Avengers Endgame: 10 Unexpected Consequences To Reversing The Snap
They said ‘whatever it takes’. Well, it took, and it took… and it kept on taking.
In the last couple of months there have been endless discussions about the implications of the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame; not to mention some of the plot holes exposed by all the machinations required to pull off such a complicated, massive two-part story.
With a story as big as this, even in a three-hour movie there will always be things they didn’t have time to get into. In particular, the consequences of those two universe-shattering snaps, five years apart, will reverberate across the world for decades to come.
When Thanos snapped his fingers at the of Infinity War, he unleashed the worst act of genocide the universe had ever seen, causing long-lasting damage to everyone who was left. Now supposedly, Banner’s reversal of Thanos’ snap two thirds of the way through Endgame reverses those ill effects and restores the universe to the way it should be… but we don’t always get what we want.
Some consequences are obvious. Many of Peter Parker’s high school classmates will be adults with jobs and even families. Wakanda will surely have chosen a new king; how is the Black Panther going to regain his throne? Poor Laura Barton has returned to find her husband is a mass murderer with a price on his head from half a dozen cartels worldwide.
Other repercussions, while not as immediately evident, are potentially even more disastrous. Let’s examine some of the possibilities...
10. The Immediate Collateral Damage
It’s important to realise the scale of the atrocity inflicted by Thanos’ snap. At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, we had a taste of the collateral damage - a helicopter, presumably having lost its pilot, careens into the side of a New York skyscraper.
Plenty of people have already extrapolated that tragedy outward, proving that far more people actually died as a consequence of the snap than the immediate 50% of the population. Imagine how many airliners were in mid-flight at the time? What about vital crew onboard ships and submarines, or engaged in air traffic control?
What about the hospitals suddenly on a skeleton staff in the middle of an incalculable emergency; or power station, treatment plant and dam employees responsible for maintaining safety measures? The humanitarian cost would spiral into the hundreds of billions.
But that’s just the big, dramatic disaster movie stuff. What about the governments that lost vast numbers of civil servants and politicians? Thanos’ snap radically damaged the decision-making apparatus of whole nations.
New elections would need to be held for the vastly smaller electorate. Wakanda certainly wouldn’t be the only royal family to lose a monarch. Drastic emergency powers would need to be enacted: some regimes would use it as an excuse to mount a coup, destabilising whole regions.
The infrastructure of the entire world took a massive hit, and those ramifications would be felt for decades. Worldwide genocide on this scale would have profound knock-on effects… as would the delayed reversal of that genocide.