Dissecting Those Shockingly Revealing Post-Credits Captain Marvel Scenes
This was the weekend of Captain Marvel’s (Brie Larson) glorious debut, and if you’re anything like us, you were more than ready to meet her in all her heroic photon blasting glory. If you aren’t anything like us and wasted your whole weekend away without a single trip to Hala, stop reading now. We’re about to dive into information that is for S.H.I.E.L.D. eyes only – in other words, it’s about to get spoiler-ific. There was a major reveal after the credits rolled, so if you are avoiding any plot details, STOP NOW.
SPOILER ALERT
Still with us? Good. Now, how amazing was Carol Danvers? She came out swinging kicking some Skrull behind until she found out everything she thought she knew was a lie. As it turned out, the body snatchers weren’t the real enemy. No fear of The Thing here. In fact, their camouflage may have been the only thing that kept them from going extinct. It tells us what kind of person Carol really is to be in the middle of her own personal journey of self-discovery and suspend her alliances to save a civilization in need. Let’s hope she can do that for C-53, which brings us to that wild mid-credits scene.
The Pager
As we all suspected, Nick Fury’s final act before disintegrating into dust was to push the panic button and page Captain Marvel. Everything came together in the prequel. We saw how Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danvers met, why he is using a pager to contact her, and confirmed she is on the other end of the call.
As Jackson stated in a recent interview, Captain Marvel said to only contact her in an emergency. Until then, she would be clocking hours doing humanitarian work in other corners of the universe. The first and last time they saw each other was 1995, so obviously the Earth communication technology back then was only at pager level. Danvers graciously rigged it to have a special button that would call her if he really needed her. It would even flash her new minted logo. The girl has her branding on point.
Fast forward to today. Thanos and his cronies have assembled the Infinity Stones and with a literal snap of the fingers, half the population in the universe is gone, or so we think. Enter the remaining Avengers trying desperately to come up with a way to reverse course.
Last we saw, the super pager was in Fury’s disappearing hand, but Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) were able to salvage it and have been repeatedly sending the signal. Bleak turns bleaker when the signal goes out and they realize they don’t even know what they were doing or if it was working.
It’s fair that they would be frustrated. Fury left no instructions or indication as to what the device did and never told anyone about Captain Marvel. Also, half of everyone was just obliterated, so couldn’t that mean Captain Marvel was too?
For a moment, I had this wild theory that Carol Danvers was gone. Lost to the snap, or even earlier than that and Monica Rambeau (Akira Akbar) had taken her place. She does grow up to be Captain Marvel in the comics and mentioned in the movie her admiration for Danvers and that she planned to build her own spaceship one day. That would be an insane twist, and I could still see Monica having a role in Avengers: Endgame, but that’s not how this played out.
I fully expected that depressing cliffhanger to stand and for us to just know that the Avengers have the pager and wait to see if they make contact, but then, they did. Or more so, the call was answered. Just as I was positive the scene was about to cut away, Captain Marvel appears and with two words launches the final stand, “Where’s Fury?”
Confirmed: Fury called Captain Marvel. Confirmed: She was not snapped to death. Confirmed: She received the call. Confirmed: She has returned to Earth. Could it all be that easy? Something has to go wrong. But for now, this is it! Here. We. Go!!!
The Tesseract
The second post-credits scene didn’t have quite as much significance but was adorable. Goose the cat, who is really Goose the Flerken, swallowed the Tesseract and held onto it until…nature took its course.
Like an Earth cat coughing up a hairball, Goose finally relieved itself of the Space Stone’s protective case. This must have happened before Fury showed the powerful cube to Dr. Selvig, Loki stole it, and Thanos crushed it to get to the Space Stone.
Or did it? Fury’s desk was empty alluding to the regurgitation happening after his death. Could Goose have been holding a spare the whole time? Maybe the Space Stone will have more play in Endgame than the other stones. Here’s hoping Goose is the key to the entire universe because that would be the most adorable ending ever.
Avengers: Endgame opens in theaters April 26.
Featured Image: Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN MARVEL. L to R: Att-Lass (Algenis Perez Soto), Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan). Photo: Film Frame. ©Marvel Studios 2019
