Was It Really Possible For Steve To Live The Nice Quiet Life 'Endgame' Suggested?

Let's Think About This

By Culture SlatePublished 3 years ago • 4 min read

Avengers: Endgame is one of the best movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It served as the final farewell to not just that chapter in the MCU, but also to some of our favorite founding Avengers. Firstly, we said goodbye to Natasha Romanov, aka Black Widow, when, despite the best efforts of Hawkeye to stop her, she sacrificed herself to help the team acquire the Soul Stone so they were able to assemble a new Infinity Gauntlet and bring back all the people Thanos had snapped out of existence

In the stunning finale of Endgame, we also see Iron Man get the sendoff he deserves by making the ultimate sacrifice to finally beat Thanos and save the entire universe from being snapped out of existence yet again. Tony, in his last struggle with Thanos, uses his suit's nanotech to get the stones away from Thanos. And despite knowing full well that using them would probably cost him his life, he does what heroes do and makes that call, snapping Thanos and his army into dust dying in the process. It's a very poignant moment for Marvel fans, as they saw Iron Man draw his final breath in order to be the hero he had to be.

The other Avenger to say his final goodbye was Steve Rogers, Captain America himself. But Cap doesn't pass on and go out in the same manner as Natasha and Tony. No, Steve goes out another way. He's the one who returns all the Infinity Stones from the time heist to their original places in the timeline. Once Cap does this, he decides to retire decades earlier and live a quiet life with Peggy Carter, and we last see a younger Steve finally enjoying that dance he always wanted with Peggy. Cap does go on to show up one more time in the present day right at the end of Endgame in order to give Sam his shield and ask him to take over as the new Captain America.

Here is the question, though. Would Steve actually have been able to live the quiet life we were led to believe? I don't actually think he could have. With what we have discovered in Loki, the other question is, would he even have been in the main timeline in order to have returned and asked Sam to continue his legacy as Captain America? Firstly, let's look at the situation with the timeline, using what we have learned from Loki about how this whole timeline thing works.

In Loki, we learn that the main timeline, or the "Sacred Timeline," is the main continuity and is protected by the TVA, whose job it is to track down variants and stop them from branching off into new timelines. To explain this a bit more for you, it means that anyone who strays away from the events of the Sacred Timeline becomes a variant and has started a chain of events that could branch into another reality like we see when Loki manages to steal the Tesseract during the events of Endgame. So why wouldn't Cap going back in time be the same? The answer is we don't know yet. This could be answered in the next phase of the MCU, as we already know that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will deal with these themes, as will Spider-Man: No Way Home. But for now, as far as we know, Cap stayed in the main timeline.

The other side of this that I had mentioned is surrounding the possibility of Steve being able to live a quiet life away from the front lines, and I honestly think that is unlikely given that he was selected for the Super Soldier Program and would still be seen as Captain America means that the US government would not be very willing to just let Captain Rogers ride off into the sunset with Peggy. In all honesty, they would still think he had time to serve in the army either on the front line or in more propaganda films because, essentially, they would have no way of knowing Steve had spent his life serving the needs of the people and saving the world. The US government would still see Cap as their soldier who had work to do.

Now, this does not mean Steve would not have been able to live a happy life with Peggy as alluded to at the end of Endgame. But what it does mean is, in all likelihood, he would still have had to be involved with the army in some capacity until he was able to retire properly. What this looked like, we don't know yet, but it could be interesting to see this play out in some way. Maybe in future season of What If...? or maybe in one of the upcoming movies dealing with the multiverse.

Written By Ross McKechnie

Source(s): Screen Rant, Wikipedia

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