Marvel never shows just one way to cross into another universe. Some crossings need a rare gift, while others need a forbidden book, a government badge or a spell that goes wrong. Each one has a different owner and a different price, and the studio almost never stops to explain the difference. That gap matters now. “Avengers: Doomsday” arrives on December 18th with heroes from “three distinct universes” on a collision course, according to the plot brief TechRadar prints.
Here is a field guide to the ways across. Each way across has a price, and the price tells you who can afford to use it. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Loki,” “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “What If…?”.
Each way across has a price, and the price tells you who can afford to use it.”
Start with the gift. America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) is the only known person in the multiverse who can make portals that connect parallel universes, according to Slashfilm. Her power is real, but she cannot steer it, and Slashfilm says her portals only open when she is in emotional distress. Slashfilm adds that it first showed up when she was young and accidentally sent her parents to an unknown dimension. BGR describes the star-shaped portal as the visible form of that power. The price is not paid by the portal but by the girl who owns it, because other people want to take it. Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) wants it for her sons, and TheWrap notes that keeping America’s power would mean killing her.
The second way crosses with a mind instead of a body. Dreamwalking is a Darkhold spell, and TheWrap defines it as possessing another version of yourself from across the universes. Slashfilm adds that the walker gets access to the counterpart’s life and skills, and the counterpart does not even need to be alive. Wanda uses it to take over her Earth-838 self, and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) later uses it to climb into a dead version of himself. Slashfilm points out that he cannot enter his own body while it sits on another world, so he can only take over a Strange on that world. Slashfilm calls the Darkhold a book that corrupts its reader.
Dreamwalking also carries the heaviest bill in the guide. BGR and Slashfilm both say it can start an incursion, the event where the boundary between two universes erodes and they collide. BGR says one or both of the worlds can be destroyed. The Illuminati on Earth-838 tell Strange that their own Strange used the Darkhold against Thanos and set one off. Slashfilm says that incursion almost destroyed their universe, while BGR says one of the two worlds involved was wiped out completely. An incursion is not a method of travel. It is what happens when travel goes wrong.
The third way belongs to the Time Variance Authority. A TemPad is the handheld device issued to TVA agents, and We Got This Covered says it lets them track variants and open Doors to leap between universes. Den of Geek calls the same trick a time door, and BGR notes that the agency routinely opened portals to other realities to destroy them. This is the only method in the guide that runs on a bureaucracy, so the agents need no gift or book, only a badge. Looper describes Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) in “Deadpool & Wolverine” as a rogue agent going off the books, which shows what the badge allows.
The best test of a TemPad is what happens when the wrong person holds one. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) steals Paradox’s and bounces around the multiverse looking for a Wolverine, Slashfilm reports. Slashfilm says the Logans he finds instantly try to kill him. The one who agrees to come is a washed-up Logan, too sad to fight, whose world fell apart. Then Paradox has Wade and that Logan (Hugh Jackman) pruned and sent to the Void. Pruning is a crossing too, but it is done to people rather than by them. Looper says it is implied that the Void’s castaways come from universes the TVA pruned.
He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) carries a better version. Den of Geek says season 1 director Kate Herron calls his device “a futuristic version of the TVA tech.” It does the work of the door and the Time Twister together, so he controls the twist himself. Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) takes it after she kills him in the season 1 finale, and Den of Geek says she uses it to push Loki (Tom Hiddleston) through a Time Door. TechRadar adds that He Who Remains also created the Temporal Loom, the machine that converts raw time into physical realities and weaves them into the Sacred Timeline. The Loom is not a way across, because it is the factory that makes the worlds you cross into.
Magic gives the smallest crossings. Slashfilm says Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) opens a portal in “Deadpool & Wolverine” with a Sling Ring she took from a Doctor Strange variant. It sends Wade and Logan back to Earth-10005. Slashfilm says Ned (Jacob Batalon) and a borrowed Sling Ring accidentally return Strange from the Mirror Dimension in “No Way Home.” BGR points out that sorcerers use these portals to travel anywhere in their own reality. A ring is quick and works for anyone with training. Nova took hers from a Strange.
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” shows what happens when the crossing is an accident. Strange’s memory spell is meant to make the world forget that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is Spider-Man. The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) blows up the box that holds it, and Slashfilm says the spell then tears rifts in the multiverse. People start to come through. Slashfilm says villains such as Doc Ock, the Green Goblin and Electro arrive from the moment just before they died, while the two older Peters are plucked from their own present days. Nobody chose the door, and Slashfilm notes that the only fix is a second spell that makes the world forget Peter exists at all.
The Quantum Realm is the odd one out, because it is less a door than a place. Looper calls it a hidden universe, and “Quantumania” turns it into a prison. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his family end up there after his daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) builds something that goes wrong. Looper says Kang was exiled there by others like him, and The Hollywood Reporter says the film puts that exile outside time and space. Looper says his way out is a ship whose energy core has to be shrunk back down to fit. It calls the prison practically inescapable. Scott seals Kang behind a gateway, and Inverse says Kang ends up in a deeper dimension. In the mid-credits scene, Immortus tells the other Kangs, “They’re beginning to touch the multiverse.”
“What If…?” is the last stop, and it bends the rules above. BGR notes that Uatu (Jeffrey Wright) can move through the multiverse. As the Watcher he is bound by a vow. “I’m the Watcher. I observe all that transpires here. But I do not, cannot, will not interfere,” he says in the first episode, according to Sportskeeda. Inverse describes the Watchers as a species that observes across the multiverse and never meddles. Compare that to the Strange of the episode “What If… Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands?” Slashfilm describes him as traversing timelines to save his loved ones through evil, corrupting means. The same universe-hopping can be witness or weapon.
Now put the whole guide next to “Doomsday.” TechRadar says the film will bring back incursions and that nothing can stop them, so the only outcome is the destruction of one or both realities. Looper reads the July trailer the same way, with Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) watching a cataclysm in the sky and a diagram behind Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) showing three connected circles. TechRadar’s reading is that the Fantastic Four and the MCU heroes travel to the Fox X-Men universe to win support, and are turned down. Robert Downey Jr. plays the main villain, Doctor Doom. Dexerto says the plot has not been shared, so how anyone gets from one world to another is still open.
That is the real question. Every method above has a limit. America’s portals are unsteady and hunted, and dreamwalking starts incursions. A TemPad needs the TVA, and the Void is where pruned people go. A Sling Ring only works for a trained sorcerer, and a rift needs an accident. If “Doomsday” invents a new way across, its price will say what kind of film it is. If it reuses an old one, the price is already written.
What Do You Think? Which way across would you trust to carry the heroes between worlds? Is a TVA door safer than a star portal, or just a better-run version of the same risk? And if “Avengers: Doomsday” needs a crossing nobody has seen yet, what should it cost?
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