So the multiverse is Dying.
Things aren't looking good and everything is fated to end in a multitude of incursions
and multiversal wars that ultimately destroy timelines across the Marvel Universe. This
is being seen in every factor of the films and throughout this video we're gonna be explaining
all the high concept things going on right now and what their basis in the comics is.
After first being opened up during the events of Loki Season 1 we've slowly seen projects
emrbacing it from across the pantheon of Marvel movies and TV shows. So far it's been explored
in What If, No Way Home, Multiverse Of Madness and Across The Spider-verse.
I've recently be re-reading the Jonathan Hickman Avengers Run and this seminal arc pulls together
a wealth of things that all culminate in Secret Wars. That 2015 book has a lot going on with
it and with that being where we're eventually headed I think we have to get used to what
it means.
Now in order to explain this we have to look at what we're told in Across The Spider-verse.
This spans the marvel multiverse with Miles Morales meeting several different spider-people
from across the Marvel. In it we discover that Miguel O'Hara was desperate for a family
and that he travelled to a universe where a version of him had had one and had died.
This ended up destroying said universe and since then he's done whatever he can within
his power to stop none canon event from destroying other universes. This is why he doesnt want
Gwen meeting Miles, why Jefferson has to die and why people that don't hit subscribe could
risk losing it all. Now this is a similar thing to what Doctor Strange touched upon
during Multiverse Of Madness.
Though he met a Christine variant he couldnt be with her because of incursions causing
the universes to come together. Now that takes us into the first big part of the video which
is explaining how that all works, what happened with it in the comics and also how the heroes
managed to find a way to stop incursions from destroying the 616.
All of this started during Jonathan Hickman’s seminal Avengers and New Avengers run. In
one book you had the public facing stuff that the Avengers were doing which involved investigating
why there were a group of God Like creatures called the Gardeners that had entered the
universe. On the other side of this you had the secret society of the Illuminati in New
Avengers which only a select few were aware of.
They were working away to keep things quiet whilst actually investigating incursions and
destroying any earths that could come into contact with the 616. This ran from Avengers
world through to the infinity storyline before going into Time Runs Out and then finally
secret wars.
Ultimately it ended in streamlining the universes so that we had Miles Morales coming into the
main one along with all the other big characters that were in offshoot books set in different
worlds.
We will have you covered throughout the video but I definitely recommend picking up Hickmans
run if you loved this movie as much as I did.
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SoI think the best thing to talk about next is what an incursion actually is in the comics
as it's slightly different to how they operate in the MCU. Just like you saw in Multiverse
of Madness, two earths start to merge into one.
They take 8 hours to collide with each other and both Earth and their respective universes
are destroyed.
During 2013’s New Avengers issue 1, Black Panther saw the start of this and encountered
Black Swan and a group from the Earth colliding with him imprisoned her. It's important to
bear in that incursions can only be witnessed if you step behind this invisible barrier
that shows you the incoming collision. It sort of acts like a doorway and to everyone
on the other side of it they can't see whats going on whereas once you pass through that
you can percieve the incoming earth.
The only way to seemingly stop this incoming earth was to destroy it and it's very much
a survival of the fittest mentality that saves their world but dooms another. We'll talk
about how the illuminati operated during this but with Black Panther being a member and
the whole invisible wall thing the incursions didn't get out for quite some time.
They were working away secretly to get to the root cause of them whilst also destroying
worlds in secret to save the 616. Once this all got out in Original Sin it caused a hell
of a lot of issues because the illuminati were murdering billions en masse every time
they destroyed a world.
Now the cause of the incursions was due to one of the earths in the multiverse exploding
25 years ago before it was supposed to. This caused what is known as a contraction in the
multiversal timeline and it had a knock on ripple effect that knocked the other earths
out of wack and caused this domino effect. It's also important to bear in mind that the
universe has these beings in them known as builders who created everything at the dawn
of time. They built the worlds and sent in beings known as the Gardeners that would evolve
life on a planet and then continue from there.
If the life worked then they would move onto another world but if the life was bad then
they'd destroy it. The opening of Avengers World centres around this with th team going
against a gardner called Ex Nihilo.
This provided a good distraction for some of the characters and it allowed the illuminati
to deal with the incursions while everyone was looking the other way.
Now the incursing earths usually appeared red but beings known as The Mapmakers turned
some incursions blue in order to track them.
This also allowed them to identify those who were interfering with the will of the universe
and get to the true reason behind all of the incursions.
Now it turned out that the person who set them off was actually Doctor Doom trying to
stop the plans of The Beyonders. Yes, Doom was trying to save the entire multiverse and
instead he ended up destroying it.
The Beyonders exist in a space outside or ‘Beyond’ the multiverse and in doom going
against him it set off this chain of events.
Just like all omnipotent beings in media the Beyonders saw humans as their playthings and
while they were meant to be the stewards of the multiverse from the outside they had their
own nefarious plans.
They wanted to conduct an experiment of destroying the entire multiverse to see what would happen.
It's kinda like when you drop a mentos in diet coke or make a potato clock? You're just
kinda messing around but Jon Tickle from Brainiac would never do this. [Brainiac clip]
Now their overall plan was to use a bomb in each universe to destroy each of the worlds
at the same time.
This bomb would be the universal constant Owen Reece who's a character that you might
know as the Molecule Man. He first appeared in Fantastic Four #20 way back in 1963 and
gained his powers from the beyonder after an atomic accident.
Seemed like it wasn't meant to be but in another plot twist we learned that, his origin was
meticulously planned out by The Beyonders, This was the main Beyonders, not THE Beyonder.
Hopefully you’re not beyond confused eh?
Anyway, The Beyonders created Molecule Man as this constant so his origin was constant
across the multiverse and thus they had a way to control and manipulate every single
reality.
Doom was told by Molecule Man that to save the multiverse, he'd need to kill every single
version of him across the multiverse to stop the beyonders twisted science experiment.
Molecule Man set this off by killing a version of himself 25 years ago before but this created
the death of the universe that then caused the contractions. This had a dorment effect
until 7 years after the death of that molecule man which is when the incursions started and
the beyonders then noticed this 3 years after this.
Infecting AI that travelled across the multiverse they then used that as a way to track the
deaths of molecule man happeneing across the multiverse.
This would be used to help them find Doctor Doom and his army of Swans which were being
used to kill all the Molecule Men.
This caused a secret war but in which the Beyonders were battling Doom to exact their
plans on the multiverse whilst he was attempting to stop them. Now the big weakness that the
beyonders had was that they couldnt travel back in time due to them being stuck having
to live in linear time. Doom used this to defeat them and in taking their power he created The
Battleworld.
That's kind of what happened in the comics but depending on what goes on with Kang. I
am kinda skipping ahead and just telling the big overarching story there so you kinda get
the context but for the next part of the video I wanna go into what happened with the illuminati
and how this is then echoed in Across the Spider-verse.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves as while all of Doom’s plans existed without
anyone knowing, The illuminati needed a way to deal with arguably the biggest threat they
have ever faced and lead them to do acts hitherto undreamt of. [Did you seriously just say hitherto
undreamt of clip]
When we look at what they'd faced before you know, they can fight a thanos, they can fight
a galactus they can do a time heist...you know...they can hit a thumbs up button. However
when it comes to things like this it's kind of beyond them. Destroying an entire world
in order to save their own is something that very few are equipped to deal with and thus
they had to become like Oppenheimer in order to carry it out.
-
Now during the events of Avengers Vs X-men Captain America discovered the Illumunati
and he was furious to learn about Tony's secret dealings. These are people who'd had their
hand in almost everything since their formation and the fact that even the avengers didn't
know about it was a real sore point.
Thus to bury the hatchet Tony invited him into the group but pretty early on he realised
he wasn't the right person for the job.
The illuminati are extremely cut throat because they have to make tough choices and people
like steve arent exactly the best fit.
You see the illuminati have someone in them that represents every aspect of earths society.
For example you have Tony representing humans, Doctor Strange representing magic, Namor for
Atlantis, Black Bolt for the inhumans, Professor X represented the X-men and Black Panther
The Wakandans.
Each one of them would meet in secret when a large threat was on the horizon and they'd
then decide how best to handle it.
Now Steve isn't exactly a cut and run kind of guy and whereas the rest wanted to destroy
the incursing earth, he refused to do it. At his core Steves biggest flaw is that he
refuses to make sacrifices and he'll do whatever he can to come to a resolution where nobody
has to die. This most notably caused them to take the L in Infinity War but it's very
much the characters greatest strenght and his greatest weakness.
So he refused to do anything that would destroy another earth and instead he came up with
the idea of using a newly built Infinity Gauntlet to push the other Earth away.
However this didn't work and it was worse for steve than when he got to meet his niece
Shannon for the first time in that alternate timeline. OOoo better not tell Peggy about
Civil War.
Ultimately this plan failed spectacularly, shattering all but the time gem which disappeared
instantly travelling into the future. I think in the MCU we're gonna get a similar sort
of thing as the infinity stones have now been destroyed and thus they can't be used on the
main earth to help divert the incursions.
Now obviously with the plan to push things causing the destruction of the infinity gems
they didn't really want to attempt anything else that could cause even more damage. So
the plan was to just destroy the incoming earth instead.
Captain America really wasn't please though so what the illuminati did is that they wiped
his memory. Yep, no more remembering that theres a big thing going on right now that
you can only stop by destroying an entire other earth.
Hickman played with this brilliantly and at the start of Avengers world we watched as
Steve woke up which is where he told tony he'd had a bad dream. We got a flash of the
illuminati standing around him but beyond that he couldn't quite grasp what had actually
happened.
Again you had these two stories going on with the Avengers just showing that everyones up
to their old ways and fighting the good old fight whereas the New Avengers has the illuminati
dealing with the untold cost of stopping incursions.
If you read just one you'd think a lot of things were pretty cliche as they send off
to do simpler things like recruit other avengers and fight big battles in space.
They were free now to head out and deal with the Incursions unencumbered by the boy scout.
There's times when they fight a world which has a play on the justice league and though
both teams initially wanted to find a peaceful resolution as time went on they thought f**k
it and had a fight.
There was also an instance where Namor stormed out because they wanted to try and find a
way to avoid destroying the other earth. The 8 hours counted down and then they hit -1
second, -2 seconds, -3 and so on and so on. Everyone was confused thinking that they should
all be dead and they started to question whether they'd got a false positive. It made them
think their instruments might be wrong or that maybe they'd got this entire incursion
thing wrong from the start.
What had actually happened though is that Namor had just gone off, recruited a bunch
of super villains and they'd got together and destroyed the entire earth.
Now as we touched on Steve's memory was fixed in the original sin run which made him remember
everything. Exposing the secrets to the other avengers he then confronted tony directly
and beat the crap out of him in his office. Now there was just one problem with this and
something you need to bear in mind when you fight Tony Stark.
Don't whatever you do fight him in his home.
This is what tony makes clear too. When youre in his office youre in his workshop, his war
room, the one place you dont wanna be if youre his enemy. Launching all his iron man suits
he evens the odds and its such a cool moment.
Now eventually things led into secret wars but we can easily see how the illuminati here
are being brought across into the MCU version of the team.
the illumiwhatti
In Multiverse of Madness we finally saw them in the 838 after we got a tease in Iron Man
2. In that movie we got a glimpse of Tony Stark’s phone with an illuminati app on
it so potentially the team was formed then and even the audience didn't know about it.
Either way the 838’s Illuminati explained the Incursions in the MCU which are slightly
different.
However where they're similar is that they've used uies and deception to keep the public
blissfully unaware of the true threats of the multiverse.
Now in the main mcu universe Doctor Strange’s world faced off and beat Thanos through using
time travel.
However in the 838 Doctor Strange used the Darkhold to Dreamwalk across the multiverse
to find a way to defeat Thanos.
In doing so, he created the Incursions and by just existing in another universe this
pulled the realities together and put them on a collision course.
In the MCU, spending too much time in another reality has an almost magnetic effect in which
the molecules from each side pull together so that they can be whole. As we mentioned,
in the comics the true cause of incursions was Doctor Doom trying to stop the death of
the Multiverse so we could see a reveal later on.
However the multiverse in the MCU does appear to be all over the place with the TVA, Council
of Kangs and Dreamwalking.
Now we also have a great example in the What If episode centred around Strange saving christine.
Described as a fixed point this is very similar to a canon event in which that variants version
of christine had to die. This would then push him on to become Doctor Strange and thus it
was a fixed point. Throughout the episode strange did whatever he could to save her
but this too ended up destroying the entirety of reality.
This seems to be similar to how things operate in Across the Spider-verse with Miguels actions
causing a world to be destroyed. In the movie we discover that he was desperate for a family
and thus he travelled to a reality in which a variant of him had had one and then died.
However this had a massive reprecussion to it ending that entire world. Since then he's
tried to stop none canon events but in doing this he ends up causing them. Gwen saves her
father as an affront to his actions, Miles is desperate to save his dad and it's gonna
have this knock on effect like what we got with doom.
Blood seems to be the only way to end things in the MCU and we see on the 838 that the
Illuminati had to kill their strange to avoid anymore from happening. We later on meet sinister
strange who caused one as well and these will likely be happening across the multiverse
even though we're unaware of them.
So yes, the multiverse is dying and there's probably millions of incursions happening
across the cosmos that the heroes aren't yet able to comprehend.
Though you might think all these events are different they basically show what can end
the multiverse. The universes themselves appear to be extremely unstable and even the slightly
change can knock things off and destroy them. For example you stop a canon event like in
the case of Christine or what we get in spider-verse then you're gonna cause that reality to fall
apart.
If you spend to much time in another reality dream walking then things are gonna head towards
oblivion. If you kill Molecule man when you shouldnt then that's gonna set things off
too and basically doing anything that shouldnt be in that reality will cause it to implode.
The multiverse is extremely fragile and frail and everyone messing around in it is whats
causing these realities to fall apart. You can start to see why the Exiled Kang was so
desperate to stop his variants in Quantumania because they've got the potential to destroy
reality by meddling so much.
Though we've never had this confirmed I think that he's likely gonna go onto become He Who
Remains and through the TVA they'll stop off shoot timelines from destroying it all.
Now they might use strange as the central figure in all of this as we learn across all
realities that he has been dream walking.
This echoes the comics with Molecule Man being the key to all of the incursions except the
MCU’s multiverse destruction is a result of the Kangs.
Either way though once the ball gets rolling on the incursions theres absolutely no way
to stop them as theyre constantly knocking other earths into other ones and so on and
so forth. I think we are slowly seeing everything fall into place which will lead to it all
playing out in Secret Wars. Now things culminated with the timelines being streamlined and we
got a main universe with some characters being pulled across from other realities.
This is how Miles got in the 616 and Amy Pascal has announced that a live action miles morales
movie is in the work. With the appearance of some live action characters in across the
spider-verse I'd love to see the miles from this brought into the main MCU and this would
be such a cool way to play on the comics and what's come before.
Either way we haven't got long for the multiverse and I think we'll see these world ending events
happen more and more.
Now that concludes the video and hopefully this rough over view of the storylines helped
you get our head around them. Obviously I'd love to hear your thoughts on you think everything
will play into the films so comment below and let me know.
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Now if you want something else to watch we have a video on screen right now _____________________
With that out the way, huge thank you for sitting through the video, I've been your
host and I'll see you next time. Take care, Peace.