Avengers: Endgame Pays Tribute to Controversial Captain America Moment

Avengers: Endgame is full of memorable moments, so many actually that it’s hard to process them all in one viewing. One moment about midway through though is going to be quite hard to forget, especially for Captain America fans who follow the comics. The star-spangled Avenger has had many popular storylines over the years, but there’s one recent story that definitely caused a lot of controversy when it debuted, and Marvel Studios and the Russo Brothers decided to tackle that story in a perfect and humorous way.

We’re about to get into some big spoilers here, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet you’ve been warned. For reals, last chance….we good? Good.

Captain America, Iron Man, and Ant-Man end up traveling back to the battle of New York to track down three of the six Infinity Stones. One of the stones is the Mind Stone housed in Loki’s scepter, and after he is arrested by the heroes his scepter is put in a case and given to SHIELD agents. As we now know those SHIELD agents are actually undercover HYDRA agents (revealed in Captain America: Winter Soldier), and Cap uses this knowledge to his benefit.

Donning his original costume Cap gets on the elevator with the SHIELD/HYDRA agents and gets right in the middle of them. He says he needs to take the case with the scepter and tells them the Secretary approved it. They go to check if that’s correct, but Cap then leans over and says “that won’t be necessary” and whispers into the lead agent’s ear “Hail HYDRA”.

The elevator then opens and Cap walks out of the elevator with the case in hand, and he’s got a big smile on his face as he does it.

Aside from being a nice homage to the now iconic scene in Captain America: Winter Soldier, this also pays tribute to the controversial Marvel Comics event Secret Empire. That event featured the divisive reveal that Captain America was working for HYDRA, and he went on to turn on all his former friends and take over the world and replace our government, ruling over the new HYDRA society.

It was revealed that this was thanks to the Red Skull, who had managed to convince Kobik (the sentient Cosmic Cube) to turn Captain America into the best version of himself, which in her mind was a Hydra version. She then rewrote the timeline so that Steve Rogers was trained as a HYDRA agent, and thus the Supreme Commander was born.

We did eventually get the real Steve Rogers back, though the Supreme Commander version is still around.

With what happened at the end of Endgame, it doesn’t look like a Steve Rogers version of this storyline will ever happen, but who knows, maybe the MCU will adopt this storyline in a new way at some point down the line.

Avengers: Endgame is in theaters now.

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