There is a new Infinity War fan theory sweeping the internet
which believes that Dr Strange travelled backwards in time to tell Nick Fury to summon Captain Marvel to Earth after people started turning to dust, even that
he gave the Nick the pager he used in that end credits scene. Between now and
the Infinity War sequel, there will be a Cpt Marvel movie hitting theatres,
where some people now expect a time travelling Stephen Strange to show up and
give them advice that they can use in the distant future to win the Infinity
War. It even goes so far as to say that Strange turned over the time stone
specifically to trigger the events that force Fury to use the pager.
It’s a clever theory, but a long shot at best, and a bit ridiculous when you really think about it. First of all,
we have never seen Strange employ the level of time travelling being ascribed
to him in this scenario. We don’t even know if he can do this; travel several
years backwards, give people advice on how to manipulate future events, then
travel back to the future. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he can. Then
why wouldn’t he use that power to prevent Thanos from ever getting the gauntlet
in the first place? Go back, tell Nick Fury to send Captain Marvel to Xandar a
few days before Thanos gets the power stone. The surest path to victory if you
have a time traveling device is to prevent him from ever getting the power
stone.
There would seem to be a misconception that there is only
one way to defeat Thanos, coming from Dr Strange saying that he looked at 14
million outcomes and only saw one that worked. That does not mean that there is
only one way to win. In reality there would have been trillions upon trillions
of possible outcomes (multiply that by infinity if you can travel backwards in
time). It just took Strange doing a time loop type trick 14 million times
before he saw one sequence of events that worked. That doesn’t mean that he saw
every possible outcome. Victory was close to impossible from that point forward.
If he did have the ability to travel way back in time, then
watch things unfold years in the future as part of his little time loop
experiment, there are far more paths to victory preventing Thanos from getting
the power stone than giving Nick Fury a pager to call Cpt Marvel after the
gauntlet is completed. If time travel was part of this equation, send all the
heroes in the Universe to Xandar before Thanos shows up there to get the most
important stone. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The reason that I believe Dr Strange needed 14 million tries
to get a successful scenario was because he could only look at future outcomes
and did not have the ability to manipulate the past. Once Thanos had the power,
space, soul, and reality stones, he was already pretty much unstoppable. There
was almost nothing they could do to stop him once he had those stones. If his
time loop contained the ability to travel backwards, there’s a whole bunch of
ways to win. It’s far more likely that he turned over the time stone to Thanos
in order to keep Tony Stark alive, because that was the only way to prevent
Ironman from dying on Titan. He specifically negotiated those terms in the exchange. I have to believe the purpose was to keep Tony alive, not to get Fury to
use the pager to call Cpt Marvel.
In my opinion, the probability that Dr Strange will show up
in the Cpt Marvel movie (set 20 years ago) to give Nick Fury advice on how to
win Infinity War is less than 5%. If I ran an online casino that took bets on
things happening in movies, I’d set the odds of this fan theory at 20 to 1. We
don’t even know if he had the power to do this, and if he did, there are way
smarter ways to use it. Don’t expect Dr Strange to show up in the Captain
Marvel movie. He might show up briefly in an end credits scene, but not in the
main body of the film. We will see Nick Fury give her an intergalactic pager of
her own at some point in that movie, but that won’t be coming at the behest of
Strange.
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