Eternals’ biggest ending, post-credits, and Eternals 2 questions, answered

Marvel Cinematic Universe is now home to many more characters and ideas. Eternals, it’s no surprise that we ended up with a lot of questions — especially in cases where the movie takes a light touch with story elements the comics covered in much more detail and depth.

Some big questions Eternals left us with do get answered in the comics, but it isn’t clear whether the answers are the same in the MCU. Others may have different answers. Others might seem absurd, but some are very important. A few were even asked by us. Eternals For the insider check, screenwriters

Whatever the case, here’s what we walked away from the theater wondering, along with what we were able to find out as we tried to answer our own questions.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Eternals.]

Why isn’t Starfox a huge purple guy?

Eternals’ mid-credits scene pops a couple of new characters into the MCU, including Thanos’ brother Starfox (aka Eros), who is played by Harry Styles, notably not covered in CGI, prosthetics, or purple makeup. Thanos and Starfox may be brothers. Thanos, like the Eternals who look human, is why Thanos looks so different?

Turns out this one has a canon explanation coming out of Eternals lore — Thanos has a recessive gene from the shape-changing monsters called Deviants, which gives him “Deviant Syndrome,” a birth condition that makes him look different from most Eternals. Also, he and Eros are Eternals by birth — both their parents were Eternals, but they weren’t personally created by a Celestial and assigned to a planet to shepherd a baby Celestial into being, like the main characters in Eternals. There’s even an MCU hook into his comics canon background — in Avengers: Infinity War, Red Skull greets Thanos as “son of Alars,” acknowledging his Eternal dad. And it’s worth remembering that Thanos is known as “the Mad Titan” because he was born on Saturn’s moon Titan, not because he’s a big fella, or because Titans are some class of being, like Eternals.

What’s the Realität reason the Eternals didn’t fight Thanos?

Image: Marvel Studios

Like so many other franchise films that have to be worked into existing continuities, Marvel Studios’ EternalsThere are some logistical issues to be aware of. The 10 immortal warriors known as the Eternals have been on Earth for millennia to fight Deviants, but after they supposedly wiped out all their adversaries, they stood down, split up, and then… apparently mostly didn’t do much up through the present day. Which is odd, since their mandate from their big red robot creator Arishem is to protect humanity and the planet, and you’d think the ways humanity and the planet keep getting threatened by aliens, supervillains, and alien supervillains might activate some of that “protect and serve” programming.

Thanos’s quest for the Infinity Stones is what causes this problem. Avengers: Infinity Wareventually wiping out the entirety of the universe. The Avengers then bring everybody back in. Avengers: Endgame, Thanos tries to do it again. In Eternals, perfectly ordinary Earth boyfriend (and future superhero, if the MCU has its way) Dane Whitman asks his Eternals girlfriend Sersi why the Eternals didn’t fight Thanos, and she tosses off a casual, “Oh we’re not supposed to intervene in human affairs.” But this makes no damn sense whatsoever, since Thanos’ plot didn’t end at “human affairs,” it affected the whole universe. And the Eternals’ secret agenda is to help humanity be fruitful and multiply so their massed numbers can fuel the birth of a baby Celestial. Their project is severely hampered by the fact that half of humanity will die spontaneously.

They often violate the rule. Eternals, for far pettier reasons than preserving half of humanity — reasons like “But technology is cool”And “But rules are dumb.” The obvious answer, unfortunately, is “The Eternals weren’t part of the story yet when Infinity War and Finale were made,” but that just gives the screenwriters more responsibility to come up with a more plausible excuse for their absence during a gigantic war for the literal fate of their protectorate — and their universe.

How did the Blip affect the Eternals?

Statistically, given Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet-fueled scheme, five of the 10 Eternals would have turned to dust during the Blip, which should have made a pretty lasting impression on the other five, given how close they all are, and how profoundly unaccustomed they are to losing each other. You can gloss over this one by noting that most of them were scattered around the globe, so maybe half of them dusted and the other half didn’t know about it. But it’s surprising that a worldwide cataclysm wouldn’t have moved them to check up on each other. It is possible that half of the dead could have been killed in a five year period. Very littleIt is important.

What is the reason Sersi kept Dane’s Eternals identity secret from Sersi?

Image: Marvel Studios

By the time these two hook up, the world is packed with people with superpowers, so it’s not like hers would come as a surprise. Also, the Eternals were extremely open with humanity about their powers in previous ages, so the “Don’t want to interfere with human development” excuse starts to get weird at a certain point. How did they suddenly decide humanity was finished with being inspired by cosmic people who had powers and that it was now time to keep their secrets? Or, given that Druig clearly isn’t bothering with secrecy, is this just something Sersi does with her hookups to avoid awkward questions?

Ikaris: How do Sersi feel?

One of Eternals’ odder aspects is setting up a standard love triangle around Sersi, without ever spending much time on how she feels about either of the men yearning for her. When the movie begins, she’s been estranged from her Eternals lover Ikaris for a long time, and she’s been dating Dane long enough that he wants to move in together. But in the brief scene where he’s kissing her and trying to broach the topic, she dodges both the kiss and the discussion as if they’re inconveniences. It’s not clear that she feels any affection for him, as the film barely shows.

When Ikaris returns, Sersi seems shocked he’s even alive. But while he at least shows some minor hope that she’ll break up with Dane, he never meaningfully discusses their relationship with her, and she never shows any anger over him unilaterally deciding to leave her, or any meaningful joy that he’s back. There’s no sense of chemistry or passion between them, even repressed passion. And when she and Dane are together again at the end of the movie, there’s similarly zero sense of feeling. What is the point of all this? Why are they leaving it there, on the sidewalk like a worm in a rainstorm.

Ikaris did actually pass away?

It’s hard to believe any superhero is dead unless you see a body, and it’s hard to see a body when someone vaporizes themselves in the sun. But given that the only Eternals who definitely die in the film only die after having their cosmic powers drained out of them, and given the Eternals’ capacity for easily shrugging off attacks that would turn mortals into a thin layer of pink jam, it isn’t all that clear whether Ikaris did manage to immolate himself.

Recent conversation with EternalsScreenwriters and cousins Kaz Firpo and Ryan Firpo asked Polygon what it would take to kill Ikaris.

Polygon: What does the melting point of an Eternal look like?

Kaz: The heart of the sun.

Ryan: Maybe he found it, or maybe he didn’t.

Kaz: Yeah, in the sequel, we’ll cut back to him and he’s just going to be stuck there going, “Dammit!”

Does it really matter if Ikaris dies? Is he coming back?

Image: Marvel Studios

The Eternals in the comics aren’t just eternal because they don’t age, they’re eternal because there’s literally a machine, the World Forge, that remakes any fallen Eternals whenever they’re needed again There’s no evidence in the Eternals movie that this is true for the MCU version of the characters, but there’s no evidence against it, either. Given that the comics version Ikaris gets vaporized in issue #2 of Neil Gaiman’s 2007 Eternals arc, and is popping back out of the Forge, no worse for wear, by the end of issue #3, it’s worth wondering whether all this movie’s dead characters could be back in action in a theoretical Eternals 2.

These screenwriters are again in the same conversation.

Kaz On a hard logistical level, I think there’s probably a clone of Gilgamesh sitting in the World Forge.

Ryan: Ryan’s memories also exist.

Kaz: It is [actor]Don Lee is coming back? I don’t know, we don’t make those rules! Gilgamesh might be the one who is able to do this with a completely different persona. Arishem seems as powerful and all-knowing as one could wish. That begs the next question [for whatever film continues these characters’ story] “How do you fight an all-knowing, all-powerful inter-dimensional space-god capable of literally crushing a planet in its bare hands?” Well, you’ll have to watch the second one to get the answer to that.

How the heck does “madweary” work?

The disease afflicting Thena’s mind doesn’t get much explanation in Eternals — it’s mostly there for extra drama, as she loses control and attacks her compatriots as the worst possible times. The vague summary, in both the comics and the film, is that it’s a psychological syndrome caused by centuries of life, which a human-like mind wasn’t designed to absorb. The buildup of too many memories and too much knowledge over time damages Eternals’ psyches, so they lose track of what era they’re in and what identity they’re currently holding.

But the more obvious symptoms of a disease of that description would be for someone with the disease (actually spelled “mahd w’rwy”) to suddenly start speaking Mesopotamian, or attacking busses because they look like looming monsters. Instead, whenever Thena is “claimed by the w’rwy,” as Ikaris says in the original Marvel comics, her eyes fill with cosmic energy, she mutters variations on “We’re all going to die,” and she tries to kill the other Eternals, exclusively. In this version of the story, mahd w’rwy winds up looking more like a cosmic anxiety attack about the impending destruction of the Eternals’ latest planetary home — as if Thena has been alive long enough that she’s getting memory leakage from previous versions of herself, understands that the Eternals are helping kill everyone on Earth, and wants to stop them.

That’d be a pretty cool spin on the story, if mahd w’rwy wasn’t a lessening of sanity, but a sign of an Eternal waking up to the horrors they’ve been visiting on world after world. But there’s no sign that the writers thought of it that way. It just feels weird and inconsistent — and like an excuse for some extra fight scenes.

What is it about her horrible memories that Thena protects so much?

The cure for mahd w’rwy in the comics is to destroy the current Eternal and create a clean copy from backup data, which does sound like something most thinking beings would resist. The film has a gentler version, suggesting that the Eternals’ spaceship has equipment that could reset Thena from scratch, solving the memory-buildup problem and curing her. It’s to the other Eternals’ credit that they don’t try to force Thena into the machine to reboot her, even though their best warrior repeatedly trying to murder them during battles is an immense threat. But it’s pretty unclear why she resists rebooting so hard herself.

Eternals doesn’t give us much information about Thena except that she’s suffering from mahd w’rwy, and suffering even more from the strain of holding it back, and the fear of hurting her companions. Her entire existence revolves around avoiding the attacks. She retreats to the desert to meditate, while Gilgamesh spends his time talking to her down and guarding her. But the movie never actually addresses what in her past is so good that she’s holding onto it and afraid of losing it. Instead, she seems to be resisting memory reset solely in order to hold on to her memories of constantly disrupting battles and having to be bashed down or talked down for everyone’s benefit. It’s sad, but also kind of baffling, and a major hole in her character.

Which Deviants are there in this story version?

Image: Marvel Comics

The cosmology around the Deviants in Jack Kirby’s original Eternals comics is fairly straightforward: Created by the same Celestials that created the Eternals, the Deviants are humanoid, intelligent, tech-focused immortal beings who rebelled against their creators and were punished. Developed from early hominid stock and injected with an unstable gene to let them mutate in a wide range of ways (see above, regarding Thanos being big and purple), the Deviants were expected to increase human potential by injecting more variety and thus survivability into humanity’s genetic lines.

Neil Gaiman’s 2006 Eternals arc suggests a much darker purpose for the Deviants — in that story, one Deviant character, who refers to his shape-shifting brethren as “the Changing People,” explains how the Celestials put the Deviants on Earth to rapidly breed and multiply as a kind of harvest that the Celestials later returned to and feasted on. “The souls of the Changing People are a delicacy for the Celestials,” he snarls.

In the movie, the Deviants apparently have a completely different purpose, but if you blink at the beginning of the film, you’ll miss it — they were meant to be a predator capable of wiping out all the apex predators on Earth in order to give humanity more room to develop and grow, without being devoured by megalodons or saber-tooth tigers or whatever else had a hunger for them. It’s unclear why the Celestials thought unleashing a race of giant, incredibly tough shape-changing immortals onto the planet would help humanity It is not get eaten. And it’s no wonder that the movie’s secondary villain, the Deviant Kro (voiced by Bill Skarsgård) resents the Celestials setting up his species to get slaughtered en masse. At least in this version, it seems that introducing Eternals on Earth was an environment quick-fix. It’s like dropping mongooses onto Hawaii to curb the rats population. (That didn’t work out well.)

​​Did Ikaris fly Ajak all the way to Alaska, or did they take a plane?

OK, maybe this one is silly, but it’s definitely hard to ignore how Ikaris comes to visit Ajak in South Dakota to show her something, then shows up in Alaska, around 3,000 miles away, cradling her in his arms. Was he simply carrying her across the sky all those miles?

Polygon asked this same question to the Firpos and also received an honest response. “We literally had this conversation with the most impressive story minds in Hollywood, Academy Award-winner Chloe Zhao, and then us. We would sit around in a room eating takeout, being like, ‘Can Ikaris just pick them up and fly them there? Is it faster?’ The answer was, ‘If it’s just one person, he holds them very cute under one arm.’”

So we’re guessing that yes, Ikaris just flew her up there. There’s no point keeping track of her travels when she mysteriously dies.

Are there plans to create an Eternals 2.

In spite of the Firpos’ jokes about Eternals 2, it’s unclear whether the Eternals will return in their own stand-alone movie, or they’re being set up to cross over with one or more of the other Marvel arcs EternalsPhase Four is set in motion. The movie does end with a cliffhanger for many of the characters, and Marvel Studios’ dedication to revolving those kinds of dangling plot threads suggests there’s more to come. However, the credits show hints that the resolution may be coming in. Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Currently scheduled to be released in 2023, the Black Knight film (currently not even revealed), the Blade movie(announced, but not yet scheduled), or another entirely.