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WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Eternals, now playing in theaters.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe had to make some daunting decisions about how to deal with a post Blip reality. In Spiderman: Far From Home, there is an exposition-laden student newscast at Peter’s school, delivered by Betty Brant, that supplies commentary and footage about how the returned classmates have been inconvenienced by the elimination and sudden return of half the student body five years later.
In Eternals, Dane Whitman confronts the truth about his girlfriend’s extraterrestrial origins and super-powered colleagues and asks her a lot of pertinent questions on behalf of the audience, including why the group never stopped wars or why they abstained from involving themselves in the Thanos conflict. However, he did not ask if any of the Eternals were snapped themselves, and it turns out the true answer to all of these questions are closely interwoven.
In an interview with Cinemablend’s Eric Eisenberg, Chloé Zhao answered this last question directly, but it is important to remember the context of the question and the precautions she took in answering. The reporter asked her whether or not any of the Eternals had been snapped, and she said, “Well, I can’t say this out loud, but if you think about… if you think about what the Celestials told them. If you think about what the Celestials told them about themselves, technically they can’t get blipped.”
The reporter also indicated in the piece that she was trying to avoid spoilers at the time, but now her intent is crystal clear. Thanos was concerned with eliminating half of all sentient life in the universe to serve his principles as an eco-terrorist. He had been enacting his vision one slow planet-wide genocide at a time using the blunt instruments at his disposal, which included the Chitauri, the Black Order, his adopted daughters and a host of assorted powerful minions across the galaxy. A being dedicated to efficiency, his search for the Stones was always about this one impossible goal.
He had no desire to vanquish enemies, settle scores or rule over anything, as evidenced by his destruction of the Stones and his contemplative short-lived retirement on the Garden. Once he had all of the Stones in his possession, he killed trillions of lives that would produce strains on their local environments and brought about a so-called balance, though brutal, everywhere in the universe. Zhao’s words do not imply that the Eternals, who can die like anyone else through blood loss, the draining of their vital energies or any other presumably numerous macabre set of circumstances, are somehow immune to the power of the Infinity Stones. The Eternals simply are not alive in the sense that Thanos invoked.
Sersi learns from Arishem that the Eternals across the galaxy were not born on Olympia but created in a place called the World Forge. Her life on Earth was one of many missions to which she had been assigned over millions of years in service to Arishem as nest guardians for embryonic Celestials. When Arishem created the Deviants in the same Forge to remove apex predators from specific biomes and allow for intelligent life to thrive, they unmade their programming and evolved past their creation parameters. As a check to restore balance, the Celestial Prime created the Eternals to curb the influence and maturation of the Deviants.
Without getting into the messy language of spirits, souls or chakras, it is clear that the Eternals lack a quality that other sentient life forms possess. In addition to the loophole immunity of Thanos’ word choice, the film lays out other examples of this missing component. Given what Arishem reveals, it seems to be beyond his power — or the power of the Celestials at large — to incubate their offspring in other ways.
Again from an efficiency perspective, if the Space Gods were capable of creating a form of life that could catalyze the energies they require for birth, then orchestrating complex predator-prey cycles would be moot. They could use the forge to create seven billion humanoids whose vital emotional and intelligence quotients could power their progeny, but Eternals don’t serve that purpose because the Celestials seemingly do not have the ability to replicate what is uniquely intrinsic to nonartificial life.
This also creates many more questions concerning what and when some of the characters knew or suspected certain key pieces of data. Phastos is an accomplished engineer, inventor and scientist. It seems odd that it did not occur to him as a purely probabilistic matter that none of the Eternals were snapped. Given that there were ten of them, statistically, one would expect five of them to have dusted along with the rest. The fact that the number was zero would seem to beg investigation on his part. This assumes that he was aware of Thanos’ precise wording, however, and there is no reason why he would have been privy to that, though many of the characters seem very informed about all of the details surrounding the Avengers, Thanos and the Infinity Stones. It also assumes that he did a headcount after the Snap, which also isn’t clear. The film outlines that many of them haven’t seen each other in many years, but it does not speak to whether or not they were aware of how the others were doing during their time apart.
There is also the question of whether Thanos’ words were chosen to spare the Eternals. As Eternals makes clear with the appearance of Eros, the Mad Titan’s brother, Thanos is aware of the Eternals’ existence, but it is unclear if he was also aware of their nature. Considering that there is a Prime within every Eternal splinter cell who communicates with Arishem and is privy to this knowledge, it is not inconceivable that Thanos may have known this when he thought half the universe into non-existence.
Whether Thanos was motivated by sparing his brother or other members of his family is unknown, but the implications of this information are vast. The MCU is drawing a line in the sand about the fundamental nature of life, whether it chooses to adopt or abstain from messy language, the Eternals — and perhaps Vision — sit on one side of that line, and other sentients do not.
Marvel Studios’ Eternals is now in theaters.
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