I spend a lot of time thinking about Captain America. I think about how, after six Marvel Studios films featuring Chris Evans in the role, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s impossible to trace where Evans ends and where Cap begins. I think about how he’s evolved from a character whose duty was to serve his country into a character whose country let him down. I think about how he bicep-curled a helicopter.
And after seeing Avengers: Infinity War, I’ve thought a lot about what happens when Captain America dies.
In Infinity War, Cap and Thanos’s worldviews are symmetrical
One of the biggest revelations in Infinity War is Thanos’s motivations for culling the universe: He believes that in order to sustain life, we have to reduce it by half. Resources are finite, and life is a burden on those resources. Eliminate life to an ideal degree (roughly half, according to Thanos’s math), and both life and resources reach an optimal level.
In other words, Thanos believes in trading lives.
The ultimate example of his willingness to trade is his choice to throw his adopted daughter Gamora off a cliff in order to obtain the Soul Stone. His sights are set on completing the Infinity Gauntlet and using it to create his vision of a utopia. Killing his daughter, whom he seems to genuinely love, is the price he’s willing to pay.
Steve Rogers and everything he stands for — and, by extension, the standard for what superheroes in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe strive to be — are the antithesis to Thanos. When faced with the choice between ripping the Mind Stone from Vision’s forehead and killing him, or protecting Vision and risking the fate of half the universe, Rogers refuses to trade a single life in the name of preserving his and countless others’. He’d rather die fighting than sacrifice an innocent to avoid the fight.
This stance is remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, Vision is an AI — Tony Stark’s computer program upgraded with the power of an Infinity Stone — which raises the question of whether Vision is even “alive” to begin with. Also, in contrast to Gamora and Thanos, Vision isn’t someone with a particularly distinct relationship to Steve Rogers. But despite this, Cap doesn’t hesitate in choosing to save Vision at all costs, risking the lives of Avengers and Wakandans alike to protect him.
When Avengers 4 unfolds next year it will most likely involve the resurrection of its vaporized heroes (especially those with confirmed sequels on the schedule). Because of this, I’d expect there to be a continued emphasis on Steve’s “we don’t trade lives” mantra — it’s one of the few lines he’s given in Infinity War, and it’s repeated — in contrast to Thanos’s worldview. There’s just too much symmetry and thematic opportunity there for Marvel to ignore it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if in Avengers 4, in order to undo Thanos’s massive cull, Steve Rogers would have to sacrifice himself to undo the damage of not trading Vision’s life — that he would be faced with having to “trade lives” to get back all the lives that were lost. And the only life Cap would be fine with trading would be his own. (It also wouldn’t surprise me if some sort of Soul Stone mythology leads to a confrontation between Cap and Red Skull, the supervillain from Captain America: The First Avenger who’s revealed to be the keeper of the Soul Stone in Infinity War.)
Cap sacrificing himself for the greater good would feel like the ultimate inverse of Thanos’s decimation: giving his life to save the people he loves, instead of killing someone he loves in the name of a greater good. It’s a sacrifice that only Cap could make.