Yes, Avengers: Endgame Has Plot Holes. Let's Talk About 'Em.

Even with a running time of three hours, there was no way Avengers: Endgame was going to be able to answer every single lingering question. While the movie does manage to wrap up the major ones and leave us feeling satisfied that our heroes have saved the world, days later, it’s hard not to think back and be like, “what the…?” There thankfully aren’t many plot holes in Avengers: Endgame, but the ones that do find their way into the movie might be keeping you up at night.

Just for a quick refresher, because we’re all here anyway, Endgame follows our heroes on a literal “time heist” as they go back in time over the last decade to retrieve the Infinity Stones before Thanos (Josh Brolin) can. Present day, he’s destroyed the stones with the stones, and the only way to undo his snap at the end of Infinity War is to basically do the whole thing over again. Separating into teams and traveling across Earth and space, though the odds are highly stacked against them, the Avengers manage to pull it off — everyone we saw turn to dust has now been undusted. But, everything’s easier said than done, and during the course of the movie — while major storylines are wrapped up — a few are left unanswered.

Since he received the super soldier serum in 1942, Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) has not aged. He literally looks the same as he did in 1942, and he was born in 1918 — that makes him 101 years old, 105 if we’re going off of Endgame’s ending year of 2023. With the beard, without the beard, Steve still looks to be in his prime.

So, it’s somewhat shocking and a little jarring to see Old Steve show up at the very end of Endgame. It’s unclear what year he traveled back to when joining Peggy, but the song they dance to “It’s Been A Long Long Time” came out in 1954, so it’s sometime after that. If he were a normal person, yes, Steve would look this old in 2023 (honestly, probably even older if he's over 100). But he’s not just a guy named Steve, he’s Captain America. All along we’ve been led to believe he’ll be this age forever, so how did he suddenly start growing old?

You get the Soul Stone by sacrificing a soul for a soul at Voramir's terrifying mountain altar, and then wake up in a pool with the stone in your hand, so how do you just... put it back? It’s not something you can exactly return to the same place you got it since it’s not like it has a designated place anywhere. Did Captain America just show up on Vormir and hand the stone back to Red Skull like, “here ya go, buddy”? The Time Stone can be handed back to the Ancient One, and the Tesseract can go back in a case, the Reality Stone/Aether can be... reinjected into Natalie Portman's Jane (yikes), but the Soul Stone can’t just be returned like an item you no longer want from Target. So are we supposed to assume Steve showed up and just threw it off the cliff where Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) died? I guess?

The final battle of Endgame has all the Avengers coming together to fight Thanos and his army. As the different groups are showing up at the destroyed Avengers compound Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) asks Wong (Benedict Wong), “Is that everyone?” and Wong shouts back “You wanted more?”

In the moment, it's a funny line — after all, everyone from the MCU just showed up at once. But after that reveal, questions start to creep in. Like, how exactly did Wong know to contact all of these people? Sure, people like Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and the Guardians (Chris Pratt and Co.) are probably in some Avengers Rolodex. But how did Wong know to reach out to Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson)? Or the Ravagers from The Guardians of the Galaxy movies, who just appear out of nowhere? There was maybe 15 minutes between the unsnap and everyone showing up, so it just seems a little unrealistic that he managed to get ahold of everyone (and their well-organized armies) the second they reappeared.

Then again, this is a movie about stopping a giant purple alien from using rainbow stones to dust half the world, so maybe we can believe Wong is a super communicator?

One major “oh no” moment happens when Steve, Tony (Robert Downey, Jr), Scott (Paul Rudd), and Bruce (Mark Ruffalo) are back in 2012 and realize they need to go further back to get the Tesseract, but they’ve run out of Pym Particles to make the return jump to the future. By going back to 1970, they get the Tesseract and more Pym Particles, since Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) is conveniently at the S.H.I.E.L.D. base. The point being that if you’ve got Pym Particles, you can time travel. No Pym Particles, no time travel.

So, Past Nebula and has a single Pym Particle (formerly belonging to Present Day Nebula) to travel back to present day to open the Quantum Realm portal for her dad Thanos also in the past. Before they jump, Thanos is shown holding that Pym Particle. They both need one, but yet, Past Nebula arrives separately from Thanos and then opens the Quantum portal for Alien Time Travel Party #2. Are we meant to assume that the portal is just an open door now, able to transport anyone, anywhere, in time and space? Did Nebula... hack time travel?

We’re all super happy and excited to see our Avengers back in action, but they’re only a very small fraction of the millions of people Thanos snapped away. What happened to everyone else? During the end credit scene of Infinity War, just before Nick Fury and Maria Hill disappear, we see cars crashing and helicopters falling to Earth because the people behind the controls have dusted. So where exactly do those people come back? If you’re were in an airplane during the dusting... do you come back mid-air? Are there people trapped in spaces that were closed up or built over after the Thanos snap? Should everyone be celebrating victory when there might be people in danger out there?