Doctor Strange Time Loop Logistics

Thanos snapped his fingers and half of all life in the universe vanished. Earth's mightiest heroes were unable to prevent this atrocity from happening despite Doctor Strange being in possession of the time stone. While waiting for Thanos to arrive on Titan, Dr S appears to use some form of repetitive time loop to view 14 million possible outcomes for the looming battle, where only one sequence of events led to victory. So how did he ultimately arrive at that one victory scenario?

It's unlikely that he used the same time loop technique on Titan that we saw him use to defeat Dormamu. In that loop, once he found an outcome that worked, he turned off the loop and continued on that time line. If he was doing the same trick on Titan, he wouldn't loop back after he found something that worked, just to tell everyone how they did it. Strange had to be using a different type of magic trick with the time stone on Titan.

The method that Strange likely used to arrive at that outcome would be similar to Tom Cruise in that Live Die Repeat movie. First time through the loop, don't tell anyone to do anything specifically, just to establish a baseline of what everyone is inclined to do naturally in the conflict. Then each additional trip through the loop, provide new instructions based on previous failed attempts, slowly converging on the optimal path. Establish a baseline and work from there, only suggesting radical changes in strategy when converging on a dead end.

In Doctor Strange's solo movie, the Ancient One says that she has spent many centuries of looking ahead in time but is unable to see past her own death. This does suggest that Strange shouldn't be able to see past his own death, yet he still knows that the heroes attained a victory after he fades to dust. The answer to this problem, maybe all the people who "died" in the finger snap were actually relocated to the quantum realm, not technically murdered. This would would also mean that anyone who vanished in the snap could possibly be rescued by Antman.

We all assume that he saw 14 million unique attempts to defeat Thanos before finally seeing one that was successful. Try to imagine the logistics of instructing everyone to do something different that many times. There had to be a ton of repetition, including Starlord persistently pestering Thanos about Gamora. Strange would have been very cognizant of that behavior. Fans have seemed to blame Starlord for messing up the plan and allowing half the universe to die. But Strange already knew exactly what Starlord was going to do, and made no attempt to stop it from happening.

We here at Cinema Analytica have even speculated that this action may have been done intentionally to make Thanos feel remorseful about killing Gamora. Everyone gets mad at Starlord during this moment, but no one seems to mention it afterwards. Tony Stark doesn't scold him for messing up the plan after the fight. Tony even says "stay Quill" before he fades to dust.  If this this wasn't the only way to win as Doctor Strange mentions, then he probably would have told Tony.

I don't think that he came up with 14 million completely different sets of instructions in each situation. It feels far more likely that he converged on the best outcome by eliminating all the mistakes. It would have been fascinating to get a glimpse into the process, to actually see what he was attempting to do and what failed. They also managed to find a method in which nobody was actually killed in the fight with Thanos. I'm sure there had to be many deaths in all those different versions.

There is also speculation that strange went back in time and gave the pager to Nick Fury. Refer to our earlierpost about why this doesn't make sense. Strange says himself that he went forward in time to view millions of outcomes. Going back time would create an infinite amount of possibilities to defeat Thanos. It's possible that there are more than just the one way to win. It just took 14 million attempts to find one that worked. If Strange had continued doing the loop, more victorious outcomes would have been revealed.

As soon as Strange mentions that there is one way to win, the movie cuts back to the battle in Wakanda. We can assume that during this time, Doctor Strange probably explained at least some of the plan but left out the part about trading the time stone to Thanos to save Tony. There also would have been detailed instructions to choreograph the coming battle and tell everyone exactly what the needed to do. Remember, nobody else got to practice that fight. Obviously they could not show us Doctor Strange explaining his plan beyond the Thanos fight because that would spoil the second movie.

When we watch the battle on Titan unfold, it does look like all the heroes were able to practice their attack 14 million times. Every move is perfectly choreographed as though they spent dozens of hours in rehearsals. What are the odds that everyone perfectly executes every single move? That level of synchronization is a bit unrealistic given the amount of time they actually had to prepare. I suppose Stark, Parker, and Strange are all high IQ people who could memorize detailed instructions in a short period of time.