Needless to say, the Avengers are a part of an extreme universe, full of people who can do amazing things. It can be hard to keep up with all of these people and how they connect in every movie.

Avengers: Endgame will be the end to an era, therefore any loose ends will hopefully be tied up and answered.

There are around twenty movies leading up to Endgame, so this is just a quick reminder of some stuff you either didn’t catch in past movies and things you might want to be reminded of.

The Tesseract (the blue cube that houses the Space Stone) –

The origins of the Tesseract begin with Asgardians, who had access to it first and eventually left in on Earth, for reasons unclear.

The next time the Tesseract is brought up is in Captain America: The First Avenger, when The Red Skull uncovered it somewhere in Norway. At some point in this film, when The Red Skull is defeated, the Tesseract falls into Arctic waters.

Years and years later, it is rediscovered by Howard Stark, Tony Stark’s father.

Revealed in the most recent installment of the MCU, Captain Marvel, we figure out that the Tesseract somehow winds up in the hands of the United States Military, where it was being used to try and create a light speed engine.

Once Captain Marvel returns to Earth and recovers the Tesseract from enemy hands, she ends up leaving it with SHIELD.

It remained there until the attack on New York when Loki stole it in order to open a wormhole. Once Loki was defeated, Thor took him and the Tesseract back to Asgard, where he left it in Odin’s vault.

The next stop on the Tesseract’s bus tour is Thor: Ragnarok. It is in this movie that Loki once again steals the cube, right before Asgard is demolished.

This leads us to the beginning of the end. Thanos ambushes the Asgardian refugee ship carrying all of Asgard, including Loki and the Tesseract.

He retrieves it from Loki and crushes the cube to reach the Space Stone inside, which begins his collection of glowing rocks.

The Other Stones –

The Mind Stone:

This yellow…rock?.. is first seen in The Avengers as a blue orb that powers Loki’s scepter.

We next see the scepter in Avengers: Age of Ultron. This is where we get to see Tony Stark and Bruce Banner use their incredible knowledge to create…a disaster.

After the really bad turnout of Ultron, the Science Bros decide another robot that is powered by the Mind Stone would be a really good idea.

But they actually do well this time, creating Vision, who has the Mind Stone embedded in his head. It remains there until the purple guy comes and adds it to his gauntlet.

The Reality Stone (Aether):

If you actually remember or care about anything that happened in Thor: The Dark World then you are one in a million. But also, you might recall that Malekith, the villain with a blatant evil name, wants to use Aether, a red liquid, in order to aid his….evil things.

That red liquid was actually a manifestation of the Reality Stone.

At the end of this movie, the Reality Stone is given to an escapee from the Looney Bin, also known as The Collector, because who else would you leave an all-powerful stone with?

That leads us to Infinity War where…well I think it’s a little redundant at this point.

The Power Stone:

The purple stone is first seen in Guardians of the Galaxy when it is accidentally found by Star Lord. It’s hard to even type his name after what happened in Infinity War…

Ronan steals the stone for a little while, but after a really intense dance battle, Peter and the Guardians retrieve it once more.

They give it to the Nova Corps, who were meant to protect it.

But they fail so hard that they didn’t even get a scene for when Thanos yanked it from their grasp.

The Time Stone (Eye of Agomoto):

The green stone is first introduced in Doctor Strange when Steven Strange discovers it in the Eye of Agomoto and uses it to give us the great “Dormammu I’ve come to bargain” scene.

We see the Time Stone again in, you guessed it, Infinity War.

This is where Doctor Strange decides ‘this rock is more important than you’ but then after getting whiplash from looking at all the possible outcomes, he changes his mind to ‘actually I am going to give it to Thanos’.

The Soul Stone:

The orange Soul Stone only appears in Infinity War when Gamora tells Thanos she has no idea where it is hidden but then Thanos basically dismembers her robot sister right in front of her eyes so she sort of feels obligated to tell the Mad Titan.

This leads Thanos to Vormir where he finds the stone and… Red Skull? I thought you were dead, or at least extremely forgotten.

Thanos –

Moving onto the villain that had many people asking ‘Are we actually upset with him? Because he’s not wrong.’

Thanos’ timeline is a little odd considering a physical cameo did not occur in every Marvel movie that he ‘had a part in’. In a lot of the films, he is connected to them because things occuring in the movie are because of him.

The first noted proof of Thanos’ plan being put into action is in Thor. In a post-credit scene, we see Loki plotting to steal the Tesseract. Viewers may not have known then, but it is obvious now that this was Thanos’ plan.

Following this, in The Avengers, the opening scene showed a lieutenant of Thanos informing him that the plan was a go. Once we realized Loki was a pawn in someone else’s game, the question of ‘who’ was asked the rest of the movie.

It was answered in a post-credit scene of the movie, where the same lieutenant informed his ‘master’ that Loki failed and the heroes on Earth were stronger than they predicted. Thanos turned his face to the side, revealing his identity for the first time.

In Guardians of the Galaxy, he made a full body cameo, sitting in a floating chair for some odd reason.

Thanos returned in another post-credit scene, this time in Avengers: Age of Ultron. It opened with the Gauntlet-of-Doom in a high-tech storage container. Thanos put the Gauntlet on and accounced, “Fine… I’ll do it myself.”

Although not physical, Thanos’ presence still loomed over a lot of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The blatant conflict between Gamora and Nebula was due to the fact that their father made them fight one another when they were children.

And it was not ‘play fighting’, it was more like ‘MMA fighting and if you lose, I’ll make you a robot’.

The post-credit scene fanatic returned in Thor: Ragnarok when his spacecraft intercepted the Asgardian refugee ship, which held Loki who was hiding the Tesseract in his back pocket for the second time.

And that is what opened the gate to the horrors of Infinity War.

This is a lot of information to remember, but Sydney Vallier, a tenth grader at Pitman High School, could recite it perfectly.

“The first time I remember seeing Thanos was the first Avengers movie, from 2012. In that movie, he was the one who sent Loki to invade Earth with the Chitauri army and steal the Tesseract. I think the only time we actually saw him was the post credit scene, when The Other was telling him about how the humans resisted Loki’s invasion, and then he turns and gives this epically creepy smile. This was back when he looked really awesome and intimidating, not like the current purple space grape…,” she explains.

Overall, everything mentioned, plus so much more, has been leading us to the doors of Avengers: Endgame. This film will surely be a doozy and will likely need a timeline of its own.