Age of Ultron's Post-Credits Scene Explained: Why Thanos Finally Decided to Do It Himself

The Avengers: Age of Ultron mid-credits scene shows Thanos announcing, "I'll do it myself," and it means he's done relying on others to collect the Infinity Stones. Here's how the scene fits into the larger Marvel universe.

Thanos is chasing the Infinity Stones, and Age of Ultron shows him deciding to do it himself

Thanos, played by Josh Brolin, is a powerful eternal alien warlord. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he's looking for the Infinity Stones, ancient artifacts of amazing power created before the universe itself. Once they're in their place in the Infinity Gauntlet, they give the wearer basically ultimate power over everything, which makes sense.

At this point in the MCU, Thanos has played a fairly minor role, appearing in only a handful of scenes, most prominently in Guardians of the Galaxy. Those scenes all build on his ultimate goal, to attain the six Infinity Stones. Each stone controls one of the six components of the universe, and it's complicated.

The Infinity Stones are complicated enough that I handed the explanation to someone nerdier

In that nerdier explanation, Thanos wants to fill the Infinity Gauntlet with the time gem, the mind gem, the power gem, the space gem and the reality gem. Holding the reality gem means he can jump between different realities. Basically, if you have them, you can destroy the universe, which Thanos is all about because he wants to impress Death, the cosmic entity he's in love with. He's got a type.

One warning, though: Infinity Stones can only be wielded by extremely powerful beings like Thanos. So "don't touch them with your bare hands or you'll turn all purple."

Red Skull lost the Tesseract, and Loki and Ronan both failed Thanos

In the first Captain America movie, one of the stones, the Tesseract, is found on Earth by the Red Skull. He gets beaten by Captain America, and the Tesseract eventually falls under the control of Nick Fury and SHIELD.

In the first Avengers movie, Thanos allies himself with Loki, Thor's brother and the god of mischief. The deal is essentially that Thanos will give Loki an army to attack Earth if Loki brings him the Tesseract. But Loki gets beaten too, so that didn't work either. The end of The Avengers marks the first time we actually see Thanos, and he seems like he's in a pretty good mood.

Later, in Guardians of the Galaxy, Thanos orders Ronan the Accuser, a rogue alien commander, to retrieve the Orb, a protective casing for one of the stones, the Power Stone. Unfortunately for him, the Orb is in the hands of Star-Lord and the other Guardians, and Ronan gets beaten on the dance floor.

Thanos is now on a collision course with the Avengers and the entire MCU

That brings us to Avengers: Age of Ultron. Thanos is more of a background threat in this one as well, because as far as Marvel villains go, he's basically the end of the line.

So the mid-credits scene of him saying he'll do it himself means he's had enough of these bozos. He's going after this stone himself, which puts him on a collision course with the Avengers and really the entire MCU. At the time, that meant waiting until May 2018, and my reaction was: "we'll all be dead by then."

Which of Thanos's failed attempts to get the stones do you think came closest to working?