Though Avengers: Endgame was released in 2019, the MCU’s Phase 4 still has yet to reveal Captain America’s greatest mystery in the movie. During the battle with Thanos (Josh Brolin), the original shield takes a significant beating while Captain America (Chris Evans) is fighting the Mad Titan one-on-one. Though Steve Rogers wields his shield in one hand and Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, in the other, Thanos manages to chip away at the notoriously durable vibranium of the star-spangled weapon, nearly breaking it in half.
Consequently, Steve does not take the shield with him when goes back in time to return the Infinity Stones after the battle. He ultimately decides to stay in the past and reappears as an old man only seconds after leaves. Inexplicably, Endgame‘s older version of Steve brings the shield back with him – in perfect condition – and passes on the Captain America shield and mantle to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), the implications of which are further explored in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
However, the question of how Steve obtains this intact shield is left puzzlingly unasked and unanswered. Though the time-traveling rules laid out by Avengers: Endgame and subsequent MCU projects such as Loki are often messy and largely incoherent, Steve’s return to the past is one of the most vexing plot points of the franchise. It is established in Endgame that changing the past cannot change one’s own present or past. Therefore, if Steve ostensibly could not do anything to alter the course of his past self, that would mean that Captain America’s shield would have followed the same path by his side as well, ultimately leading to its destruction.
Steve’s conundrum raises many issues within the canon of the MCU. For example, Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) has a set future too, as seen in Agent Carter, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Captain America: Civil War. But, surely, Steve going back to marry her has to change her life significantly, which shouldn’t be possible. Additionally, Loki establishes the idea of a Sacred Timeline and its enforcers, the TVA, who prevent variants like Steve from doing exactly what he does – meddling with the continuity of the universe.
Since Steve (and for a while, Tony) has the shield at any given point from World War II until the final battle with Thanos, there is no time when old Steve could have taken it that it would not be missed, making the ending of Avengers: Endgame seemingly impossible. However, with the introduction of the multiverse, it is perhaps feasible that old Steve somehow obtained his version of the shield from another universe during his journey to return the Infinity Stones. Maybe his quest led him across the mulitverse to a timeline reality in which Captain America was dead or retired, rendering the shield unneeded. Though there are many theories about what could have happened once Steve went back to the past, at this point the MCU’s Phase 4 does not seem to have any intention of addressing them.
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Author: Kylie Boersma
