Marvel's master plan: The complete novice's guide to Infinity Stones
T.H.A.N.O.S. moves everything around me
It's all connected.
That's the guiding mantra / rallying cry / marketing pitch for Marvel's Cinematic Universe. Every film exists in the same continuity, pushing along a large meta-narrative one two-hour (or so) chapter at a time. The continuity, of course, is only skin deep. A tragic death of a fan favorite in the first Avengers is quickly reversed for the television show, with some weirdly hokey justification. Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark comes to a beautifully acted emotional revelation at the end of every film, only to inexplicably backtrack before the next big stage show.
But there is one driving force that unifies all the robot-alien-hero fighting, and it's the infinity stones — six rocks of inexplicable power that combine to create exponentially more inexplicable power. Often obscured by poetic names, these rocks have become pivotal plot points in Captain America, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more — each time winking at some climactic event yet to come. The new Avengers: Age of Ultron took it a step further with an all-too-confusing scene involving a shirtless Thor standing in a pool of water seeing visions of the future.
To put it another way, the rocks are MacGuffins of the highest order. A MacGuffin, in film school parlance, is a plot device (tangible or otherwise) that motivates the characters without necessarily explaining why. In Marvel’s world, infinity stones represent an ultra-powerful force that bad guys want and good guys want to make sure the bad guys don’t have, even if they don’t see the bigger picture.
Marvel Studios started its film series relatively grounded, explaining away some of the crazier elements with exaggerated science and technology. Over the last 11 films, it's been slowly and deliberately introducing more cosmic and magical elements into the foreground — all leading up to 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, where Thanos (Josh Brolin) will finally jump into the Bad Guy Foreground. It’s a lot to ask an audience to keep track of everything, and for the most part you can enjoy the films without a degree in comic book history. But like Thanos himself, Marvel’s ultimate plan is nothing short of the entire universe (of entertainment). It’s probably best to start learning the fundamentals now.
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Infinity what now? "Before creation itself, there were six singularities, then the universe exploded into existence and the remnants of this system were forged into concentrated ingots... Infinity Stones."
— A blonde-haired Benicio Del Toro in Guardians of the Galaxy
That’s the most succinct explanation we get about the infinity stones in all of Marvel’s first 11 movies. The Big Bang’s leftovers are represented by six colored stones with powers that don’t otherwise exist in the universe. Each has its own name: space, mind, reality, power, soul, and time. We've only seen the first four on screen so far, with soul and time still awaiting their on-screen debut.
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I assume there’s a comic book connection somewhere.
Of course! Infinity gems, first known as Soul Gems, originally debuted in 1972's Marvel Premiere #1. There's a lot we could say here, but let's boil it down to the essentials: the Mad Titan Thanos wanted the six soul gems to destroy the world. He was defeated. He was later resurrected, and — surprise, surprise — went back to gathering infinity gems from all across the galaxy.
This time around, which in our meta human world is circa 1990, Thanos amasses all the gems and places them in his infinity gauntlet (read: glove), and destroys half of the population of the universe. He is once again defeated by a merry band of superheroes across a number of various comic book issues.
It's worth noting that in both events, the Marvel character Adam Warlock played a very key role in Thanos' defeat — but seeing as he's not (yet) part of Marvel's Cinematic Universe, we're not going to delve down that path. (Worth noting but wholly speculative: some elements of Warlock, specifically wielding an infinity stone on his head, seem to have been mapped onto the film version of Vision.)
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Okay, so… what are the six stones, and where have I seen them before?
Chart time!
Tesseract (Space Stone)
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As seen in both Captain America (used by Red Skull) and The Avengers (used by Loki), the Tesseract is a blue stone capable of teleporting anything from one point in the universe to the other. The other use is, apparently, as a means to manufacture futuristic weaponry — but who's to say those blue lasers aren't just teleporting all the victims to some random pub on a distant planet? Sounds like the plot of Marvel’s first TV comedy. Last we saw, Thor took it back to his homeworld of Asgard at the end of The Avengers.
Aether (Reality Stone)
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The Aether is a red floating liquid thing that attaches to a host and... makes him or her stronger? In the comics, it's more focused on wish fulfillment. Its only appearance in the movie so far has been Thor: The Dark World as "thing Natalie Portman has and the bad guy really wants." By the end of the film, it was given to The Collector (aka "blond Benicio Del Toro") for safekeeping — although his whole house was wrecked during Guardians of the Galaxy, so who knows if it moved at that point.
Orb (Power Stone)
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This is the stone that actually wrecked The Collector's home in Guardians of the Galaxy. The purple stone gives the wielder incredible power — superhuman strength shooting beams of purple destruction, and possibly wiping out all organic life from a planet just by touching the surface. Here, it's "thing Chris Pratt has that bad guys want." By the end of GotG, the Power Stone was being housed by the intergalactic police known as Nova Corps.
Loki's Scepter / Vision (Mind Stone)
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Surprise! Except kind of not. Loki's blue-glowing scepter, it turns out, housed a yellow infinity stone. As seen in The Avengers, the mind stone lets the owner control the minds of others. It can also transform a fleshy red robot into Paul Bettany. The stone can currently be found on Vision's (aka BettanyBot's) forehead.
Soul Stone
Not yet seen in films, the Soul Stone of Marvel comics was a somewhat sentient creature that could trap souls inside another world. The concept of "souls" really hasn't been explored in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so no telling how it'll be presented on screen.
Time Stone
Visit the future! Alter the past! Speed up and slow down the passing of time! Stay young forever! Reboot the entire series and start over! (Just kidding… probably.)
Aren't the infinity gem colors different in the comic books?
Yes, but even in comics, the associated colors have changed — especially in more recent issues. There have also been, at times, additional infinity gems, because why not? There’s no significant reason why the infinity stones are a certain color. According to director James Gunn, the Power Stone in Guardians of the Galaxy was purple because "the Aether [in Thor: The Dark World] already took red." The only thing that's remained consistent is the color palette: red, purple, blue, green, yellow, and orange.
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Okay, so about the glove...
Gauntlets, technically — and plural. One for each hand. The first one ("righty") makes a blink-and-you-miss it cameo in the first Thor, in the Asgard treasure chamber along with other dangerous relics. (This one seems to be stocked with fake gems for show.) At the end of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, however, we see Thanos pick up a different gauntlet ("lefty").
When will we see the last two gems?
Thanos gets the last words in Age of Ultron: "Fine, I’ll do it myself." As in, he’ll now be actively seeking out the infinity stones (as opposed to using freelancers such as Thor’s Loki and GotG’s Ronan the Accuser).
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It's pretty safe to say that by the end of the two-part Avengers: Infinity War films, the sextet will be in heavy play. There are six movies between now and Infinity War Part 1. If we were to make an entirely uneducated guess, the most likely candidates for cosmic weirdness are Doctor Strange and Thor: Ragnarok. The wild card might be Guardians of the Galaxy 2, but last August, Gunn hinted that Thanos wouldn't be as important to the sequel, which makes us think the stones themselves might also be secondary. (Our personal favorite theory right now is that Heimdall, aka Idris Elba in Nordic armor, aka Mr. "I can see nine realms and ten trillion souls," has the Soul Stone — but it's very much just speculation.)
And do the stones really spell out THANOS?
This is a weird one that was popularized over the Age of Ultron premiere weekend, specifically via dishonourable on Reddit. There are six infinity stones and six letters in Thanos’ name. The "alternate names" to each stone so far — Tesseract, Aether, Orb, and Scepter — are all letters found in "Thanos." Which is to say… maybe? We’ll have to see what the last two stones are named (Heimdall and Nebula? Hose and Nightcap? Hairpin and Nail polish?). Even then, it’s at best Marvel producers making a fun Easter egg for the audience — nothing revelatory for the story.
It’s probably Helicopter and Nickelback.
If everything is building toward Infinity War, what happens afterwards? Does Marvel have anything planned after that?
Just one film so far — July 2019’s Inhumans. As the name suggests, inhumans are experiments created by Kree aliens to create genetically altered soldiers using a process known as Terrigenesis. They were first seen in the second season of Agents of SHIELD.
