I think Marvel’s biggest weakness since Avengers: Endgame may become Avengers: Doomsday’s greatest storytelling advantage.

The Multiverse Saga has felt disconnected because, frankly, it has been disconnected. I do not believe Marvel deliberately spent the last seven years making its movies and television shows feel like separate islands so the Russo brothers could eventually reveal some brilliant master plan. Kang changed. The Avengers disappeared as an actual team. Major story threads appeared, vanished and sometimes seemed to have very little dramatic relationship to one another.

But Avengers: Doomsday does not need to prove Marvel planned the fragmentation.

It needs to make the fragmentation matter.

That is the argument I want to prove here. Endgame destroys the center of the MCU by removing Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and, functionally, the Avengers as the institution holding this giant story together. The projects that follow repeatedly ask characters to rebuild their identities after losing the person, role, relationship or world that used to define them. Sam Wilson has to decide what Captain America means without Steve. Shuri has to decide what Black Panther means without T’Challa. Peter Parker loses everyone who knows Peter Parker exists. Loki discovers that identity means almost nothing without the freedom to choose who you become. Yelena Belova and the Thunderbolts eventually have to build a team out of people defined by isolation, damage and failure.

Those stories do not create a particularly clean plot line. They may, however, create an argument. If Doomsday forces those separate heroes, teams and universes into a crisis where protecting your own people may come at somebody else’s expense, Doctor Doom can finally make all of those different answers collide.

I want to give that storytelling move a name for this piece: retroactive coherence. That is our label, not some official McKee or Truby term. A climax cannot travel backward through time and transform messy setup into brilliant planning, but it can reveal a dramatic relationship between pieces that previously seemed separate. When the final crisis forces those pieces to carry different sides of the same argument, the audience can look backward and understand their function differently.

So the real question is no longer whether the Multiverse Saga was secretly connected all along. I think the better question is much harder and much more interesting: Can Avengers: Doomsday turn seven years of Marvel’s biggest structural problem into the point of the story?

Endgame Did Not Just Defeat Thanos. It Destroyed The MCU’s Center

Go back to the resolution of Avengers: Endgame and look at what the movie actually leaves behind. Tony Stark dies after making the sacrificial choice that completes his arc. Natasha Romanoff dies on Vormir so Clint Barton can return with the Soul Stone. Steve Rogers returns the Stones, leaves the present and chooses the life with Peggy Carter that history originally denied him.

Thor gives up the throne of New Asgard and leaves Earth with the Guardians. Clint returns to his family. The Avengers compound has been obliterated. There is no final scene in which a new six-person roster stands inside a rebuilt headquarters while somebody explains what the next version of the Avengers will be.

The victory is enormous, but the resolution is also dispersive. Marvel saves existence by completing the Infinity Saga and, in the process, removes or scatters most of the characters and institutions that had been giving that saga its center.

This is where Robert McKee’s emphasis on value change becomes useful. The climax of a story does more than complete an action; it changes the condition of the story world in a way that carries meaning. Endgame obviously turns annihilation toward restoration when the vanished return, but there is another value shift happening underneath that victory: the Avengers save the universe and lose the Avengers as we knew them.

That gives the Multiverse Saga a legitimate dramatic starting condition. The problem is that Marvel then struggled to turn that starting condition into a visible saga-level progression.

The Multiverse Saga’s Real Problem Was That Nothing Replaced The Center

This is where I do not want to let Marvel off the hook, because fragmentation by itself is not structure. You can begin a story with characters scattered across different worlds, different goals and different emotional conditions. Eventually, though, the audience needs to feel those lines tightening.

McKee’s idea of progressive complications matters here. Story pressure should accumulate. One event changes the conditions of the next event, options narrow, consequences grow and the audience begins to sense that the story is moving toward an unavoidable crisis. The Infinity Saga was not planned with perfect precision from Iron Man forward, but by the time Thanos moves into the foreground, the audience can feel previously separate pieces converging.

The Multiverse Saga rarely created that sensation consistently. He Who Remains introduces the danger of his variants in Loki. Another Kang becomes the villain of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Shang-Chi’s Ten Rings send an unexplained signal. Kamala Khan’s bangle carries another piece of cosmic history. Monica Rambeau ends up stranded in another universe. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduces incursions. The TVA returns in Deadpool & Wolverine. All the while, enormous sections of the MCU continue telling stories whose immediate dramatic engines barely touch those threads.

Individual projects can still work that way. A saga has a harder job because the audience has been taught to search for hierarchy: Which rules matter? Which characters matter? Which consequences are accumulating? Which question are we moving toward?

This is where the Scriptnotes distinction between mystery and confusion becomes especially useful. Mystery gives the audience a question and enough orientation to enjoy not knowing the answer. Confusion leaves the audience unsure which question the story expects them to ask in the first place.

For too much of the Multiverse Saga, Marvel trained us to ask, “What is all of this building toward?” without giving us a sufficiently stable dramatic object around which those questions could organize. Kang was supposed to provide part of that answer, and then the entire saga-level architecture changed.

That is a real structural problem. The interesting part is that plot connection is not the only kind of connection a story can eventually exploit.

Because These Characters Kept Wrestling With The Same Damn Question

Once I stopped asking whether every Marvel project contained an incursion, a Kang variant or the next Infinity Stone equivalent, another pattern became much easier to see. A surprising number of post-Endgame stories put their characters under variations of the same pressure.

Who are you after the person, role, relationship or institution that used to define you disappears?

That question does not turn all of these projects into one perfectly designed story. What it gives Doomsday is something potentially more useful now: characters who have reached radically different answers to the same underlying problem.

Wanda Maximoff Builds An Identity That Reality Cannot Sustain

WandaVision begins with grief so overwhelming that Wanda creates an entire world around refusing it. Westview gives her Vision, children, marriage and a rotating television fantasy in which every new sitcom era provides another structure capable of protecting her from the fact that the life she wants is gone.

The important choice is not ultimately whether Wanda can overpower Agatha Harkness. Wanda’s crisis arrives when she fully confronts the cost of maintaining the Hex. The people of Westview are suffering so she can continue living as the wife and mother she desperately wants to be. Preserving that identity therefore requires her to keep taking freedom away from everyone around her.

When Wanda lowers the Hex, she loses Vision and the boys again. The story makes identity inseparable from cost: she cannot simply declare herself the person she wants to be if maintaining that self requires everyone else to pay for it.

Sam Wilson Has To Decide Whether Captain America Is Inherited Or Chosen

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier makes the post-Steve vacuum literal. Steve gives Sam the shield, but possession of the object does not automatically give Sam a usable identity. Sam turns it over to the Smithsonian, the government installs John Walker, and the series spends its story converting “Who is Captain America?” from a succession question into an argument about history, institutions, race and moral authority.

Isaiah Bradley is essential because he destroys any possibility of treating the shield as an uncomplicated inheritance. Isaiah served the same country, was experimented on, imprisoned and erased by it. By the time Sam finally carries the shield publicly, he is accepting the identity while refusing to ignore everything ugly attached to it.

Steve cannot tell Sam what Captain America must become next. That is precisely the point. Sam has to choose what the mantle means when the man who once embodied it is no longer there to provide the answer.

Loki Goes From Wanting A Throne To Becoming The Thing Holding Everyone Else’s Choices Together

Loki may be the cleanest version of this entire thematic argument because the show turns identity and free will into literal story machinery. The TVA begins by telling Loki that the version standing in front of them is a mistake. Then Mobius forces him to watch the life the “correct” Loki was supposed to live: Frigga’s death, reconciliation with Thor and eventually Loki’s own murder at the hands of Thanos.

His identity has already been completed without him. Then the show makes the problem even stranger by surrounding him with Sylvie, Classic Loki, Kid Loki, President Loki and, yes, Alligator Loki. They all carry the same nominal identity while producing wildly different lives from it.

Season 2 turns that question into a moral choice. Early Loki wants a throne because he believes ruling will finally validate him. At the end, he receives an image that resembles the throne he always wanted, but the value has completely reversed. Loki destroys the Loom, gathers the dying branches and condemns himself to isolation so everyone living on those branches can retain the freedom to make choices he cannot dictate.

Same image. Opposite meaning. That is exactly how character change becomes visible.

Peter Parker Saves Reality By Giving Up Peter Parker

Spider-Man: No Way Home takes the same argument down to the level of one person’s social identity. Peter begins the film because the world knows he is Spider-Man and he wants Doctor Strange to remove the consequences. His initial desire is essentially to keep every part of his old life while making everybody else forget the piece that has become inconvenient.

The climax takes that option away. The ruptures in reality can be closed only when everyone forgets Peter Parker completely. Peter therefore saves everyone by surrendering the identity he spent most of the movie trying to preserve.

The coffee-shop scene with MJ is what makes the sacrifice a choice instead of a piece of magical plot mechanics. Peter walks in planning to restore the relationship. He sees MJ and Ned building lives without him, notices the wound on MJ’s forehead and decides not to put himself back into their world simply because he is lonely enough to want it.

The multiverse supplies the mechanism. Identity supplies the story.

Shuri Has To Decide What Black Panther Means Without T’Challa

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever starts from another missing center. T’Challa is gone, Wakanda is grieving and Shuri has lost the person through whom much of her relationship to family, tradition and the Black Panther mantle had been organized.

Her artificial heart-shaped herb gives her the power of the Black Panther, but her ancestral-plane encounter with Killmonger reveals the actual story problem. What kind of Black Panther is she going to become? Killmonger recognizes the rage inside her and offers a version of the mantle organized around vengeance.

The final confrontation with Namor forces the answer into action. Shuri has him beaten and can kill him. Instead, she chooses the alliance her mother had been trying to build and refuses to let grief complete the transformation Killmonger predicted.

The mantle survives. Shuri decides what kind of person will carry it.

Shang-Chi Inherits His Father’s Power Without Inheriting His Father’s Identity

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings barely needs the literal multiverse to belong inside this thematic pattern. Wenwu has spent Shang-Chi’s life defining him through inheritance: this is the family you came from, this is the violence inside you and this is therefore the kind of man you are capable of becoming.

That is why the Ten Rings changing hands matters more than the simple transfer of a weapon. Shang-Chi eventually inherits his father’s power without accepting the worldview Wenwu attached to it. He can carry something inherited without allowing inheritance to become destiny.

Again, the central question is choice. Who gets to decide what the thing handed down to you means?

The Truby Test: These Are Variations On The Same Moral Problem

This is where John Truby’s character-web idea becomes incredibly useful. Truby argues that characters become richer when they are designed in relationship to one another rather than treated as isolated inventions. The hero, opponent, allies and other major characters can become different responses to a common moral problem.

The Multiverse Saga obviously has not functioned as one literal character web. Half these people have never occupied the same room. But Doomsday now has the opportunity to turn them into a thematic character web by forcing their different solutions to the same problem into direct competition.

That problem can be stated pretty cleanly: How much of your identity is inherited, and how much do you get to choose?

Sam inherits Steve’s shield and has to redefine Captain America. Shuri inherits T’Challa’s mantle and has to decide whether vengeance will define what Black Panther becomes. Shang-Chi inherits his father’s Rings without surrendering his moral authorship to his father. Peter loses every relationship that once confirmed Peter Parker existed and still chooses to be Spider-Man. Wanda tries to manufacture a reality that preserves wife and mother as identities because she cannot bear the cost of losing them. Loki discovers that infinite versions of “Loki” are capable of making completely different moral choices.

These are not the same plots. That distinction is important. They are different dramatic experiments built around related questions of identity, belonging, inheritance, freedom and choice.

That is also why the name “Multiverse Saga” may have trained us to look for the wrong kind of connective tissue.

The Multiverse Is A Physical Metaphor For The Saga’s Identity Problem

What is a multiverse if not identity turned into geography?

Every alternate reality automatically asks some version of the same question: how much can change before this person stops being this person? What makes one Loki a tyrant, another a hero and another an alligator? Why can three Peter Parkers have different faces, different losses and different histories while still feeling like variations of the same essential person?

That is where alternate universes become dramatically useful. A multiverse can take something internal — regret, identity, unrealized possibility, the road not taken — and put another physical version of it directly in front of the character.

No Way Home does that by giving Tom Holland’s Peter two older Peters who have already lived through versions of loss he has only just begun to experience. Multiverse of Madness repeatedly confronts Stephen Strange with versions of himself whose desire for control has produced catastrophe. Wanda crosses realities because another Wanda is physically living the motherhood she believes should belong to her.

Deadpool & Wolverine turns the idea into something even more explicit. Wade Wilson wants his life to matter, and his universe is dying after losing its anchor being. Wade responds by trying to acquire another Wolverine as though the correct hero can simply be swapped into the empty position.

Instead, he winds up with a Logan defined by the belief that he failed the people who needed him. Wade is carrying his own fear that he will never become the important person he desperately wants to be. Their final choice at the Time Ripper works because heroism stops being an identity either man can claim and becomes an action they are willing to take together.

They become heroic when they are willing to accept the cost themselves.

That distinction is going to matter enormously if Doomsday really does force characters to decide who pays for survival.

Thunderbolts* Finally Turns The Post-Endgame Vacuum Into A Team Story

This is where Thunderbolts* becomes much more important than “Marvel introduces another superhero team.” These characters begin the movie as people whose isolation makes them useful to Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Yelena is emotionally hollowed out. John Walker lost the public heroic identity he wanted. Ghost has been surviving alone. Bob is so fractured that the Void becomes an entire destructive identity capable of swallowing the people around him.

Val puts several of them in the same room expecting them to eliminate one another. That is the starting value of the team: isolation weaponized.

The climax reverses it. The answer to Bob is not finding somebody physically stronger than Sentry. Yelena and the others enter the Void and refuse to abandon Bob inside the worst part of himself. Relationship becomes the action.

Then Marvel lands the thematic reversal by giving these damaged people the Avengers name. They do not become a team because Nick Fury picked the six best résumés. They become a team after the story demonstrates that they are willing to remain connected when isolation would be easier.

Put that next to Endgame and the larger arc becomes interesting. The original Avengers conclude their story by scattering after saving existence. One of the teams carrying the Avengers identity into Doomsday begins as isolated people who were literally placed in a room to destroy one another and discovers its identity through refusing to leave a damaged person behind.

That is not proof Marvel planned all of this seven years ago. It is excellent material for a writer trying to build retroactive coherence now.

The Fantastic Four Give Doomsday A Team That Already Knows What It Is

The Fantastic Four: First Steps provides an almost perfect contrast to the post-Endgame Avengers problem. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben arrive from another universe with something the main MCU has spent years struggling to rebuild: a coherent family unit with an established shared identity.

Their story therefore does not ask whether they count as a team. It asks what that bond costs when the rest of the world makes a legitimate claim against it.

Galactus turns Franklin into the unbearable version of that question. Surrender the child and Earth can survive. Refuse, and billions of lives remain at risk. Reed can intellectually understand why sacrificing Franklin can be expressed as an equation even while he cannot accept the answer as a father. Sue draws an even harder line around the idea that their son cannot become expendable simply because the number of people on the other side is larger.

That gives Doomsday a family whose identity has been forged around refusing to reduce one another to variables. Now put that family into a multiverse crisis where entire universes may become variables.

There should be conflict there.

If there is not, Marvel is wasting the setup.

Doom Only Works If He Turns Those Different Identities Into Opposing Answers

This is where Doctor Doom stops being a casting event and becomes a real antagonist.

Truby’s strongest opponent is not merely somebody standing between the hero and a goal. The opponent becomes dramatically richer when both sides are competing over the same fundamental problem while advocating incompatible ways of solving it. That turns plot conflict into moral argument.

Avengers: Doomsday already has the ideal shared problem available: reality is collapsing. Disney’s current official description says heroes from three distinct universes are being set on a deadly collision course. Everyone entering that story can therefore want some version of the same thing.

Survival.

The drama lives in what each person believes survival allows them to do.

Reed Richards can think the unthinkable because somebody has to solve the equation before catastrophe arrives. Sue can remind him that people do not become numbers simply because the equation is terrifying. Sam Wilson carries a heroic identity built around serving people without claiming ownership over them. Yelena and the New Avengers have just learned that saving a dangerous person can require entering the darkness with them instead of eliminating them from a safe distance.

Loki is sustaining a multiverse whose branches are allowed to exist precisely because he refuses to decide which lives deserve continuation. Peter Parker has already accepted a devastating personal cost rather than force everyone else to carry it. Wade and Logan become heroes by choosing sacrifice for themselves instead of assigning sacrifice to somebody weaker.

Those philosophies overlap. They are not identical.

That is exactly what the screenplay should exploit.

The least interesting version of Doomsday introduces the Avengers, New Avengers, Fantastic Four and X-Men, gives us an obligatory misunderstanding, and then puts everybody on the same side while Doom becomes a giant health bar. The stronger version makes the collision ideological before it becomes physical.

If the survival of one reality threatens another, heroic characters can become legitimate opponents without anyone suddenly becoming stupid or evil. Reed can reach one answer. Sam can reach another. Magneto can have an entirely different definition of what protecting his people requires. Doom can enter that disagreement offering the one solution nobody else is powerful enough, ruthless enough or organized enough to impose.

Now we have drama.

Doctor Doom’s “Stolen Lives” Argument Can Put The Entire Saga On Trial

This is why Doom’s line from the publicly released footage interests me so much: “All of you have lived stolen lives, but now you must give them back.”

The threat matters because so many Marvel victories since Endgame involve characters rejecting the life history seemed prepared to assign them. Steve takes the life with Peggy that his original timeline denied him. Loki survives beyond the death that once completed his story and eventually gives countless timelines permission to continue. Peter alters the memories of everyone he loves so reality can survive. Heroes repeatedly cross boundaries, reject predetermined outcomes and insist there must be another way.

Marvel has trained us to experience many of those choices as victories.

Doom does not have to change the facts to attack them. He only has to change the moral interpretation.

That is an antagonist move. He can argue that the problem is not that these heroes failed. The problem is that they succeeded. Every impossible rescue, altered timeline, surviving branch and refusal to accept the prescribed cost becomes evidence that reality is now carrying consequences somebody eventually has to settle.

This is also where Robert Downey Jr. playing Doom becomes more useful than simple stunt casting. Tony Stark spent much of his life responding to fear through control. Ultron is the clearest example: Tony sees catastrophe coming and tries to build a system powerful enough to prevent uncertainty altogether. His final growth in Endgame comes when he stops trying to engineer a world where nobody has to pay and accepts a cost that falls on him.

Doom can represent the opposite endpoint. Faced with a multiverse that looks impossibly unstable, he can conclude that the mistake was ever allowing everyone else to choose in the first place.

That gives the Multiverse Saga something it has desperately needed: an opponent capable of turning all those separate character stories into evidence for one worldview.

This Is Where Retroactive Coherence Either Works Or Falls Apart

Retroactive coherence does not mean declaring every dangling post-credit scene brilliant because a later movie finally references it. Marvel cannot put Shang-Chi’s Rings, Kamala Khan’s bangle, an incursion, the TVA and Doctor Doom into the same exposition scene and expect the audience to applaud because all the nouns finally touched.

The connections have to change behavior.

That is the craft test. If a connection exists only to explain continuity, it is information. If the connection forces a character to choose differently, changes an alliance, exposes a value conflict or raises the cost of solving the problem, it has become drama.

Sam should make decisions differently because he is now responsible for people carrying the Avengers name. Reed’s solution should create moral pressure on characters who do not share his assumptions. The Fantastic Four’s refusal to sacrifice Franklin should matter when someone proposes a universe-scale sacrifice. Loki’s commitment to preserving branches should become incompatible with any plan that creates stability by pruning possibilities. The X-Men should arrive with the loyalties of people whose entire world may be treated as expendable by heroes from another reality.

That is how the earlier fragmentation acquires a dramatic function.

Each group has spent years living inside its own moral ecosystem. Doomsday can finally remove the walls and discover that these people do not agree simply because the Marvel logo appears before all of their movies.

The Avengers: Doomsday Multiverse Cannot Just Collide Geographically

The official premise gives Stephen McFeely and the Russos a beautiful external story engine: heroes from three distinct universes placed on a deadly collision course. Separate worlds that were never designed to coexist are literally being forced into the same story.

But “collision” has to mean more than Ian McKellen’s Magneto standing next to Anthony Mackie’s Captain America while everybody in the theater loses their minds. That moment can be fun. It cannot be the dramatic point.

The strongest version of the Avengers: Doomsday multiverse gives each world a legitimate survival claim. The Avengers are protecting their reality. The Fantastic Four are protecting theirs. The X-Men are protecting theirs. Nobody needs to become evil because each group can be morally correct from inside its own story while still becoming an obstacle to everybody else.

This is where McKee’s Crisis becomes incredibly useful. A real crisis arrives after easier options have been stripped away and the protagonist has to choose between meaningful alternatives carrying genuine cost. Marvel has spent years teaching its heroes to search for another way: save Vision, save Peter, save Wanda, save the branches, save Bob, save Franklin, save the supposedly doomed universe.

Doomsday can finally put that instinct under maximum pressure.

What happens when there really is no clean way to save everybody?

If Doom has an answer that actually works, the conflict gets much nastier. Survival may be possible. The price could be giving one man the authority to determine which world continues, which people are sacrificed and how much freedom everyone else must surrender to keep reality stable.

Then the Avengers-level question is no longer whether the heroes can punch the villain hard enough before a timer reaches zero. It becomes whether survival without choice, agency or moral responsibility still counts as victory.

How The Multiverse Saga Could Lead Into Avengers: Doomsday

Joe Russo recently described a “natural progression” from Endgame into Doomsday. The version of that statement that makes the most story sense to me has almost nothing to do with discovering that Endgame secretly planted Doctor Doom in the background or that every Disney+ show was executing one hidden blueprint.

The progression can be emotional and structural.

Endgame destroys the old center. The stories afterward follow characters trying to define themselves without it. Some inherit mantles and redefine them. Some reject identities imposed by other people. Some lose families and build new ones. Some encounter alternate selves. Some discover that preserving another person’s freedom matters more than controlling the outcome. Some broken people eventually stumble into carrying the Avengers name because the old institution never really rebuilt itself.

Then Doomsday arrives and turns all of those private answers into a public crisis.

Who are you when your world is no longer guaranteed to exist? What do you owe people from another reality? Is protecting your family still heroic when another family pays the price? Who gets to choose which world survives? How much freedom can you surrender before the thing you saved stops resembling the life you were trying to protect?

Those are Multiverse Saga questions.

They are also exactly the kind of questions an Avengers movie should force characters to answer together.

Doomsday Does Not Have To Fix The Multiverse Saga. It Has To Reveal What The Pieces Are For

This distinction is the reason I think the argument works without turning into Marvel apologetics. A strong Doomsday cannot retroactively make every Phase Four or Phase Five decision correct. It cannot erase the Kang pivot, repair weak connective tissue or make every abandoned setup suddenly feel essential.

It does not have to.

What the movie can do is take the condition Marvel actually created and dramatize it. The MCU after Endgame became a world without a clear heroic center, populated by people rebuilding identity in isolation from one another. The multiverse then expands that condition from people to worlds: separate histories, separate loyalties and separate answers existing alongside one another until continued separation becomes impossible.

That is where Truby’s designing principle becomes a useful final pressure test. A designing principle is the deeper process that organizes the events of a story and makes the parts feel like they belong to the same whole. Marvel may not have entered the Multiverse Saga with a clear enough one, but Doomsday can still reveal an emergent version:

After Endgame destroys the center of the MCU, follow heroes and worlds learning to define themselves separately until the collapse of reality forces those separate identities to decide whether they can survive together.

That is a story.

More importantly, it is a story capable of using Marvel’s actual history instead of pretending that history was cleaner than it was.

Maybe The Multiverse Saga’s Disconnection Can Finally Become The Point

So can Avengers: Doomsday turn the Multiverse Saga’s biggest structural weakness into something dramatically meaningful? Yes, but only if Marvel earns the retroactive coherence. The movie cannot simply tell us that all these stories were connected. It has to force the characters shaped by those separate stories into a crisis where their different answers finally matter.

The proof begins at the end of Endgame, when Tony dies, Steve leaves and the team that held the MCU together scatters after its greatest victory. The final proof has to come in Doomsday’s crisis, when heroes from separate worlds can no longer protect their own lives in isolation and Doom forces them to decide what they owe one another when survival itself carries a cost.

That is the craft lesson far beyond Marvel: disconnected pieces become a story when the climax reveals the pressure they were uniquely built to carry. An ending does not have to prove the middle was planned perfectly. It has to make the middle matter.

The Multiverse Saga broke the MCU apart. Doomsday has to prove the pieces belong in the same story.