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Thena’s struggles with Mahd Wy’ry provided the backbone to her character arc, but that arc is never really resolved throughout Eternals.
There is a lot going on in Eternals, including the ten heroes previously unseen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who each needed their arcs established and concluded amidst a main plot. Along the way, however, it seems that not all those arcs saw the conclusion they deserved. The condition Mahd Wy’ry served as the backbone to Thena’s character arc, providing a substantial subplot to the film which created some of its earliest conflicts, yet none of those conflicts were ultimately resolved, leaving Thena’s Mahd Wy’ry to either be cured in a later MCU installment or forgotten altogether.
The larger plot of Eternals involves the immortal heroes’ mission to Earth thousands of years ago, where they protect humanity from the Deviants who threaten the early stages of civilization. The key twist to the film is that Earth is not the super team’s first mission, as they believed. It’s actually their latest mission over the course of millions of years in which the Eternals similarly cultivated the populations to countless planets for the purpose of fueling the birth of new Celestials. The Eternals’ memories are then wiped after each mission, but their member Thena suffers from a condition known as Mahd Wy’ry — a side effect of vestigial memories.
Mahd Wy’ry starts affecting Thena centuries prior to the film’s plot, driving her to fits of uncontrollable violence, as she attacks her teammates while rambling fragmented bits of information about her past lives. Her fellow Eternals narrowly escape her first fit with their lives intact, and given the recent conclusion of their mission to stop the Deviants, they decide the best route is to hide her away in a secluded part of the planet with her companion Gilgamesh, who is the only one capable of soothing her back to herself.
The condition makes for the core conflict Thena struggles with throughout the film, as the only solution presented for Mahd Wy’ry would be to erase of all her memories, including her present life. Thena and the Eternals decide the cost is not worth it, but by the end of the film, they never find a resolution.
Thena’s last fit of Mahd Wy’ry seemingly occurs during her final battle with an evolved Deviant, but she seemingly recovers just in time to kill the Deviant unexpectedly and save herself. From there, she disembarks on a mission with her fellow Eternals, her condition unresolved and possibly all the worse given Gilgamesh’s death earlier in the film.
In the absence of the only person who could soothe her, Thena is seemingly zooming through space in close quarters with Druig and Makkari, the latter of whom was the exact figure she nearly killed during her first bout of Mahd Wy’ry. There is no resolution to the central conflict of her character arc, and even its origins continue to hang in mystery. Although it’s explained in the film what caused her Mahd Wy’ry, with her lingering memories identified as the culprit, it’s not actually explained why she was the only Eternal to suffer from the problem. Her memory should have been wiped along with everyone else’s, but it seemingly wasn’t.
The end result is that a vital piece of film feels unfinished, and it’s up to the MCU projects that follow to tie up the loose end. Some explanation for why Thena was the only one afflicted with Mahd Wy’ry, as well as an explanation for why it was no longer a concern by the end of the film, stands out as probably the most important element of the character for subsequent films to resolve. Without resolution, her character arc makes little sense.
Indeed, if the MCU were to ignore it altogether it would be hard to look past. There have been unresolved plotlines in past MCU films to be sure, so this would be far from the first, but it may just be the most egregious, and there’s seemingly no way to address the problem until the Eternals return, as the film’s title card promised.
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