Warning: Avengers: Endgame SPOILERS to follow!
When Thanos snapped half of the universe out of existence in Avengers: Infinity War, not only was Peter Parker among the fallen, but so too were some of his classmates, including Zendaya’s Michelle “MJ” Jones. Thanks to the efforts of the surviving heroes, the fallen were all brought back in Avengers: Endgame, albeit 5 years after they first disappeared. That sets up an interesting dynamic to be explored in Spider-Man: Far From Home. Zendaya explained how the Snap and coming back changed MJ, saying:
[The Snap] kind of puts our characters in a special place, because now we come back and the world's kind of changed, and we all have to kind of depend on each other a little bit more, because we're like the oddballs now. We kind of have to confide in each other with that experience, and that's cool.
We have wondered about how Peter Parker’s high school class returning five years later would work, and it seems that those who were snapped will go through a period of serious adjustment. The world of the film has changed and it seems that MJ, Peter, Ned and the rest of the snapped classmates in Spider-Man: Far From Home will be in a unique position of playing catch up as they try to find their bearings in a world that went on without them.
Five years might not seem like that long, but if you went to sleep in 2014 and woke up now, you’d probably be feeling pretty unmoored by a lot of things.
As Zendaya tells Fandango All Access, this kind of makes Michelle and the people who were snapped “oddballs” in the film and that makes sense. While the heroes obviously know exactly what happened and were fighting to bring everyone back, the average person might look at these people who have literally returned from the dead with a skeptical eye, even though it is half the population.
Whether their status as the returned brands MJ and the other snapped high schoolers with a scarlet letter or makes them pariahs in any way we’ll have to wait and see, but that experience will clearly be something that ties them together. Perhaps that brings Peter and MJ closer together romantically, as they can confide in each other about what it was like to be snapped and brought back in the way that they were.
Just as the survivors of The Decimation bonded over their survivor’s guilt, so too will those that were snapped find comfort in each other in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
We don’t know yet how the snap and the return affected these characters beyond just jumping them forward in time. What was the experience like of dying and coming back? While I don’t think Spider-Man: Far From Home will dive into the darkness in this way, being once again burdened with the weight of existence wasn’t pleasant for Jon Snow so I’ll be curious to see if it has any psychological effect on MJ, Peter and the rest.
Spider-Man: Far From Home wraps up Phase 3 and the Infinity Saga when it swings into theaters on July 2. Check out our 2019 Release Schedule to prep for all of this summer’s biggest movies.
