Captain Marvel's Ending Proves That Carol Danvers’ Mission Has Only Just Begun

For the past year, everyone has eagerly awaited the arrival of Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), the woman who Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) paged at the very end of Avengers: Infinity War. Her debut film Captain Marvel, out now, served as our introduction to the MCU’s last hope in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame (as well as giving us the buddy-comedy with Larson and Jackson we didn’t even know we needed). But her ‘90s-set epic origin story did more than just prove why Thanos should be oh-so-afraid of her — the ending of Captain Marvel also sets up a potential sequel that extends beyond the current phase of MCU films, because Carol’s mission has only just begun.

While Captain Marvel begins with Carol Danvers as simply “Vers,” a member of the Kree Starforce with no memory of her past, she takes back her agency over the course of the film. She learns the truth about her mentor Yon Rogg (Jude Law) and how he had killed Kree scientist Mar-Vell (Annette Bening) six years prior to get her Tesseract-enhanced Light Speed Engine. Carol had finished what Mar-Vell couldn’t before her death and destroyed the Light Speed Engine, but the blast infused her with the energy instead, giving her powers during her fateful crash in 1989.

And Carol’s realization about her past also comes with the shocking discovery that the Kree are actually the villains of the story in the Kree-Skrull War. The Skrulls are a peaceful, shapeshifting alien race who simply don’t want to follow Kree rule, but their punishment is the Kree destroying their planet and hunting down all the surviving refugees. But the Kree continue to propagate lies about their part in the war, and Carol just can’t let that continue.

After defeating Yon Rogg and destroying his Starforce team, Carol sends him back to Hala, the Kree capital, with a message: she is “going to end the war, the lies … all of it.” She vows to finish what Mar-Vell started all those years ago, beginning with reuniting her former Skrull enemy Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) with his family. Then, she gives him Mar-Vell’s Kree Imperial Cruiser equipped with the Light Speed Engine to help him find the thousands of Skrulls scattered across the galaxy as well as a new home planet where they can all live in peace.

Presumably that’s Carol’s first priority, and once she’s helped the Skrulls find peace she’ll definitely return to Hala to get her revenge on Yon Rogg and the Kree Supreme Intelligence for the atrocities they’ve committed in the Kree-Skrull War, as well as lying to her about her own past. It’s hard to tell from the comics what will come next, as Captain Marvel completely revamped the Kree-Skrull War mythology, as well as making the Skrulls victims instead of equally responsible for the war with the Kree. But in the post-credits scene where Captain Marvel shows up at the Avengers compound (a scene that no doubt be expanded upon in Avengers: Endgame, per its resemblance to the trailer for the April sequel), she has much longer hair, which makes sense it takes place 25 years later (but take note: she doesn’t seem to have actually aged a day).

Has she achieved her mission of ending the Kree-Skrull War by then? Is Carol time-traveling? Or do her powers prevent her from aging?

Clearly a lot has happened in between Captain Marvel and Endgame, and hopefully we’ll get to see more of it — all Marvel has to do is greenlight a Captain Marvel sequel to make our dreams come true.