Anna Daniels
It’s fair to say that one of the major themes of Far From Home is deception. Beck managed to fool everybody into thinking him a hero, even the famously mistrustful Fury. Oh, but wait — the flick’s post-credits sequence revealed that that wasn’t actually Fury and Maria Hill we’d been watching Beck run circles around, but the Skrulls Talos and Soren, who had taken the place of the super-spies at the request of the actual Fury, who was busy supervising some mysterious operation aboard a Skrull spaceship.
Of course, Parker is also forced to go to great lengths to hide his heroic identity from his entire class (although MJ figures it out), only to have his efforts spoiled by Beck, who posthumously deceives the world into thinking Spidey is a villain. With all of this deception going on, it’s worth wondering: is Beck actually still alive?
Well, he is a master of illusion, and he certainly executed his plan to launch the elemental attacks, get Parker involved, secure E.D.I.T.H., and beef up his drone fleet to massive proportions quite well. It seems pretty likely that he would have had a contingency plan for making sure the world would see him as a hero in the event of his defeat, and that this plan wouldn’t require him to die.
What if his death, then, was just another illusion? Sure, he tried the trick once — with a hologram of his injured, dying self which Parker caught onto thanks to his “Peter tingle” — but since he was well-prepared enough to have that illusion in place, is it so much of a stretch to think that he wouldn’t have had another failsafe just in case?
Consider Parker’s last question to E.D.I.T.H. once the dust had settled: he asked if all of the holograms had been disengaged, and the AI responded in the affirmative. What he didn’t think to ask was whether Beck still had a pulse.
In the end, Parker could have been fooled by a mere squib, just like the kind they use to fake gunshot wounds in the movies. Of course, this is all pure speculation on our part — unless and until someone spots beck in the far background of that mid-credits scene, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and a big floppy hat, looking on and smiling as his “dying” self blabs Parker’s secret to all of New York.
Written by: Looper
