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The Doctor Strange of What If…? discovered what Absolute Points are — and just how important they are to the future of entire timelines.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for What If…? Season 1, Episode 4, “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?,” streaming now on Disney+.
In Avengers: Endgame, as the titular heroes try to figure out how to venture into the past and effectively borrow the Infinity Stones, we learn that time-travel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe operates on a specific path. Going to the past and changing the outcome of an event will not alter your own past, but rather create a branching reality due to its nature as a Nexus Point (as established in Loki). However, there is also something known as an Absolute Point — a point that cannot be changed, for doing so would permanently break a universe by seemingly creating a pure paradox.
The Doctor Strange of the timeline introduced in What If…? Episode 4 encounters such a phenomenon when he tries to alter the past — and in turn, accidentally wipes out his entire reality in the process of breaking an Absolute Point.
The Stephen Strange of What If…? — otherwise known as Strange Supreme — is a variant of the Marvel sorcerer. In this reality, it was not his gifted hands that he lost in a fateful car wreck, but rather Christine Palmer, who he was still in a relationship with. Christine’s demise inspired Stephen to travel the world, putting him on the path to become the Sorcerer Supreme, fight back against Dormammu, save his entire world, and gain full access to the Time Stone. But this variant of Stephen, still in mourning over Christine, decided to try and use the Time Stone to change the timeline and alter things so she’d never died.
Every attempt to restore her, however, just leads to another death for Christine. The universe seems to conspire to kill her — because she has to die. As an echo of the Ancient One explains to Stephen after multiple failed attempts to alter the past, Christine’s death in this world is an Absolute Point. Without her demise, Strange doesn’t become a Sorcerer, doesn’t defeat Dormammu, and doesn’t gain access to the Time Stone to come back in the first place. Destroying the Absolute Point and altering his own timeline won’t just create a branching path, instead it would lead to the destruction of his entire reality. But Strange’s grief overwhelms his reason, and he goes about amassing the power necessary to alter the past.
Even when a splintered copy of Doctor Strange — the part of him that humbly and sadly accepted Christine’s death and was given true form by the Ancient One’s echo –confronts him, Strange Supreme can’t be stopped. Defeating and absorbing Doctor Strange into himself, Strange Supreme becomes powerful enough to shatter the moment Christine died and save her. But the whole of reality fades away around them, his actions having wiped out everything. Uatu even confronts Strange and reminds him neither of them are gods, and behaving as such has led to nothing but ruin. The Watcher and Strange Supreme can only watch as Christine fades from existence as well, and the entire reality around them is left a blank void — all because Strange broke an Absolute Point.
It’s a harrowing sight to see, with every character who had ever lived in that entire universe erased from existence, without even knowing why. Good, evil, none of that mattered. Not even Thanos and his plans for the universe resulted in so much loss. Absolute Points might be the rule that no sorcerer, god, or Infinity Stone can change. Absolute Points represent pure moments of existence, after all, which tracks with other Marvel Universes that became unstable due to the alteration of their actual history instead of just creating a branching timeline (like in the Age of Ultron comics event). Absolute Points could easily become one of the most dangerous and important elements of any time-traveling adventure going forward in the ever-expanding MCU.
What If …? is available to stream on Disney+, with a new episode arriving every Wednesday.
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