Both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame avoided answering a big question: what specifically happened to the victims of Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) Snap? At the end of Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos manages to achieve his goal, assembling the Infinity Stones and snapping his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet. The Avengers watch in horror as many of them crumble into dust, realizing that this is happening to half of everyone living in the universe. But what exactly happened to his victims?
Avengers: Endgame picks up immediately after the remaining Avengers' defeat, and with the help of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), they find and kill Thanos in the film's opening sequence. Avengers: Endgame's five-year time-jump skips to the resounding emotional aftermath of half the universe being dusted out of existence, but after the Time Heist and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) snaps half the universe back into existence, the film doesn't explore what happened to them.
The obvious answer is that the victims of the Snap in Infinity War all died, but there’s little detail given for the specifics of what that means. Add in what people who came back in the Blip have said, and it paints an unclear picture of what happened. There are some details that suggest no one actually died in the Snap, which has a surprising amount of credibility and only makes a deeper mystery of what happened to the Snap victims.
What Happened To Thanos’ Snap Victims
Roughly the first third of Avengers: Endgame is about the aftermath of the Snap from the perspective of the survivors. Support groups are formed, and the world is plunged into a gray depression, as the remaining Avengers struggle to maintain order and reckon with their failure. Once Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) pitches the Time Heist, and the Avengers succeed in bringing all of the Infinity Stones back from other timelines, Hulk snaps his fingers, and everyone who was dusted in the Snap returns.
Instead of exploring what happened to everyone, the returning heroes fight Thanos from an alternate timeline. The only lines of dialogue given to experiencing the Snap by one of its victims comes from Spider-Man (Tom Holland) who tells Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) that he "got all dusty, and I must've passed out because I woke up, and you were gone." His description of experiencing the Snap sets the stage for what other characters describe in the next MCU movie.
Far From Home Revealed More About Snap Victims Than Endgame
Spider-Man: Far From Home picks up where Endgame left off, addressing more of what happened to everyone. Students talk about “the Blip” over shots of high school band members dusting away and then reappearing on the same basketball court. Five years after everyone disappeared, when the survivors had moved on with their lives, suddenly everyone was back, which treats the event as something between a notable historical event and a joke. The movie mines it for a lot of humor, from Flash Thompson (Tony Revolori) getting shut down buying alcohol to Brad Davis going from little kid to classmate of the main characters. Even May Parker (Marisa Tomei) humorously describes popping back into her apartment just to find that someone else is living there now. While some of the humor is Far From Home being a lighter follow-up to Endgame, the full consequences of the Blip are more macabre than the film's tone might imply.
May’s description raises some questions about what happened. From her description, it sounds like she was there one moment, gone the next, then right back where she was before with no time passing from her perspective, even though she was gone for five years. Taken literally, that suggests that there’s no afterlife in the MCU, or that if there is one, then none of the characters experienced one. That doesn’t match with other movies in the MCU that show an afterlife. In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) communicates with Odin (Anthony Hopkins) in Valhalla, and T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) confronts his ancestors in Black Panther. If the Snap didn’t actually kill anyone, the characters not experiencing an afterlife would make sense.
What The Snap Mystery Means For MCU Phase 4
There already are a lot of consequences of the Snap for everyone who survived in the MCU. Phase 4 of the MCU will offer more opportunities to deal with exactly what happened to victims of the Snap. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and the third MCU Spider-Man movie all star characters who disappeared in the Snap, with others likely to appear in the other movies. This gives the MCU plenty of time to dig into other characters' descriptions of being snapped out of existence.
These movies are likely to deal with the Snap more because they're not just Far From Home’s light-hearted palate-cleanser following the heaviness of Endgame. Particularly, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness provides a unique opportunity to explore the mechanics of the Snap because not only was Strange blipped out of existence, but as Sorcerer Supreme, he has a much deeper knowledge of other realms and the different possible versions of the afterlife. It’s also set to have a horror tinge to it, which matches perfectly with that kind of universal-scale trauma. What is more, Eternals has an extended timeline that will cover time periods before and after the Snap, and given the characters' potential relationship to Thanos, it is likely that they will also shed more light on the Snap's consequences and effects.
While Thanos successfully snapped away half of all life in the universe in Avengers: Infinity War, exactly what happened to them isn’t clear. There’s been a limited time so far to explore just what the victims of the Snap experienced during those five years or if absolutely nothing happened to them. It’s a mystery hiding in the margins of the MCU, which Phase 4 gives them the opportunity to really explore.
