Tony Stark wasn’t alone on Titan at the end of Infinity War. Nebula, who arrived on the planet to fight Thanos separately in her own ship, also survived the Snapture. Everyone assumed that Avengers 4 would reveal the experienced space traveler giving Iron Man a lift back to Earth where he could mourn with the rest of humanity. What no one expected was for him to seemingly end up alone in the cosmos on the verge of death, like he is in the first trailer for the newly titled Avengers: Endgame.
It was a sad, somber start to the film’s first official look, but the question isn’t really “if” Tony will make it back to his home planet; the question is “how.” There’s a zero percent chance Marvel will kill its signature hero off alone on the Guardians ship due to a lack of food and oxygen. But he’ll need some help if he’s going to get out of dodge. So who will save the day for Stark? Here are four plausible ways Tony could make it back alive.
Nebula Does End Up Giving Him a Lift
It’s not clear Tony is actually alone on the ship. The trailer also shows a sad Nebula on the Benatar (the Guardians ship) at one point. Maybe they’re stranded together and we just saw him in a private moment. That’s a stretch, though, because we doubt Nebula would let them get in such a dire situation unless she was incapacitated, and Titan was completely empty and nonthreatening once Thanos left.
The more likely scenario is she refused to help him entirely and never departed with him, or left Tony to fend for himself. Maybe their egos clashed, or she was in too much pain, or she simply he didn’t care. We can easily imagine the two of them, both emotionally broken, not getting along. But while Nebula might be dangerous, she’s not altogether evil. Even if she did abandon Tony, a guilty conscience could bring her back to save him just in time.
The Genius Scientist Figures It Out Himself
Tony seems completely resigned to his fate in the trailer, but we would never count him out entirely since he has proved to be the ultimate survivor. He did just survive taking a sword to the stomach from freaking Thanos. It’s not anywhere close to unreasonable he will gather himself in his final moments and figure out the Benatar’s advanced technology to travel fast enough to get home, or to renew his oxygen supply to buy him more time.
The guy created the arc reactor in a cave, we think he can figure out how to re-filter some air and make a spaceship go fast.
“Paging Captain Marvel to the Benatar.”
Oh, do we hope this happens. We want to see if an audience can actually make the roof of a theater explode from excitement. It’s not an unreasonable wish, either. We imagine Tony is generally heading in the direction of Earth and not just aimlessly setting sail from Titan. Maybe he’s not going to make it because he ran out of fuel (one thing he couldn’t “science” his way out of). Fortunately for everyone, he’s not the only superhero heading to his home planet. Not after Nick Fury in his final pre-dust moments paged Captain Marvel for help. The same Captain Marvel who can fly through space.
On her voyage to Earth she might pick up a weary Iron Man and save what we imagine will be the first of many days. It would be an incredible moment, and one hell of a union between the hero who began the franchise and the one we expect to carry it forward.
A Loving “Rescue”
The one thing we know for sure Tony does on the ship is record a message for Pepper with his helmet. He did this once before in Iron Man 3. It was transmitted to another helmet of his she found in his Malibu home’s wreckage, and only she was able to access it thanks to a retinal scan. What if Tony’s new message is close enough to get to Earth anyway, maybe thanks to amplification on the Benatar? The Guardians do send messages around the galaxy with ease, after all. Rather than being a proverbial message in a floating space bottle, Tony’s goodbye could be received by Pepper immediately.
That might not seem like it would matter since she doesn’t have a spaceship of her own to go pick him up, but she does have a large collection of Iron Man suits than can travel in space. What if she puts one on, as she briefly did in Iron Man 3, and goes out into the universe to get him herself? You know, sort of like she does in the comic books as the superhero (trumpet sound) Rescue.
This is not just speculation, either. There’s real evidence Gwyneth Paltrow will don a unique iron suit of her own in the film, one Tony might have left behind for her specifically in case of an emergency. And dying adrift in space is about as big as emergencies get.
Tony may have even confirmed Pepper will be the one to save him with the simple line, “It’s always you.” That’s one Rescue we would really love to see.
Images: Marvel
