Yep, I finally went to see the Avengers movie today.  I have Thoughts, which also include Honking Great Spoilers, so I’ve put them under a cut.  Just because I was spoilered (grrr!) doesn’t mean you have to be.

Dr Strange giving up the infinity stone to save Tony Stark just doesn’t make sense on the surface.  There’s nothing in the plot to indicate he gives two hoots about Tony, in fact he specifically told him and Spidey he’d give them up in an instant.  So his last words: it was the *only* way… after he had gone into the future & looked at a bazillion possible futures, in only ONE of which they won. It’s a plot. He’s telling Tony that it’s a plot, that this is the only one of millions of futures which works out.

Team Iron Man were trying to get the gauntlet off of Thanos, which struck me as a good idea at the time. I was wondering why they didn’t just cut his arm off… but remember Thanos saying “all this for *a drop* of blood”? So (a) we deduce he’s hard to dismember and (b) Tony now has a drop of his blood.

So Tony clones Thanos Mark 2 aka NotEvil Thanos, and we have Thanos v NotEvil Thanos.
Ah but still, why did Benji *give* him the stone? Because it’s actually the Weasel Stone, forged by Peter Dinklage in the Secret Forge of Improbable Machinery. Its actual power is to imitate the Time stone by taking you into a Weasel (pocket) universe out of the way, and then to make your arm wither & fall off while you’re fighting NotEvil Twin.

Meanwhile Other Wizard Guy (Wong?) uses the *real* time stone to go back in time and steal his dad’s car keys… no, wait, wrong universe…

Wong goes back in time with Bruce Banner through a portal to the planet of, seriously, she didn’t see that coming when he pushed her off the cliff. He drops Banner from a great height onto the “there must be sacrifices” table. Hulk stops hiding because NOW is his moment and…

Rage!Hulk pushes Thanos off the cliff instead of Gamora. But Thanos holds on… will he fall???

Of course! Rage!Hulk has the gauntlet and half of Thanos’ arm. Wong opens a portal half way down the fall & Thanos falls into the Weasel Universe. Not!Evil Thanos reaches up with one gauntleted hand and Wong pulls him back up into the Real world.

The Weasel Universe now contains two one-armed Thanoses locked in eternal conflict.
Meanwhile in the Real world, Gamora snaps the “someone had to be sacrificed” stone onto the gauntlet, because Thanos was, after all, her father. Dr Strange walks calmly through a portal and adds the Time stone, as Stark and Spidey try to step through after him there’s some banter & much smirking as Strange slams it shut. Strange, Wong and Gamora portal to Scotland to persuade Vision and the Witch Whose Name I Never Caught that he needs to borrow the Forehead stone.

Strange now has all the stones. Suddenly all his clothes fall off and…

….oops wrong universe

He does some wavey-handy stuff & all the special effects run in reverse. None of it has ever happened, so he puts all the stones tidily back where he found them, except…

There is always A Price To Be Paid for meddling with the structure of the multiverse. As he removes the stones and gives Thor the Gauntlet to take back to be hammered into ploughshares by Peter Dinklage, no, all his clothes really DO fall off. He starts to fall apart like everyone did before, only in multicoloured bits this time. His cloak sadly waves him goodbye & settles back in its glass case. His pieces reassemble and he gasps and sits up.
“Where am I?” he says.
“It’s all right, you’re safe, you’re in hospital. That was quite a scare you gave us.”
“What do you mean? Where am I, who are you…. for that matter, who am I?”
“Why is he talking like that?”
“I don’t know – there are documented cases of people coming out of comas speaking other languages, I imagine an American accent wouldn’t be too strange…”
“Strange? Strange… tell me! Who am I? What’s my name?”
“Sherlock…”