We’re almost a year removed from Avengers: Infinity War and like the Avengers themselves, we are still tallying the losses from The Decimation wrought by Thanos. Thanks to the posters for Avengers: Endgame, we recently learned that Shuri is indeed among the fallen, and the Avengers will not be able to rely on her brilliance for the war to come. Now a new clip for the upcoming film has revealed that another character, one we haven’t seen in a while, was dusted: Stellan Skarsgård’s Dr. Erik Selvig. Take a look:
We’ve seen a bunch of shots like this in the marketing for Avengers: Endgame, where the various surviving heroes look at images of all the missing and dead friends and teammates who fell during Infinity War. As you can see on the left of this screenshot, the new clip from Avengers: Endgame shows that Dr. Erik Selvig, the astrophysicist from the Thor films, has also been reduced to dust.
We last saw Dr. Selvig in Avengers: Age of Ultron, where he was one of the team members working at the new Avengers facility in Upstate New York. There he, along with his team of scientists, was presumably working to help the Avengers and the world protect itself against new threats. As Captain Marvel is being shown in the screenshot above and we now see, his mind and knowledge will not be on available to aid the Avengers this time around.
It’s been so long since we’ve seen him that you might have forgotten about Dr. Selvig, but the revelation of his dusting just reminds us that he was a part of this world and the scope of what Thanos did. All the characters we’ve met over the years of the MCU that were still alive at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War were subject to the indiscriminate culling of The Decimation.
With all that said, here’s where things get interesting. We thought Dr. Erik Selvig was alive. The human trio of the first Thor film, Stellan Skarsgård’s Dr. Selvig, Kat Dennings’ Darcy Lewis and Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster, all seemed to have survived the snap because they all appear in the novel Avengers: Infinity War: The Cosmic Quest Volume Two: Aftermath.
That book by Brandon T. Snider is about the aftermath of The Decimation. In it, Dr. Selvig and Darcy set out to find and understand the cause of the devastation and in their quest they are aided by Jane Foster. The three are dubbed the “Science Avengers.” So, how can Dr. Selvig be dead in this clip from Avengers: Endgame if he is one of the main characters in an entire book set after Avengers: Infinity War?
One possibility is that Dr. Selvig is only presumed dead. I’m sure with over 3 billion people snapped out of existence at once, it would take a while to know for sure who is and isn’t still alive. We’ve also seen the Avengers looking at an image of Scott Lang in these kinds of scenes in the trailers so they can be wrong. Of course, he was in the Quantum Realm.
We also know that Marvel is totally willing to add footage and change things and design the trailers to throw us off so that we don’t know too much when we see the film. That could be a possibility here, but that effort for a character we haven’t seen in an entire Phase would seem unnecessary.
I don’t know that we’ll get a firm answer that clears up this disparity, but if I were to guess, I would say that sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one. This is just a book and I don’t think Marvel is super concerned about the canonical complications from it. The movies are what takes precedence and are the official canon. We see this in Star Wars too, where the books are supposed to be canon, but their level of tie-in with the new films has amounted to a few Easter eggs at best.
So I think we can probably count Dr. Selvig among those hoping for an undusting until we hear otherwise. You can check out the new clip with Dr. Selvig’s digital headstone in the video below.
Avengers: Endgame arrives on April 26. Check out our 2019 release schedule to keep track of all the biggest movies coming this year.
