10 questions that need answering after Captain Marvel
Note: contains spoilers for Captain Marvel
It’s been a long time coming, but Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers has finally made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Captain Marvel. The female-first flick is all anyone’s talking about ahead of Avengers: Endgame and that post-credits scene from Avengers: Infinity War.
The nostalgic trip back to the '90s does a pretty good job of filling in some of the franchise’s blanks, but in classic MCU style, there are still plenty of questions dangling once the credits have rolled. With this in mind, here are 10 questions we need answering after Captain Marvel.
1. Where is Yon-Rogg?
For anyone who had gone anywhere near the internet in the run-up to Captain Marvel, the ‘big twist’ that Jude Law was the villainous Yon-Rogg wasn’t a surprise at all. Despite playing the de facto big bad, Yon-Rogg was spared by Carol Danvers and plonked back on Hala.
With Captain Marvel being set in 1995, the question of Yon-Rogg’s whereabouts remain a mystery in a pre-Avengers: Endgame world. Considering Yon-Rogg pledged allegiance to Ronan the Accuser, it’s a puzzling state of affairs that he didn’t appear in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
2. What’s Carol been doing?
Another MIA member of Captain Marvel is the woman herself. As Captain Marvel came to an end, Danvers set out to find a new home for the sympathetic Skrulls and promised to kick more Kree butt. Both are pretty big challenges, but do they really take 24 years?
When Captain Marvel pops up in Avengers: Endgame, we’d be asking "Where the hell have you been?" if we were Thor. Although the MCU has only just started exploring the cosmos, there have been plenty of times Carol could have come in handy (more on that in a second).
3. Why didn’t Fury use the pager?
A niggling plot hole that has everyone talking, why didn’t Nick Fury didn’t use his magic pager to contact Captain Marvel until he was ‘dusted’ in Avengers: Infinity War? From Loki and the Chitauri to the metal maniac that was Ultron, there’s no denying that Captain Marvel would have been an invaluable member of the Avengers.
While it’s no secret that Captain Marvel was meant to appear at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, things played out differently. Kevin Feige himself has attempted to answer the pager point, musing that maybe these weren’t real emergencies or maybe Fury did contact her, but Danvers decided not to answer the call.
4. What’s the deal with Carol’s age?
Captain Marvel did a great job of de-aging Jackson and Clark Gregg, but don’t count on some Hayley Atwell CGI trickery when it comes to Captain Marvel in Endgame. As the movie’s new trailer and Captain Marvel’s mid-credits scene show, Danvers doesn’t seem to have aged a day between 1995 and 2019.
Popping up after The Decimation, Danvers finally joins the cause and asks “Where’s Fury?” while looking exactly like she did over two decades earlier. It could have something to with getting her powers from the Space Stone, with the MCU apparently taking Danvers down the Wonder Woman route.
5. What’s the real story behind Fury’s eye?
The mystery of how Nick Fury got his eyepatch was finally answered. Again rewriting his comic book history, MCU Fury lost his eye in a nasty incident with Goose the flerken. It was a clever payoff, but does it make sense?
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a ferocious Fury told Steve Rogers, “Last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye.” Goose is technically a thing not a someone, so it means Boden and Fleck took a few liberties with the eye reveal. Ironically, The Winter Soldier also showed a snap of Fury with both eyes in a post Captain Marvel world -- great continuity guys!
6. What happened to Ronan?
Audiences were excited to hear that Lee Pace would be back as Ronan the Accuser, but Captain Marvel never gave much away. Just like Yon-Rogg, there are plenty of gaps between Ronan’s fleeting 1995 appearance and his search for the Power Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy.
It’s already been confirmed that Ronan was supposed to have a bigger part, meaning there was never that fully formed version of a “radical zealot” the MCU introduced in Guardians. Alongside the sidelined Starforce, fans will never know what Ronan’s expanded role was supposed to be like in early drafts of Captain Marvel.
7. Where is the post-credits scene set?
Demonstrating yet again why it’s worth sticking around through the credits, Captain Marvel neatly set up Larson’s Endgame arrival and left everyone scratching their heads with a surprise appearance of the Tesseract. People are rightly confused and asking where in the convoluted MCU timeline the Tesseract scene is set.
It would be a little too easy to have the post-credits scene set before Loki steals the blue cube in The Avengers. What if Goose's hawking it up on Fury’s desk is set after Avengers: Endgame?
Thanos broke the Tesseract to reveal the Space Stone in Infinity War, but if Endgame stops this happening, the Tesseract would still be in its cube form. This would also neatly bring the furry flerken back into the MCU and set the Space Stone up for another storyline.
8. How does Fury know Howard Stark?
Even though Samuel L Jackson once again excelled as the formidable Nick Fury, Captain Marvel screwed with its strange history more than normal. In Iron Man 2, the one-eyed overseer of SHIELD claimed that he knew Howard Stark ‘better’ than Tony.
Considering Fury is a lowly desk jockey in Captain Marvel’s 1995, that just doesn’t add up. Bearing in mind that Howard and Maria Stark were brutally executed by the brainwashed Winter Soldier in 1991, Fury might be telling a few porky pies. Who knows, maybe Fury made Stark his morning coffee?
9. Are Skrulls really the good guys?
An actual Captain Marvel twist had the shapeshifting Skrulls come out of the shadows as nothing more than a poor race of refugees. For once, Ben Mendelsohn wasn’t playing a villain and Talos wasn’t the bad guy many were expecting. It’s taken 11 years to bring Skrulls into the MCU and they’re sure to play a part in Phase 4 and beyond.
The question is though, how long will they stay on the side of good? A storyline just begging to be adapted for our screens is the critically acclaimed ‘Secret Invasion’ pitting the Skrulls against the Avengers. There are already hints that Nick Fury is secretly a Skrull. For now, it’s a case of wait and see.
10. What does Stan Lee’s cameo mean?
In one of the movie’s standout moments, Captain Marvel paid tribute to the late Stan Lee with one of his best cameos to date. Captain Marvel features Lee on a train, reading the script for Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (which he cameoed in as himself).
It’s all very meta as Lee plays himself – within Captain Marvel – and raises more questions than answers.
If Lee exists as himself in the MCU, it makes sense that Marvel Comics also exist. We’ve seen this in Logan where the fictionalised accounts of the X-Men were made into canon, but how would that work in the MCU? This only makes that whole Watcher scene from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 even more complicated.
Lee has at least one more MCU cameo, so here’s hoping some of the mysteries surrounding his role are expanded on.
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