The MCU’s Blip Opens The Door For Some Great Stories

Big crossover events are a staple of comic book storytelling. Marvel Comics has been doing them for years. It’s a way to tie so many books together into a shared universe and have different characters go through similar struggles. A great example of this is Civil War, an event that rippled through Marvel’s entire superhero community with every character, no matter how big or small, still affected by what was happening.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had a lot of success trying to emulate this shared universe through its Avengers movies and cameos. However, nothing truly embodies the spirit behind the idea of a comic book crossover more than the MCU’s Blip. This is essentially the time between Infinity War and Endgame when Thanos snapped the Infinity Gauntlet and wiped away half of the universe in the blink of an eye.

The Blip was an event that every single living thing in the universe shared. Obviously, The Avengers films focused on the core characters having to deal with the ramifications of this calamity. But as the MCU begins to expand and tell smaller-scale stories, especially on Disney Plus, other aspects of the Blip are starting to be explored.

Although the Blip was somewhat of a factor in Spider-Man: No Way Home, as blipped students returned to school five years later, it wasn’t until The Falcon and The Winter Soldier that the Blip was used as an actual plot device to build a story around. It treated the Blip as a real-world logistical nightmare. With half the world’s population gone, countries had much looser borders. Migrants set up new lives with new jobs and new homes. It became a true status quo that was thrown into disarray when the Avengers brought everyone back. Governments, both local and international, had to deal with the real-world consequences of what to do with all these newly returned people. As with most situations, the poor and less privileged were pushed aside and treated badly. This led to the rise of the Flag Smashers, the show’s main antagonist. The show posed the question of how the Blip would actually affect society and then built its story around that.

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Secret Invasion does something similar. For decades, Nick Fury had partnered with the Skrulls to find them a homeworld. He was their main liaison to humanity and pretty much the only one championing their cause. So when he vanished in the Blip, the Skrulls’ future was left uncertain. This was the triggering event that led to the Skrulls’ secret invasion of Earth, and it also begs the question as to what might happen to other causes around the globe if their main spokesperson suddenly vanished. The Blip has a snowball effect of unintended consequences that the Avengers never considered for a second when they sought to bring everybody back.

Even shows that aren’t about the Blip still can’t avoid just how big of an event it was in the lives of their characters. An example of this is shown in Hawkeye. In a very cool sequence, Yelena Belova was blipped away and then returned almost instantaneously. The audience got to experience what it was like being blipped from her perspective. Five years passed in the span of a second. Yelena was lost, confused, and would have to soon deal with the fact that her sister Natasha died during that period, leading Yelena to go after Clint Barton for revenge. The Blip wasn’t a major factor in the show’s plot, but it still played a huge role in instigating one character’s motivations.

The potential for using the Blip as a jumping-off point for other stories is endless. There are so many opportunities to explore how the Blip affected every corner of the Marvel Universe. For example, sorcerers like Wong and Doctor Strange are guardians against interdimensional mystical threats like Dormammu. If half of these sorcerers suddenly vanish, then it leaves far fewer guardians to protect the Earth. And since the Blip was a universal event, it has left an opening to see how other worlds had been affected, such as how the Nova Corps would fare with half of its forces gone. Plus, Captain Marvel had even mentioned how she was traveling from planet to planet in an effort to restore order. A story about her adventures during this time would also be interesting.

The MCU has accomplished a lot since it began over a decade ago. The expanse of its cinematic universe has grown far larger than anybody intended. And the Blip as a universal event proves that it’s about as close to fans getting a true comic book crossover on screen as they are going to get.

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