'Doctor Strange 2' Opened Up a Massive Multiversal Plothole in the MCU

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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is out now on Disney+, allowing those who didn't get a chance to see it in cinemas a glimpse into the trippy weirdness of the multiverse.

It also allows those who did see it already to take a closer look. And with the closer look it's afforded us, we think we spotted a problem.

Let's go back, first, to Avengers: Infinity War. The Avengers have brought Thanos to his knees, then Star-Lord goes and mucks it all up, reversing their fortunes to the extent that Thanos is able to force Doctor Strange to give up the Time Stone and thereby make Thanos all-powerful.

Strange looks through 14,000,605 possible futures, and sees only one where the Avengers prevail – and it means that half of life on the universe has to die before normality can be restored five years later.

He hands over the stone, purple anarchy is unleashed, Thanos kills half the universe, yadda yadda, barn decapitation, time heist, I Am Iron Man, happy ending.

Now to The Multiverse of Madness. Strange and America visit a universe where the dead Strange is honored with a statue for giving his life to help defeat Thanos.

(It's not quite the case we later discover Strange was corrupted by using the Darkhold to find a way to defeat Thanos, causing an Incursion and then offering to be killed by Black Bolt to fix his mistake, but we digress.)

Here's our question: how is there a universe where Thanos was beaten but Strange didn't come back to life? That couldn't be one of Strange's 14,000,605 possibilities. Because then there would be two futures where the Avengers prevail.

Without getting too far in to physics, metaphysics or even metahuman metaphysics, there is in fact an answer to this question, so the plot hole is in fact, possibly not a hole at all. But we thought you'd want to know either way.

So here's the solution: Thanos exists in potentially infinite universes, not just 14,000,605 of them. In some of them he's a mad tyrant, in others a mellow surf dude who likes piña coladas and getting caught in the rain. In others he's a flerken or a pizza ball, who knows?

The point is that the 14,000,605 possibilities examined by Strange all branch from the same moment in that universe right there, the Infinity War universe. Parallel universes are posited on the idea that all events, from a galactic cataclysm to the flap of a butterfly's wings, birth a new universe in their alternative outcomes.

So while Strange and America might visit any number of universes, there's no reason to say that any of them are among the 14,000,605 that branched off from the moment of his choice on Titan. They could be one of the universes where Thanos was an angry tentacle beast or a Purple Supremacist or any other kind of threat, but not necessarily one that threatened half the universe. And even if he was, it might still be a different alternative universe from the 14,000,605 that branched off from the Infinity War moment.

Somewhere in the multiverse, maybe this article was written by Thanos himself. MAKE U THINK…

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