With more than 30 movies in a little over 15 years — not to mention the additional shorts, TV shows, and complicated cross-movie continuity entailed in keeping everything together — it’s not too surprising that, occasionally, the Marvel Cinematic Universe drops the ball when it comes to providing closure to important plot elements.

Sometimes, that’s exactly the thing that can set up a big reveal much further down the line, as is teased for next year’s Captain America: Brave New World, which will pick up on plots from, checks notes, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. (You know, like most movie franchises that wait 17 years to pick up storylines again.) Other times, unresolved plots are a sign that everyone quietly agrees that, just maybe, a project was so disliked or unsuccessful that everyone involved has made a silent pact never to speak of it again… and then there’s the time that people just lose track about what’s out there and what isn’t, which is no harm no foul. But which of the MCU’s unresolved plots does everyone think about… and which are lost to the ages?

This is the latest topic in Popverse's new weekly series Famous, Infamous, and Forgotten — a vigorous, opinionated, and intense look at one specific corner in the pop culture realm we inhabit to pick out the most famous version of it all, the most infamous version of it all, and the most forgotten version of it all.

There’s a lot of dangling plots in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here are three of our favorites.

The Famous Unresolved Plot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The end of 2021’s Eternals saw the assembled might of the hidden race of superhumans on Earth defeat Tiamat the Communicator, a Celestial whose birth would mean the destruction of the planet. It was a big deal, as might be expected, and ended with a partial-Tiamat transformed into marble, unable to move, coming up out of the ocean large enough to be seen from space. (No, really; there’s a shot where we can see his hands appear out of the cloud cover.) You’d think that kind of thing would be a big deal, given that it involved part of the Earth cracking open and a dude climbing out, but… apparently not. Three years — and multiple movies and shows — later, and all we’ve seen about this again was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. We know that there’s a lot of things going on to distract people in the MCU, but, really? No-one’s bothered about the giant man crawling out the center of the Earth?

The Infamous Unresolved Plot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

The literal inciting incident of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War — the suicide of Crossbones, to prevent his capture by the Avengers while on a mission — remains somewhat of a mystery almost a decade later. Not in the sense of, “What happened to Crossbones,” because the answer to that is pretty obvious, but more around the simple question, “What was actually happening right there?” Audiences still have no idea what Crossbones was really up to, beyond stealing a biological weapon for a client that was seemingly so dangerous that death was preferable to capture. But… who was the client? What did they want with the biological weapon? And why did none of the Avengers seem that interested in actually finding out the answers to those questions, instead of getting into fights with each other for the next few years? On the plus side, whoever the client was, they don’t seem to have been up to anything that dangerous since Civil War, so maybe we should just assume that they weren’t that interested in wrongdoing, after all…

The Forgotten Unresolved Plot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Where is Baron Mordo? The post-credit scene of 2016’s Doctor Strange showed the villain attack a former student from Kamar-Taj, stealing his magic in the process. “I see, at long last, what’s wrong with the world,” he said. “Too many sorcerers.” So, there’s a magical serial killer on the loose, killing magic users and taking their abilities… which would normally feel like something that the Sorcerer Supreme would be on the lookout for. And yet, we’ve had absolutely no follow-up to this scene at all: not in the second Doctor Strange movie, nor in WandaVision, wherein a magical serial killer would have seemed to have belonged. Then again, maybe this might explain what’s happening in the beginning of the Agatha All Along trailer… 

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