Avengers: Doomsday ending theory: Endgame's TVA scene

I think Marvel has already shown us how Avengers: Doomsday ends, and it hid the clue inside Avengers: Endgame (2019). Back in July, I said the Doomsday trailer was hiding a funeral. Xavier and Magneto stand at a window with the whole sky on fire behind them, and I said that's the X-Men's universe, and it dies in this movie. Then Marvel put Endgame back in theaters with four new scenes attached, and one of them makes me think I was right.

That scene is at the TVA. There's a wall of screens, and two Earths drift into each other, the way worlds do right before a multiverse falls apart. One of those Earths belongs to the X-Men. Both worlds open fire, and the X-Men's is the one still standing. Then the screens start going out. Not one, but hundreds, then thousands, worlds going out like somebody's flipping breakers. O.B., the TVA's engineer, says it plainly: the multiverse is collapsing.

Avengers: Doomsday takes the Secret Wars name, not the Secret Wars story

My one rule for reading Doomsday is the same thing I've said about the MCU for years. "Marvel takes the name of a comic, and doesn't take the story." The title tells you which direction they're facing, and then they go somewhere of their own. So when somebody says the movie is called Secret Wars, so it must be that book, that's exactly the thinking I'm not doing here. I'm reading three things: what Marvel has put on screen, where it comes from in the comics, and what it's pointing at.

The question I'm chasing is the way in. The Russos have told this story themselves. After Endgame, they kept trying ideas, and Joe Russo says they never found the story. Then Joe called Stephen McFeely and asked what if they all went back and did Secret Wars. McFeely said no and hung up on him. The next morning at 7:30, McFeely called back with an idea. That idea is what I'm hunting for, and I think the TVA scene is the engine of it.

Jonathan Hickman's incursions explain why the X-Men's world survived

In 2013, Jonathan Hickman took over the Avengers books and built them around one idea. Universes are dying, and they're dying in a very specific way. Two Earths from two different universes start to overlap. That's an incursion. When they touch, both universes are gone, every star and every person on both sides, unless one of those Earths gets destroyed first. That's the only way out. You survive an incursion by killing the other planet, billions of people you've never met who did nothing to you, in a universe just as real as yours.

So the heroes of the main Marvel Universe build a planet killer. In New Avengers number 21, from summer 2014, another world sits in the sky, and it's time to use it. Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner and Black Panther all look at that button and can't do it. Namor does. He presses the button, and a whole Earth goes out in the evening sky. The rest of that run is about what surviving turned them into.

Now go back to the TVA screen. The X-Men's world meets another Earth, both open fire, and the X-Men are the ones still there afterward. That tells you who's walking into this movie: people who have already done the math, already pressed the button maybe more than once, and lived with it. When I said in July that this X-Men universe would hit the Avengers on sight, this is why. Every time somebody from another universe has come through, it's been them or us. Xavier and Magneto at that window still look like two men at a funeral, one they helped cause.

The Fox universe number doesn't kill the X-Men '97 theory

Some people will point out that Marvel put a number on that Earth, and it's the Fox number, the same one Deadpool & Wolverine used. Their argument is that this makes it the Fox universe and kills my X-Men '97 idea. Yes, Marvel put the Fox number on it. But look at what Marvel has shown us of these X-Men. There's not a stitch of black leather. Cyclops in the January teaser is in blue and gold.

The number is there because the actors are Stewart, McKellen, Marsden and Grammer. It's their universe in a different skin. What I think Marvel is doing is rolling the Fox X-Men into a live action X-Men '97, and if what they're saying is that the Fox universe was the live action '97 all along, I'm fine with that. That's my call: same universe, same faces, the '97 look.

The part of my July call that matters most, that this universe dies in this movie, I think is more alive now than it was then. Their world won one fight. The next shot is thousands more going out. Fox number, '97 skin, and that universe is still headed for a funeral.

Wakanda, Namor and Reed Richards look like the Illuminati under another name

If that's what the X-Men have been doing, who's doing the math on the other side? Look at the cast from the main universe, the one we live in. Marvel's own description calls out the Wakandans as their own group: Shuri's Black Panther, Namor. And what Marvel showed at D23 is built around Doom and Reed Richards. That set off every alarm I have.

Hickman's New Avengers was the book about a secret room. Six or seven of the smartest, most powerful people on Earth, the Illuminati, meet in private to decide things the rest of the world never finds out about. Issue number one, from January 2013, opens in Wakanda. Black Panther watches a woman from another universe, the Black Swan, blow up a whole planet over his head, and he calls the room together. Reed Richards is in that room. Namor is in that room. There's a chair that used to be Xavier's, and after Xavier dies, Beast sits in it.

The fuel for that whole run, the thing that makes every meeting feel like a bomb about to go off, is Black Panther and Namor. They hate each other. Namor drowned Wakanda, and Hickman puts them in the same room with a button and makes them decide together which worlds die. Wakanda Forever was Wakanda and Namor's kingdom going to war, with Shuri and Namor ending it without anybody really forgiving anybody. Marvel built that grudge in 2022, and now those two are in this movie on the same side, under the same collapsing sky. Put Reed next to them, and Beast, who took Xavier's chair in the books, is standing on the other side of that incursion with the X-Men.

I said in July that the Wakandans didn't land for me in the trailer, and I still feel that. But I think they've got the worst job in this movie. The Illuminati are already in the room, just under a different name.

Why Marvel gave Yelena's Thunderbolts team the New Avengers name

At the end of Thunderbolts, Marvel put a new name on Yelena's crew: the New Avengers. Now Vanity Fair is reporting that Kevin Feige hinted Yelena anchors Doomsday. I think this is the title, not the story, rule in one frame. Under Hickman, New Avengers means that secret room. It's the name on the cover of the comic where the smartest people alive decide which planets get blown up.

Marvel took that title and put it on the least powerful team in the movie, the most damaged one. These are people who spent their whole lives being pointed at targets by somebody else and told to pull the trigger. I think Marvel did that on purpose. If Yelena anchors this movie, then the point of view belongs to the people who get told afterward that a world had to die, the people who would have been the bomb before. Marvel gave the New Avengers name to the people who'd refused the bomb.

Which Steve Rogers is in Avengers: Doomsday

The other question I left open in July was which Steve that is, the bearded Steve with Mjolnir flying to his hand. I said I didn't know. Since then, one of the new Encore scenes goes back to the ending of Endgame: Steve and Peggy, the dance, the life he finally got. There's a knock at the door, and it's Loki, who says, "No, but I can help you. Both of you." That's our Steve, at his own front door, in the life we all saw him choose.

Kevin Feige has said out loud that one of the books they pulled from for this movie is Time Runs Out, the last stretch of Hickman's run from late 2014 into 2015, right before Secret Wars. In Hickman, Steve Rogers is the one guy in that room who says you don't get to kill a world, not to save your own, not ever. So the room takes a vote, Doctor Strange wipes his memory, and they throw him out. In New Avengers number three, Steve Rogers is the one they had to erase. Time Runs Out opens eight months later with an old Steve Rogers remembering all of it and hunting the men who did it to him.

Steve got his dance, the porch, the house and the woman he waited 70 years for. Now there's a god of lies on his front step telling him it isn't over. In the story Marvel says it's pulling from, the old man is the conscience. Everybody else in this movie is doing math. I think he's going to be the one who says you don't get to do that math.

Doctor Doom doesn't beat power, he takes it

In July, I said the voice isn't the risk with Doom. The commitment is: whatever Doom is, hold it, two movies, no drift. Since then, the D23 presentation showed Doom raising Sentinels from the dead, a whole army of them. Remember the Sentinel standing over Cyclops in the January teaser? Now we know whose it is. And in one of the Encore scenes, Bruce Banner is alone in a cell doing gamma experiments when Doom walks in and tells him he's come to collect him. Then there's green magic and the Hulk screaming.

Collect is the word, and I think it's the whole character. In the big events, Doom has one move and makes it every time. In the original Secret Wars from 1984, the Beyonder drags everybody to a planet to fight it out, and Doom steals the Beyonder's power. In Hickman's Secret Wars from 2015, Doom, Doctor Strange and the Molecule Man go after the beings who've been killing the multiverse, and Doom walks out with their power and builds a whole new world out of what's left. Doom doesn't beat power. He takes it.

So look at what he's doing here. He takes the Hulk. He raises Sentinels. And sitting on the bench in this cast is Bob Reynolds, the Sentry, with the power of a million exploding suns and a man terrified of what's inside him. Nobody is going to fight Doom the way they fought Thanos. Thanos was collecting stones. Doom is collecting the people strong enough to stop him. "Doom is collecting batteries."

Doom's lost wife and child set up his clash with Reed Richards

The D23 presentation is narrated by Sue Storm, and it's about Doom and Reed and their history. It tells you that before Doom became Doom, he lost a wife and a child. Comic book Doom never lost a wife and child on the way to becoming Doom. The closest the books get is Hickman's Secret Wars, where Doom is God and the wife and kid beside him are Reed's. That's Marvel adding something, which is exactly the rule: take the title, go somewhere else.

Why a family? Because of who's standing across from him: Reed Richards, with Sue, the Torch and Ben, his whole family beside him. Hickman's Secret Wars ends with Doom as God. He saved what he could out of the dead multiverse and rules all of it. Then Reed walks in, it comes down to one conversation, and Doom admits to Reed's face that Reed would have done it better. That's Doom's tragedy. He saved what he could, and he knows the other man would have saved more.

The last new Encore scene, after the credits, has Tony Stark in the cave hammering out the Mark 1, the first mask, and then it cuts to Doom's mask. Tony built his first suit to get out of a cave. This Doom built his to get out of a grave. The whole movie, I think, is Doom asking Reed one question: could you have done better?

My Doomsday predictions: worlds die, and somebody big doesn't survive

Here's my board as it stands. My picture says this movie is Time Runs Out, the movie where the worlds die, and Battleworld is next year's movie. It says the X-Men have been surviving by killing worlds, and that they're the Fox universe in a '97 skin, a call that keeps its July date. It says Doom collects, and the whole thing comes down to Doom and Reed.

The part people keep forgetting is that in the books, Secret Wars ends with a reset. The multiverse dies, Doom rules what's left, and then it's over. Reed and Franklin rebuild everything from scratch. If Marvel is heading the same direction and next year's movie is called Secret Wars, then Doomsday is the one movie where nothing has to survive. Worlds can die, heroes can die, whole teams can go out like those TVA screens, because the bill doesn't come due until the reset. So I'm adding one more call: Doomsday kills somebody Marvel would never kill in a normal Avengers movie, and it doesn't flinch.

Here's what I'm looking for. Anybody holding a detonator; if it's Namor, that's a confession. The Molecule Man or the Beyonder named or shown. An Earth dying on screen while other heroes see it from theirs. Doom and Reed alone in a room. And whatever the other planet the X-Men killed turns out to be. Marvel gave it a number, 1127, and never said whose world it is. They put it on the screen for a reason.

Here's what breaks my picture: the X-Men show up as refugees asking for help, the multiverse gets fixed by the end of this movie, Doom's plan turns out to be conquest for its own sake with no grief and no salvage, the TVA saves the day, or one of those X-Men walks out in black leather. Two more July calls stay on the board with their July dates. Doom holds the voice, two movies, no drift. And if Steve hands Sam the shield a third time, that's a mistake. The movie opens December 18th.

Avengers: Doomsday asks who gets to decide who dies

Every Avengers movie so far has asked the same question: can we stop it? This one is asking something worse. When you can't save everybody, who gets to decide who dies? I want to know who's holding the button: Namor, Reed, Doom or nobody. Right now, I think the X-Men walk in with blood on their hands. And the one guy Marvel brought back from his happy ending is the guy who already answered that question. Nobody.