I suspect it's fundamental to the whole creating life/resurrecting the dead thing. I think the only thing we've seen it do by itself is yank Dr. Strange's astral form out of his body, which thankfully Thanos tried on the one character who knows how to put it right back where it belongs.

Jessica, if I understand correctly by traveling back to 2014 the Avengers already diverged an alternate timeline from their own past. So in that timeline Thanos and a bunch of his minions and soldiers just disappear one day with no one knowing where they went. He's no longer around to collect the gems and kill half the universe there.

Connie, no, it wouldn't take that long, but I was willing to handwave that.

Matt, I think I disagree -- Banner's point to Swinton was that there would just be *one* timeline once they'd put all the stones back (although what that does to Loki I'm not sure). So I'm with Jessica -- if Thanos doesn't collect the stones, they have no reason to go back, etc. Unless Steve somehow undoes the bit where Nebula senses Nebula, but then... Yup. Major problem. I decided not to think about it, but it is a problem.

The five year delay really bugs me. Five years is long enough for people to move on, to rebuild their lives, to see in general that the reduction in resource pressure is not a bad thing. How many spouses remarried, how many jobs were re-filled, how many households were replaced? The only reason I can think for them to wait five years is so Morgan is old enough to be a distinct personality. One year would have been a short enough time that a couple of billion people could be reabsorbed with minimal chaos, and Thor could well be on his way to slovenly decay. And Ronin could still wreak mayhem on lots and lots of people.

But Steve can't move on, so of course let's not consider how it affects the rest of the world. The wars that break out as 2-3 billion people try to refind a place in the world will be horrible. But Steve got to play house with Peggy in a time loop.

Connie, except that it seems like the reduced the resources as well? That part makes no sense to me AT ALL, but they did say "living things," not just sentient beings. Which is ridiculous. But...

Okay, let's see if I can unravel this one thing. Banner told Swinton that the divergent timelines created when they took the stones would collapse when they put the stones back and thus the original timeline would be repaired. She seemed to agree with that, her objection was that she didn't trust them not to fuck it up. (Which, fair.) But they ended up taking the tesseract twice - once when Hulk messed up the heist and Loki took off with it, and once from the army base. Steve presumably returned the tesseract he had to the place he got it, the base, leaving the Loki-tesseract unreturned and the Loki-tesseract timeline presumably intact. WHich gives us a whole new universe to play in, in the upcoming Loki tv series, presumably.

Is no one going to mention Ant-Man saying "Flick me!" and hiking his butt in the air? I almost choked on my popcorn.

They did say that Thanos dusted half of all living things in his Snap. I thought that's why Scott looked out at birds in the trees and smiled and said "I think it worked."

Still, five years is too long. Unless we're supposed to believe that everyone in the world suffered severe depression and could not move on. But that does seem to be what the writers were saying.

My understanding was the Ancient One's issue wasn't with divergent timelines in general, but rather divergent timelines in which one or more of the Stones had been removed. Which means Loki being on the run with the Space Stone isn't disasterous as the Space Stone still exists, it's just in Loki's pocket rather than Odin's Vault.

Of course, if the Stones not existing is disasterous, what does that mean for the main timeline when Thanos destroyed them? That's definitely its own problem.

I can buy Steve waiting till Peggy was dead in their timeline before triggering his return, which might have kept that timeline from collapsing until he left. Thanos' own loop is more handwavey. Only The Doctor can get away with this sort of thing because they pretty much ignore logic and I assume he's bouncing between timelines all the time.

I'm also upset about the people popping back into fatal circumstances--they poofed out of an airplane that's not there so they plummet to their deaths, patients who were under surgery appear in operating rooms and die before the doctors can figure out what's going on, people appear in streets adn get run over. I think time travel is sloppy plotting.

Thanos didn't destroy the stones in a way that fucked with the timeline, so if there's a problem with the stones not existing, they took care of that by bringing the past stones into the future where Thanos got his head chopped off, thus replacing the destroyed stones with past versions of the stones. That past version of the Soul Stone didn't have Gamora's soul, though.

Do we know for sure that the un-dusted people appeared at the same place and circumstance they disappeared from?