Did Anyone Ever Have the REAL Time Stone?

There is no Time Stone. Okay, that's not completely true, but for a couple of days, Marvel fans were looking at these new posters for Avengers: Endgame Encore and asking the same question: where the hell is the green stone? I'm looking at this collage of the new Encore posters right now, and across these designs, the gauntlets keep showing the other stones while the green one is suspiciously absent. You've got the Infinity Stones prominently featured in this marketing: the Power Stone, Space Stone, Reality Stone, Soul Soul and mind over and over again, and no green, no Time Stone. Now, before somebody pauses the podcast and runs to Twitter and tells me, Eric, there's another poster where you could see it— yes, there is. An official poster has surfaced where you can see the Time Stone. So I'm not saying Marvel has officially erased the Time Stone from Endgame or retconned anything. I'm not even saying that these posters prove anything. I'm just saying that they made me ask a question. And unfortunately for everybody listening, I kept asking it. I mean, when Marvel is putting this movie back in theaters, despite how it will maybe topple them over another world record or something, it does make us reexamine this right before Doomsday. The timing is conspicuous and it immediately activates my conspiracy board brain. It gets me thinking. I mean, the color of Doctor Doom is green. That's the first thing. The color of Loki is green. The color of the Time Stone is green. It's simple math. And Endgame Encore isn't just Marvel throwing the movie back into theaters for nostalgia. Joe Russo has called this version required viewing before Avengers: Doomsday because there's new material connecting these stories. And do not worry, before Doomsday is released, it's been said that the movie will be put on Disney Plus, Endgame Encore, before Doomsday comes out. Exactly when? Don't press me. I don't know when. It's just been talked about and confirmed. So if you're not able to make it back to theaters to see Endgame again, or you don't feel like sitting in a theater and you just want to see what's new, what's been thrown in there. I mean, I will say the movie has been color graded. It looks 10 times more beautiful than it did when it came into theaters, believe it or not. You see these before and after shots, look those up. Seriously, it's— the movie looks gorgeous right now. So I mean, I'm real excited to go see it at the end of this month. It comes out the end of September. So if Marvel is specifically asking us to look at Endgame again, maybe we should. And I've got one question I cannot get out of my head: did Thanos ever actually have the real Time Stone? And here's where this gets weird, because after thinking about it, I'm not convinced the Avengers in Endgame did either. All right, stay with me. The thing we know— let's establish the movie Before I start cooking with ingredients Kevin Feige never gave me. In Infinity War, Doctor Strange has the Time Stone. Thanos needs it. Strange sees over 14 million possible futures and finds one where they win. Tony is about to die, and Strange does something that should be completely unthinkable for a master of the mystic arts, especially after him telling Stark on the ship that he would let him die if, if it means protecting the stone. He voluntarily gives Thanos the Time Stone. Thanos takes it and he goes to Wakanda. Wanda destroys the Mind Stone, killing Vision before Thanos can take it, and for about 3 seconds it looks like she won. But Thanos uses what appears to be the Time Stone. Time reverses, Vision comes back, Thanos rips the Mind Stone out of Vision's head. I'm sure you have that image in your head like I do mine, and Vision dies again. Absolutely horrific. Thanos now apparently has all six Infinity Stones. He snaps, half the universe disappears, and that was the tale we've been told since 2018. But then Endgame gives us a scene that in retrospect gets really interesting. Bruce Banner goes back to 2012. He meets the Ancient One, and he needs her Time Stone. She says absolutely fucking not. It's a lot for Bruce to ask for. She even explains how you don't understand the effects that this can have on basic Basically, what we now would call the multiverse timelines. I mean, they're setting up the the timeline multiverse stuff in this movie, by the way. So the disciplined ancient one. I mean, if you know her character from Doctor Strange, she isn't a pushover, and her reasoning makes perfect sense. You don't casually give somebody an infinity stone. This isn't hey, can I borrow your charger? The time stone is one of the most fundamental forces protecting her reality. She explains the danger of removing an Infinity Stone from its proper place in history, and Bruce promises that they'll return everything. Still no. And then Bruce tells her something. Doctor Strange gave the Time Stone to Thanos willingly. And that's when everything changes. The Ancient One realizes that if Strange voluntarily surrendered that stone, there must have been a reason. She gives it to Bruce, and that's the canon explanation. And it works. But here's my theory. Theory number 1: the surrender protocol. What if hearing that Doctor Strange gave Thanos the stone willingly didn't simply make the Ancient One trust Strange? What if it told her what Strange had done? Imagine you're the Sorcerer Supreme, or someone preparing the next generation of Sorcerers Supreme. You're guarding one of the 6 most powerful objects in existence. Surely there is a plan for this, because eventually somebody stronger than you could come for it. Somebody could capture you. Somebody could threaten someone you love. Somebody could put you in a position where the only apparent options are give them the stone or let somebody die. You're caught between— forgive me— a rock and a stone place. I'm sorry for that one, but it's staying. I should have said a stone in a hard place instead of a rock at a stone place. It doesn't matter, you get the joke. It's stupid. Anyway, what if the Masters of the Mystic Arts developed a protocol, a last resort? If somebody forces you to surrender the Time Stone, they don't get the Time Stone. Maybe you conceal the real one. Maybe you enchant another object. Maybe you take an ordinary stone and place enough magic around it to anybody who isn't one of you, it appears to be the genuine article. We're talking about people who can create portals across the planet. They can astral project your soul out of your body. They manipulate dimensional energy. They make weapons out of magic. Doctor Strange literally concealed the Time Stone before producing it for Thanos. So the concept that these people can just fake a green rock is not exactly where I'm going to call bullshit. Now, and this is important, none of this protocol is canon. Marvel has never told us that there is a Time Stone decoy protocol. This is my theory, but watch what happens to the Ancient One scene if there is. Again, Bruce tells her Doctor Strange gave Thanos the Time Stone, and suddenly she's not thinking, oh, Stephen must have had a good reason. She's thinking, Stephen surrendered the stone. Maybe because those words mean something to her. Maybe she realizes he used the protocol. Strange didn't surrender the real Time Stone. He did exactly what he had been trained to do. When there was no other option. And if Strange used the protocol, the Ancient One now knows what she needs to do. Bruce wants her Time Stone. He thinks he needs it to save the universe. She can't let the genuine Time Stone leave her reality, so she gives Bruce exactly what Strange gave Thanos— a fake. And that's where 2 theories become one. Originally, I had 2 separate theories. Maybe, maybe Strange like tricked Thanos, or maybe the Ancient One tricked Bruce. But I like this version much more because they aren't 2 theories anymore. They're the same protocol. Strange gets cornered by Thanos— protocol. Ancient One gets cornered by Bruce— protocol. And suddenly, one tiny moment in Endgame has a completely different meaning. The Ancient One doesn't change her mind because Strange abandoned everything she taught him. She changes her mind because Strange's decision tells her that he remembered exactly what she taught him. And now she trusts him, not because he gave away the Time Stone, because he didn't. Maybe he didn't. Now I know the problem, because there's somebody listening right now screaming, Eric, Thanos used the Time Stone! Yes, he did, or that's what we saw. And this is where we put a theory on top of another theory. Theory number 2: What actually happened to Vision? This is the weakest part of the argument if you believe Strange gave Thanos a fake, because the movie seemingly gives us direct proof that Thanos's Time Stone Stone works. Wanda destroys Vision. Thanos activates the Green Stone. Everything moves backward. Vision reassembles. Thanos kills him. Case closed. Except Thanos wasn't standing there with one Infinity Stone. He was standing there with 5. 5 Infinity Stones. We know how powerful these stones are, and one of those 5 stones is the Reality Stone. We've seen what the Reality Stone can do. It doesn't just make a little hologram, it can completely alter what somebody sees and experiences. On Knowhere, Thanos creates an entire false version of reality around the Guardians. Gamora believes she kills him. She watches it happen, and then Thanos simply removes the illusion or the alteration and reveals what's actually there. So here's the question: what if what we're watching in Wakanda isn't actually time travel? What if the fake Time Stone is giving Thanos the appearance of having all 6 stones while the stones he genuinely possesses are doing the work? Reality, space, power, soul, and whatever combination of those abilities are necessary. I'm not saying the Reality Stone has a rewind button. I'm saying we have 5 cosmic cheat codes interacting with each other, and we have absolutely no manual for what combinations are possible. What happens when you use 5 stones? Maybe Thanos didn't literally move Vision backward through time. Maybe he reconstructs the state he needs Vision to be in, because Thanos doesn't actually care about Vision. He doesn't need to restore Vision's soul. He doesn't need to undo Wanda's pain. He needs one thing: the Mind Stone. So perhaps reality itself is manipulated just enough to put the Mind Stone back where Thanos can't retrieve it. He grabs Vision. Rips the stone out. And now this is where it gets confusing, because that Mind Stone could absolutely be real. And that's the important distinction. I'm not saying Thanos's entire Infinity Gauntlet is fake. I'm asking whether he had 5 real Infinity Stones and 1 magical counterfeit, and whether the 5 genuine Infinity Stones are powerful enough to hide the fact that the 6th one isn't doing anything at all. Now we get to the snap. And this is where my brain breaks, because if Strange gave Thanos a fake Time Stone, then the Infinity Gauntlet used for the original snap wasn't complete. Not really. Power, space, reality, soul, and mind— all genuine. Time? Maybe not. And Thanos snaps anyway, not knowing he may not be possessing all 6 stones, with the full intention to snap away half the universe, which he absolutely does. But 5 years later, the Avengers retrieve their own set of Infinity Stones, and where do they get their Time Stone? The Ancient One. So if the Ancient One used this protocol, Bruce brings back another fake. Now Hulk puts on the Nano Gauntlet. 5 genuine Infinity Stones, 1 possible counterfeit. Snap. Everybody comes back. Then 2014 Thanos gets this same Nano Gauntlet. Tony steals those same stones. 5 genuine Infinity Stones, 1 possible counterfeit. Thanos and his army disappear. His legs turn to jelly. 3 universe-altering snaps, 2 different Infinity Gauntlets, 2 different eras, potentially the same missing ingredient: time. That's where I stopped treating this just as, hey, Marvel forgot the green gem on the poster. Because if this theory is true— and keep in mind, theory— the question isn't just Where's the Time Stone? The question becomes, what exactly did those snaps do? Now here's the theory on top of a theory, and everybody listening who already has a headache about MCU time travel, I promise we're almost home. I'm not going to explain 17 timelines. You don't need them for this. All you need is this: the Ancient One herself tells Bruce that messing with Infinity Stones and their place in reality has consequences. So imagine something even stranger. Imagine trying to use the Infinity Gauntlet to rewrite the universe without one of the fundamental forces the Gauntlet is supposed to contain. Maybe the snap still works. Clearly something happened. People disappeared, people returned. Tony erased Thanos's army. I'm not going to argue that those events weren't real. I'm asking whether the method was different from what everybody thought. Maybe when Thanos said I am inevitable. He believed he had permanently imposed his will on the universe. But what if it was never permanent? What if without the genuine Time Stone, the snap couldn't fully anchor the change across time? What if Hulk wasn't simply undoing a perfectly completed event? What if he was repairing something that was already unstable? What if Tony's snap added another change on top of that? Snap, snap, snap. Reality written over and over with potentially no actual control over time. And now we're entering the Multiverse Saga. Incursions, broken universes, timelines colliding, Doctor Doom, Secret Wars. I'm not saying the fake Time Stone caused the Multiverse Saga. That's way too big a leap. But what I am saying is if Marvel reveals that something about the Infinity Stones in Endgame wasn't what we thought, there is suddenly a very interesting path connecting the Infinity Saga To Doomsday, and Marvel is currently asking everybody to go back and watch Endgame before Doomsday. That's why my eyebrow is up. But here's why this could all be complete nonsense. We need this section because I love this theory, which means I'm exactly the kind of person who needs to argue against it. First, there is promotional art for Endgame Encore where you can see the Time Stone—not all of the promotions, but one. So the missing green stone is not some airtight marketing cipher. It could genuinely just. B composition, different artists, different angles, different gauntlets. Nothing more. Second, the MCU has never told us there's a fake Time Stone protocol. I made that shit up. It's good shit, but I made it up. Third, the biggest of all, the movies treat these stones as genuine. Thanos's stone behaves like the Time Stone. Bruce's stone behaves as though the Avengers assembled all six stones. Nobody comments on anything wrong. And when Steve returns the stones, the movie presents that as resolving the problem. So if Marvel ever did reveal something like this, it would have to add information to scenes that we've already seen without breaking those scenes. And that's a very difficult needle to thread. But Marvel has done that before. Sometimes the best retcons aren't that thing never happened. They're that thing happened exactly the way you remember. You just don't know everything that was happening. And that is the version of this theory I would want. Don't erase Infinity War. Don't erase Endgame. Don't tell me the snap secretly didn't happen. Tell me there was one more move on the chessboard that we couldn't see. So if this is all true, where is the real Time Stone? And if I'm right about any of this, that's the question I can't answer. Maybe Strange hid it somewhere. Maybe the Masters of the Mystic Arts recovered it. Maybe it survived somewhere it wasn't supposed to. Maybe we've already seen something connected to it and don't know about it yet. Or maybe Marvel put some gauntlets on some posters and the green stone happened to be obscured. I just spent 20 minutes creating a Sorcerer Supreme counterfeit rock protocol, which I'm comfortable with, and that's what we do here. But I'm obsessed with this theory because it would have dire consequences for the movie we're about to see. We know there's changes being made, more to explain. This might not be exactly it, but there might be a variant situation similar to this, you know, where they add a little bit to bring more sense to the upcoming story of Doomsday. I mean, that's definitely happening in the movie. There's going to be stuff. I think it would be a mind-blowing moment to go back to see Endgame and have something like that be revealed. I mean, the Ancient One knowing Steven is the best of us, Doom potentially understanding magic/science in a way that Thanos didn't. I mean, there's just so much that could possibly come from the theory and stuff we just wouldn't know unless it were true and explained to us how everything worked, how everything went down. I mean, maybe turning people to dust— that's not what Thanos thought of. He just thought eliminate half of all life. We don't know exactly what he thought, but he thought something like that. And then everybody turns to dust. Maybe with all 6 Infinity Stones, you couldn't undo that with another snap. Maybe with all 6 real Infinity Stones, that is a much more graphic situation, a more permanent one. And maybe snapping all 6 stones, which in this case no one really ever did, could cause way more damage on the ground zero point of that snap than we could even ever imagine. But there's one piece of this that keeps me from throwing it away. The Ancient One scene. Because the more I think about it, the stranger the wording becomes. Doctor Strange doesn't lose the Time Stone. Thanos doesn't take it from him. But Bruce specifically tells her Strange gave it away. And that is what changes everything. Maybe she heard that and thought that, that Stephen knew what he was doing. And that explanation is the explanation we've had for 7 years. Maybe that's still the explanation. But what if what she actually understood was Stephen knew exactly what to do? And then she did it too. Five stones, one fake, three snaps, and maybe no one ever had time. Thank you for listening to Marvel Maniac, an MCU after show going deep in the theories this week. It's one of my favorite things to do is just to speculate what is changing through this movie and why are they re-releasing it, telling us it is a pre. prerequisite. You have to watch this movie before Doomsday. Your thoughts would go a long way. Email [email protected] with your theories or join our Discord server. It is in the notes of this episode. We love to theorize and talk, and we don't have a lot of people in there yet, so it'd be great for you to join and help us build a smaller community into a slightly larger one where we can all share our theories. There's a tip jar in the same notes section That's the Discord. Never expected, always beyond appreciated. And yeah, I kind of let myself go crazy with this one because it's fun, it's inspiring, and that's what Marvel Maniac is to me. For a long time, you know, between Avengers 1 and 2, you're theorizing what Ultron is going to be like in a million different ways with people online. So it's just kind of fun before the movie comes out, before the re-release, to kind of go into a crazy what-if scenario. And I know it's actually that crazy, but if I'm right, man, this episode's gonna be something else to look back at, having that realization. But I wasn't the first guy to notice that the Time Stone was missing from all these posters. And again, there is another poster or two with the Time Stone on it. They just put up— made a lot of posters. That's another thing that's like surprises me. There's more posters for Encore than there was For the original Endgame, I think they really want to put emphasis that there's something different about this—a recut, an edit, a couple of extra minutes, maybe a new post-credits scene explaining something that they need us to know before Doomsday. I find that so interesting. So again, let me know what you think. Would love to hear your thoughts. Please rate the show. Like I said at the beginning, it goes a long way, and we want to get noticed on Apple Podcasts, so we. could bring more Marvel maniacs together. So it's been my pleasure. And until next time, Avengers, disassemble.