Captain America, image souce: Time Magazine

If you haven’t watched Avengers: Endgame, be warned, this post has spoilers.

At the end of Avengers: Endgame, we see Steve “Captain America” Rogers sent to various altered timelines to return the artifacts borrowed from them. He was supposed to return in five seconds but instead never shows up. Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes and Sam “Falcon” Wilson instead spy an old man on a nearby bench who, it turns out, is a hundred year old Captain America. On the face of it, this makes no sense because the whole movie took great pains to explain that its version of time travel could not cause time loops.

In this post, I attempt an explanation that keeps to Endgame’s own time-travel theory but still explains the Captain’s appearance on that bench. It’s convoluted but that’s time-travel for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Sean Spicer, former Press Secretary, source: CNN.

(In this, I feel like a Press Secretary. The job of a Press Secretary is to come up with an explanation that makes the most sense given the circumstances. She (or he) is not allowed to change what has happened and neither can she (or he) deny what has occurred. It’s a difficult job. Sometimes, nobody has to do it.)

Before we get to my explanation, I will very briefly explain Endgame’s time travel theory (a really good one, imo).

Endgame’s Time Travel Explained

When it comes to time-travel, the first thing the movie explains, and explains well if tersely, is that no, you cannot alter the past. When you travel to some time in the past, you create a fork in time and there are then two realities that proceed in their own way that never again join with one another. (All time travel theories suffer because of the joining and Endgame’s model brilliantly and elegantly side-steps it.)

How did he pull it off?

Here’s my theory: Captain America went back in time to live out the life he lost when trapped in the ice. Naturally, this creates a fork in reality. In one fork, we have a missing Captain and in another the Captain lives a normal life. What we see in Endgame is the latter fork, the fork in which Captain America went back in time, not the reality where he’d left. Knowing the original date and time he’d time-traveled, all the Captain had to do was show up on the bench and wait for people to notice him. In this alternate reality, he also carried a spare shield that he bequeathed to Falcon.

This means there’s another reality in which the trio Falcon, Winter Soldier, and Hulk are left scratching their heads wondering why Captain America never showed up. Fortunately for us, that’s not the reality we’re shown in the movie so we have some closure about his fate.