A Hidden Red Gem on Dr. Doom's Armor Suggests He Already Has All Six Infinity Stones in Avengers: Doomsday

There is a glint of red on the left clasp of Dr. Doom's armor in the Avengers: Doomsday trailers that I have not been able to shake. Based on what we've learned about Dr. Doom and what Marvel Studios wants us to focus on for the Avengers: Endgame Encore re-release coming September 25th, I think I've connected some dots, not just on what this red gem is, but on how Doom got so powerful, what happened to his dead family, and how Doomsday is really a direct sequel to Endgame.

The Red Gem Wasn't Visible Until Comic-Con

This little dash of red was not visible in the July 20th trailer, and it did not appear in any of the banner prints of Doom's armor we saw over the past year. The first time it showed up was on the Dr. Doom armor displayed on the convention floor at San Diego Comic-Con. We just didn't notice it because everyone was focused on the ribbon tied around his other arm, which was probably a reference to the family he lost.

That same evening, the gem appeared in the Doomsday trailer shown to the crowd, and it became clearly visible when that trailer released on YouTube during D23 on August 14th. You can see it in the shot craning down over Doom's hood to his mask, with at least two Latverian witches standing beside and behind him. The same red crystal shows up on the clasp of the Iron Studios Dr. Doom figurine, in the scene where he appears to be holding the Ultimate Nullifier.

Whenever a red crystal or gem shows up in a Marvel property, the instinct is to think Reality Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones. That's exactly what I think it is, but I don't think it stops at one stone. I think Doom having all six of them is what makes him so savage in this movie.

Doom's Power Already Looks Bigger Than Thanos With the Gauntlet

In both trailers, Thor swings Stormbreaker at Doctor Doom and Doom simply stops it with two fingers. That already tells me the sorcery in Doom's armor is equal to or greater than the full power of Stormbreaker, a weapon we know was stronger than the combined strength of all six Infinity Stones bound together in the Infinity Gauntlet. In Infinity War, that weapon cut through the full blast of those six stones and wedged in Thanos's chest, and would have taken his head off with better aim. So whatever power Doom has now has to be greater than Thanos with all the stones.

I'm completely fine attributing that power to Doom's sorcery alone, but I think there's room in that reading for the possibility that his sorcery also helped him obtain the six Infinity Stones of his own timeline in the past.

Why Doom's Universe Would Have Its Own Set of Stones

The MCU has already confirmed that each reality contains its own set of Infinity Stones. In the first episode of Loki, the TVA has a junk drawer full of stones gathered from pruned timelines, all rendered powerless paperweights by the agency's anti-magic barriers. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the 838 universe had its own Infinity Stones and its own Thanos, defeated in a past Infinity War conflict where that universe's Doctor Strange used the Darkhold and caused an incursion to stop him.

If the 838 universe's stones were deadly enough that the Illuminati there felt they had to act, it stands to reason that the 828 universe, the universe the Fantastic Four and Victor Von Doom come from, has its own set of Infinity Stones too.

What the Endgame Encore Trailer Is Really Pointing At

The Avengers: Endgame Encore trailer that released last week made some odd footage choices, including a shot of Steve Rogers with the suitcase of Infinity Stones at the end of the film, returning them to their original timelines, alongside this line from Tony Stark: "You mess with time, time it tends to mess back." That is an altered line from the original 2019 version, which was "You mess with time, it tends to mess back." From these choices, I think Marvel wants us focused on the temporal consequences of the Avengers' actions in that film, and on what Steve Rogers did or didn't do on the return journey that unfolded off screen.

I've also brought up the Ancient One's warning from Endgame that I think will be retroactively redefined to set up Doom's rise: "The Infinity Stones create what you experience as the flow of time. Remove one of the stones and that flow splits. Now this may benefit your reality, but my new one not so much. In this new branch reality, without our chief weapon against the forces of darkness, our world would be overrun. Millions will suffer." But what hasn't been discussed enough is what she says right before that, pleading with Bruce Banner: "I can't help you, Bruce. If I give up the Time Stone to help your reality, I'm dooming my own." She knew.

Reality, Power, and Space: The First Three Stones

If this red crystal on the armored clasp is the Reality Stone, that might explain how Doom transfigures his suit midair in the second trailer into a version with a clasp on the other side, one with a small rectangular shape in the middle. That single clasp now appears to have a dark notch at the top, which could be the purple Power Stone. Whether or not that's it, Doom clearly packs a punch like the Power Stone's when he launches the god of thunder off his feet and flings Stormbreaker aside.

As for the Space Stone, Doom somehow appears suddenly in the Baxter Building penthouse beside Franklin Richards in the Fantastic Four: First Steps post-credits scene, catching Sue Storm off guard without triggering any security alerts. We may have already seen what that tech looks like, since in Multiverse of Madness, the 838 universe's Reed Richards teleports onto the Illuminati dais through a blue square. Multiverse of Madness producer Richie Palmer said in the film's commentary that artist Ryan Meinerding based that effect on Doctor Doom's time platform in the comics, which first appeared with Doom in 1962's Fantastic Four number five and can send people back into the past, a trap Doom used on Reed, Johnny and Ben. Palmer made clear the movie only used it for teleportation, not time travel, and its blue, pulsating look reads like Tesseract-powered tech. I think Doom and Doomsday will use a square like this too.

Time and Mind: Two More Pieces of the Puzzle

Does Doom have the Time Stone? If he did, couldn't he just undo whatever happened to his wife and child, and the scarring on his face? Sure, unless those things were caused by other Infinity Stones or cosmic forces too powerful or complex for the Time Stone alone to undo, or unless the Time Stone itself caused them. I do think there's something to the Ancient One's warning to Bruce Banner and to Tony Stark's altered line about time messing back. The green glow we see when Doom's sorcery resurrects and controls the Sentinels might in fact be his use of the green Time Stone to revert the broken Sentinels to their previous operational, mutant hunting function.

Does he have the Mind Stone? There have been rumors that Doom might be mind controlling certain people in this movie, possibly people under the masks of the Latverian witches, though I'm not going further into that here. Part of the Mind Stone's power is also allowing people to see illusions and false realities, or to possess divine cosmic wisdom, the same way it foretold Wanda Maximoff's destiny as the Scarlet Witch. Everything these trailers and the directors have told us is that Doom is impossibly smart, which one line underlines directly: "Victor was always the smartest guy in every room."

The Soul Stone and What It Could Mean for Doom's Family

Of the six stones, the Soul Stone is the one we understand least, beyond the sacrifice required to get it. We saw the orange stone light up on Thanos's gauntlet at specific moments during the Battle of Titan, once right after a Power Stone shockwave took out some of the Guardians, and again when Thanos was trying to identify which duplicate Doctor Strange held Strange's actual soul. Getting the Soul Stone required linking with the souls of everyone Thanos dusted, which is why a soul realm exists for those who snap.

If Doom has all six stones, how did he get this one? Would he have sacrificed his wife or child to get it? Did they die in separate events, maybe the child dying in an incursion caused by Steve Rogers's actions, and Victor sacrificing his wife on Vormir in the 838 universe to counteract it? Or did the wife die first, with Victor throwing his daughter over a cliff on Vormir the way Thanos did, hoping to one day restore them both with all six stones? That could be behind Reed Richards's outrage in the lines "Did you do this? Answer me, Victor. Did you do this?" Alternatively, the Soul Stone Victor has could be the one Steve Rogers brought back and was unable to return, or one Red Skull forced a crueler price for elsewhere in the multiverse. Either way, I think the Soul Stone question could explain why the Time Stone alone wouldn't fix what happened to his family, since he needed that Infinity Stone through sacrifice, and needs it to remake the universe.

A Calculating Version of Thanos's Endgame Plan

My theory is that Doom's past goal was to gather all six Infinity Stones of the 828 universe as a step toward creating a new universe where his family was alive, one immune to the incursion crisis his world faces. If he has all six stones, that changes what he's aiming to do with three Earths on a collision course in Doomsday, since someone holding all six could simply rewrite reality however they want, the same plan Thanos had at the end of Endgame: "I will shred this universe down to its last atom, with the stones you've collected for me, create a new one teeming with life that knows not what it has lost, but only what it has been given. A grateful universe born out of blood. They'll never know it."

That description, a new world teeming with life that never knew what it lost, sounds to me exactly like what God Emperor Doom creates with Battleworld in the comics, a society of grateful souls who see Doom as a god and remember nothing of their earlier existence. So the pitch for Doomsday, as I see it, is what if the most threatening version of Thanos had actually succeeded, but instead of a mad tyrant, he was a calculating scientist who achieved it not with a violent snap, but by carefully selecting the best candidates from three or more worlds he hopes to spare, using power he already had. What if there was a scientist with the power Thanos sought in Infinity War and Endgame, but who could dream bigger?

Do you think Dr. Doom is walking into Doomsday with all six Infinity Stones already in hand?