There are many questions we have about Avengers: Endgame that are seemingly destined never to get answered: how does time travel actually work? Why didn’t Black Widow get a funeral? Why are there two Ant-Men in the same battle? And yet Secret Invasion just proved that sometimes patience really is the key to victory, as Captain America once told us, by finally making sense of a strangely brutal moment of dark comedy from the film all these years later.
It’s no secret at this point that Secret Invasion outed Rhodey as a Skrull imposter, but in the series finale we were left with the distinct impression that Don Cheadle’s Avenger has been in captivity for a very long time indeed. Going by context clues — his hospital gown and his paralysis — he may even have been a Skrull since Captain America: Civil War. Even that is not the case, the odds are high that Skrull-Rhodey was featured in Endgame, at the very least.
Assuming this is the case, then, this at last provides some context to a memorable moment of jet-black humor from the 2019 mega-blockbuster. When the Avengers are discussing the ins and outs of using time travel to stop Thanos, Rhodey pitches the extremely dark idea that they travel back to when Thanos was a baby and then, well, strangle the infant Titan, an action that War Machine acts out in a particularly graphic mime. Naturally, his fellow heroes are horrified by the suggestion and the idea is discarded.
While it remains to be seen if Kevin Feige had a long-term plan for Skrull-Rhodey and informed the Russo brothers about this or not, in the context of the MCU, we can now perhaps view this decidedly un-heroic pitch as coming from a militant alien willing to kill anyone to further their cause. So naturally they were A-OK with floating the idea of executing a defenseless child. Rhodey himself is a practical, military man, who would obviously hate Thanos, but even so this always seemed a rather extreme position to take.
The fact that a card-carrying Avenger was advocating killing baby tyrants, a move that’s literally ripped from Deadpool’s playbook (see the Hitler-killing deleted scene from Deadpool 2), really should’ve tipped us off to the fact something was up with Rhodey years ago.