Why didn’t Doctor Strange stay in the original winning timeline?ون
In Avengers: Infinity War, Doctor Strange experiences 14,000,605 timeline scenarios, one of which was a win. Why does he proceed to return back to his origin point so he can say he already did it once, just so he can do the same thing again? It already happened and he was there, why not just stay there instead of going back in time to say his plan that worked works?
There are a couple of explanations I can imagine for this. One is that he just says there was one victory every time and it’s always a lie and the actual first victory was the last time.
The other is that the one victory so far just wasn’t good enough so he tries for a better one and just accepts the final outcome, which may or may not be an improvement to the already established win scenario. If that’s the case then I would expect more experimentation to find better and better scenarios after establishing one baseline strategy that works. In either case, actually, finding incrementally better scenarios sounds like the right way to proceed.
-
6if i recall he was never in those timelines, he was looking into them like how The Ancient One could see her end – Memor-X 8 hours ago
2 Answers
You misunderstood one important thing: Dr. Strange did not travel through time. He just looked into 14mil different possible futures to see the one scenario where they could win. His body stayed in the present all the time, as you can clearly see during this whole scene.
And even if he would have been able to really travel there: this future would not be possible if he left, as e.g. Thanos getting the Time Stone was one important thing in the plan...
I may stand to be corrected as I have only seen Endgame twice back in May, but it seems, especially towards the very climax, that he slightly shepherds the last few moments towards the win, such as his words to Tony - "If I tell you how it ends it may not happen that way" (or something similar) and right at the very end, it seems that both Tony are on the very same page as he gives some sort of wink or encouragement with regard to him making the snap.
He also may have had to return to the starting point in order to be able to surrender the Time Stone and prevent Thanos from killing Tony - regardless of whether he was just observing or actually living (or being snapped out of) the scenarios.
-
1His exact words IIRC are: "If I tell you what happens, it won't happen." – F1Krazy 56 mins ago