Doctor Doom is the Fantastic Four’s greatest enemy, one of the best supervillains in all of comic books. His rivalry with Marvel’s First Family is legendary, and he has gone to cosmic lengths to try and wipe out the people who have foiled his plans of domination at every turn. Recently, Doom took Steven Strange’s title as Sorcerer Supreme, and declared himself the emperor of the world. Obviously, the Fantastic Four didn’t take too kindly to the Latvarian dictator’s new world order, and tried to take him down. They would have beaten him, too, but Doom revealed a new strategy to bring them down for good, and without help, it might just spell the end for the Fantastic Four.
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Step One; Time Displacement
The Fantastic Four decided that enough was enough and tried to take down the self-proclaimed Emperor Doom once and for all. However, before they could knock him out, Doom cast a spell to catapult the Four across time. Johnny ended up on Earth before it produced oxygen, the Thing was dropped in a dinosaur-infested jungle, Mister Fantastic was stranded in the medieval ages, and Sue almost burnt up nearly eight billion years in the future. Thankfully, while Doctor Doom plans infinite ways to destroy the Fantastic Four, Mister Fantastic has planned infinite emergency plans to keep them alive. He set up a tracker in the Forever Stone, one of the world’s longest lasting geological formations that is always easily accessible no matter the time period. Once there, they would carve the date they were stranded on and the person farthest in the future would summon the Time-Sled to pick everyone up. The only problem is that Sue was that person and her tracker stopped working, meaning that nobody could summon the sled without her getting lost forever.
Thankfully, they managed to solve this temporal problem. Mister Fantastic reasoned out why Sue didn’t instantly appear, then created artificial diamonds which he buried miles beneath the Earth’s surface. He made arrows of diamonds that would never move, all over the Earth, pointing to the Forever Stone. Sue deduced Reed would do something like that and literally made the entirety of the Earth’s crust invisible to see his message. With teamwork that transcended billions of years, Sue called in the Time-Sled and rescued her family. They booked it back to the present to beat the block off of Emperor Doom, and they did, with Doom asking how it was possible they survived. Mister Fantastic explained their failsafe, but then Doom started to laugh. Unfortunately for the Four, Reed had played directly into Doom’s hands, and he was about to unleash his nigh-unbeatable plan. Again.
Save Scumming to Victory
Doom explained that he used an altered version of Doctor Strange’s time magic to create a sort of temporal save state that he could reset to whenever he wished. Every time the Fantastic Four beat him, Doom would simply figure out how they did it and reset, then try and destroy them a different way with the knowledge only he kept. He’d already reset dozens of times by this point, and said that this was the first time the Four used the Time-Sled, which he would account for when he reset and tried to destroy them again. Doom gloated like the malevolent dictator he is, calling Reed a fool for explaining how they survived, and said that he would keep going back to his save point over and over until they were destroyed. No one could stop him.
Unfortunately for Doom, his critical mistake was doing exactly what he just chastised Mister Fantastic for. By explaining his plan, it gave the family a chance to do something before their timeline was wiped from existence. Johnny looked at the Time-Sled, and Sue managed to piece together his idea. It was the one advantage they had over Doom in the moment, and could turn everything around. With her final moment, Sue managed to send the Time-Sled back to the Fantastic Four’s farmhouse earlier that morning, which should tip off their past selves that something is seriously wrong with their plan to take down Doctor Doom. Doom’s plan is absolutely perfect, yet like so many other times, his hubris will be the instrument of his defeat.
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Image courtesy of Marvel Studios.
