4 Things We Could Learn About Carol Danvers in ‘The Marvels’ as She Recovers Her Kree-Stolen Memories

Playing hardball for all the marbles, Marvel’s The Marvels, even as a garbled, larval Warhol mardoll, shlarbal flarvoll. That one got away from me. Let’s start over.

Marvel’s The Marvels is a big swing from the rapidly-deflating novelty blow-up baseball bat that is the MCU. It’s a team-up between a much-beloved-but-immensely-altered character who starred in a show that not enough people watched, a separate altered take on an even more obscure character last seen as an “also starring” in WandaVision, and Captain Marvel, around whom the grouchy and unhugged denizens of the internet love to do angry, repetitive troll donuts ad infinitum.

One of the biggest draws that the film has on its side: The promise that we’ll finally get some of Carol Danvers’ backstory filled in, nearly five years after her introductory solo movie. Danvers, as fans already know, has a bad case of the leaky diaper brains thanks to her former Kree handlers, and there’s a good long chunk of her life that she’s not yet privy to. Pulled from the comics, the movies, and our own frustrations, here are a few spitball ideas as to what Carol might remember about herself during the events of the movie.

1: That her powers weren’t just from the Space Stone

The science of superpowers is more art than science, and more made-up-nonsense-moonman-speak than art. One character might get bitten by a radioactive spider and gain the ability to stick to ceilings. His neighbor might get bitten by that same spider and develop melanoma.

So it’s not exceptionally weird that different MCU characters with origins tied to different Infinity Stones would develop their powers in different ways. It does, however, seem a little bit bananas that Carol Danvers’ Space Stone powers are so planet-shatteringly extreme, while the Mind Stone gave Quicksilver the ability to run pretty fast and Vision the power to have all the best monologues in the franchise and get his forehead pulled apart like sourdough bread.

Maybe – and this is just speculation – Danvers has repressed the body horror nightmare memories associated one of her many comic book origin stories: That she was tortured and ripped apart at a genetic level by a species of sadistic bug monsters called the Brood. It’s a nasty corner of Marvel history from the days back when Chris Claremont was pouring buckets of aliens on every story, and it could make for a nice entry point for one of the X-Men’s most constant villains. Even better, it would make for a compelling new detail that the Kree kept from Danvers.

2: That she shot a dog one time

If The Marvels is going to go into Carol Danvers’ forgotten history, there’s no better place to start than that time when she blacked out and shot a dog.

Yes, in the comics, Danvers is Marvel’s second most prolific alcoholic, beaten out only by Tony Stark and his recurring decision to shotgun handles of bourbon and then fly his tank suit into the Middle East. While he can be, and has been, forgiven for his tipsy little war crimes, it seems entirely unlikely that anyone could ever excuse what Captain Marvel (going by Warbird at the time) did in the pages of Quicksilver #10: She got the kind of drunk that kids in Disney cartoons used to get in the ‘50s, giggled a bunch, and shot the Inhumans’ dog.

Now, is this an organic fit for an MCU story designed to empower and inspire? Who’s to say? Hooch got shot in Turner and Hooch, and that’s a classic of its genre, plus Agatha killed the dog in WandaVision and now we’re giving her her own show. One scene where Carol Danvers gets her memories back and recalls, wide-eyed, the time when she was staying with Anson Mount on the moon and accidentally drunksploded his giant English bulldog? That’s just good cinema.