‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ Opens a Multiversal Plot Hole

‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ is available now on Disney+, allowing those who didn’t get a chance to see it in theaters a glimpse into the oddities of the Marvel multiverse. And, in turn, examine in more detail a key factor of ‘Doctor Strange 2: the post-credit scenes.

It also allows those who have already seen it to take a closer look. And with the closest look that has allowed us, we believe, to have detected a problem.

Let us first return to ‘Avengers: Infinity War’. The Avengers have brought Thanos to his knees, and then Star-Lord goes – who, by the way, will be back in the long-awaited ‘Thor: Love & Thunder’, whose first reactions praise his humor and his cast – and spoils everything, reversing his luck to the point that Thanos is able to force Doctor Strange to hand over the Time Stone and thus make Thanos all-powerful.

stranger examines 14,000,605 possible futures Y only see one where the avengers prevailwhich means that half of the life in the universe has to die before normality can be restored five years later.

Deliver the stone, purple anarchy is unleashed, Thanos kills half the universe, blah blah blah, decapitation of the barn, time travel, I am Iron Man (note, because in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ this is the original phrase what Iron Man was going to say when using the gems) and happy ending.

Now we go to ‘The multiverse of madness’. Strange and America visit a universe where the late Strange is honored with a statue for giving his life to help defeat Thanos.

(Not quite so, we later find out that Strange corrupted himself by using the Darkhold to find a way to defeat Thanos, causing an incursion and then offering himself to Black Bolt to be killed to fix his mistake.)

This is our question: how is there a universe where Thanos was defeated 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 much into physics, metaphysics, or even metahuman metaphysics, there is indeed 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 anyway.

So here is the solution: Thanos exists in potentially infinite universes, not just 14,000,605 of them. In some of them he is a crazy tyrant, in others a quiet surfer who likes pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. In others he is a flerken or a slice of pizza, who knows?

The point is that the 14,000,605 possibilities examined by Strange are all derived from the same moment in that universe there, the one in ‘Infinity War’. Parallel universes are based on the idea that all events, from a galactic cataclysm to the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, give rise to a new universe in their alternate outcomes.

So while Strange and America could visit any number of universes, there’s no reason to say that any of them are among the 14,000,605 that branched out from the moment of their choice on Titan. It could be one of the universes where Thanos was a raging tentacled beast or a purple supremacist or any other kind of threat, but not necessarily one that threatened half the universe. And even if it was, it could still be a different alternate universe from the 14,000,605 that branched out from the time of ‘Infinity War’.

Somewhere in the multiverse, perhaps this article was written by Thanos himself. IT MAKES YOU THINK…

‘Doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness’ is now available on Disney + Spain.