops him and repeats that this could be a second chance. Tony points out that he is living his second chance, thank you, and he's not willing to risk it.

On the way back to the car, Nat declares that he's only arguing against this because he's scared. Steve thinks he has a point. Scott asks if this is it then because they need him, right? Steve says no, they just "need a really big brain."

Which means, of course...Bruce, who has apparently spent the past five years figuring out how to meld his human self with his Hulk self so he now resembles a less svelte Jolly Green Giant. There's a little bit of exposition for that, but nothing that really explains anything and it basically sounds like the "enlightened" ramblings of a pothead, so. This scene was the first listed in the guides that came out while this movie was still in theaters as one you could totally skip out and go to the bathroom during and not miss anything important. And that's what I did and every recap of it that I saw on Tumblr later confirmed the utter skipability of it.

Emilio: Wait...you haven't seen this movie since that first time in the theater?
Diandra: No. I've seen parts of it in memes or when I needed to reference something for the fic, but this is only the second time I've seen it in full. In fact, you should assume that every time we recap one of these it is only the second time I've seen it. Unless I decide to recap the first Thor, which I rewatched because Chrissy kept nagging me for forgetting things that had happened in it.
Chrissy: You forgot literally the entire B plot, but sure. Call me a nag.
Diandra: Anyway. The only one I've seen three times is "Black Panther" and that was because I watched it separately with two different people, which come to think of it you know because you were one of them.
Chrissy: You know, this is probably why you don't remember things. You're only getting better at it now because you're doing these recaps.
Diandra: Why do you think I do these recaps?

There's a brief little comedy where some kids get Scott to take a picture of them with BruceHulk and when he offers to take one with them too they're like '.............and you are?' but otherwise this really is just filler, so, next!

Tony is washing dishes in the sink, which for some reason he can't do without spraying himself in the face and getting water everywhere. As he's wiping water from all the stuff on the shelf, he pulls down a picture of him and Peter, which is next to a picture of his dad. Of course, this inspires him to run some ideas through a simulator in the basement to see if maybe time travel is possible after all. He asks a voice that doesn't sound like Friday to invert a Mobius strip, which I'm pretty sure would make a real computer react like it was told to divide by zero, but whatever. He looks at the result and spews a few more sciency sounding words for her to try. The hologram twists and warps for a few seconds before flashing the words "model successful 99.987%". He falls into his chair and blurts "shit!" And then a tiny voice behind him echoes the sentiment and he turns to find Morgan sitting on the stairs grinning. He tries to salvage that slip by claiming that only mommy is allowed to use that word because she trademarked it. Morgan is like 'oh, like the other word I heard you say a few months ago when you tried to use a hammer and slipped? Sure.' She asks what he's doing awake anyway. "Cause I got some important shit going on here," he answers and she gives him an adorable dirty look.

Chrissy: You get that from your mother too. Spitting image of her.

He corrects that he had "something important" on his mind. She asks if it involved juice pops. Recognizing what she's aiming at, he teaches her another new word - extortion - before asking what kind she wants.

Chrissy: Really, if I didn't know any better, I'd think you were an actual clone.

He looks back at the hologram one last time as he takes her hand and escorts her to the kitchen.

We skip to him finishing the last bite of popsicle as she's sitting in bed and wiping her sticky mouth with his sleeve. She asks for a story. He says "once upon a time, Maguna went to bed. The end." She isn't impressed. He insists it's her favorite story and go to sleep already, kid. He kisses her forehead and says he loves her "tons". Not understanding how measurements work, she replies that she loves him "3,000". He replies probably the way Robert Downey Jr. did when his kid originally used that line on him, then turns out the light and leaves the room calling "go to bed or I'll sell all your toys."

Chrissy: He probably said that at some point to his actual kids too.
Diandra: Possibly while he was filming one of these movies and forgetting that he's not really Tony Stark, yes.

He finds Pepper downstairs and says "not that it's a competition, but she loves me 3,000." Pepper just laughs. Apparently the couch she is sitting on has a clear view of the table with the hologram still hovering over it. Tony looks at it and distractedly tries to talk to Pepper about the book she's reading for all of three seconds before giving up and blurting that he figured out time travel. She thinks that's both amazing and terrifying. He agrees. They have a somewhat oblique conversation wherein they are obviously dancing around the debate of whether or not he should actually use it. Pepper notes that they were among the lucky ones, building a life together post snap, but a lot of people were less fortunate and now he might be able to help them. He doesn't think he has to though. He offers to just put a stop to it all right now. Shove the proof it would work in a box, drop it in the lake, go to bed and pretend it never happened. She doesn't think he will because he wouldn't be able to "rest" and I just realized the importance of that line.

Chrissy: You would have realized that sooner if this wasn't only your second time seeing it.
Diandra: You know what I miss about the last couple recaps? The mute button.

Avengers building, next day. Or thereabouts. Hulk is testing the time machine he built out of Scott's quantum time tunnel. Steve and Nat are setting up generators and stuff, which Hulk notes will hopefully prevent them from losing Scott in the 50s or something. Scott is like 'what now?' Nat smiles and assures him Hulk is just kidding, then reprimands Hulk for saying shit like that. Once Scott turns away, she asks in a whisper for confirmation that he really was kidding and he hisses that he has NO IDEA because they're working with time travel here. "Either it's all a joke or none of it is."

Chrissy: Thanks for that one, writers.
Diandra: Yep, feel free to apply that to literally every other movie or TV show in this universe including plots that don't involve time travel.

Scott stands in front of the time tunnel and puts on the helmet of his suit. Hulk says he's going to send him back one week, let him stay there for an hour and bring him back in ten seconds. "Perfectly not confusing," Scott says. He shrinks down and disappears into the time tunnel. Hulk counts down from three, flips a bunch of switches, pushes a button and Scott reappears. Except now he's now a teenager. "This doesn't feel right," he whimpers in alarm. Bruce starts fiddling with things on the control panel and Scott disappears again. This time, he comes back as an old man. Now Steve and Nat are starting to panic. Hulk smashes a few more things on the panel and Scott turns into a baby. Steve is like 'okay, quit fucking around and bring him back.' Hulk tells them to kill the power and Nat goes to flip a switch. Hulk hits another combination of buttons at the same time and Scott appears back in his normal adult body as the machine powers down behind him. "Somebody peed my pants," he moans. Hulk grins in relief and says "time travel" theatrically. Steve shakes his head and walks away from him. Hulk calls after him like 'what, I brought him back didn't I?' And I just realized why I heard people describing this movie as "funny" back when it was in theaters. Or maybe more accurately, why I found that description baffling. It's probably the same reason people describe movies like "Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri" as a comedy. Moments of comic relief are apparently all some people remember from an otherwise dramatic story with major character deaths.

Chrissy: Probably why people think "Romeo and Juliet" was a love story too.
Diandra: Wow. Um...yeah, that makes sense.

Steve ends up outside the building when Tony comes ripping up in one of his sports cars. A product placed electric Audi, in fact. Tony rolls down the window and says "let me guess, he turned into a baby." Steve says uh...yeah. Tony says that's because instead of pushing Scott through time, they pushed time through Scott. Somebody should have warned them that might happen. Steve admits that Tony actually did try to warn them. "Oh, did I," Tony snarks. "Well, thank god I'm here." He holds up something that looks like a bracelet and says he built a time and space GPS. Steve sort of smiles like 'I knew you'd come crawling back eventually.' Tony comes as close as he can to an apology by saying he realized "resentment is corrosive and I hate it." Anyhow, it turns out maybe they were right about this working, but fair warning: he is determined to bring back what they lost WITHOUT undoing the past five years in the process. "And maybe not die trying, would be nice."

Emilio: [cough cough]
Diandra: Mmmhmm. Notice he didn't make that a requirement.

Steve agrees to the terms and Tony pulls a restored Captain America shield from the trunk of the car. Before it turns into a mushy moment, he says he just has to get it out the garage before Morgan tries to use it as a sled. He asks if they have a whole team yet. Steve says they're working on it.

Cut to Scott sitting on the bench outside unwrapping a taco when the Guardians' spaceship lands and blows the entire contents of the taco right out of the shell. Nebula stomps past him, calling to Rhodey via commlink as she does that he should be careful where he comes down because "there's an idiot in the landing zone." Rhodey - in full iron suit - lands a few feet from Scott, nearly giving him a heart attack and follows Nebula inside, passing Hulk. Hulk hands Scott a couple fresh tacos from a whole stash he is carrying around for some reason. Then he apparently gets on the ship with Rocket because the next thing we see is them landing somewhere else and then driving around some twisty European looking roads past a sign that welcomes them to New Asgard. Rocket notes that the place is kind of a letdown from the original Asgard. Hulk reminds him that the Asgardians lost their world and half their people and then half their people AGAIN and that was all BEFORE The Snappening, so...be nice to them, they've suffered enough.

Valkyrie is among the people working the fishing docks. Hulk greets her happily and she scrunches her face and says she preferred him "either of the other ways". Girl, same. Hulk tries to introduce her to Rocket and she's like 'yeah, whatever. You shouldn't have bothered because he's not going to talk to you.' Hulk asks how bad it is. She says they only see him once a month when he gets his "supplies". She indicates a corner full of barrels of various kinds of beer.

Rocket and Hulk go to a little house where the door just swings open. Rocket notes that it smells like something died inside and calls out to Thor. From somewhere inside, Thor's voice asks if whoever it is is here to fix the cable because it's been on the fritz for a couple weeks. They round the corner into the living room where a shirtless, dreadlocked and beer-gutted Thor is grabbing another bottle of beer. Hulk calls his name and Thor turns and excitedly greets him with a hug, then hugs a not at all thrilled Rocket, whose face is right at gut level. He points to Meik and Korg, who are on the couch playing video games. Korg greets them, then points to the screen and complains to Thor that "that kid" is back and calling him a dickhead again. Thor grumbles about "Noobmaster69" and stomps over, grabbing Korg's headset and telling the kid that if he doesn't knock that shit off and log out, the God of Thunder is going to fly over there, rip his arms off and shove them up his ass. He hands the headset back to Korg, who thanks him for acting like his personal attack dog.

Thor starts slugging from his beer bottle. Hulk approaches him like a hostage negotiator approaching a possibly unhinged person and asks if he's okay. Thor is like 'of course I'm fine. Why wouldn't I be fine? Everything is fine.' Hulk is like okay then, we're here because there's a chance we can fix everything and we need your help. Thor belches and asks if by "everything" he means, like, the cable. Hulk says uh, no. Everything as in Thanos. Thor's smile freezes and then his face crumples. He grabs a fistful of Hulk's shirt and, with tears in his eyes, hisses at him to NEVER SAY THAT NAME AGAIN. Korg pipes up that they don't mention He Who Shall Not Be Named in this house.

Emilio: But you can talk about Voldemort all you want.

Hulk says he knows uh....That Guy scares Thor. Thor snorts like 'no, he doesn't. Who told you that? You do remember that I killed him, right?' Hulk tries the empathy route, saying he's been where Thor is now before and "you know who helped me?"

Chrissy: Captain America and the guy on the corner who sold you weed?

Thor guesses Natasha. Hulk says it was Thor, actually, because he's probably talking about the time they were on Sakaar.

Thor points to the window mutters that Hulk should ask all the Asgardians out there how much his "help" is worth, then flops in a chair. Hulk is like 'this is what I'm trying to tell you though: we can bring a lot of the people they lost back.' I say a lot because, as stated before, The Snappening was only, like, the third genocide they went through. Thor rants that they can stop right now because he is NOT wallowing in his own self pity and desperately waiting for someone to rescue him. They're fine. Good day. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. "There's beer on the ship," Rocket says like 'hold on, I think I speak his language.' Thor finishes his bottle, drops it on the floor and asks what kind of beer they've got.

So now that we have everybody assembled again...oh, wait...we're still missing one? Oh...right. Sigh.

Tokyo. We're dropped in the middle of what looks like a gang war suddenly where some guy dressed like the CW version of Green Arrow is picking off thugs. He chases a Hey It's That Guy out onto the street. Dogen pulls out a sword and exposits that he doesn't know why this guy is chasing them because "we never did anything to you!"

Chrissy: Of course you would remember the character he played on "Lost" before anything else.
Diandra: What, you thought I would remember that he was in that Wolverine movie nobody wants to remember anything about? Pfft.

Jeremy Renner's voice rambles in Japanese about how he survived when half the world didn't and I'm not sure that explains much, but okay. He concludes with the probably more important detail that Dogon hurts people. Dogon snorts at the destruction like 'you hypocrite' and they fight.

After about a minute, Purple Arrow manages to slice his throat and deals the death blow off camera so they don't have to deal with gory stuff. He wipes the blood from his sword on his sleeve as the camera pulls back to show someone standing behind him. He takes off his hood and mask and turns to face Natasha. They have a little back and forth about what, exactly, the fuck Clint thinks he's accomplishing with this new career path he's gone on before Nat tries to lure him back to the team with pretty much the same approach Hulk used on Thor. Clint begs her not to give him hope. She apologizes for not being able to do it sooner and holds his hand.

Some unidentified rock song starts playing as everyone regroups at Avengers plaza. Tony gives Thor - who is stumbling along and wearing sunglasses inside - a new nickname: Lebowski.

Diandra: I forget what we determined about references to other characters played by actors in this universe. I think it had something to do with the other Jeff, but...
Chrissy: At this point there are so many actors in this universe that it's impossible to NOT reference a character in somebody's filmography.
Emilio: And yet, somehow nobody has mentioned Sherlock Holmes.
Diandra: Yeah, we're still not doing that.

Tony asks "Ratchet" how the machine thing he's working on is coming and Rocket is like 'ha. I hate you.'

Somewhere else, Nebula and Hulk have apparently finished strapping Scott into the new and improved version of his ant man suit, now specially tweaked for time travel purposes. Rhodey arrives just as Scott yells at Hulk to be careful with the Pym particles he's handling in his giant Hulk hands. Because Pym particles are a finite resource ever since they lost Hank to the Snappening and they only have enough for one round trip each plus two test runs. I'm not entirely sure that's how they worked before, but whatever. Just chalk it up to one more thing about this universe that had a rule change driven by plot convenience. He plugs the vial into his suit, disappears briefly and corrects that they can only do one test run now. Clint appears in the doorway and volunteers to do it if Scott is just going to botch it like that. Or words to that effect.

So they strap Clint into the suit and Nebula fiddles with the settings while Hulk starts warning him of what to expect. Rhodey decides now is a good time to question why they aren't just going back to kill baby Thanos. Hulk is like 'uh...because we're not monsters and time travel doesn't work like that.' Scott argues that they could just grab the stones before Thanos does so he can't use them. Hulk is like 'that's not complicated enough to make a whole movie out of, so we're going with the theory of time travel wherein changing things in the past does fuck all to the future and a bunch of fanboys are going to be really shitty if anyone questions it or makes a movie using any other version of time travel ever again. Cool?'

Chrissy: Had a few arguments in the years since this movie came out, have you?
Diandra: No, I just auto block the mansplainers who go off about time travel like...you're talking about a fictional world where witches and vampires exist and you're getting all upset because this world also includes time travel now and you want to lecture everyone on how THAT is impossible? Fuck off.
Emilio: So this is about "A Discovery of Witches" specifically.
Diandra: No, that's just the most recent - and most ridiculous - example of their very selectively limited capacity to suspend disbelief.

So Clint stands on an enormous futuristic pad built in what looks like a warehouse in Avengers Plaza. Everyone stands by watching warily as Bruce counts him down from three. The Ant Man helmet forms over his face, the center of the platform turns into a time tunnel and he gets sucked down, shrinking and pinballing through tunnels.

He pops out in a shed. He staggers to the door, wobbly from the trip, and stares at his farmhouse across the yard. He goes over to the front porch, picks up a baseball glove from his five years missing son and cries. Then he hears his daughter yelling at the boy inside and runs to the door calling her name.

Chrissy: It's a good thing we're doing the version of time travel where nothing matters because if we weren't he would definitely fuck things up right away.
Diandra: Yeah, I get the feeling that's exactly why we are going with this theory of time travel. Because it gives the writers free license to let the characters do whatever because NOTHING MATTERS, WELCOME TO THE NEW TIMELINE, VARIANT.
Chrissy: Now I'm both eager to see where these recaps go from here and terrified of what it is bound to do to your sanity.
Emilio: What sanity?
Diandra: Thanks for the vote of confidence, Emilio.

Lucky for everyone, his suit auto activates and he disappears before the girl comes down like 'yeah, what?' He reappears on the platform in Avengers plaza, still holding the baseball glove as convenient proof that they can take things back with them. Nat runs to make sure he's okay. He says it worked and throws the glove to Tony.

So. Now we get to jog through the planning stage of the mission. This involves putting up data for all six of the stones on screens in the conference room and discussing who should be sent to retrieve which of them and when and where. Steve and Tony say every one of them has had some sort of connection to one of the stones. Except Scott, who has no idea what they're talking about, but then that's a pretty normal state in general for him. Hulk reminds the audience that they can only take one round trip each so they have to choose the points in history they want to grab the stones from carefully. Tony thinks they can narrow possibilities down to "our history", which I assume means they can only travel within their own lifetimes. Steve tries to prompt Thor to tell them what he knows about the Aether (reality stone), but he's fallen asleep with a beer in one hand and his other hand partway in his pants. We jump right to him waking up and declaring that the Aether isn't really a "stone" so much as an "angry sludge sort of thing". Anyway, his grandfather "hid" it from some Dark Elves and his girlfriend Jane stuck her hand in a rock and became infected with it and he had to take her to Asgard to be treated and introduced her to his mother... We pan across the other members of the team as he's talking and they all look somewhere between annoyed and horrified by Thor's lack of coherence. Except Scott, who looks like a little kid at story time.

Chrissy: He's used to stories like this. Have you met Luis?

He goes completely off the rails as he notes that his mother is dead and he and Jane aren't a thing and Tony finally tries to cut him off and offers to get him some breakfast. Thor says no food, but he'll take a Bloody Mary.

And we go to Rocket, being the only official member of the Guardians not snapped to explain where Quill got the power stone (a planet called Morag). Then Nebula to say that Thanos retrieved the soul stone from Vormir, which is the "dominion of death at the very center of celestial existence" and he murdered her sister in the process. Everyone looks uncomfortable for a minute at this one and Scott quietly says "not it".

And then Hulk, Nat and Tony are laying around the conference room sometime later trying to figure out the time stone because nobody directly connected to it is in the group. Nat asks what sort of doctor that "time stone guy" was anyway. Tony is like 'uh...the kind that could pull a rabbit from a hat?' Both guys drop the random exposition that he had a place on Bleeker Street, which Nat lights on to suggest that if they pick the right year they could find three of the stones in New York. Or they could count on the audience not remembering shit any better than the writers and go back to the time Loki attacked New York in 2012 when neither Doctor Strange OR the stone were in the sanctum yet.

Chrissy: How did the Abridged Script put it? "Unless of course it's in Kamar Taj like it's supposed to be, but hey, maybe we'll get lucky."
Diandra: Yeah. There are going to be a few glaring problems with this whole mission.

The panel in the conference room shows the stones in three groups: New York, Asgard and other planets (Morag/Vormir). Steve announces that they have a plan.

Chrissy: It's a shitty one, but it's a plan.

And then we get a shot of them all walking to the platform in Ant Man suits in slow motion while Steve further rambles about this being their chance to take back everything they lost five years ago. They all get only one round trip, so there's no room for errors here and they should be prepared for anything. Hulk sets the time tunnel and Nat smiles at Steve and says "see you in a minute." The platform activates to the Avengers fanfare, the helmets form over their faces and on the last note they get sucked into the tunnel.

Chrissy: Just gonna ignore the looks Tony and Steve were giving each other there, huh?
Diandra: Specifically you mean the look Tony had that said "I MISSED YOU SO MUCH WHAT WERE WE EVEN FIGHTING ABOUT I LOVE YOU"?
Chrissy: Uh...yeah.
Diandra: I wasn't too worried about it since, as I recall, there's going to be more opportunities for HoYay coming up here that don't involve quite so many other witnesses.

New York, 2012. The Chitauri attack is already underway. We do the hero moment of the camera spinning around the main six again, then pan over to show the present versions of four of them appearing in an alley. The Ant Man time travel suits disappear, revealing plain clothes on Tony and Hulk, the Cap suit on Steve and...uh...the regular red Ant Man suit on Scott.

Emilio: And beneath this is another Ant Man suit! I'm Ant Man suits all the way down!

Cap reminds them to "stay low" just before 2012 Hulk appears at the end of the street, smashing one of the aliens with a car and then jumping up and down on the car and running away roaring. BruceHulk looks embarrassed on behalf of his past self. Steve says yeah, he might need to smash a few things if he doesn't want to look suspicious. Hulk mutters about gratuity while ripping his shirt off and makes a few half-hearted growling noises, bashing the hood of a taxi and tossing a motorcycle.

We skip right to him jumping onto the roof of the Sanctum, where the Ancient One is deflecting whatever Chitauri happen to wander this far. He says he's looking for Doctor Strange. Since she already demonstrated an ability to see the future, she just says he's five years too early to find him here. He's still a doctor and currently performing a surgery and probably being a dick to somebody. Hulk realizes that she's wearing the Eye of Agomotto and says that's what he came here for. She looks down at it and says oh....no. He says he wasn't asking and he doesn't have time for this, so...he starts to just grab it from her. She slams her palm into his chest and his astral projection (which just looks like Bruce) shoots from his back while Hulk's body hits the ground. "Let's start over, shall we," she asks a very surprised Astral Bruce.

Asgard, 2013. Loki is in his cell, tossing a cup to alleviate boredom when Thor and Rocket sneak past outside. They find the room upstairs where a maid is giving Jane some Asgardian clothes. Jane is hidden behind the door because no, Natalie Portman is not in this movie. Rocket lays out the plan: Thor will distract her while Rocket uses this thing that they claimed didn't exist back in "Dark World" to extract the Reality Stone from her blood.

Chrissy: We've been over this: the stones work how the writers need them to to service the plot of the current movie.
Diandra: Yeah, yeah...

Thor is like yeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhh, I'm just gonna sneak down to the wine cellar and grab a drink or twelve first. He stops his retreat, distracted, when his mother appears on the other side of the castle, some handmaidens in tow and he remembers that this is the day she died.

Thor starts muttering about how he can't do this and it was a bad idea and he might be having a bit of a panic attack right now. Rocket motions him to come closer and slaps him across the face. "You think you're the only one who lost people? What do you think we're doing here," he snaps. He rants that he lost all of the closest thing to a family he has and...uh...so did Thor, buddy. And a lot of his friends. And his entire planet. But his POINT IS that she is completely gone and he can't do anything for her. Whereas there are a whole lot of people who are "only kind of gone" that he can save if he sticks to the plan. Thor sniffles and says okay, he can do that. Maybe. Rocket starts heading toward Jane's room and Thor is like 'uh...nope, never mind' and starts going the other way.

Morag, 2014. Nat, Clint, Rhodey and Nebula touch down. Nat kicks away a lizard like creature and asks if they can hurry it up a little because they only have so much time for this pit stop before they get to a whole other planet nowhere near it because they could only use one ship apparently. She hugs Rhodey and gets on the ship with Clint while Rhodey says things like "get the stone and come back" and "watch each other's six" and this is pretty much the point where it becomes obvious where the tragedy is going to be. As the ship is taking off, Nebula says she laid in the coordinates for Vormir, so they don't have to do anything.

But first...Rhodey asks if they just have to wait for this Quill guy then and let him lead them to the power stone. She says actually, they should take cover because "we're not the only ones in 2014 looking for the stone." Rhodey says hold up...who else is looking for them? "My father...my sister...and me." Rhodey is like 'ooookay...maybe should have mentioned that before, but...' He asks where 2014 her is right now.

We smash to her fighting a bunch of aliens...somewhere. One of them gets the upper hand and she is saved at the last minute by Gamora, which she is not at all happy about. Gamora tries to help her up and she slaps her hand away. Gamora shrugs and says father wants them back on the ship because he's found an infinity stone.

On the donut ship that would be used to kidnap Doctor Strange, Gamora finishes that he found it on Morag. But it's still only one and there are six, so he's still far from enacting his plan. Thanos beams directly onto the ship and says he's sending them to Ronan's ship while he wipes fluids from his ridiculously huge...battleaxe? Maybe? It looks like a support beam from a building that he sharpened.

Chrissy: With that handle in the middle I'd say more like a propeller.

Nebula falls to her knees dramatically and vows not to fail daddy while Gamora rolls her eyes. She yelps as a spark shoots along her head. Gamora rushes to her and is startled when a video suddenly starts projecting out of her eye.

Emilio: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobie! You're my only hope!
Diandra: More or less.

The conversation her future self just had with Rhodey replays, but before FutureNebula can answer Rhodey's question about who is looking for the stones, Nebula smacks the side of her head and it stops. Gamora asks what that was about. Nebula has no idea, but it is giving her a splitting headache. Gamora turns to Thanos, who perked up at the mention of Infinity Stones, and suggests her synaptic drive was damaged by the battle. Thanos uses his ridiculous battle axe to lift Nebula's chin and demands Gamora take her to his ship.

Back in New York, Tony uses his nano Iron Man suit to fly into the old Stark Tower just in time to hear Loki surrendering to the Avengers surrounding him as he crawls from the crater Hulk smashed him into. Tony's past self starts barking orders while his present self gets distracted. "Mr. Rogers, I almost forgot that that suit did nothing for your ass." The camera focuses on Avengers Cap's ass while present Cap is like 'uhhhhhhh....why are you checking out my ass, Tony?'

Chrissy: I can't help it!

On Tony's shoulder, Ant-Man blathers that HE thinks it looks great. "As far as I'm concerned, that's America's ass," he says, saluting ridiculously.

Chrissy: I wanna know what prompted this whole line of dialogue. Is it in response to anything in particular or did Robert Downey Jr. just adlib a random thought and everyone went along with it?
Diandra: I'm curious about this implication that Tony has been checking out Steve's ass all along.
Emilio: Wasn't that a mutual thing? I remember having a conversation about RDJ's ass somewhere...
Chrissy: I seem to remember an implication in Ragnarok that Tony wears his pants really tight because he's trying to get people - or at least Steve specifically - to look at his ass, yes.
Diandra: God, I forgot about that.
Chrissy: Shocker.

The elevator arrives and Time Heist Tony ducks behind a wall as the guys who I think turned out to be evil in Captain America 2 (Sitwell and Rumlow) come out to claim the sceptre with the mind stone Widow is still holding. Scott acts as exposition fairy, asking who those guys are. Tony says HYDRA, but they THOUGHT they were SHIELD at the time. Scott wonders how the hell they could have not known those were bad guys and Tony is like 'I wonder how many people would really miss you if you were "accidentally" stepped on?'

Steve passes Loki, barking orders into his comm and Loki briefly shapeshifts into a Steve copy to mimic him and ask how the HELL Thor puts up with these people. Thor slaps a gag on him and Tom sets a record for price per word because he will not have any more lines in this movie.

Chrissy: And one of those lines was Chris Evans playing him because apparently he had so much fun doing it last time.

Tony spots the Tesseract and points it out to Scott as the one they are after. Scott bends over slightly, pointing his head in the direction of the Tesseract, and says "flick me."

Emilio: You can pretend I'm the Cap, if that makes it easier.
Chrissy: Yes, we will talk about how you have forever ruined a fantasy later, Scott.
Diandra: I don't know why because that was actually a pretty good impression of YOU he was doing there.
Chrissy: Oh, shut up.

Tony flicks Scott over to the case with the Tesseract and Scott crawls up 2012 Tony's arm, apparently unnoticed. Tony then reengages his suit and jumps off the balcony. We follow the Avengers, who all pile into the elevator with Loki and the Tesseract (the case for which Tony is sitting on for whatever reason). Hulk tries to get on, but there's no room for him, so he punches the door angrily and stomps off to find the stairs.

If you were wondering why they just let the scepter walk out of the room with the bad guys, the answer is coming up now. Tony hovers in the air, scanning the tower at a distance and tells Cap that it's in the elevator approaching the 80th floor. Cap says he's got it and he'll meet Tony in the lobby. The elevator doors open and the guys inside are surprised to see Steve because isn't he supposed to be somewhere else right now? He just gives a cryptic brush off of "change of plan" and takes his place in the middle of the elevator. Rumlow pointedly puts his hand on his weapon holster, which Cap sees from the corner of his eye. He loudly announces he got a call from the Secretary and he's going to be running point on the scepter from here because there's whispers going around that somebody might be planning to steal it. Sitwell is still unsure and pulls out his phone to call the director. Steve leans over and mutters "Hail Hydra."

So they just let him walk right out with the scepter in the case. Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why they were defeated.

The Avengers and prisoner arrive in the lobby. We focus on one of the SWAT agents milling around. It is Tony. He calls to "Thumbelina" that it is is "go time". Scott doesn't seem at all bothered by that nickname. He just slides down Tony's chest into his shirt, landing on the arc reactor. He asks if Tony is wearing Axe Body Spray. Tony is like 'yeah, yeah, product placement, MOVING ON.' And then Scott announces that he is "going inside you."

Chrissy: Dude, you don't have to announce it. You're so small, it's not like I'm going to feel anything.
Emilio: ..............ouch.

The 2012 Avengers run into a pack of agents led by Robert Redford, who demands to know just what they think they're doing. And because I just decided that this is going to be too confusing if I don't do something, I'm going to start referring to older iterations of core characters with the prefix Alt to distinguish them from the present time traveling versions from here on out. AltThor asks who the hell this guy is. AltTony exposits that his name is Alexander Pierce and he's "the guy above the guys behind Nick Fury." Pierce says that's Mr. Secretary to them and they will be turning their prisoner over to him now. AltThor is like 'his name is Loki and Odin will be personally in charge of his punishment, as usual.' Pierce is like 'after we're through with him, maybe. Also, hand over the Tesseract because it belongs to SHIELD.' They start arguing and Tony asks Scott if he's ready yet. Scott asks if he's sure this won't kill him. Tony promises he'll just have a "mild cardiac arrhythmia" only he uses a different word because these writers don't do medical stuff.

AltTony starts wrestling with the agents over the case when Scott yanks something inside the arc reactor and it flashes. He starts gasping and gagging and falls on the ground, dropping the case. While everyone tries to figure out what's happening and call a medic, Scott climbs back out, runs over to the case and kicks it. Loki and nobody else watches as it spins across the floor toward Tony. Tony picks it up and tells Scott to meet him in the alley. He goes to open the door to the stairwell just as AltHulk smashes through it, sending him flying. The case breaks open and the Tesseract bounces out and slides to a stop literally right at Loki's feet. Loki, not being one to miss a glaring opportunity, looks around at all the chaos, picks up the Tesseract and poofs right out of there and into his own series which I GUESS I'm going to have to recap, aren't I?

Chrissy: Oh, like that's going to be a hardship?
Diandra: It might drive me to insanity considering it's a whole lot more of this kind of time travel. Which I think you already noted.
Chrissy: Oh, come on. Did you really think you were going to be able to stop with this recap?
Diandra: I was kind of hoping, but...WandaVision was pretty awesome and stems so directly from this that there was originally supposed to be a mid credit scene previewing the series. And yeah, it would be kind of fun to do Loki.
Chrissy: [SNORT]
Diandra: God, why did I phrase it that way?
Emilio: Hey, obviously Loki would agree.
Chrissy: HA!
Diandra: I'm just...gonna move on now.

AltThor announces that he's going to try something and sets his hammer on the arc reactor, tapping the other side like CLEAR! AltTony stops seizing and he's like 'oh, thank God, because I had NO idea what that was going to do.' Then they both realize that they can't locate either the case or Loki. Tony is peeling himself off the floor and grumbling that they just blew it. Totally.

Somewhere else in the building Steve is asking what the hell is going on and do they have the Tesseract yet when he runs right into the 2012 version of himself. Luckily, AltSteve just thinks this is Loki in disguise because as we noted he particularly likes cosplaying Captain America.

Chrissy: Hmm, he has a nice ass.
Diandra: Stop it.

Steve sets down the case with the scepter and AltSteve launches at him, thus beginning the most ridiculous fight of this series so far. When Steve hits the ground, AltSteve says "I can do this all day" and Steve groans like 'yeah, yeah, catchphrase, god I'm annoying.'

They both throw their shields, which both go flying away, kick the scepter mid-fight and go tumbling off the catwalk after it. The locket with Peggy's picture falls out of Steve's pocket. AltSteve picks it up and demands to know where he got it from.

Chrissy: You never were the brightest bulb, were you?

Steve goes to grab the scepter and they fight some more. AltSteve gets Steve in a strangle hold and Steve - out of some sort of desperation - gasps that Bucky is still alive. AltSteve lets go, startled, and Steve punches him in the face, grabs the scepter and uses it to knock him out. Then he stands up, looks down at his own unconscious body face planting the floor for a beat and mutters "that *is* America's ass."

Chrissy: The writers who do shit like this really can't be surprised when fanfiction writers find ways to have characters fuck their clones.
Diandra: You would think so, but I saw an article about the "Loki" series wherein the writer seemed to believe the term "self-cest" was just invented by it, like.........oh, you must be new to fandom. Here's a whole bunch of crossover fics going back to the early days of the Internet. Take a minute, look that over, and then we can discuss the entire sub-trope that is Jack Harkness.

Meanwhile, back at the Sanctum, Astral Bruce has resorted to begging. The Ancient One says if she gave him the Time Stone to help his own reality, she would fuck over her own. He says the science doesn't really support that hypothesis...does it? She magics an orange line between them for an impromptu power point presentation on timelines. The Infinity Stones circle the line. The Ancient One flicks one of the stones to illustrate a disruption in the normal flow of time and it makes a line veering off in a different direction. She says while it may help HIS reality, they will be "overrun" in this one without the protection of the time stone. Bruce says yeah, okay, but...we can return the stones to their streams when we're done, right? He plucks the stone from the air and replaces it in the ring and the divergent stream dissipates. She says sure, in THEORY that would work. Assuming, of course, you survive long enough to return them. And she's not willing to take that risk. Besides, "it is the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to protect the time stone." Bruce says that's funny because Stephen just gave it away. Her face falls and she says he what now? Bruce says yeah, he just handed it over to Thanos. She stares for a long beat, then summons Bruce's Hulk body, merging it back with the Astral form, opens the Eye of Agomotto and plucks out the stone. Because she figures Stephen couldn't possibly have done something so colossally stupid for no reason, so she has to trust that this was all supposed to happen. Or...something. Because he is "the best of us", whatever that means.

Chrissy: She implicitly trusts the judgment of the guy she technically hasn't met yet, who will pretty much spend his entire hero's journey demonstrating poor judgment.
Diandra: Whatever, we need to move this plot along. Next!

Thanos' ship. Thanos plugs something into the back of AltNebula's head and orders Ebony Maw to pull up her memory file. Maw says there's something weird about the file...that video was a memory, but it wasn't hers. There's another Nebula sharing her network and her...data...something...is time stamped from the future. Thanos asks if they can link to this other Nebula and search her memory for infinity stones. AltNebula jerks and starts playing back part of the conversation in the Avengers conference room about where they should intercept the stones in their timeline. He pauses the video and zooms in on the reflection of the "camera". Gamora mutters that there are two Nebulas. Thanos says no, the same one from two points in time. He orders them to head for Morag and keep looking through Future Nebula's memories.

Asgard, 2013. Frigga ditches her entourage and sneaks up behind Thor, scaring him into shrieking like a little girl. She says he should leave the sneaky stuff to his brother because he's better at it. Thor tries to claim he was just going for a walk despite this version of him being significantly fatter and hairier than the one she probably saw only hours ago. She zeroes in on his face and asks what happened to his eye. He mumbled something about getting hit in the face during a battle. She just smiles at him and says he's not the Thor she knows. "The future hasn't been kind to you, has it?" He's like 'who said anything about the future now?' She reminds him that she was raised by witches and she isn't stupid. He dissolves and admits that he is from the future and he needs to talk to her. She hugs him.

In the next room, Jane wakes up in what might be extra footage from "Dark World". Rocket appears behind the bed and raises the injector thing. We don't see the attack, but the next time we see Rocket he is being chased by guards across the palace.

Intercut with this little comedy is a mother/son reunion. Thor tells Frigga about killing Thanos, but there wasn't any point because it was too late and he was "just an idiot with an axe." She says no, an idiot wouldn't be here "seeking council from the wisest person in Asgard". But he is definitely a failure. Which just makes him like everyone else. He thinks he's not SUPPOSED to be like everyone else. She says the measure of a person - a hero - "is how well they succeed at being who they are." He says he needs to tell her something. She says no, he doesn't. Because he's here to save HIS future, not hers. And she shouldn't know what her future is going to be. Rocket bursts into the room, makes a half ass introduction to "mom" and tells Thor they need to go. He hugs her again, sniffling out an I love you. Rocket starts counting down the return timer...or whatever...and Thor stops him because he thought of something. He holds out his hand for the hammer. After a few seconds where he's clearly not sure it will work, Mjolnir flies through the window and slaps into his hand. He laughs like he was totally not sure that would happen and says he's still worthy. He says goodbye one last time, the time travel Ant Man suits form over them and they disappear.

We replay the scene from the first Guardians movie of Star Lord dancing and singing to his walkman on Morag, kicking aside little lizard creatures and using one as an impromptu microphone. Rhodey blinks at him from behind a nearby rock, turns to Nebula and deadpans "so, he's an idiot?"

Chrissy: Yes.
Diandra: On so many levels, yes.

He activates his iron suit and cold cocks Quill as Tony probably fantasized about doing many times on Titan. Nebula fishes a lock pick from his bag and uses it to open the door of "The Temple of the Power Stone". Rhodey starts looking for giant spikes or other booby traps -

Chrissy: A giant stone rolling down a track?

- while Nebula rolls her eyes and just plows ahead. He follows cautiously.

The stone is suspended between pillars, much like the reality stone was on that planet in "Dark World" and the redundancy is probably the main reason we couldn't just retrieve that one the same way (which would have made a WHOLE LOT MORE SENSE, but whatever). Nebula marches right up to it and sticks her hand through the barrier protecting the stone, her entire hand turning into a smoking skeleton immediately. Being mostly machine, she just plucks out the stone, drops it into Rhodey's hand and blows on her smoking limb like it's a gun barrel. He just stares, unphased. She gets a little self conscious and says she wasn't always like this.

Emilio: She used to be Scottish and travel in a blue box through time and space with a guy she really wanted to bang until he turned out to be her son-in-law.
Diandra: Shhh! Spoilers!

He says yeah, he wasn't either, but "we work with what we've got."

They start up their return code...or whatever...and the suits form around them. Rhodey disappears, but Nebula freezes, her left eye light blinking. She takes off the helmet and shrieks as sparks shoot along her implants, grabbing her head in pain. She collapses and the projection beam shoots from her eye. Elsewhere, AltNebula screams and starts projecting the scene from the beginning of this movie, but stopping after "I am inevitable" and before Thor axes Thanos' head off. Gamora asks what is going on and what Daddy Dearest did to those people, exactly. Thanos says he didn't do anything...in this timeline...yet. Obviously this is about their timeline wherein he successfully recovered all the infinity stones and used them to "restore the balance". Or, as he phrases it: "I won." Ebony Maw is like 'so it's the future then?' Rather than correct him about the particular rules of time travel we're going with here for the time being, Thanos just says it's his destiny.

The video kicks back on and they hear Nebula speaking and the Thanos of Destinies Yet to Come musing that maybe he's been too hard on her before Thor whacks his head off. Thanos is like 'uh-huh...like I said...destiny.' Ebony Maw declares that AltNebula is clearly a traitor since they just saw her working with those people and gestures to wind a chain around her neck. AltNebula yelps that that's not her. She would never betray daddy. Thanos rips the chain off and strokes her face creepily as he says he knows and now she can prove it. In the temple, the video stream stops and Nebula gasps as she realizes Thanos now knows what they are doing. She runs out to the ship to try to warn Nat and Clint, but they are apparently already out of range. Outside, Thanos' ginormous ship hovers over their little puddle jumper and beams it aboard.

Back to 2012. Steve arrives back in the alleyway to find a dejected looking Tony and Scott. Tony says they had a bit of a setback. And we skip right to the end of whatever explanation he gives where he is defensively saying he just got "hit in the head with the Hulk". Scott just yelps that this was their one chance and they blew it because the deal was "six stones or nothing!" He and Tony have a little spat because Scott is totally blaming him for ruining the whole plan since he was against it before. Steve tries to redirect to something more productive: asking if they have any other options to get the Tesseract. Scott says no because they only have one Pym particle each left so they can't just go somewhere else and still make it back home and they KNEW THAT GOING IN. Tony visibly has a realization and blurts that there IS another way, actually. They just have to go somewhere where they can get the Tesseract AND more Pym particles. He turns to Steve and says "military installation, Garden State." He has a "vaguely exact idea" of when both of those things would have been there. Steve is like 'are you kidding me?' Tony insists they can do it and Steve mutters that they'll have to improvise. Scott asks what the hell they're talking about and what they're doing now. Steve hands him the scepter to bring back to the compound and he and Tony start punching numbers into their suits. Scott is like 'uh...I'm still here.'

Chrissy: Do you hear something?
Diandra: Eh, just the third wheel. Ignore it.

Scott finally gets their attention and reminds them that if what they're doing right now fails, they won't be able to come back. "Thanks for the pep talk, pissant," Tony snarks. Then he looks at Steve again and asks if he trusts him. Steve says "I do"...wait, what was the question again?

Chrissy: It's okay, we all know how much you love me.
Diandra: Well, I guess somebody has to.
Chrissy: You know, if it wasn't for that spectacular ass...
Diandra: And what do you think is your best feature? That winning personality?
Emilio: Why haven't you two been doing this all along?
Diandra: We haven't been?

They look into each others eyes, activate their suits and disappear.

New Jersey, 1970. In his final cameo appearance, a CGI de-aged Stan Lee plays a guy who is nearly driven off the road, presumably by Team Stony. We cut to them sneaking into a military facility that advertises itself as the Birthplace of Captain America. Tony exposits that he wasn't actually BORN here, was he? Steve says no, it's more of a metaphorical thing. Tony wonders aloud where the quasi-fascist SHIELD would hide an infinity stone. Steve nods at a bunker with a couple shady looking guys going into it. It looks like the same bunker he and Nat were in in Winter Soldier. Tony taps his glasses/computer thing and gets a thermal scan of the men going down in an elevator

So I guess they follow sometime later, but it's not totally clear. They share the elevator with a black lady who is probably somebody's secretary even though a year earlier the government trusted a few black women computer scientists to get their men to the moon. Tony gets off at the first stop with a pointed "good luck on your mission, Captain." Steve replies with "good luck on your project, Doctor."

Chrissy: Thank you for validating years of fantasies there, Cap.
Diandra: Oh, you did not imagine me calling you Doctor.
Chrissy: Once, maybe. Back before I started having fantasies about a different Steph who *I* called Doctor. Basically, anytime anyone says "Doctor" now I start getting revved up.

Tony runs through an office/storage area scanning for the Tesseract. He finally finds the safe it's in, grabs a briefcase laying nearby and uses his nanotech suit to cut the safe open. He just gets the Tesseract in the case when Howard Stark (the John Slattery version) rounds the corner looking for Arnim (presumably Zola). Tony stiffens and beats a hasty retreat, but Howard points out that he's headed in the wrong direction if he's looking for the door. He asks if Tony has seen Doctor Zola and Tony is luck uh...nope. Haven't seen anybody. Nobody down here but us chickens. He gets so flustered he trips over a chair. Howard asks if he knows him because he looks familiar...

Chrissy: I wonder if he's going to remember this in about 20 years when his son starts looking like this.
Diandra: Which would create a possible paradox in any other version of time travel which, again, is probably why we're using this one. Fuck knows how that will affect this timeline.

Tony fishes out an MIT visitor badge. Howard kind of sniffs in the direction of it like 'oh, you're one of THEM' and asks what his name is. Tony proves he is not the smoothest when it comes to these sort of things by mumbling "Howard...Potts." Howard Stark introduces himself and shakes his hand, noting that Tony is looking a bit...green. Tony says he's just been...uh...working long hours...um... And he nearly leaves without the case, which Howard has to remind him about.

In another part of the building, a de-aged Michael Douglas answers the phone in a lab while the camera pans over an ant farm and an early ant-man helmet prototype. On the other end of the line, Steve (who is slightly better at this) introduces himself as Captain Stevens from shipping with a package that's um...glowing and he's not sure they should be handling it... Hank, who has fluffier hair than I remember Michael Douglas ever having, slams down the phone and runs from the lab. Steve steps out of a hallway as he passes and sneaks into the now-empty lab. Because apparently all the offices around here are generally deserted. He finds some vials helpfully marked "Pym particles" and steals four.

Tony notes the flowers Howard is holding and casually asks if he's got a date. Howard says yeah, well...he's been spending too much time at the office lately and she'll be giving birth any day now. Tony is like 'oh...right...um...' Howard hands him the flowers so he can fix his tie. Tony asks how far along she is. Howard doesn't know and kind of gestures in front of himself like he's trying to guess by how big the bump is before saying "she's at the point where she can't stand the sound of my chewing." So he'll be eating dinner in the pantry tonight, probably. Tony blurts that he has a daughter. Howard says yeah, he'd love to have a girl. "Less of a chance she'd turn out exactly like me." Tony is like 'hah, yeah...wait, what?' Yeah, it turns out Howard is aware that he is a bit too self-centered and the last thing the world needs is another him.

Steve runs into the black lady from the elevator telling some security guards about these two men she's never seen before that seemed kind of shady. "One of them had a hippie beard."

Chrissy: She is not. I mean, what?

Steve ducks into another abandoned office before they can see him while the guard calls in a possible security breach. This office turns out to be Peggy's, which he only realizes belatedly after seeing his own picture in a frame on the desk. She appears in the office next door, yelling at some guy and he gets way too close to the windows to gawp at her. Luckily, she's too distracted to notice him staring at her from a few feet away.

Now outside the compound, Tony asks where Howard and his wife are with names for the baby.

Chrissy: And here's where I totally could have just used my real first name and turned out to be the guy my dad named me after because time travel.
Diandra: Yeah, except...that's not how time travel works in this movie, apparently.

Howard says his wife really wants to name it Elonzo if it's a boy. Tony is like 'eh...maybe don't?' Howard asks if he was nervous when his kid was born. Tony says fuck yeah. Howard asks if he felt like he was "qualified", you know, "like you had any idea how to successfully operate that thing?" That Thing says nope, you learn as you go. In fact, he kind of used what he remembered of the stuff his dad did as a guide.

Chrissy: ....of what not to do.

Howard thinks that's a bad idea because his dad liked to solve every problem with his belt.

Steve appears several yards away and waves at Tony. Tony says some nonsense about how he always thought his dad was rough on him, but now he only remembers the good things. Howard presses for specifics. "No amount of money ever bought a second of time," Tony quotes. Howard muses that even though his kid hasn't been born yet, "there's nothing I wouldn't do for him." He says goodbye and Tony hugs him and thanks him "for everything you've done.........for this country" before running away. Howard shakes off the weirdness of that stranger hugging him and goes to the car that's waiting, handing Jarvis (played by the same guy who played him in "Agent Carter" but aged up) the flowers. He points at Tony and asks if they've ever met him because he looks so familiar.

Emilio: Dude, I'm not even sure I recognize YOU. How do Peggy and I look exactly the same while you look like a completely different person?
Diandra: And meanwhile, there are people who never saw "Agent Carter" going "who is that guy? Did Daddy Stark just call him Jarvis?"
Chrissy: Daddy Stark, incidentally, is probably Stephen's secret pet name for Tony.
Diandra: Only in Tony's wildest fantasies.
Chrissy: Obviously.

Back on Morag, AltNebula is throwing Nebula around. AltNebula thinks her counterpart is "weak" and removes the time travel wristband thing from her before Gamora arrives. Nebula begs Gamora to do something because did she happen to see what happened in the future? How Thanos got the soul stone? AltNebula kicks her in the head to shut her up, then pulls a knife to pry a gold colored plate from her skull. The next thing we see is some version of Nebula with a gold skull plate handing Thanos a vial of something and ask how she looks like this. Because it wasn't confusing enough keeping track of which timeline everybody belonged to so we're going to have the Nebulas switch places now.

Vomir, 2014. Nat and Clint arrive and park their ship a ridiculous distance from the mountain they have to climb for some reason. She is just grumbling about this when NotHugoWeaving welcomes them, identifying them as the Daughter of Ivan and the Son of Edith. He shows them up to the cliff basically right away like 'let's just get this over with, shall we?' He points at the void and says "what you seek lies in front of you. As does what you fear." Nat simplistically concludes the stone is at the bottom of the cliff. NotHugoWeaving is like yeah, sort of, but only one of you can actually get it. Because, you see, the reason it's called the Soul Stone is that someone has to trade their soul for it.

So they take a few minutes off to the side to discuss this. Clint suggests maybe he's just making shit up. Nat reminds him that Thanos brought his daughter with him to retrieve this stone and only one of them came back, so...it tracks. And now one of them has to get it so they can unsnap billions. "Whatever it takes." Clint says yeah, and we both know who has to be sacrificed, right? She says yes and takes his hand. He says wait, we are thinking the same thing, right? She says all she's cared about for the past five years is finding a way to get everyone back. And she doesn't really want to kill herself to do it, but if it's between the two of them... He says he doesn't want her to save him. And she does know what he's turned into these past few years, right? She says she doesn't judge people "on their worst mistakes". He calls her a pain in the ass. They press foreheads together for a minute because it would probably be weird if they kissed NOW. He says she wins, then kicks her legs out from under her and instructs her to tell his family he loved them. She flips him onto his back and hits him with a stun blast, snarling that he can tell them himself. She starts running for the edge of the cliff. He recovers and shoots an exploding arrow close enough that the blast knocks her over, tosses the bow aside and runs for the cliff.

In some version of the script, this was probably where the debate ended and he got to be the sacrificial lamb. But apparently the majority of the audience loves him more or hates Scarlet Johansson more or maybe the writers just really wanted to get Kate Bishop into the MCU and figure it would be better if she was Clint's trainee than replacement. Whatever. So just as he's leaping off the edge, she leaps right after him and shoots a line into the side of the mountain. They slam into the rock face and he realizes the line is somehow attached to his belt and she's just dangling freely from him. He says "damn you" and tries to hang on to her, but can only reach with the one hand. She says it's okay and he can let go. He sobs and begs her not to do this. She kicks off the side of the mountain right out of his grip and he screams as she falls to her death.

Chrissy: And the writers prove that they could totally make that awful scene in "Infinity War" even worse if they put their minds to it.

The sky above the mountain tower thing flashes and we snap to black briefly before Clint wakes up in a pool of water, clutching the soul stone. He sobs some more.

And then everybody is back in the Quantum stream, returning to the pad in the Avengers compound. The Ant Man suits disappear and they look around, dazed. Hulk asks if they got all of the stones. And then they realize that one of them is missing and Clint is looking traumatized.

They wait until they are outside on a dock to discuss, apparently. Tony asks if any of them knows if she even had family. Uh, y'all were shitty friends. Just saying.

Emilio: Yes, but we haven't been able to get an origin story for her so...

Steve says THEY were her family. Thor gets in Tony's face and asks why they're acting like she's dead. They have the stones, don't they? They can bring her back. Clint says no, that's not how it works. Conveniently.

Chrissy: We can resurrect Gamora though.
Diandra: Yes, CONVENIENTLY we can resurrect the ones who have non-flashback movies coming up.

Thor thinks the Earth man doesn't know anything about this space magic they're working with. Clint says no, the "red floating guy" said it couldn't be undone, but if THOR wants to go have a talk with him and see if he can get a different answer... Everyone goes quiet and Clint cries that it was SUPPOSED to be him. Hulk yells and throws a bench. Once the attention is all on him, he says if they can't get her back then they have to make her death COUNT for something.

Chrissy: Because that's what we DO. We AVENGE shit instead of stopping it from happening in the first place.

So Rocket, Tony and Hulk all work on making another Infinity Gauntlet out of parts of an Iron Man suit. Which is not only something I'm pretty sure they basically said couldn't be done before (something about the original needing to be forged by a dying star), but very nicely telegraphs who is obviously going to be wearing it at some point.

Chrissy: We've been over these rule changes several times already. The writers will break as many rules as they need to to service the plot.
Diandra: We should have made that a drinking game when we started this movie.
Chrissy: You would have lost coherence by now if we had.
Diandra: I fail to see a downside there. Speaking of which, when did we stop drinking?
Chrissy: Speak for yourself. I'm almost through this bottle of wine here.
Diandra: I thought you had beer before.
Chrissy: Like, two hours ago.
Diandra: Well, give me the rest of that bottle and open another one. Obviously I need to catch up before the big fight scene here.

Once the glove is ready to go, Rocket asks who is going to volunteer. Thor volunteers. Steve and Tony both rush to stop him from just grabbing it. Scott says they should discuss this. Thor is like 'fuck that.' He says he's the strongest Avenger, so it should be his responsibility. He and Tony start talking over each other and trying to shut each other down and Thor begs Tony to just LET him do SOMETHING right. Tony says no, the glove is "channeling enough energy to light up a continent" and he is in NO shape to take that on. "What do you think is coursing through my veins right now," Thor snarls. "Cheese Whiz," Rhodey quips. Thor kind of glares at him half heartedly. Hulk, having spent the last few minutes realizing the importance of dropping that "strongest Avenger" thing, says lightning isn't going to help. He has to do it. Because...something something gamma radiation...but mostly because he hasn't gotten his hero moment yet.

Meanwhile, Nebula...who is, of course, actually AltNebula...is out by the time platform, messing with the control box.

Tony reminds Hulk that he needs to just bring everyone who was snapped out five years ago back in the present without changing anything else. Hulk is like 'yeah, don't snap your kid out of existence. I know. Even though that arguably is worse for A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE and will probably create a few new villains we'll have to deal with. But FINE. It's all about YOU.'

Chrissy: I'm sensing a little hostility.
Diandra: Me? Nah.

Everyone braces and the guys with powers or armor shield the ones without. Tony orders Friday to activate "Barn Door Protocol", which apparently turns the plaza into a metal fortress. The glove adapts to Hulk's enormous fist, which...why did they even make it human sized in the first place?

Chrissy: STOP ASKING QUESTIONS.
Diandra: [grunts] [drinks]

He screams as it activates and starts shooting energy up his arm. Thor yells that they should get it off him. Hulk insists he's okay even though his arm is starting to blacken.

AltNebula opens the time portal platform to 2014 and Thanos' whole ship comes shooting out and blasts through the ceiling of the plaza. Presumably this is all before Friday activated the shields, but who the hell knows.

Hulk is still screaming while he raises his hand and FINALLY snaps. He falls over and the glove falls off. Everyone rushes to tend him and make sure he's not dying. Hulk asks if it worked. Scott goes out into the hallway as the shields all come up. Clint's phone starts ringing. It's his wife. Confirming what Scott is just getting a gut feeling about at the same instant: "I think it worked."

This moment of reprieve is interrupted as Thanos' ship hovers over the building and starts blasting away, destroying the building and everything around it just to be really thorough. Somehow this doesn't instantly kill even the humans, although at least Tony, Scott and Rhodey kind of have the excuse of still being in armor. Down in the rubble, Hulk holds up part of the building to keep it from crushing some of them. Rhodey crawls out of his malfunctioning suit and uses a piece of rebar to pry a chunk off Rocket.

It turns out Scott survived partly by going tiny as he digs himself out from somewhere in time to hear a mayday from Rhodey that the level they are on is flooding and they need help.

On a higher level, Clint finds the gauntlet in a sewer pipe just as something growls behind him. He fires a lighted arrow at it and it illuminates several...things...crawling toward him. So he grabs the gauntlet and runs forward down the tunnel.

Thanos beams down from his ship in full battle armor. AltNebula comes out to greet him and he praises her for a job well done. She smiles and removes the gold plate she stole from the Nebula who actually belongs in this timeline, declaring that the morons didn't even suspect anything. He says no, that's the thing about arrogance. It's pretty blinding. He stabs his bat'leth into the ground and hangs his helmet on it and orders AltNebula to go retrieve the stones for him. She asks what he's planning on doing while she does that. He sits on a rock and says he's gonna wait.

Chrissy: Uh-huh. You know, there are so many reasons why she should have been the one to take him down.
Diandra: Didn't she actually say her goal was to take him down in the last "Guardians"? See, this is where that whole bullshit about some toxic males editing the movie down to focus on only the white boys resulted in a perfectly coherent edit. The biggest contribution a female made in this whole movie was throwing herself off a cliff to save one of the other five leads (all of whom are white men).

Chrissy: And to bring back a conversation point we brought up a couple hours ago... this is why you had Nebula take the glove in your fic, right?
Diandra: I did that because she WAS the one who reversed the snap in the comics. And while the context of that was very different and obviously wouldn't work here, I felt her taking revenge against Thanos was the logical and satisfying conclusion of her story arc that the writers are IGNORING FOR SOME REASON. Well, I guess I know the reason. And I love Evans and RDJ and will miss them in future installments of this series. But still, it sucks that she and Carol are totally neutered in this movie. Like we can't figure out a way to have them in here and still put everything on the five white guys or at least the two that aren't coming back.

Apparently they didn't just leave our Nebula in the past because Gamora watches AltNebula walk away from inside the ship and swaggers back in to where Nebula is slumped against...some sort of machinery. Gamora wants to know what happens to the two of them in the future. Oh, who the fuck knows? We're NOT DOING THAT VERSION OF TIME TRAVEL.

Emilio: [whispering] I think the alcohol is kicking in.

Nebula says well, after I tried to kill you about a dozen times, we became friends and actually embraced our sisterhood. Gamora reaches a hand to help her up, saying they can still stop him.

Tony finds Steve in the rubble and shakes him conscious. He waves the shield and says he's keeping it next time Steve loses it.

Chrissy: Also says "that's my man" which is...weird.
Emilio: No, it isn't.
Chrissy: Oh, I know he IS, but it's weird that he's saying that NOW in this context.

They pick their way out of the post-apocalyptic remains of the building to find Thor staring out at Thanos. He reports that he's just been sitting there, waiting. Steve asks where the stones are. Tony says they're buried somewhere down there. Whatever, as long as Thanos doesn't have them. Steve agrees that they have to make sure it stays that way. Thor asks if the humans realize this is absolutely a trap. Tony says yeah, but he doesn't care anymore. Thor says good, as long as we're on the same page... Storm clouds start swirling and his eyes glow and lightning crackles around him. He holds out both hands and both Mjolnir and Stormbreaker come to him. "Let's kill him properly this time," he snarls.

And so begins the longest goddamn battle sequence ever. I believe I have mentioned before that I'm not good with battle sequences, either in recaps or fiction, and as Emilio noted, the alcohol is starting to kick in, so...brace yourself because this will probably get very bumpy.

The three of them approach Thanos together and Thanos greets them by noting that they just COULDN'T live with their failure, huh? Clearly he was wrong when he thought the half of everyone he DIDN'T snap away would thrive because "as long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. They will resist." Tony is like yeah, that's the thing about humans. Stubborn species. Thanos says at least now he knows what went wrong so he can get it right the second time around: he shouldn't have left ANYONE alive. He should have just destroyed everything and started from scratch so the life in this new universe won't know anything different.

Chrissy: That...wouldn't work.
Diandra: Yeah, apparently all of his plans are bullshit and probably only make sense in his own head because they result in him being a god.

Tony, Steve and Thor all attack him at once.

And we check in with the team members still in the building. Hulk is struggling to hold up the floor that is sinking underwater. Rhodey tells Rocket he'll see him on the other side as the water rises to their chins. Scott rides toward them on some sort of makeshift debris boat, yelling at them to hang on. Clint is still running through hallways overhead somewhere, being chased by...I'm gonna say Chitauri? He sets a bunch of explosive arrows as he goes and barely escapes the resulting fireball as he exits the tunnel. This really only slows the creatures down, so he still has to fend them off with a sword as he rappels up to a higher floor. AltNebula swoops in to take the gauntlet off him, which he doesn't think anything of because she's one of theirs, right? And then she calls daddy to tell him she has the stones and points a gun at Clint. Gamora stops her before she can shoot him, Nebula trailing behind her. Clint - obviously confused - skitters away while the women argue about destiny and whether or not AltNebula has to do this. AltNebula laughs and says he won't let her stop now and tries to shoot Gamora. Nebula shoots her first and here is yet another thing that only works because of the version of time travel we are using. Clint retrieves the gauntlet again like 'okay, we can talk about whatever the fuck just happened later.'

Tony opens some sort of panel on the back of his suit and orders Thor to "hit me" in a move they apparently discussed at some point. Thor hits the panel with a bolt of lightning and Tony blasts Thanos with his supercharged blasters. Thanos just walks the blast back toward Tony until he can pick him up, using him as a shield for Mjolnir, which Thor has sent in his direction. Tony goes flying and starts losing consciousness. Steve tries to attack again and Thanos punches him out. Thor attacks and gets pinned to a rock. Thanos punches and kicks him repeatedly, then catches Stormbreaker out of the air as Thor tries to call it to him and mirrors the moment in "Infinity War" where Thor drove the blade into his chest. Except just as the axe pierces Thor's armor, Mjolnir levitates and knocks Thanos away from him. Thor and Thanos both watch, baffled, as it flies back to the person who threw it: Steve. "I knew it," Thor yelps.

Chrissy: Do you think this one idea really was deliberately planted way back in "Ultron"?
Diandra: Probably. Joss Whedon certainly made it clear we were supposed to see that Steve COULD have picked it up, but chose not to. Apparently he was able to use it at one point in the comics, so that might just be a thing everyone accepts as cannon and not specific to the MCU.

Thanos kicks Thor aside and turns to this new threat. Steve immediately starts spinning the thing like he's had a ton of practice with it, hitting Thanos with both it and the shield alternately. He's also using it to summon lightning, which is a direct contradiction to how "Ragnarok" just said it worked, but WHATEVER.

Chrissy: We should have at least been keeping a tally of rule changes in this movie. What are we on now, five?
Diandra: What, you keep telling me to ignore them and now you want me to keep track? [drinks] [flips a bird]

At the end of all this, Steve has a busted up shield, a wound to his thigh and probably lots of internal damage as he and Mjolnir are thrown a great distance in different directions. But of course he's still struggling to get back up while Thanos monologues about how all the geonocides he committed before were not personal, but he's going to ENJOY destroying this stupid little angry planet now.

Chrissy: Random reference is random.
Diandra: Yeah, well...[blows a raspberry]

His army - including all the minions who died during "Infinity War" - beams down from the ship and a bunch of...shuttles?...land and release all those dog robot things and the flying lizards from "The Avengers" and basically it is absolute overkill against the seven guys currently available.

Emilio: You mean eight guys.
Diandra: Really?
Chrissy: Yeah, who did you forget to count?
Diandra: [muttering while ticking off on fingers] Tony, Steve, Thor, Hulk, Rhodey, Rocket, Scott...
Chrissy: So you forgot Hawkeye. Why am I not surprised?
Diandra: Oh, who wouldn't?
Emilio: You're also not counting Gamora and Nebula?
Diandra: Yeah, I guess I wasn't quite sure which side they are on yet.

Steve peels himself off the ground, tightens the strap on his broken shield and starts limping toward Thanos. His comm link kicks in suddenly and Sam's voice asks "hey, Cap, can you read me? Cap? It's Sam." He stops, startled. "On your left." A portal opens behind Steve and Alan Silvestri starts a song that everyone else apparently believes is memorable but I couldn't immediately recognize from any other score for the last three Avengers movies. T'Challa, Shuri and Okoye walk out of it and Chrissy bursts into the opening of "The Lion King" so suddenly that I nearly fall out of my chair.

Chrissy: AhahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahahahahaha! [claps]
Diandra: Well, that's one way to diffuse whatever sadness comes with seeing Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther for what would turn out to be the last time.
Emilio: Technically those episodes of "What If..." were the last time.
Diandra: Right. And based on the texts Chrissy sent me while watching that, I suppose we're going to have to recap that show too.
Chrissy: TENTACLES!
Diandra: Ugh.

Sam flies out behind them and does a big loop around the field while a bunch more portals open up. We focus on Doctor Strange coming out of one, followed by the Guardians who were snapped because they're coming directly from Titan. Peter swings in after them. T'Challa starts his battle cry, echoed by the Wakandan army coming up behind him out of the four largest portals on the ground. Bucky and Groot are with them because that's where they were at the time of the snap. A bunch of Asgardians come out of another, led by Valkyrie on a winged horse. Wanda drops in front of them randomly like somebody forgot she was in Wakanda during The Snappening. Wong is leading the rest of the sorcerers coming from a portal to Shanghai. Hope appears in the middle of this group for some reason and looks around like 'who are all these people and what did I miss?'

Pepper - in full Iron armor where she assumes the title of Rescue - drops in front of Tony and retracts her helmet.

Chrissy: Bet you didn't even remember I had superpowers, did you?

Emilio: Does she still?
Diandra: Probably not, but who the fuck knows? Certainly not the writers.
Chrissy [whispering to Emilio]: Yeah, the alcohol is definitely kicking in.

Stephen asks Wong if they got everybody. Wong is like 'dude, we just scrambled together, like, five dozen superheroes and three whole armies.' "You wanted MORE?!"

Chrissy: You really are a size queen, aren't you?

Diandra: [splutters and spits wine]

Scott blasts out of the rubble of the building in giant form, depositing Hulk, Rocket and Rhodey on the field.

The music finally reaches a crescendo because yes, this is everyone and Steve turns back to Thanos, yelling "Avengers..." Thor lands beside him, but Mjolnir still comes to him and he adds "...assemble" in a low growl.

Chrissy: It only took, what, 20 movies to get around to that line?

The music goes fully into the Avengers fanfare and both sides start charging with a lot of yelling and/or snarling. We pan over some of the chaos and catch quick glimpses of Star Lord and Shuri shooting, T'Challa ninja-ing, Drax stabbing and Scott - still in giant form - just punching out one of the dragon things. Pepper flies overhead and blasts at an enemy ship. And in what is probably the coolest moment, Tony joins her and they fight back to back.

Steve and Thor somehow switch weapons and when Thor realizes this he says no, "you have the little one" and they pass them back before rejoining the battle.

Tony gets slammed into a rock and I guess because Pepper lost him, Peter has to save him by yanking the monster goon back with a web right into Scott's path as he stomps through. Peter runs to help Tony up and starts rambling about how he must have passed out because Tony was gone when he woke up and the weird magic guy said they had been gone for five years and started doing that "yellow sparkly thing" and...Tony just hugs him and he shuts up. Sort of.

Quill is fighting a couple goons and one of them totally gets the upper hand before somebody shoots him from behind. It's Gamora. Except, obviously, the version of Gamora who was removed from the timeline before she even met him, but he doesn't know that yet. He staggers over to her and reaches for her face, gasping that he thought he lost her. She grabs his hand, knees him in the groin and snarls "don't touch me."

Emilio: So you're still mad, huh?

She kicks him again and he goes down, grunting that she missed the first time, but "you got 'em both the second time." Nebula joins them and looks down at him dispassionately. Gamora is like 'this guy? Seriously? Did future me take a major blow to the head or something?' Nebula shrugs that it was "between him and a tree" so...

Chrissy: I would still have gone with the tree, but then he died and came back as a baby, so that would have been weird.

Quill just gestures at them in confusion like 'I can STILL HEAR YOU and also what the fuck?'

Clint is running through the battlefield with the gauntlet like, oh, you're still here, aren't you? Sam tackles a creature trying to stop him and stabs it with his metal wings. Clint gets on comms and asks Steve what he's supposed to do "with this damn thing". Steve is like 'get it off the battlefield, dumbass, why did you even bring it up here?' Hulk yells that they need to get them back where they came from. Uh, yeah. Everyone is kind of busy right now though and the time travel pad is buried in a mound of rubble, so... Tony points out this last part: they can't get them back if Thanos destroyed the tunnel. Scott says that wasn't their only time machine and reduces himself to normal size before calling the Cucaracha van. Steve hears it and asks if anyone in his vicinity can see an "ugly brown van". Valkyrie spots it from her flying horse and says "you're not gonna like where it's parked" and when the fuck did she get a com? Does everyone have them, or...fuck it. The writers clearly are to busy trying to spin ALL THE DAMN PLATES at once to be worried about details like how characters in two completely different parts of the battlefield can somehow be having a dialogue. I'm sure the dudebros have some fanwank that would explain it, but whatever. I don't care.

Tony asks how long it would take Scott to get the time machine running. He says maybe ten minutes. Steve tells him to start and they'll bring the stones to him. Hope flies in next to Scott and says they're on it.

Stephen flies over to an empty spot somewhere and Tony lands next to him.

Chrissy: Hey, so, remember all that ho yay between us before you turned to dust? I've talked to Pepper and she is totally open to a threesome.
Diandra: ..........how long were you working on that one?
Chrissy: About as long as we've been waiting for you to get to this recap.

Tony reminds Stephen of that one in 14 million odds of them winning and asks if this is that one. Stephen is like 'I can't risk telling you what is supposed to happen and changing it.'

Chrissy: Okay, cool. At least one of us has a Sherlock Holmes project to get back to.
Diandra: I still hate you.

Hope flies Scott into the van and they both expand back to normal size. He tries to start the car, announces that it isn't working and he'll have to hotwire it.

Thanos asks...Cull Obsidian? Is that the guy who died in "Infinity War"?...where Nebula is. His minions don't know because she's not responding to their calls, but Ebony Maw alerts Thanos to a more pressing concern: Clint running by in the distance with the gauntlet.

A bunch of minions swarm Clint. T'Challa drops in and kinetic blasts them away before asking Clint to hand over the gauntlet. Clint does gladly. T'Challa runs the next leg of this ridiculous marathon with it, taking down a few goons on the way. Thanos throws his boomeranging propeller to knock it from him and starts running to take it. Wanda drops between them, eyes glowing red, and growls that he took everything from her. Of course, since this version of Thanos is not the one that killed Vision in front of her, he has no idea what she's talking about. She levitates a couple giant hunks of twisted debris and throws them at him, followed by some fireballs. T'Challa runs to recover the gauntlet, but Maw levitates it away from him. He just jumps to grab it and goes along for the ride as the chunk of ground rushes to meet Maw. Peter swings through and T'Challa throws the gauntlet to him. He lands in a pack of minions, activates the Instant Kill setting on his suit and just stands there letting the spider arms stab all the minions.

Thanos gets Wanda pinned briefly, but she just gets a look like 'is that all you got?' and blasts his weapon away. She levitates him and starts ripping chunks of his armor off and he yelps at Cull to "rain fire". Cull is like 'but...that will kill our guys too...' Thanos is like 'I'm in danger of LOSING OVER HERE!'

Chrissy: I think they finally admitted in WandaVision that she could have taken Thanos single handedly.
Diandra: So could Carol. Which is why the writers had to take great pains to find reasons why they couldn't just LET THEM.

The ships in the air start blasting indiscriminately at the ground and the sorcerers - led by Wong - form shields to protect their side.

Pepper is flying over a nearby dam that just broke and asks if anyone else can see this waterfall forming over here. Stephen - realizing he hasn't had much of anything else to do since he got here - runs over to magic the water back up away from the battlefield, basically forming a water tornado.

Peter is getting buried in bad guys and yelps for somebody to help him. Steve throws Mjolnir toward him and he webs it and lets it yank him away. The webbing snaps as he's crossing the field though and Pepper catches him, flies him over to Valkyrie and drops him on the back of the horse. He tries to introduce himself, but doesn't even finish the sentence before a nearby blast knocks them both off the horse. He tries to run the gauntlet a little further and then just curls in a ball on the ground amid the bombing and chaos.

The ships stop firing suddenly and everyone watches as they silently redirect to some clouds in the distance before firing again. Sam and Tony ask what the fuck this is about and what they're firing at. Friday tells Tony that "something" just entered the atmosphere. A fireball flies right into and through the main ship, which basically goes dead in the air. Yeah, it's Carol. She makes another pass through and the whole ship crumbles into the water. Steve is like 'hey, thanks for joining us, Carol.'

Emilio: Hey, she's the cavalry.
Diandra: That would be totally awesome if I believed that.

She lands in front of Peter, who is clutching the gauntlet like it's a giant teddy bear. He whimpers an introduction. She's like 'yeah, you're adorable. Wanna hand me the baton?' He looks at the approaching flank of goons and mutters that she's gonna have a hard time getting through that. You did just see her gut that ship overhead, right? But this is the writers hamfisted way of doing this: Wanda lands beside her, followed by Valkyrie and Okoye and Pepper flank Carol. Shuri, Mantis, Hope, Gamora and Nebula all join in so that we can have a few seconds of every major female character on screen at the same time like 'here's your representation, ladies. Are you happy now?'

There's a couple moments of the women fighting. Okoye spears Cull, Valkyrie splits open one of the dragon ships with a sword. Carol flies through all of it in a ball of fire, headed right for the tunnel Scott managed to fire up in the back of the van. Thanos tries to cut her off and Pepper, Shuri and...Wasp? I think?...blast at him. He throws his weapon right at the Quantum Time Tunnel, which knocks everything back, including the water tornado Stephen is still messing with. The gauntlet lands near Tony, who rushes Thanos to try to keep him from it. Thanos tosses him aside, goes to grab it and Thor appears to fight him back. They end up in a deadlock...again...and Thor has both Stormbreaker AND Mjolnir this time. Steve jumps on Thanos' back and tries to help Thor. Thanos knocks both of them away and punches Steve unconscious. Maybe. Carol regroups and gets a few blows in before Thanos tosses her aside too. He puts on the gauntlet and it starts sparking with power. Before he can snap, Carol returns, forces his hand open and starts bending his fingers totally back like she's going to snap them right along with the gauntlet. He rips the power stone off the gauntlet so he can get enough force to punch her across the field.

Tony peels himself off the ground and looks at Stephen, who just holds up one finger of the hand not STILL spinning the water tornado.

Chrissy: Ugh. THIS GUY is going to take my place? Really?
Diandra: Don't worry, I'm sure that in this particular case, everyone is going to say they liked you better.
Chrissy: Uh-huh. Just so you know, if you even THINK of touching Pepper, I will come back to haunt your ass.

Thanos returns the power stone to the gauntlet. Tony rushes in before he can snap this time and seems to just hang on to the gauntlet until Thanos punches him away. Thanos doesn't even notice that the energy isn't sparking around the gauntlet anymore as he gloats "I am inevitable" and snaps. Then he turns his hand over to show the stones are all gone and looks at Tony, who has the Iron Man duplicate with all the stones sparking and crackling. "And I...am...Iron Man," he grunts before snapping.

We do a quick tour of the battlefield as Thanos' entire army starts crumbling to dust, ships falling out of the sky. Thanos watches and silently sits back on that rock he was using before the battle in defeat before he turns to dust himself.

And if you thought Widow's death earlier was rough, you may want to brace yourself for this.

Tony crawls over to some sort of wreckage he can collapse against. The whole right side of his body looks like his arm caught fire and is actually still smoking. Rhodey lands beside him and retracts his helmet, but can't retract the rest of his suit, so he sort of cups the undamaged side of Tony's face with a giant metal hand and cries. Sad music starts playing. Peter lands next and squats in front of Tony, hysterically spewing standard lines like "can you hear me?" and "we won." Pepper pulls him away gently and takes his place. Tony rouses a little to say "hey, Pep" and cover her hand as she puts it on the arc reactor. She looks him in the eyes and smiles tearfully as she says they will be okay and "you can rest now." He stops breathing, the arc reactor goes dark and her face crumples. She kisses his cheek and cries into his chest.

And I think this is where there was a few seconds of reaction shots from various characters that were cut and then added back in so the movie could be re-released in theaters in a very obvious effort to push it over "Avatar" as the highest grossing movie ever. Which...congratulations on winning that title for almost a whole year, I guess. I say I think because as we noted earlier in this recap this is only the second time I see this movie and I was DEFINITELY not going to spend another $15 and test the limits of my bladder for a second time in a theater for THAT. And apparently it isn't on the DVD. Fuck you, Disney.

Sad music plays as we montage over the reunions in the aftermath. Clint with his family. Peter with his classmates, particularly Ned, who hugs him crying. Scott and Hope. The Wakandan royal family. Nick Fury and Goose. Just kidding. Tony voice overs that everyone loves a happy ending, but...you know...you can't always get one. "I'm hoping if you play this back it's in celebration. I hope families are reunited. I hope we get it back and something like a normal version of the planet has been restored." He rambles on about the extended universe and the forces of darkness and light and the future and we finally show what this is that's playing. He recorded another message in his mask and Pepper, Happy, Morgan, Rhodey, etc. are projecting the holographic image in the living room. He says he is recording this in the event of his untimely death because this time travel thing they're doing tomorrow has got him wondering if he's going to survive this. But that comes with the job, right? "Part of the journey is the end." He mutters that he's probably worrying over nothing because it'll all work out just like it's supposed to. He gets up, seems to look through time right at Morgan, and says "I love you 3,000" before turning the feed off.

They go outside past a bunch of people whose faces we don't see yet. Pepper sets a wreath with the original reactor she had engraved with "proof that Tony Stark has a heart" at the center of it in the water off the dock and we pan back over...everyone. Happy throws an arm around Rhodey. Steve looks stoic. Peter looks like 'y'all told me this was going to be a wedding scene. Fuck you.' Thor has cleaned himself up as best he can now, which doesn't include shaving for some reason. Hulk has his arm in a sling. Stephen looks...anorexic. Wong is stonefaced, as usual. The Pym/VanDyne clan are all grouped together (thanks for showing up just for this, Michelle), as are the Guardians minus Gamora who is SOMEWHERE I assume, but hell if I know. The Wakandan royals look...regal. Bucky and Sam are standing next to each other in the back because we all know they're going to be a thing now. Wanda is standing with them because she doesn't really have anywhere else to be. I'm not really sure who the guy behind them is, but Maria Hill and Thunderbolt Ross are behind him. And bringing up the rear is Captain Marvel standing on the steps of the house and Nick Fury standing at the porch banister.

[ETA: I looked up the trivia on IMDB...apparently the kid I can't identify was in "Iron Man 3", which I elected not to recap after I skimmed through it to remind myself of what it was about. But Chrissy didn't even call me on forgetting that because she had no idea who he was either, so...]

And then Clint and Wanda have a quiet conversation alone sometime later. Because they both lost somebody else, I guess, and we're mostly glossing over that, but here's a little coda to prove that the writers didn't forget entirely, they just pushed it mostly into future installments of the series. Clint wishes he could tell Nat that they won. Wanda says they both know and Clint puts an arm around her.

Happy gets nostalgic and tries not to cry as he asks Morgan if she wants anything to eat and she says she wants cheeseburgers. He vows to get her all the cheeseburgers she wants and she's like 'uh.........okay.........you're weird.'

Chrissy: He and Pepper are going to end up together just like the comics, aren't they?
Diandra: That would make sense, yeah. Although it wouldn't be JUST like the comics because that happened before the Civil War, where Happy died tragically.
Emilio: Nothing in the MCU is just like the comics anymore.
Diandra: That, yes. Which is why it was so weird that the gatekeepers were getting their panties all in a twist over "Captain Marvel" despite that being one of the most faithful adaptations of an origin story in the MCU, while declaring this and "Ragnarok" - largely original spin off stuff - awesome.
Chrissy: Yeah, sexism is a hell of a drug.

In New Asgard, Valkyrie finds Thor standing on the cliff staring out at the ocean or possibly the sun which would be worse because "the sun will rise on us again, brother." Fuck. Valkyrie asks when he's coming back because their people need a king. He says yeah...they already have one. He looks at her pointedly until she stops laughing. He says he's done trying to be who he is "supposed to be" and she is a natural leader, so... She says she would make a LOT of changes. "I'm counting on it, Your Majesty," he says. She asks what he's going to do then. He doesn't know, but the Guardians are taking him with them because they have a movie coming up and the scenes between them in the last movie were kind of fun.

He enters the ship and Quill swipes away the viewscreen picture of Gamora he was staring moonily at. So...wait...did she go back to her timeline? Get snapped out by Tony? Why is this not mentioned at all?

Emilio: Probably saving it for the next "Guardians".

Thor saunters up and slaps him on the shoulder and starts swiping at the screen. Quill scowls, reminds him that it's HIS ship and he's in charge around here. Thor is like 'uh-huh. Sure, buddy' and swipes the screen again. Then he calls him Quail. Drax wanders over and suggests they fight to see who should be in charge, a suggestion I, for one, am all for because I think we ALL KNOW who would win that one. Nebula agrees that it's a good idea. Rocket offers his blasters "unless you guys wanna use knives." Mantis pipes up that yes, please, they should definitely use knives!

Chrissy: Ah yes, the woman excited at the prospect of two testosterone addled males stabbing each other...why does that sound familiar?
Diandra: I know where you're going with that, Freud, but I have a giant mental block when it comes to Chris Pratt and sexy shit, so I'd rather not help you.

The Chrises laugh awkwardly and Thor insists they will not need to knife each other because everybody knows who's in charge here. Long pause before Quill can't hold in the insistence that it is HIM, right? Thor says yeah, of course buddy, but looks at him like 'you might want to sleep with one eye open.' And I should give props to Chris Hemsworth here because apparently he is the reason Thor didn't just revert back to his old self before that battle like the whole depression-weight-gain thing never happened. I love that even with the beer gut and shaggy hair and hobo beard, Quill still seems completely aware that women are bound to prefer Thor.

Chrissy: That's because he's still prettier. And smarter. And stronger. And probably better in bed.

Hulk has apparently rebuilt the time pad in the woods by Tony's house. He gives the case full of infinity stones to Steve, reminding him that he needs to return them to the EXACT MOMENT they were taken like he's an idiot.

Chrissy: Except it shouldn't matter if they're off by some time as long as they get the stones back before any important changes happen, right? Because it's not like they can affect THIS universe in any way if they screw up. Right?
Diandra: [gestures violently] WHATEVER.

Steve assures him he will prevent any bad alternate realities from happening. "Clip all the branches." Really? So when are you returning the Tesseract to, because I'm pretty sure that ship already sailed. Hulk says he tried to bring Nat back along with everyone else appropos of nothing really so they can bond over how much they miss her. Sam and Bucky are hovering nearby. Sam offers to take some of the stones for Steve, but Steve insists he'll do it all himself.

Then Steve turns to Bucky and says "don't do anything stupid till I get back."

Chrissy: How can I if you're gone?
Diandra: And there it is.

Actually, he says the far more vague "you're taking all the stupid with you." They hug. Manfully. And Steve steps onto the platform. And here's where reading some of the comics can result in annoyance. Because in the comic I read that most resembled the first movie, Steve was adamant that he had to go back to his own time (WWII) to be with his best friend Bucky. Here, he is literally turning his back on Bucky, stranding him in this time while he goes joyriding through the past decades they both missed. Like, dude. DUDE. And I just realized I should let the rest of this scene play out before I really launch into that rant, so...

Steve activates his time travel Ant Man suit while Hulk reminds the audience...er...Sam...that he will take as long as he needs to return all the stones, but from their perspective he will only be gone five seconds. Steve clutches the stone case in one hand and Mjolnir in the other, nods at Bucky and drops into the time tunnel. Hulk counts down from five and...nothing happens. Sam asks what happened and Hulk says Steve "blew right past his time stamp" whatever that means. Sam starts yelling at Hulk to get him back, but Bucky has spotted something off camera and calls to him. SOMEHOW an elderly Steve (who looks so much like Chris Evans' own great grandfather that the sight made his mother cry, apparently) is sitting on a bench beside the water, his shield propped next to him. Sam approaches cautiously and asks if something went wrong or...right. Steve says Tony was always telling him to get a life, so he figured after he put all the stones back... Sam says good for him, but now they're going to have to live in a world without Captain America. Clunk. Steve is like 'no, you don't' (clunk) and hands him the shield. At his direction, Sam puts his arm through the straps, but says it feels "like it's someone else's." But, he thanks him and says he'll do his best. Steve shakes his hand and says that's exactly why he's giving it to him.

And we get a brief shot of him in the late 40s or so, dancing with Peggy before we go to credits in case anyone was still unsure of what happened there. And I forgot that was the last scene, so I guess that means I'm going to end this recap with that rant I just put off.

One thing I have learned in the...years...since this movie came out is that you can get a couple minutes or so of entertainment by asking the dudebros mansplaining about How Time Travel Works to explain how THAT little scene works into the rest of it and watching them twist themselves into a pretzel. I have no problem with this scene, aside from what I already addressed earlier. It's a fitting end for the character as he exists in these movies. But remember what I said, like, two hours ago about this being the worst version of time travel narratively? It's because it basically makes doing something like this impossible. Living in an alternate universe/timeline and returning to this one as an old man? Sure. But they are obviously implying that he somehow managed to go into the past in THIS universe and just get back to this point the long way, which could only happen in literally any other version of time travel, which, I guess in hindsight we should have seen coming because I'm pretty sure that's what happened in "Timeline" too.

Chrissy: So basically the writers are trying to have it both ways.
Diandra: Exactly.
Chrissy: What did we say about them changing the rules whenever it suits their story purposes?
Diandra: Yeah, I guess I'm mostly just annoyed by the dicks who want to act like I'm a stupid girl who obviously doesn't understand science when I try to point out inconsistencies. Like, this is a universe where being exposed to radio active toxic sludge somehow turned a guy into a giant green rage monster, but traditional rules of time travel are just too difficult to accept? I should have used that as my example earlier instead of the vampire thing, shouldn't I?
Emilio: Well, this universe does have vampires and witches too.
Chrissy: Which segues us nicely into a discussion about what we're recapping next. After "Deadpool 2" anyway. Because I know you said at one point that "Endgame" could be a natural stopping point, but it was obviously setting up SEVERAL other shows and movies, so...
Diandra: I am never going to be done with this series, am I?
Chrissy: You did exactly one of the three Hobbit movies and never even talked about going back for a second, so I have no doubt you can quit anytime. Just not yet. More importantly, you can go back to skipping ones that aren't as important or summarizing ones you don't need details of like you did the first "Guardians".
Diandra: Yeah. Okay, we can discuss it. But first..."Deadpool 2". Which will involve a less CGI'd Josh Brolin and a completely different kind of time travel that is more in line with the comics and I will DEFINITELY BE POINTING THAT OUT.

By the way, there was no mid or after credit scene for this movie. Now that we finally got people used to the idea that they had to stay through the credits. Just a sound effect of metal being struck that might be from the first "Iron Man".

And at 25,500 words, this recap is, it turns out, NOT the longest I've written so far. That title is held by "Infinity War" which was 27,200. Apparently we went on a LOT more tangents with that one. I could take a page from the blatant efforts to push this movie to highest grossing of all time and throw in a summary of the second Spider-Man movie here (because I'm pretty sure I don't want to recap that in it's entirety) to inflate the word count and make this the longest recap, but I'm not gonna.