Captain America’s ultimate fate in Avengers: Endgame was highly moving, but it did leave us with a lot of questions about the mechanics of him going back in time and getting married to Peggy Carter yet still being in the prime timeline. To confuse things further, the filmmakers have two different explanations: directors the Russos say he created a new timeline and just hopped back over for that lake scene while the writers say there’ve been two Caps all along.
In an interview with Backstory Magazine, scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely laid out how they think the series of events went according to their “Two Caps” interpretation. First of all, McFeely explained that it (sort of) gels with the explanation of time travel the Ancient One gave in Endgame.
“Here’s how we reconcile it. We think there have always been two Caps from 1945 to, say, now, and we just didn’t know that. That’s the loop, right? It’s not Back to the Future rules, it’s branch reality rules. This is not stepping on a butterfly that turns the world into Biff’s casino. You can’t alter your future by going back to the past.”
Interestingly, McFeely went on to confirm that Steve travels back to 1948 to reunite with Peggy – after the events of Agent Carter, which took place in 1946-1947. There would then have only been the one Cap in the timeline until the original Cap was defrosted 70 years later. Although, there was one occasion when they almost met.
“[He] jumped to 1948 and decided to stay. So, his younger self is on ice somewhere and it’s only in 2011 that there are technically two Steves running around — to the point where if you were to look closely at Peggy’s funeral, there’d be an old man in the back named Roger Stevens.”
This last point was originally a fan theory devised after Endgame, that Old Man Cap secretly appeared in Captain America: Civil War. Markus and McFeely recently revealed they believe this is canon, though we’re not sure if this “Roger Stevens” is the pair confirming the alias Steve used for his second life or if it’s just a joke. Surely someone could’ve worked out the truth if Peggy’s husband looked a lot like Cap and had a similar name, right?
Tell us, though, do you subscribe to the “Two Caps” theory, or do you agree with the Russos that Steve created a new timeline? Leave your thoughts on Avengers: Endgame‘s conclusion in the comments section down below.