Thanos’s snap in Avengers: Infinity War is arguably the single most consequential event in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To remove half of the living universe in one fell swoop amounts to a loss of life on a scale we barely have numbers to quantify. Then, everyone who remained behind had to cope with an impossible trauma. By the time Bruce Banner brought everybody back five years later, everyone on every world had changed forever. The aftermaths of both the snappening and un-snappening are simply a part of the MCU’s storytelling makeup from here on out.
It didn’t take long into Phase 4 for the MCU to show the aftermath of the blip from a layman’s perspective. WandaVision episode 4 showed Monica Rambeau’s chaotic return from being gone for five years as a barely staggered reverse-dusting that poofed billions of people back into reality at roughly the same time. In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the doubled world population puts stress on the geopolitical structures that emerged in the five-year gap to handle the blip in the first place, leading to further inequality and extremism. However, it wasn’t until Hawkeye that the MCU showed what being blipped was actually like for those who disappeared. And the truth is horrifying.
Hawkeye episode 5 opens with the story of Yelena Belova’s blipping. Shortly after the events of Black Widow, Yelena is successfully working on her mission to free the remaining Black Widow agents of the Red Room’s chemical control. After that, her plan is to move to New York with her sister, Natasha, and finally have a family again. Minutes later, Thanos snaps somewhere in Wakanda. Yelena blips. When she returns, her first thought is to find Natasha, who the audience knows is already dead.
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The horrifying reality is that those who blipped didn’t actually feel anything. One moment Yelena was in a bathroom, and the next the bathroom walls were a different color as five years went by in a snap. There was no pain, no time to parse what the strange dust was, and no sense of disappearing with an impulse to say goodbye. According to the blipped, they stayed in place while the world around them changed in confusing and impossible ways. By the time they realized anything was wrong, they’d already lost five years of their lives.
Monica was asleep when she blipped. From her perspective, she took a nap and had a Rip van Winkle–esque awakening five years later. That somehow feels kinder than those who were conscious during the time shift, who didn’t even have the benefit of experiencing a transition between their lives in 2018 and the new reality of 2023.
Of course, both Monica and Yelena quickly discover that the one person they need to contact upon their return is dead. So, the result of their slightly different yet still traumatic blip circumstances is the same. Multiply what they went through by literal billions of life forms across an entire universe and the full effect of Thanos’s snap becomes even more unconscionable than it seemed in the first place. Put the entire MCU in therapy.
Hawkeye is streaming on Disney+.