Avengers Endgame: Captain America's head-scratching ending, explained (2024)

April 28, 2019 8:23 am ET

WARNING: If you couldn’t tell by the headline, this post contains huge, massive, potentially life ruining spoilers for Avengers Endgame.For the love of Thanos, don’t keep scrolling unless you want to know how Captain America’s character arc ties up.

For devoted fans of the MCU, there’s so much to love in Avengers: Endgame. The three-hour epic is crammed with character development, emotional reunions and tragic goodbyes. It even features a long, overdue appreciation of America’s best ass.

But, for all the moments the movie executed with perfection, the end of Captain America’s story arc feels like a crucial, head-scratching misstep. The film leans heavily on time travel to set the world right after Thanos’ snap, which causes a host of problems.Trying to untangle the logic of time travel is never really going to work, but this is a plot hole so huge, that, even at the slightest examination, it caves in on itself like a collapsing portal, so let’s try anyway.

During the denouement of the film, after balance has been restored to the universe, Cap decides that he’ll be the one to return the Infinity Stones to their proper places in time. Now, the way time travel works in Endgame, Cap can take all the time he needs jumping from decade to decade and planet to planet, but only about 5 seconds will have passed in his original timeline.

As he’s leaving, Bucky tells Steve, “I’m going to miss you,” which is a weird thing to say to someone who’ll be back basically as soon as he left. He knows that Steve, after returning the stones, has decided to go back to the 40s, before he was frozen in ice, to be with the love of his life, Peggy Carter. The final shot of Endgame is Steve and Peggy finally getting their long, overdue dance.

In theory, it’s a sweet moment that gives Steve Rogers and Captain America the happy life and ending they never had, but it’s also totally out of character and requires a lot of mental gymnastics to be believable.

Basically, as this Screen Crush video posits, Steve Rogers staying in the 1940s and living out his life creates an alternate timeline but it doesn’t change anything that happened in the MCU films. As Steve decides to stay with Peggy, he’s getting an alternate reality that looks like something like this.

The new timeline closely mirrors that of the films, considering that a much older version of Steve appears sitting on a bench by a lake to hand off the Captain America shield to Sam Wilson. Basically, as we saw in the film with Nebula, traveling back in time just means that there’s another version of you running around. So, for all this time there’s been, in affect, a duplicate Steve Rogers just hanging out and living a nice, normal, suburban life while the Captain America version of him hangs out and fights Hydra and tries to save the world.

No one begrudges Steve Rogers a happy ending. Certainly, if any character deserves one, it’s him. But, after so many films went to lengths to establish that he can’t sit idly by while things are pointed south (which is literally what he says to Tony Stark in Civil War) he is basically sitting idly by while things go south. Time travel doesn’t erase his memory, so he knows all the bad things that are going to happen….and he just lets them happen? Because he’s retired? He knows that his best friend, Bucky Barnes, is being used as a Hydra agent, he knows that S.H.I.E.L.D is actually Hydra, that he could spare millions of people the pain of Thanos’ snap, but instead of trying to change all that, he’s just going to stay home? Take a knee on this one?

The entire with being a superhero is that you don’t get to pick and choose when you are one. Even if he is initially resistant to rejoin the Avengers at the start, Tony Stark eventually comes in to save the day because he knows he can’t be at rest while others have suffered. It is the same conundrum that Peter Parker references in Civil War. When bad things happen, and you can stop them, but you don’t, they happen because of you.

This ending with Peggy also undercuts Steve’s relationship with Bucky, making it seem like he’s choosing a life with Peggy over his best friend. With everything Steve does in The First Avenger, Winter Solider and Civil War for Bucky, him leaving his best friend is very much not “till the end of line.”

The fan theory that Steve would go back in time to be with Peggy has been around for a long time, but it’s always been hard to imagine because it doesn’t square up with the character the films created. In the service of a happily ever after, Steve Rogers in Endgame ultimately makes a choice just for him. It is, to be fair, a sweet, beautiful moment but it also creates way too many complications. Like, if old Steve can come back and meet Sam and Bucky, where was he at Peggy’s funeral? Did she have a husband that she just didn’t tell anyone about? Did they have kids?

Parsing the logic of the narrative decision doesn’t make any sense, instead we’re left to hold on to an emotional conclusion that feels as flimsy as the fantasy of traveling back in time to be with a true love. It’s nice to think about, but just something that should never work.