Since the dust has finally settled on James Gunn’s explosive trilogy-ender, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, it’s time to start addressing the many elephants in the room, specifically the minor details concerning the relationship between Rocket Raccoon and the High Evolutionary, which forms the backbone of the threequel.
Unless they’re avid comic readers, many audience members pieced together from the initial trailer that Rocket was a byproduct of the heinous experiments conducted on animals and children aboard the High Evolutionary’s warship. We learn that Rocket was created to be exceptionally intelligent in order to live among the ‘perfect’ species — formed in the HE’s image — on a planet called Counter-Earth.
From the beginning, the HE knew that Rocket was different from all the others, set apart from both his own species and every other. When attempting to mutate wild animals into the docile inhabitants of the new world, the HE finds fault in the designs of his machines, which frequently produce extremely violent anthropomorphic animals. In a last-ditch effort to fix his mutation device, he enlists the help of Rocket, still an effective toddler at the time, who points out the flaw almost immediately.
This sends the HE into a blind rage. He questions his own intelligence and scolds Rocket for proving to be smarter and more capable than his creator. Long story short, the HE executes Rocket’s theory and it works wonders, reversing the negative effects of the serum used to mutate the animals and rendering them passive.
Now, at the time, we pegged this breakthrough down to Rocket’s undeniable smarts, but is it necessarily the fact that he’s infused with the HE’s level of intellect, or just another advantage of being a raccoon (or “trash panda” as Star-Lord puts it). The IQ of raccoons is only marginally lower than that of monkeys and apes, direct descendants of humans, thereby making raccoons a close contender on the scale of mammal intelligence.
This isn’t set in stone, however, as even a theory as concrete as this still has its flaws. Many Redditors weighed in on the suggestion that Rocket might just be that clever. Some comments agreed, but suggested another advantage that Rocket had over the HE: his height.
Meanwhile, some individuals felt that although the theory was solid, there’s a major pothole of sorts. If Rocket truly possessed solely the next-level intelligence of a Rocket, the HE would have simply reverse-engineered thousands of smart raccoons to create a colony similar to humans without all of the extra baggage, i.e. over-emotional, volatile, self-indulgent, etc. From this valid point, we can assume that the HE experimented on countless raccoons but came up short every time, until he found Rocket.
And that’s only to say that Rocket is the only one of his kind. Who’s to say there aren’t more raccoons out there with his level of self-awareness? Perhaps we’ll be meeting this other intelligent lifeforms later down the line.