Anna Daniels
For a character as direct and simple as Captain America, who is always striving to do the right thing, there sure is a lot of debate about whether he did the wrong thing.
As if the whole Team Cap/Team Iron Man debate wasn’t enough, there has also been considerable fan discussion about how his time ended. We saw that he spent his life with Peggy, obviously, but exactly how did he do that? Should he have done that? And is he, in fact, still alive somehow?
Captain America’s story: It’s complicated
To make a long and complicated story short and relatively simple, here’s what we know for sure. After Thanos was defeated, Captain America took it upon himself to return the troublesome Infinity Stones to their original locales. The next time we saw him, he was an old man who gracefully handed over his shield to an overwhelmed Sam Wilson.
We don’t see what happened to Steve after that, except for the closing shot of him and Peggy Carter embracing in the 1940s for that dance he had long promised her. It was a quiet, sentimental note on which to end an often loud and bombastic story. Cap got the ending he had strived for and deserved.
Or did he? Some fans interpreted the ending as Steve Rogers just idly standing by while allowing events like 9/11 to happen. Even creepier, it seems that he’s the father of Peggy’s children, which would make his earlier flirtation with Peggy’s niece Sharon Carter in Winter Soldier suddenly not so sweet.
And as if that weren’t enough, in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Steve Rogers is listed as being dead along with Iron Man and Black Widow, even though we never actually saw Steve die. What gives?
What do fans say happened to Steve Rogers?
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There is an unwritten rule, that if we don’t see a body, they’re not really dead. On Reddit, Marvel fans have been theorizing that we have yet to see Steve’s actual death and that a future movie or TV show like The Falcon and Winter Soldier might at least clarify what happened.
One fan theorized, “Maybe I misunderstood the timeline thing but the current timeline has no more Cap after he went back in time. He went back in time and lived in a separate timeline. It’s not explicitly stated that he’s staying in our timeline. I assumed he’d be returning to his own.”
The whole time travel gambit makes matters really complicated and confusing. It has also been theorized that perhaps the upcoming Loki series might show us how Captain America got the Tesseract/space stone, which Loki absconded with in Endgame.
That presumes Chris Evans would come back to Marvel for at least a brief appearance
Where does Chris Evans stand on Cap?
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However, in an interview last year, with Scarlett Johansson no less, Evans seemed to close the door on a return, even if he did leave the door open a hair. He told his MCU castmate, “It’s not a hard no, but it’s not an eager yes.” A fan might jump in and ask, “So you’re saying there’s a chance?”
Since then, Evans has further indicated he’d prefer to move on from the MCU. While promoting his new Apple TV+ series Defending Jacob, he gave a lengthy interview in Esquire that showed him still grappling with his Marvel fame.
“I don’t put myself in a box. I don’t have some huge plan in terms of what my goals are. I just kind of wake up and follow my appetite. I’m at a point in my life now where I have the very, very fortunate luxury of pursuing what I want to do. And I don’t corrupt that process by thinking about how other people see me,” Evans said.
Written by: Cheat
