Why Rocket Steals the Batteries in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and What It Reveals About the Trilogy

Rocket steals batteries he does not need in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and the whole story does not happen without that inciting incident. As I revisit these films to decode why Rocket is, in James Gunn's words, the secret protagonist, I think I finally figured out why he does it.

Yondu spells out the problem himself: "I know you steal batteries you don't need and you push away anyone who's willing to put up with you cause just a little bit of love reminds you how big and empty that hole inside you actually is." Vol. 2 follows up the first volume's love letter from a mother with a backhand from the father, and both stories tell us quite a bit about Celestial bloodlines and what it means to exist. I found a ton of new details I can't believe were hiding there all along.

Ego's Missouri opening is the hunt for a fuel source

Like Vol. 1, Vol. 2 opens with a flashback to Missouri and a song from Meredith's mixtape, this time 1972's Brandy (You're a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass. The lyrics are about a man who leaves his woman behind because his life, his love and his lady is the sea, which is how Ego later rationalises leaving Meredith. Ego using this song to crush the last remaining vestige Peter has of his mother is the most awful thing, yet Peter even whistles it as he pees, and when Yondu, Peter's real daddy, whistles it, it's a duet with his arrow too.

The cooling towers of a nuclear power plant sit on the horizon. It's interesting that the opening shot has a fuel source, because Ego is seeking one in Meredith: a battery to power his expansion. Batteries and our destructive uses of them are really the fuel of this movie. The de-aged Kurt Russell used the stand-in Aaron Schwartz, the kid from Heavyweights, which is why the smile looks a little unlike Russell's, and Gunn smartly hides the effect behind a windshield at first. They park by a Dairy Queen later overtaken by Ego's goo, with a cameo from Gunn's late pup Dr. Wesley Von Spears. Ego calls Meredith his river lily, perhaps hoping this river will flow out to the sea with him as the seafarer, and later depicts her in a dress covered in river lilies. The extraterrestrial plant he shows her twitches unsettlingly as it grows. Eternals later shows Celestials reproducing by planting seeds in planet cores, and that is essentially what Ego is doing, while the red cellular imagery zapped by blue light feels like the moment of Peter's conception.

The Anulax batteries are the forbidden fruit of Vol. 2

The Sovereign, one of my favourite planet designs, is a collection of conjoined planets partly covered in gold. It isn't from the comics; Gunn based it on Flash Gordon and Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra. The Guardians are there because of the Anulax batteries. That is why the Abilisk is attacking, Nebula was arrested for trying to steal them, and Rocket cannot help himself. They are considered the most powerful and valuable form of energy in the universe, and I wonder if they could be Celestial derived as well. It would make sense, since their explosions are one thing capable of destroying a Celestial brain.

The designers gave them a double helix filament of tiny fuel cells made to look like DNA strands, plus brass coloured parts with hieroglyphic markings, so each has an ancient weight. Each tiny cell might be its own galaxy or universe, like the microverse battery in Rick and Morty. Either way, wielding one is essentially playing God. Decipherers have also translated the planet coordinates in Gunn's master Easter egg: the Sovereign's reads biomedical clinic 89P13, Berhert's half world cage C, and Ego's planet Wyndham built Earth, setting up the Vol. 3 twist about where Rocket got his start.

Baby Groot's Mr. Blue Sky dance separates dancers from non-dancers

Three months after the first film, Peter scans the creature with a modified 1977 Mattel Electronic Football game while Rocket rigs Peter's Walkman as speakers, a meta nod to Gunn writing the soundtrack into the script and having the actors listen to the songs on set. The music always comes from a diegetic source, here the speakers vibrating. Groot dances to Mr. Blue Sky with Gunn once again doing the mocap, which makes it better because the moves are just a Midwestern dude rocking out in his apartment, reenacting Peter's Come and Get Your Love dance.

Drax later says there are two types of beings, those who dance and those who do not. I use this to categorise every MCU character: Tony Stark, dancer; Steve Rogers, not until the end of his journey; Peter Parker wants to be one but keeps getting pulled away. Groot is a total dancer, and dancers can sometimes escape into their own happy places, blissful to the danger around them. He freezes when Drax sees him, and in the background he stays mad at Drax throughout the movie, repeatedly hitting him, until he finally nuzzles up against him at the end.

Yellow blood and Ayesha's eugenics

Gamora tears open the Abilisk, spewing thick yellow blood. We have seen that colour and consistency before in the spinal fluid mined from Knowhere, and the Vol. 3 trailers showed it running through Herbert Wyndham's facility and Gamora cutting open a bear octopus hybrid with similar blood. My theory going into Vol. 3 was that Wyndham might be using Celestial blood to endow his creations with consciousness and intelligence, and perhaps these Abilisks are similar creations.

Rocket's expressions reward a second look. When Ayesha boasts that every citizen is born impeccable "both physically and mentally," Rocket stifles a laugh on the word mentally, because as an engineered being he knows how damaged that can make you. Ayesha tells Peter she sees "an unorthodox genealogy a hybrid that seems particularly Reckless." Bloodlines are a major theme, since Gunn has said Vol. 1 is about the mother, Vol. 2 the father and Vol. 3 the self. But here bloodlines are only as useful as an electrical circuit to a battery. Rocket mocks her: "oh I'm using my wrong eye again aren't I." Rocket's eyes are a little off too, but he ends this movie crying out of both of them.

Rocket's motive and the greatest pilot in the universe

When the Sovereign fleet pursues, Rocket claims he is teaching the high priestess a lesson, and Peter replies, "I didn't realize your motivation was altruism." It sounds like Rocket was going to steal them anyway, but he cites a strike against genetic superiority and egoism, and I don't think he's fully lying, since these end up destroying a Celestial bloodline in the ultimate Ego. Drax says piloting the asteroid field would take the greatest pilot in the universe, to which comes the reply "lucky for us." Right there, Gunn is telling us that what seems like Peter's story is actually Rocket's. Wyndham designed Rocket in part to pilot a spacecraft; he was made to be an explorer.

Drax's slap-on spacesuit sets up Yondu's sacrifice, Ego's egg shaped ship is inspired by Mork's from Mork and Mindy, one of many examples of reproductive imagery, and the hexagonal jump point network introduced here returned in Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame, and at the time was set to return in The Marvels, where it seemed to be broken again. The Guardians movies do all the heavy lifting of MCU world building. When Rocket explains his theft, he only says he did it because he wanted to. But why did he want to?

Yondu, Stakar and the one rule even pirates keep

On Contraxia, Kraglin and the ravagers catch snowflakes. Now that we know from the Holiday Special that a young Peter told them about Christmas, one must wonder if Yondu is thinking about Peter. Stakar Ogord shuns Yondu for dealing in kids, establishing the one rule even the worst pirates refuse to break, which makes Ego, who did this countless times and piled his progeny's corpses on his own planetary body, particularly perverse. Stakar refers to his wife Aleta, played by Michelle Yeoh, and in the comics they merged into Starhawk.

Yondu kept Peter because he was a skinny kid who could squeeze into places adults couldn't, which sets up how Rocket uses Groot later, and the tracer Yondu planted means he knew where Peter and Rocket were for three months. He chose to kick back on Contraxia and only went after his boy when Ayesha's offer, made in front of his crew, forced his hand.

The Chain: Peter breaks up the found family

Rocket repairs the Milano with what Gunn called an expensive, sophisticated 3D printer he stole. It's sad to think Rocket encodes the ship's exact layout because he never wants it to change; he wants the family to stay together. Peter breaks it up, and we hear Fleetwood Mac's The Chain, one of the best breakup songs, from Rumours, made as the band were all getting divorced. The chain forged at the end of Vol. 1 is coming apart because Peter chooses biological over found family, and Rocket refuses to talk to them because they are leaving him.

Mantis puts Ego to sleep by absorbing his genocidal guilt over his progeny, a word that is singular and plural, masking that Peter isn't Ego's only child. The Holiday Special confirms Mantis is Ego's offspring, hinted here by one of his mates being her race, and a deleted scene with Kurt Russell would have confirmed it. More and more Guardians seem to have a direct Celestial link, and that includes Rocket.

Ego the Celestial treats Peter as a battery

Arriving to My Sweet Lord, Drax pops a bubble that divides into countless more, foreshadowing the expansion, and domes on the planet look like half buried skulls. Unlike the armoured Celestials, Ego claims his first memory was as a floating brain, based on the Boltzmann brain concept you might have seen in Futurama. Ego subscribes to it wholesale: no one else matters. He sounds like an older Celestial seeking a reproductive loophole, and Peter glowing blue in Meredith's womb shows Ego sees him as a battery. Even their game of light catch is a battery test, and only then does Ego show unfiltered excitement.

Nebula explains that every time Gamora prevailed, "my father would replace a piece of me with machinery." Like Peter and Rocket, she was treated as a box of scraps, and her rage matches Rocket's toward Wyndham and Peter's toward Ego. The broken toys theme extends to schoolyard cruelty about looks; crossing paths with Ayesha seems to leave everyone with a form of body dysmorphia. Groot is spared by ravagers for being too adorable, and that smallness might have left a self consciousness that turned him swole later. When he brings Rocket an eye, it calls back to Rocket's obsession with broken parts, out of resentment for his own existence.

Gods and monsters, and the truth in the bones

Ego is a cautionary tale about godlike beings walking among mortals. Gods and Monsters is also the theme of this trilogy: those who seek godliness will always fall to those who embrace their monstrosity. Celestials aren't forever, so Peter's eyes filling black is really a horrifying image of someone devoid of a soul. The cave of bones is shaped like a giant eye, and Gunn said it holds Easter eggs; I spotted a Gungan skull, what looks like Stitch, and in a set photo what looks like Donald Duck, maybe Howard.

Returning to the argument quoted at the top of this piece, Yondu says the scientists who made Rocket never cared about him. I think that tells us Yondu knew Rocket was made by Wyndham's group, so Wyndham isn't exactly hiding. The battery theft also drives Vol. 3, since Ayesha and Adam Warlock are still chasing them. Why does Rocket steal? For many reasons, but one is to have some godly control over his own life, similar to Ego's expansion.

A tumour, Hasselhoff and a bomb in Ego's brain

Ego says only Peter carried the Celestial gene, which tells us Meredith was the exceptional one. When he confesses to putting the tumour in her head, Gunn uses a dolly zoom, framing it as the film's most horror filled moment, and ironically planting a destructive force in Ego's brain is how they avenge her. Ego briefly morphs into David Hasselhoff in his Knight Rider outfit, telling us his form is a composite of 80s heroes Peter admired. He threatens Peter with spending "the next thousand years as a battery," which is sadly how many patriarchs view their kids.

Rocket performs invasive surgery on Ego, sacrificing the Anulax batteries as a detonator; he knows their greatest use is to slay a Celestial, a class of God that has only brought pain. He cares less for humanoids made in the Celestial image than for animals like him, monsters not gods. Yondu tells Peter to use his heart rather than his head, because Peter's brain came from Ego, while Rocket is smart enough to rely on his. Groot, following the Celestial light, picks the uncracked button, perhaps because he dislikes anything being broken, like family. Ego warns, "if you kill me you'll be just like everybody else," and Peter answers, "what's so wrong with that."

Yondu's funeral and Father and Son

"He may have been your father boy but he wasn't your daddy." Yondu's face is covered with U.S. military pins, including an Air Force missile maintenance badge, a pocket rocket, over the mouth he whistled with. The first hand to light a candle is Rocket's paw; both are losing a father figure. Kraglin gives Peter the Zune, and the first song is Cat Stevens' Father and Son. In my view it's not a dialogue but a monologue: one man realising that every father gets rebelled against someday. I can't help but think about my own dad. The final line, "I know I have to go," belongs to the son leaving and to the father letting him go.

Rocket's final line says Yondu didn't chase them away even though he was mean and stole batteries he didn't need. Since Yondu told him they were the same, Rocket slips into talking about himself, realising his choice caused all this trouble, which continued as Ayesha cocooned Adam Warlock. I believe the batteries are derived from Celestials, and so is Rocket. Going into Vol. 3, my theory was that Wyndham might have used the yellow Celestial fluid to give creations like Rocket consciousness. Their brokenness, I believe, comes from their godliness: Celestial batteries who blow up to save the universe. The final shot is not Peter but Rocket, the secret protagonist who knows he has to go.

Do you think Rocket's battery theft was really about taking control of his own life?