Spoilers ahead for Ant-Man And The Wasp
After the immensely destructive actions of Thanos, Ant-Man And The Wasp provided a fun, if underwhelming adventure that temporarily took our minds off the death of our beloved characters.
But Marvel fans have been speculating for months on the potential connection between Ant-Man’s quantum experimentations and the eventual solution to the deadly finger snap. So, of course, the mid-credits scene for this film dropped a small clue, or maybe a red herring.
As Scott drops into the quantum realm, original Wasp Janet van Dyne warns him not to get stuck in a “time vortex,” because then he’ll be beyond the team’s help. And as a veteran of the quantum realm, Janet knows what she’s talking about.
The ridiculously high body count of Infinity War presents a problem, as the majority of these characters are (obviously) going to be resurrected, and there are precious few ways to bring them back, unscathed. Time travel is often discussed as the solution, and this tease seems to confirm it, unless it's just the writers at Marvel trolling us. So what are the other options?
It’s possible Tony Stark and the team could open a hole into a parallel, identical dimension where everybody is still alive, but that’s both underwhelming and kind of dark (for Disney), as it still leaves the original characters dead, along with half of that universe. And this is Marvel we’re talking about, not Rick and Morty; it’s just not going to happen.
The second possibility is that the finger snap didn’t actually kill those characters outright, but trapped them in some kind of limbo, where they are waiting to be released. And that remains a strong possibility, but it also doesn’t make a great deal of sense, seeing as their remains appeared to be burnt to ashes - they didn’t look as though they were being teleported.
The most likely solution seems to be that old trope time travel, friend to fan fiction writers everywhere. It’s the perfect narrative device to undo massive, headache-inducing plot twists that the writer doesn’t want to deal with, or didn’t intend to follow through.
For example, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (which is pretty much licensed fan fiction) relied on time travel to undo all of J.K. Rowling’s carefully constructed plot, to briefly resurrect dead characters and undo utterly disastrous mistakes made by the protagonist.
We don’t want that kind of story, do we? We want the time travel depicted in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where going back technically fixes everything, but it is implied that Harry and Hermione always went back in time - they weren’t disrupting their destiny, but completing the circle.
That kind of time travel, the “fatalistic” kind, would fit perfectly with Doctor Strange’s vision of a single, extremely unlikely sequence of events resulting in victory against Thanos. The finger snap probably happened right when it needed to, the exact moment Scott happened to be inside the quantum realm.
So maybe Thor’s heavy-metal-forging of his new ax wasn’t a waste of time at all - we needed those precious seconds of failed assassination attempt to allow Scott to slip into the quantum realm, get trapped, and eventually head back in time to … do what?
Remember, we still have Captain Marvel’s origin story to sit through before we reach the conclusion to Infinity War, and I have a strong suspicion that Captain Marvel’s post-credits scene is going to consist of Scott Lang tearing a quantum tunnel into the nineties - “Do you just put the word ‘quantum’ in front of everything?” It’s hard not to when discussing Ant-Man ...
But that theory is flummoxed by the fact that Scott has no idea what just occurred in the real world. Even if he does make it back to the nineties, he’s completely clueless, and is probably still the size of a molecule.
That being said, the quantum-dwelling Janet is shown communicating with Scott through dreams - it’s possible that Scott could learn the fate of his friends and/or communicate with them using the same technique Janet did.
It’s assumed Captain Marvel is currently in a galaxy far, far away, and that Nick Fury’s pager can cut through light years to reach her. But I can’t help feeling (and this is completely unfounded) that Ant-Man and Captain Marvel’s stories are strongly connected. Marvel (the company) are way too narratively organized to not have this all planned out perfectly. And there was one tiny detail of Infinity War that struck me as important - when Nick Fury encounters Thanos’ 50% genocide, he instantly, without any hesitation, reaches for his Marvel pager.
It’s almost as though he was expecting it. During Loki’s invasion, when the Earth was in dire need of superpowered intervention, Fury went to the trouble of forming the Avengers, even though it was kind of a lot of work. He never touched that precious pager, and we have to assume that he was saving it for something pretty specific.
After all, the Earth was swarmed with an alien army, and then thousands of Ultron clones, so you’d think he’d just press that button and call the Captain Marvel cavalry, unless he had some kind of prior agreement that states the button is only to be used in a very specific emergency.
I think Ant-Man might have communicated the inevitable finger snap to Fury and Marvel, while trapped inside the quantum realm. Not only does it line up with what we’ve seen so far, it’d also provide the perfect mind-blowing mid-credits plot-twist for Captain Marvel, and what kind of Marvel movie would it be without one?
Or it could just be some epic misdirection on behalf of Marvel, so take it with an eye-watering handful of salt. Either way, fan-theorizing is half the fun of being a fanboy.
