Multiple Iron Mans, multiple timelines? Avengers 4 is like Lost, says Evangeline Lilly

Ant-Man and the Wasp star Evangeline Lilly in a recent interview compared the plot of Avengers 4 to the fourth season of Lost, the popular television series that she starred in. Season 4 of Lost was when the plot branched out and introduced the concepts of parallel timelines, flashbacks and flashforwards.

“You want me to tell you about the flash-forwards and flashbacks and flash-sideways?” Lilly said, according to a report on Comicbook.com. “When I heard about Infinity War (and Avengers 4) and the direction that they’re heading, I did have this moment of realizing, oh, wow, there’s a bit of a déjà vu for me with the Lost franchise. We are hitting that (Lost) Season 4 space where everything’s about to shift, and you’re about to lose the solid ground underneath you. And (Ant-Man and the Wasp), of course, will play a part in that.”

Lilly played Kate in six seasons of science fiction drama, Lost.

At the end of Infinity War, the supervillain Thanos snaps his fingers and ‘kills’ half the universe’s population, and half the Avengers, too. It is commonly accepted that the plot of Avengers 4 will involve the surviving heroes travelling back in time and rescuing those doomed to die. This theory was seemingly corroborated when pictures from the sets of the fourth Avengers film showed Iron Man, Captain America and the others

The directors of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 have been adamantly denying that character deaths will be reversed. “If we say goodbye to some characters, we will say it permanently,” writer Stephen McFeely told Huffington Post. But an unofficial plot synopsis for the film, published in a magazine that also (accurately) revealed the first synopsis for Infinity War, teased time travel and alternate dimensions.
The set pictures suggest that the surviving Avengers will return to a pivotal moment in their history, the Battle of New York from the first film, where Thanos first sent his armies to Earth. But besides seeing Ant-Man and the Wasp join the battle - they weren’t present the first time around - we also see Tony Stark in a SHIELD uniform, which he wasn’t wearing in the original battle. This has led fans to speculate if multiple versions of the characters exist in multiple dimensions, thereby ensuring that death isn’t cheated, just sidestepped.

“In the new photos, it seems almost certain the scene isn’t a flashback, as Downey Jr. can be seen wearing a S.H.I.E.L.D. uniform, which he wasn’t wearing in The Avengers.The tweet releasing the newly leaked photos remarks, “this has to be time travel and not a flashback because there are two Tonys in the same place??” one fan wrote on Twitter, according to Express.co.uk.

Avengers 4 has been touted as a ‘significant conclusion’ to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it. Disney chief Bob Iger recently said that he hopes for the series to continue with new characters.

Marvel’s next film is Ant-Man and the Wasp, due out on July 13. It will be followed by Captain Marvel in early 2019.