More often than not a story can survive having a lousy ending than a lousy beginning. If your story begins awkwardly or doesn’t have something to “hook” the reader/viewer, they never become engaged in either the basic concept, or the characters or the imagery that they first see when it opens. The result of that is they get bored and switch off, dismissing the story as uninteresting enough to pursue.

And there are many cases, in this age of sequels, where multiple stories form a single “saga”, an overall story that encompasses many parts each of which gets explored in its own stand alone presentation.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one such sage. It began with “Iron Man” in 2008 and, through twenty follow up films, built a single unified story centered on the threat of the “infinity stones” and an uber-villain named Thanos who was intent on using them to literally destroy half the life in the universe.

So when the final two-part climax (films 21 and 22 of the saga) came along in “Infinity Wars” and “Endgame” they were essentially breaking a single concluding chapter into two pieces, each of which would focus on a single overall conclusive event:

In “Infinity Wars” the good guys lose. Big time.

In “Endgame” the good guys win.

And that is the root of what turned out to be the major flaw that rendered “Endgame” into little more than a sloppy climax spectacle which required the viewer to look back to everything that had happened in the eleven years and twenty films prior and pluck from the almost random (and senseless) sequence of events in “Endgame” what they now call “’member berries” and “jangling keys” set up in those earlier stories. In other words, the whole story of “Endgame” was little more than a badly constructed “feast for the senses” climax to a story a decade in the making.

As such it was expected than anyone who had seen and liked any of the earlier stories would have to buy this final outing just to see how everything turned out. And the result of that was it made a couple billion dollars at the box office.

But the story itself was crap. As a stand alone it would have been crapped all over as simply bad storytelling that not only didn’t make sense, but actually undid and dismissed the entire universe in which it was set. It killed, once and for all, any “stakes” that the protagonists would have had to risk and rendered anything undoable, if needed to exploit some aspect of that universe in the future. 

Got a character who was killed off? No problem. We now can undo even death. Why? Time Travel and the Multiverse!

And the moment you remove the stakes for the character, and the reader/viewer realizes they have no meaning, you have essentially invalidated your entire story. Because nothing matters. It can all be undone.

But it’s in the way this was done in “Endgame” that renders it somewhat unique and worth exploring.

Remember, the original intent was to show in “Infinity Wars” the good guys lose, but in “Endgame” they ultimately win. That was the plan to achieve maximum audience engagement.

And the creators actually doubled down at the beginning of “Endgame” by making it literally impossible for the “good guys lose” to be undone, at least in the existing universe.

How? Easy.

The entire saga, and especially “Infinity Wars”, the entire focus was “Thanos doing a ‘fetch quest’ to gather the stones and then using them to end half the life in the universe.”

And once the creators had achieved that goal of “good guys lose” with the conclusion of “Infinity Wars”, they suddenly found they had a real problem:

The only logical way of having the good guys win in the end was to literally set up a “reverse fetch quest” scenario, in which they good guys spend the entire film looking for the infinity stones to do exactly what Thanos did, except in reverse.

And they knew the audience would know that’s what was happening and were afraid they wouldn’t be satisfied with just watching a repeat of “Infinity Wars” in reverse.

So what did they do to permanently knock that “oh, this is just the last moving in reverse” idea out of possibility?

They opened “Endgame” by having Thanos destroy the infinity stones so what he’d done couldn’t ever be reversed. Ever.

Anyone who saw “Endgame” for the first time can remember the shock of learning that, followed by the beheading of Thanos. (And killing Thanos was little more than housecleaning. After all, he’d served his purpose and having him hanging around just muddied things up because even if the good guys managed to undo what he’d done, he’d just try to redo it again because that was his nature. So he had to go.)

Seeing him die and knowing the mess was now permanent everyone instantly thought “how are they going to be able to fix this?” That was the “hook” for the final film.

And it was when the entire MCU got tossed into the trash.

Because there literally was no way to undo what Thanos had done… in THAT universe. The only choice they saw was to invalidate what had provided the entire rest of the saga with its tension and drama… potential consequences.

They had to dip into either “undo it from the get go” (time travel) or “have another source like another universe where it didn’t happen” (the multiverse). And they decided to go with both.

As a result the entire story of “Endgame” was simply a case of someone yelling “make it bigger! Make it louder! More explosions! More eye candy and fan service!”

Now could a reverse fetch quest have worked with the good guys hunting down the stones again, one by one? Probably. In fact, if you look at real world conflicts that’s generally what happens. The Japanese lash out and absorb a quarter of the Pacific Ocean, then the Allies counter-attack and take it back, bit by bit. Same with the Germans in Europe. They take France, and eventually the Allies take it back.

But it takes work to sell that kind of “repeat in reverse” conflict. It takes something that was used in the Kurosawa movie “Rashoman”, which repeats the focus event (a rape) but from different points of view, each of which adds something new to what the audience knows about an event they’ve already experienced… but from a different point of view.

In a “repeat in reverse” for “Endgame” they could have established that Thanos had to hide the stones again himself and chose to do so in the hands of his chief minions (the Children of Thanos characters who got little if any explanation in “Infinity Wars”. Each could have formed a fresh challenge to defeat and take back the stones.

And it would have made sense. Since the stones had already been explained as being remnants created by the literally creation of the universe, and having existed for billions of years, it is entirely plausible that they simply could never be destroyed and could only be hidden or guarded to prevent falling into the “wrong hands”.

And it would have provided ample opportunity to explore those individual minion’s stories and characters as they were confronted and, ultimately defeated.

But they wanted to ram home there would be no “reverse fetch quest” and to nail that down the stones had to go.

No wonder they needed to wait five whole years after that to try and restart the story. Why? Because they had to establish a new set of “stakes” for the good guys, in this case, primarily, Tony Stark’s daughter. His fear that undoing the snap would cause her to cease to exist was the primary conflict for the first half of the movie. And for a story the size of the entire MCU, that’s a pretty weak conflict, even if you need Tony to make the “get out of corner free card” work at all.

So “Endgame”, while a loud and sensory focused conclusion to a decade long saga was sufficient to draw in audiences, it was still crappy writing.

But hey, it made two billion dollars, right?

Screw the story. Bring on the jangling keys.