The Tesseract has been stolen, studied and fought over for most of a century. Few objects in the MCU have passed through so many hands, and its story runs longer than any one film tells it. It matters again now, because “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives on December 18th and two of the men who have held the cube are in the cast.
Here is a guide to every hand that held the cube and what each one set in motion. Every time the Tesseract changes hands, it sets up the next disaster. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Captain America: The First Avenger”, “Captain Marvel”, “The Avengers”, “Thor: The Dark World”, “Thor: Ragnarok”, “Avengers: Infinity War”, “Avengers: Endgame” and “Loki”.
Every time the Tesseract changes hands, it sets up the next disaster.”
The cube began in Odin’s treasure room. Nerdist and CinemaBlend both say it reached Earth around 965 A.D., and Nerdist adds that devout humans guarded it in Tønsberg, Norway. In 1942 Johann Schmidt, the future Red Skull, takes it from a church there in “Captain America: The First Avenger”. CinemaBlend says he first went for a coffin that turned out to be a fake before he found the real cube hidden in a nearby wall. Hydra’s Arnim Zola turned its power into weapons, and the results were so effective that Schmidt broke Hydra away from the Third Reich to conquer the world on his own.
Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) ended that run in 1945. Schmidt grabbed the cube to use against him, and it sent him to Vormir to guard the Soul Stone. The cube burned through the floor of his plane and fell into the ocean, where Howard Stark found it. Looper and Syfy both say his team was searching for Steve when it turned up. Howard was also one of the people who laid the groundwork for S.H.I.E.L.D. He kept studying the cube afterward, and Syfy says his notebooks in “Iron Man 2” make that clear.
The next stop is the one “Captain Marvel” filled in. By the late 1980s the cube sat inside Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S., which Syfy describes as a joint Air Force and NASA program. A Kree scientist named Mar-Vell was working there under the name Wendy Lawson, and she used the cube’s energy to build a light-speed engine for the Skrull refugees under her care.
In 1989 the engine exploded and Mar-Vell was killed, and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) absorbed the blast of Tesseract energy that gave her powers. Syfy says the cube did some good for once. The cube itself survived in Mar-Vell’s hidden base in Earth’s orbit, where it sat for six years. When Carol returned in 1995, she and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) found it there. Goose the Flerken swallowed it so the Kree could not have it, and a credits scene has Goose cough it up on Fury’s desk.
S.H.I.E.L.D. kept it until 2012, when Loki took it. CinemaBlend says the deal was simple: Loki was supposed to deliver the Tesseract to Thanos in exchange for a Chitauri army. Loki used the cube to open a portal over New York for that army. Erik Selvig built the portal under Loki’s control. CinemaBlend says he left a flaw in it that let the Avengers close it. Syfy and CinemaBlend both say S.H.I.E.L.D. had been developing weapons from the cube’s power, the same trick Hydra used. Once the Avengers beat Loki, Thor took him and the cube home to Asgard. Syfy adds that Heimdall used the cube’s energy to repair the Bifrost.
Asgard put the cube back in Odin’s vault, and “Thor: The Dark World” shows why that mattered. In its mid-credits scene, Sif and Volstagg hand the Aether to the Collector. Den of Geek says they reason that two objects of such great power should not be kept close together, and that the characters call both objects Infinity Stones in that scene. Asgard already held the Tesseract, so the Aether went elsewhere.
In “Thor: Ragnarok”, Asgard is destroyed and the cube seems lost with it. It is not. Nerdist says Loki stole it from the vault before the end, and Syfy and CinemaBlend both say he took it while fetching the Crown of Surtur.
That is how it ended up on the ship carrying the surviving Asgardians. In the opening of “Avengers: Infinity War”, Thanos attacks the ship and starts torturing Thor to make Loki give up the cube. Loki hands it over. Thanos (Josh Brolin) crushes it, frees the Space Stone and sets it in the Infinity Gauntlet. CinemaBlend says he uses it right away to teleport and to phase the Hulkbuster armor into a rock wall. Looper puts the distinction well, because the container stops existing there but the Stone does not. Thanos later used it alongside the five other Stones to wipe out half of all life.
That is the end of the cube in the main story, but “Avengers: Endgame” brings it back twice. The Avengers’ time heist sends a team to New York in 2012 to take the Tesseract. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) has it knocked out of his hand while he is disguised as security. It lands at Loki’s feet, and Loki grabs it and teleports away. Tony and Steve then jump to 1970 instead and take the cube from Camp Lehigh. Syfy says Tony picked that place because both the Tesseract and more Pym Particles should be there. Syfy also notes that 1970 is the year Tony was born, and the trip gives him a scene with his father Howard.
That leaves two extra cubes to track. Looper counts the 2012 and 1970 cubes as alternate versions of the Tesseract, and it admits that tracing the whole multiverse would quickly spiral out of control. TheWrap points out that the film’s own rule says changing the past creates a new timeline, so Loki’s escape must have created a branch that the film never follows. The film does not say what Loki did next, but “Loki” does.
The 2012 cube lands in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia with Loki, and Time Variance Authority agents arrest him there, according to ET Online. BGR says they confiscate the Tesseract at processing, and TVLine says grabbing the cube is what made him a variant in the TVA’s eyes. Later Loki forces a man named Casey to give it back, and the drawer it comes out of holds about a dozen Infinity Stones from other timelines. TVLine says the TVA mostly uses those Stones as paperweights. That is a long way from a church wall in Norway.
The main timeline has no cube left. Marvel’s own Instagram post lists every Infinity Stone as destroyed in the main timeline, according to TechRadar and SCMP. TechRadar adds that Steve returned each Stone to its own timeline at the end of “Endgame”, so the branches where the Avengers took them are presumably intact. That makes the Tesseract a branch story now.
It also explains why the chain fits “Avengers: Doomsday.” TV Insider quotes the official logline, which says the film follows heroes “from three distinct universes” on a “deadly collision course.” Slashfilm’s list of the cast Marvel announced includes Tom Hiddleston as Loki. TV Insider counts “Loki” among the projects that sent characters across universes and timelines before this film. TV Insider and Dexerto both list Evans as Steve Rogers, and TV Insider says the July trailer ends with Thor and Steve reunited. Joe and Anthony Russo, who directed “Endgame”, are back behind the camera.
Steve helped take the 1970 cube and Loki took the 2012 one, so each of them is tied to a different branch of the same cube. Whether either of them touches a Space Stone again is still unknown, and Marvel lists the main timeline’s Stones as destroyed. If the cube comes back, it will have to come from a branch. That would suit an object that has never stayed put.
What Do You Think? Which handoff did the most damage, Hydra’s theft or Loki’s? Does the “Endgame” heist break the Tesseract’s chain, or just stretch it across timelines? And could the Space Stone still matter in “Avengers: Doomsday”?
Catch up properly: every MCU movie and show in chronological order on the MCU+ Universe Tree.
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