Headscratchers / Captain Marvel (2019)

Headscratchers for Captain Marvel (2019).

Spoilers will be unmarked.

Dr. Lawson's power core

• The movie takes place specifically in 1995, by which time Hydra had already infiltrated and grown within S.HI.E.L.D.. So how was Lawson able to procure the Tesseract for her experiments — to the point that she was free to take it up into space in secret without a supervisor or mole asking about its whereabouts?
  • Probably a combination of Right Hand Versus Left Hand, and the fact that HYDRA, while growing more powerful, were not omnipotent or omnipresent within S.H.I.E.L.D. HYDRA might have known and figured they could just re-obtain the Tesseract when she was done with it, or HYDRA might not have known about the presence of the Tesseract at all, especially if it had been in Dr. Lawson's possession for a long enough time beforehand. Remember that at this point, HYDRA were more interested in obtaining the super-soldier serum as well as Hank Pym's technology; they may have just assumed the Tesseract was lost and prioritized more achievable goals.
  • Um no If Hydra was part of shield since its founding, why would not know about the Tesseract? Also why would a an explicitly global organization (it is called the World Security Council not the American Security Council) hand to an exclusively American project? I mean just changing one or two lines to have Project Pegasus be an international project for space exploration would make this all more plausible.
    • Maybe the US military simply seized control of the Tesseract following World War II. Or perhaps Howard Stark willingly gave it to the American government to give them a leg up in the Cold War.
  • Given she has super tech and the resources of an intergalactic empire, Lawson was quite capable of simply stealing it. It wasn't like she was advertising the fact that she was building warp technology, even her test pilots were in the dark.
  • A minor point here is that while the movie takes place in 1995, that's after six years of Carol being an amnesiac in the Kree Empire — Hydra had already infiltrated SHIELD when Dr. Lawson was active, but it may not have been as thorough in 1989 as it was in 1995, let alone 2014.
    • Unless he was just being dramatic (maybe, he does seem to have a proclivity for it), Dr. Zola said that HYDRA had been operating within SHIELD since its genesis (presumably around the time that it was codified out of the SSR, installing leadership around Zola whom he could corrupt and turn into sleepers in order to seed more agents from there). So by the late 80s SHIELD would have been absolutely riddled with operatives if the conspiracy was as large as it was in The Winter Soldier (they were, after all, orchestrating events like the Iran-Contra Affair, meaning that they had enough leverage in the government as a whole to manipulate world events). It does seem difficult to buy that the object Zola himself had worked on with Schmidt would slip past his notice once he had his tentacles within SHIELD. During the events of Carol's disappearance Zola would have been reduced to the supercomputer state but still very much in control of the organization.
  • In 1989 Howard Stark was still working with S.H.I.E.L.D. it's believed by that point he knew something was rotten within by that time he could have 'arranged' for the Tesseract to be 'loaned' to the USAF on an ongoing basis by selling it as a 'Win-Win' for S.H.I.E.L.D. if Lawson is successful they would have 'dibs' on the new engine tech and if it doesn't work then the Tesseract would be returned...while Howard was secretly planning to never have it returned. Unfortunately Howard got a fatal case of 'metal fist to the face' before Carol showed back up and it fell back into S.H.I.E.L.D. hands.

Lawson making things harder for herself

• Related to the above: if Lawson had already obtained the Tesseract, why even build a Lightspeed Engine anymore when it could have whisked the Kree cruiser anywhere in the universe? The refugees are probably unaware of what the cube can do, but wouldn't an advanced Kree scientist already know about it, or learn about its power while experimenting with it, like Selvig did?
  • An Infinity Stone is almost impossible to control on its own without a control device like the Infinity Gauntlet, she was trying much like HYDRA in WW2 to extract it's energy into an object to power it, and in this case instead of a weapon it was an engine to help the Skrulls.
  • And knowledge of what the Infinity Stones are seems very limited. Thor didn't know (at least, not enough to recognize them) until he visited the Norns in Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's likely that even the Kree aren't fully aware of what the Stones are, what they can do, or what they're contained in. To Mar-Vell, the Tesseract was just an artifact she could use to help her design a new kind of FTL engine. Even if she knew that the Tesseract contained the Space Stone, devising a way to tap into the Space Stone's power to send the Skrulls anywhere they wanted would probably be far more difficult than using the Tesseract energy to design a new engine.
  • Also if she did know what the Tesseract really was, well Thanos isn't the only guy who would want to collect the stones, the FTL engine is a big enough MacGuffin on it's own, throw in an Infinity Stone and that's a very large target for a project to protect endangered refugees.

Director Keller

• How did Talos within an hour of arriving on Earth locate and subdue a director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and know enough about the organisation to manipulate its agents to do his bidding?
  • It's mentioned that Skrulls have access to the memories of whoever they are impersonating, albeit to a limited extent. It is also established that they are well aware of Earth and at least some Skrulls had been there already; it might even be that Talos himself had been to Earth before to look for his family but couldn't find them, which is why he sought out Carol in the first place. In fact as he mentions that he had the Black Box from the doomed aircraft it would make sense that the box itself led him to Carol, making it likely that they infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. and / or Pegasus long before, so when Carol went missing on Earth and S.H.I.E.L.D. got involved he just went straight for the Director he already knew about from the earlier sneak ins.
  • It's also possible that the other Skrulls, like the one who impersonated Coulson, was able to identify Keller from Coulson's short-term memories and tell Talos who to look out for before taking off with Fury.
  • Talos mentions he got Keller's form at the Blockbuster and tied him up in a closet.

Why didn’t the Skrulls tell Fury he needs to see a doctor after getting scratched?

• When Fury gets scratched, he passes it off as a flesh wound, but the footage cuts away to the Skrull leader (Talos) shaking his head knowingly, but they never actually say anything. I guess it would be more understandable if the poison in the scratch couldn’t be cured, but that’s never clarified. Instead, they just come off a dicks.
  • I thought Talos was just shaking his head at Fury's stubbornness, and it just turned out worse than he thought it would.
  • Talos probably knew that no human doctor could do squat to heal a flerkin-claw wound. Why ruin Fury's day even more?

Why isn’t the cat caged up in a basement somewhere?

• After Fury loses his eye, he just kind of keeps the cat as a pet. We know he’s the biggest badass in the franchise, but the cat is a really freakin’ dangerous alien that can eat people whole or destroy body parts with a single scratch.
  • Well... what else would you expect from this mother-flerkin cat? If you cage it, it will escape. Plain and simple.
  • Goose has also shown to be very handy in a fight, and capable of identifying friend from foe. Keeping it around is a pretty good idea.
  • That "cat" had apparently been living at the base where Mar-Vell did her research for years, without any string of mysterious disappearances or maimings among the military staff. Goose knows how to behave around people; she'd just been pushed too far by Nick's excessive attempts to cuddle and manhandle her.

Vandalizing private property

• This is nagging at me, but when Captain Marvel blasts a juke box to kind prove her identity, is something like that acceptable in the alien culture she came from? I mean, Thor doesn’t smash things in public with his hammer to prove his identity, and Valhalla looks like it would tolerate that more than a futuristic society with public transportation and computers everywhere. Iron Man at least tries to buy the property he’s about to destroy, and only when he’s desperate.
  • Thor didn't smash anything to prove his identity, but he did smash a coffee mug on the ground just because he liked the drink.
  • Honestly, considering that she's fighting an intergalactic war and is coming across road block after road block, respecting etiquette on a planet she (thinks she) has never been to probably isn't a top priority. That's if it would have even been a priority to begin with. We've also seen that Carol is extremely emotional, and thus potentially impulsive, possibly of the "shoot first, ask questions later" variety.

Changing the color of the Starforce uniform

• Yon-Rogg is pissed when Carol shows up with a differently coloured uniform. So...why, then, is the ability to alter the suit's colours even an option?
  • Early on the movie, we see Starforce changing their uniform colors to black so they can be stealthy. This is probably why they can do it.
  • It's shown that the Kree have spies on other worlds. Presumably they would need to be able to change their look for such missions, not to mention the use as camouflage in alien environments.
  • And given that one of the options Monica lands on is screamingly bright Tron Lines, it might have the ability to change colors to hit blind spots to Bizarre Alien Senses. . . what humans see as stealthy black might be florescent green paisley to a being that sees on a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and what we saw as looking like Carol wrapped in neon signs might be invisible to them.
  • A more mundane possibility is that Kree uniforms have different colors based on the Kree's role or position, like Star Trek. Being able to change the colors at will would be convenient when one's assignment changes.
    • This (on its own) would probably only justify a limited group of pre-set options. But the suit seems to allow for almost any possible colour scheme.
    • Which means the feature makes sense as camouflage. Star Force can be deployed pretty much anywhere on a moment's notice, you never know what planet you're going to be on in an hour and what camouflage you will need, so the armor has all the options. When not changed for stealth purposes, it's supposed to be the green-and-silver Kree colors, so Yon-Rogg is basically offended that Carol changed the colors of Dress Blues.

Music and the Supreme Intelligence

• When Carol is forcibly connected to the Supreme Intelligence in the climax, the AI makes note of a record playing Nirvana's "Come as You Are." Except the environment only draws things taken from the visitor's consciousness, and that song came out after Carol was abducted from Earth. She might have heard it in the two days she was back on Earth, but the film never shows that, leaving this oddity.
  • There were several minor time skips as she travels with Fury from place to place. She probably heard it in that time, and it got stuck in her head, resulting in it playing in her subconscious when she's connected to the Supreme Intelligence.
  • The Supreme Intelligence almost certainly has access to her memories before she was taken. The fact that she's commenting on these things now means that they must be new memories.
  • Also, was the music ever confirmed in the dialogue to have been diegetic? It could just be for the audience, to make them feel uneasy.
  • It was definitely in-universe. Carol reacted to it and saw the record player, and the Supreme Intelligence specifically commented on it and danced to it.
  • The Supreme Intelligence's mind-link web was hooked into the Kree communication network. Possibly it just skimmed through whatever the Accuser ships' gear was picking up from local broadcast frequencies, and picked out something to appeal to Carol's musical tastes.

No need for life support?

• When she leaves with the Skrull refugees, Carol flies off into space sans her armor's Collapsible Helmet. Why? As otherwise established, her powers don't let her breathe in space. When she took on Ronan's forces she used the helmet so she could breathe.
  • In the comics, Carol can breathe in space. Some of her cosmic adventures only give her a ship so she has a place to sleep, eat, and relax; otherwise, she can fly pretty much anywhere she wants with nothing but herself. She may have used the helmet initially because she didn't realize the full extent of her powers, but quickly learned she didn't need it once the Kree Power Limiter had been fried.
  • It could also be a spacesuit similar to the ones seen in Guardians Vol 2, albeit with its field being much thinner and closer to the body as a result of being made on a higher, military budget rather than just something Rocket made/stole/bought from a black market dealer.

An FTL engine? Who cares?

• Why would Lawson's FTL engine change the game for anyone? The Kree and other alien races are already capable of FTL travel. We see them do it. It's ubiquitous technology in Guardians of the Galaxy.
  • That FTL requires jump points. Yon-Rogg and the rest of Starforce sit out the entire second and half of the third act because they have to travel 22 hours at sublight speed to reach a jump point that can take them to Earth. A "point-and-click" FTL drive, that can take you to anywhere from anywhere, would be as much of a gamechanger as moving from railroads to airplanes.
  • It's an especially significant gamechanger for hunted refugees — it's a lot easier for the Kree to patrol a limited number of known jump points than to search everywhere.
  • This is the real answer—a Portal Network is only useful if you have control of the portals. The FTL drive itself meant little to the Kree, because they DID already have such a network, but to refugees on the run being able to bypass it meant everything.
  • Adding a minor point that using too many of those at once is also bad for your body.
  • In fact, the bigger headscratcher is why no one else in the galaxy has seemingly tried again to recreate the engine, albeit with some other power source.
  • There's your answer: They tried, but they failed because they didn't have the Tesseract. There was no need to show that because they failed.
  • Yep. The tesseract wasn't just a "power source", it was the mechanism that made it work. No space stone, no on-demand jumps. It's worth noting that the Asgardians' ability to open wormholes between a handful of planets was enough to let them carve out an empire. The distress signal in Infinity War reveals that it takes more than twenty-odd jumps to get from Asgard to Earth the normal way, and ships are stuck moving at sub-light speed between them.
  • The Asgardians' ability to create/access the Bifrost also may have its roots in the Tesseract. In "Thor" Loki says that if Thor destroys the bridge, he'll never see Jane again. In "The Avengers," Loki refers to the Bifrost still being gone, and Odin having to use "Dark Energy" to send Thor to Earth, apparently at some cost. But the Tesseract is returned to Asgard at the end of The Avengers, and by "Thor 2," the Bifrost has been rebuilt as good as new.
    • Come to think of it, the Asgardians presumably have laid claim to the Tesseract before, because Red Skull found it in the first place by tracing back obscure Norse legends. So the Space Stone may well have played a role in Bifrost's original construction, back in prehistory before its concealment on Earth, as well as in the bridge's recent repairs.
• I got the impression that calling it an FTL engine was Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale and that it was meant to be something a lot faster than what already existed.

Keller and Fury checking out the skrull's private part

• I can understand Fury being curious, but why would Keller do that since he is one of the skrulls? If he is trying to keep up appearances, then it's an odd thing to do.
  • It's likely just as you said, to keep up appearances. He notices that Fury is curious about it and acts curious as well so as to not seem suspicious. If you encountered the corpse of an alien for the first time, wouldn't you be curious as to how they compare to us?
  • Alternatively, Talos himself was curious how he compared to his comrade.

Did the Kree just almost start a war with Asgard?

• Last time an alien invasion took place on Earth, namely the Jötunn invasion during the medieval era, Asgard responded with such force the Jötunn are still a shadow of their former power 1000 years later. Asgardians are a known power on the intergalactic scene. Wouldn't the Supreme Intelligence or Ronan be at least somewhat concerned of provoking Asgard when they already have trouble with at minimum the Skrulls and Xandar?
  • At least it's consistent. The Kree have demonstrated a persistent millennia-long tendency to meddle with Earth without any thought about Asgard's opinion.
  • True, but there is a difference between merely meddling with Earth and glassing the whole planet with WMD. And it’s pretty hard to hide just about anything from Heimdall. Possible, yes, but still pretty damn hard.
  • Maybe Heimdall saw them arrive in Earth's orbit indeed, but it certainly takes some time to mobilize the Asgardian army, and Carol repelled the Accusers in mere minutes. Heimdall probably saw what was going on and decided Asgard shouldn't bother coming to help. Or better yet, sending ambassadors on Hala to demand explanations.
  • Was the Supreme Intelligence even consulted? It seemed to me like Yon-Rogg made the call out of desperation, and there's no particular reason to think he's even aware of Asgard having once into Earth to kick cold butt. Ronan might have known, but then again he might not depending on the limits of his role as an Accuser. In any case, his characterization has been one of a bloodthirsty warrior, so maybe he just didn't care about anything past "KILL SKRULLS!"
  • Firstly, we know that Asgard has been mostly non-aggressive for at least a thousand years, so they may not have been seen as a threat. Plus, a small special-ops force isn't the same as a full-scale invasion. And Ronan seems like the type who refuses to be afraid of anything, even if he has good reason to be.

Nick Fury's age

• This movie establishes a) that Nick Fury was born on July 4th, 1950, b) that he joined the US Army straight out of high-school and left it as a "full bird" Colonel, and c) that by the time the Cold War ended in 1989 he had already had an extensive career as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. How old was Fury supposed to be when he left the Army?
  • Okay, let's assume that he graduated High School in 1968, and enlisted in the Army in time for Vietnam. Six months of training, then a year in-country. He distinguishes himself, shows leadership, and is picked for Officer Candidate School. So by 1970 he's a 20-year-old second lieutenant, and probably headed back to Vietnam.
    According to the internet, he could then potentially progress through the ranks to O-6 (colonel) in as little as 12 and a half years. Being Nick Fury, he'd probably rise fast, so it's reasonable to say he's a colonel by 1985, when he would be 35. For whatever reason he then decides to leave the military and go into intelligence work. That gives him ten years to do the spy thing and join SHIELD.
    Also, was it confirmed that he was in SHIELD by 1989? He could have joined in the intervening six years, possibly because the collapse of communism left him at a loose end in the CIA (or whatever other agency he was working for).

It's possible he started working for SHIELD while still in the Army. It's not uncommon for military personnel to be assigned to civilian government agencies or departments. A recent director of the CIA was still a uniform-wearing Air Force General.

Ronan takes an interest

• Why have Ronan take an interest in Carol? He dies by the time Carol returns to our part of the galaxy. Unless they do another sequel in the past, it seems like a Sequel Hook going nowhere.
  • That's certainly not the only thing left hanging. The universe is a substantially different place by the time of Guardians of the Galaxy, with the Supreme Intelligence apparently gone, the Kree at peace, and Ronan and Korath having defected. Something certainly must have gone on between those two movies, and chances are we'll witness it in some fashion at some point.
  • Ronan may be dead, but not the Accusers. The Kree probably have more of them around.
    • Unless they called him the Accuser because he was the only one left.
  • With Captain Marvel's first movie happening in 1995, who's to say that they can't have Ronan in a sequel? The sequel doesn't have to be a modern day movie happening after Endgame. There's plenty of room for it to happen between the end of this movie, and before the start of Guardians.
    • Not to mention the flashback/backstory option. Maybe we'll see Carol fighting it out with more Accusers in the opening act of Guardians 3, resulting in some Macguffin or villain going astray for the Guardians to run into, decades later?

Why didn't Fury use the communicator sooner?

• Okay, it's an Acceptable Break from Reality when you have a universe like this, but it's gotta be said somewhere. So, there's a superhero this powerful, and during Ultron, Malekith, the Hydra takeover, Thanos _before_ people started turning to dust, etc. etc. Carol never said "you know, I should probably go do something about that," and nobody who knew of her said "you know, we should probably ask the cosmic ultra-powerhouse who could deal with this in about ten seconds for help."
  • Pretty much all the excuses I can think of will sound fairly lame, but...
  • Maybe Fury believed in all the cases previously cited she would simply come too late to do any good. She flies fast, yes, but the universe is big. This is somewhat supported by The Stinger, as Carol showed up on Earth after what look like days or even weeks after the Snap. Granted in that specific case she might have had her hand full with the after effects even before getting to Earth.
  • Maybe Fury though she was so powerful she would do even more damages than the baddies. Carol literally one-punched a space warship after all, letting her loose on the ground in the middle of, say, NYC, could be fairly catastrophic even by the standards set by Thor or Hulk.
  • Maybe there will be an interquel where Fury did ask to come back for whatever crisis of the day happened, but then they had a falling out and from then onward, the transmitter would only be used in case of ultra-super-omega catastrophe, and neither Loki, Ultron, or whatever qualify until the Snap. Somewhat supported by the contrast between the downright idealistic 1995 Fury, and the hyper cynical Winter Soldier era Fury. Maybe Carol didn’t like the change of attitude.
  • Maybe Fury was so secretive on the whole event, he was literally the only person on Earth who knew she could be contacted and in position to do so. IE neither, say, Maria Hill, Coulson or whatever politician in charge could suggest it to him, and he was confident the avengers could handle anything.
  • Bottom line is, that’s like asking why Umbrella didn’t send Nemesis in during the event of Resident Evil 2. The true answer is that he didn’t even exist as concept art in Capcom HQ back then. Same with MCU Captain Marvel. I dare you to find any hint of her existence in the earlier MCU movies, while finding hints of Hulk and Thor or Captain America existences in Iron Man 2 is common knowledge. She was somewhat shoved in, I guess, in the MCU continuity, and it shows.
  • She's always been the back up plan. He would have called her in if the Avengers had failed at any point, but they've always been successful in the past. It's only when the Avengers had quite obviously failed that he pushes the button.
  • In addition to the "It'd take too long for her to get there" factor (since most MCU films are set over a matter of days, and Carol seems to arrive several days, or longer, after the pager was activated), maybe he DID call her during some of the films, just in case, but sent an all-clear after the local heroes resolved things.
  • Must have been really annoying for her after the third or fourth time then. Maybe that’s why she looks so livid in The Stinger.
  • Word of God is that Fury did contact her during the first Avengers movie. Obviously she didn't participate in the battle of New York, but considering her relative position it might have been more practical for her to have attacked Sanctuary, distracting Thanos's forces from being sent through the portal to Earth. In fact considering her ties to various intergalactic organisations and empires, there's any number of ways she could help beyond 'fly to Earth and punch people'.
  • According to the comic "Marvel's Captain Marvel Prelude", she's the Godzilla Threshold and they tried to avoid calling her if possible. And, if that comic is canon, both Fury and Hill know about the pager.
  • If we look at the events between 1995 and 2019 there is only ONE event that could be considered 'Carol Worthy' and that would be the Battle of New York in 2012, and by that time Fury no longer has just Carol he's got 6 Avengers on his roster, one of which is a freaking Demi-God and another is a giant rage monster who's about as durable as Carol herself, so Fury might have held back...lets see if the New Hometown Team can deal with the situation and if not, then call in Carol. Same thing in Infinity War, he waited till he KNEW the Avengers Team had failed/fallen then called in Carol.
  • I would argue that Ultron’s shenanigans were even more Carol worthy, as the Avengers won pretty much by the skin of their teeth, and that Hydra’s takeover would have been fairly catastrophic. Then again, in the latter case, Fury or Rodgers didn’t call any other Avengers either.
  • It adds weight to Fury's argument with the World Security Council about nuking New York that he's got Carol's pager in his back pocket, ready to use (or possibly already activated, as stated above). "If we don't [bomb New York], we lose everything!" "I send that bird out, we already have." Because he won't even consider sending that bird himself unless Carol somehow can't handle the situation.
    • Fury may not want to admit to the WSC that Carol is even an option, considering how they're actually inclined to nuke millions of innocent New Yorkers without even waiting to see if the Avengers might win, first. Carol's already been manipulated by one overly-ruthless government; giving another one a chance to take advantage of her isn't a good idea, even if they do come from her genuine home planet this time.
  • Another possibility: Calling on Carol could bring Earth to the attention of any enemies she's made over the years, and any enemy of hers that she hasn't already curb-stomped is presumably powerful enough to be just as bad as if not worse than any of the previous threats.
    • This. For all we know, it's possible that Fury or the governments of Earth had to disavow any connection to Carol at some point to avoid a war with the Kree or anyone else she might've tangled with.
  • It's also possible that Fury did call Carol during these past events, but she simply wasn't able to respond for one reason or another.

How did Fury find Carol?

• After the chase sequence, Carol goes to the old bar she and Maria used to go to. Fury, meanwhile, is at SHIELD HQ and decides to go find her. Suddenly, he's at the bar. How did he know she was there?
  • Good ol' fashioned detective work? He mentions he's got a lead on a motorbike thief matching her description, so he could have got help from the cops who were keeping an eye out for her already.
  • Also, Carol was using a public computer just before she made off with the motorcycle and the mannequin clothes. It would have been fairly simple for Fury to find from the Internet Cafe staff which computer she had used and then to find that she had attempted an online search for Pancho's Bar.

Why were Fury and Carol detained at Project Pegasus?

• At Project Pegasus, Fury uses his thumb print to get into Project Pegasus and it's explained that, as a SHIELD agent, he has clearance. That's great but once they get into the facility, a random guard detains them in a locked office. What gives?
  • They specifically showed up asking for Dr. Lawson once they're inside, something that's supposed to be hidden and buried. Since the security guard was probably waiting for the higher ups to decide what to do with the two sudden investigators, he just put them in containment until he got his orders.
  • The whole point of showing him using his own thumbprint first and then it not working once they're left in the office is so there's no doubt for the audience that they're being held deliberately. We see that he has clearance and then we see that it has been overridden. That's why Fury's page says that they've been detained.

Leonard Cohen

• After Carol has crashed into the Blockbuster store, and she's making the call to her Kree teammates, on the background we see ads for different music albums. Most of them make sense given that the movie takes place in 1995; for example, you see posters of Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which came out that year. But there's also several posters advertising Leonard Cohen's The Future, and they look pretty new and shiny... Except that that album had come out in 1992, and it wasn't really much of a success outside Canada. So why would there still be pristine posters for it hanging there three years later?
  • That particular store's manager was a really big fan and kept a supply of pristine ones to use?
  • Natural Born Killers was released to the home video market in 1995, and its soundtrack included some songs from that Cohen album. Cross-promotion between the film and its music, probably.

Supreme Intelligence Round 2

• Was there a reason given as to why the Kree made Carol make contact with the Supreme Intelligence? It's perfectly reasonable that they didn't see any risk, but from their perspective Carol is an ultimately inconsequential traitor who betrayed the empire to help a few refugees. Wouldn't a super AI ruler of an interplanetary empire have better things to do than rub a rogue soldier's face in the dirt? Wouldn't the Kree soldiers' time be better spent doing just about anything else?
  • The goal was probably to break her mentally and find out everything she knew about the Tesseract. As far as the Supreme Intelligence was aware, it was a weapon for the Skrull to use against the Kree, so it wants to find out the capabilities of the weapon and how to operate it so that the Kree can use it against their enemies.
  • As for having better things to do, I would assume that as a super-advanced AI ruler of an interstellar empire, the Supreme Intelligence is capable of splitting its attention enough ways that dedicating part of its mind to breaking Carol wouldn't significantly impact its ability to do other things at the same time.
  • The Kree stated they would use the Supreme Intelligence to bring Carol back to their side. With all the power at her command she wasn't at all "inconsequential" if they could find a way to control her again. Hence the AI keeps trying to convince her that she needs the Kree.
  • It's also possible that the Supreme Intelligence had the ability to wipe Carol's memories again, but wasn't able to use it thanks to her Heroic Willpower.

Carol's Call Sign

• The movie reveals that Carol's Air Force call sign is "Avenger". Nick Fury chooses that as the name for The Avenger Initiative. The original name he had in mind was "Protector Initiative". Carol never saw combat in the Air Force and pilots don't get to choose their names. Call signs tend to be embarrassing nicknames. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5w_52r0uI8 . So how exactly did a pilot that has never saw combat earn the name "Avenger".
  • Perhaps at the time it was meant to be embarrassing, that Carol acted like she was out to "avenge" the restricted role women had in the military.
  • Or her embarrassing flubs in training like the failed rope climb.
  • None of Carol's peers in any of the flashbacks seem to be particularly welcoming of her, or of women in general. It's possible they gave Carol that call sign as a deliberate move to rub it in her face that she'd never be able to do anything actually exciting. Or maybe she really was just so impressive that they gave her a suitably impressive call sign.
    • Maybe Carol's fellow pilots were on the whole more accepting of her and Maria than we saw in the flashbacks, and went out of their way to give them cool-sounding names. (Maria got dubbed Photon, after all.)
  • Out of universe, it's for the sake of promoting Carol's ties to the wider MCU, making her seem more a part of the story despite the fact she didn't get a solo film until the near end of Phase 3 — in fact, her callsign in the comics was actually "Cheeseburger". As for the in-universe reason... not a clue. Probably mockery.
  • As far as I've been able to tell via Google, women could fly military aircraft in the US Air Force in 1985 and thus be eligible for a callsign, just not participate in combat missions. As for 'Avenger' being too 'cool', in addition to it possible being a mocking nickname, the Nom de Guerre trope shows that 'cool' nicknames are more common in fiction (eg. Top Gun).
  • Maybe she really likes British spy shows.
  • Or maybe she and Maria used "Avenger" and "Photon" to record their scores while playing flight-simulator games off-duty, and the other trainees found out about it. Which would make their call signs a dis, along the lines of: "Go back to the arcade, girls, it's the closest you'll ever get to being real fighter pilots."

Carol's Skrull test on Fury

• Carol quizzes Fury on his past as Skrull can only copy recent memories. Okay, but Carol has no way to verify that Fury is just spinning her BS and making up stuff about his past. She doesn't know his real past to compare against.
  • She probably thinks she can see through an inauthentic-sounding answer. She's likely wrong, but it ends up not mattering.
  • She also asks the questions rapidly, making it harder to come up with a lie, and finishes by asking for a quirk of Fury that is too strange for a Skrull to just come up with on the fly.
  • Carol basically confirms in-film that she's just turning Fury's question on itself as an opportunity to mess with him, which is what Fury himself realizes after he reveals the bit about the toast.

Fury's Skrull test on Carol

• Carol proves she's not a Skrull by firing off one of her photon blasts and telling Fury that Skrulls can't do that. How would he know she's telling the truth though? He only found out about Skrulls and Kree a few hours ago.
  • He wouldn't. And he immediately states this to her.
  • And by creating the situation where he says that, she implicitly raises a pretty good point: Fury doesn't know enough about the situation to make any kind of informed judgement. He just has to trust her, or not trust her.
  • Also, showing off her power is an implicit argument that he ought to trust her, because if she had hostile intentions she could have blasted him at any time.
  • It's also a good way for Carol to further test Fury's identity. Skulls and Kree would know that a Skrull can't shoot photon blasts, but an earthling wouldn't. And Fury is a federal agent/spy, so he would be naturally, justifiably distrustful. If Fury had simply said, "fair enough, you're not a Skrull" to her shooting the jukebox, it would raise suspicion about his identity on multiple levels.

Why do the Kree bother with the Skrulls?

• The Skrulls can't possibly pose any threat to the Kree empire, so why do they expend the effort to try to hunt them down? Don't the Kree have other potential enemies, like Xandar, that would warrant their attention? For that matter, why didn't the Skrulls go to hide out on Xandar or some other galactic power instead of on defenseless worlds?
  • It's indicated the vast majority of the Kree people and military totally buy the "Skrulls are invading us" line. A fantastic way to keep control of a dictatorship is to convince your people that there's a massive threat they must fight and give up all control to the rulers to do so.
  • Also, it seems the Skrulls were a bigger force once before the Kree crushed them and the Kree want to ensure they don't become strong again and come for payback (which, given their abilities, would be a serious concern).
  • For all we know, the Xandarians hate the Skrulls as much as the Kree do. It's likely the Kree have spread the propaganda that the Skrulls "infiltrate and take over" so a bunch of Skrull refugees coming to Xandar would easily be mistaken as an invasion force. Let's face it, green-skinned sinister-looking shape-shifters are hard to trust and wouldn't be welcomed.
  • Plus, taking on the Skrulls could instigate a full-on conflict with the Kree that Xandar wants to avoid.
  • For me, what few scenes we see on Hala give out a strong ‘’1984’’ or Soviet Russia vibe. Things like repeatedly stating how the individual must sacrifice everything for the collective or how you get to be brainwashed by the leadership if you misbebehave (ie: express emotions). I think a closer examination of the Kree empire would reveal major social problems that are swept under the rug through heavy handed propaganda. The Skrulls happen to simply be the ‘’Enemy du jour’’ needed to kept the population in check. Talos states his people wouldn’t bow down to the Kree expansionists way and were wiped out as a result. The Kree also have a commissar like corp with the Accusers, who are even more Exterminatus trigger-happy than a flippin’ WH40k inquisitor. Such an attitude is somewhat comprehensible in the grim darkness of the future, not so much in the MCU from what we’ve seen thus far. I also seem to remember the original comic book Kree were always supposed to be space commies, so there you have it.
  • The fact that the MCU Kree are ruled by an AI may also be a factor. If the Supreme Intelligence's way of thinking is qualitatively anything like that of the Zola AI, its decision-making process will be strongly rooted in predicting how people will behave and knowing exactly what they're capable of doing. The Skrulls' ability to impersonate others, behaving in ways that the person whom they're duplicating would and/or could never do, would really mess with its expectations, hence make ruling the Kree Empire more problematic. Exterminating the Skrull race may ultimately be about removing a pesky random factor from the Supreme Intelligence's social equations, no more than that.
    • Indeed. If the MCU Supreme Intelligence is anything like its comic counterpart, it's continuously doing long-term calculations on how to ensure the survival of the Kree Empire for the millennia to come. In the comics, the Supreme Intelligence went as far as decimating most of the Kree Empire and its people because it felt the Empire had become stagnant. For the SI it's all about long-term cost/benefit analysis, no enemy is too insignificant if it predicts they might pose a threat to the Kree at some point in the future.
  • Well... how do you know there aren't Skrulls hiding out on Xandar? How would you know? How would anybody? It's also possible they deliberately spread themselves out, just in case the Kree managed to finally destroy Xandar.
  • Another thought: Skrull infiltration is a perfect excuse for aggression against any power or world. Need some resources on Torfa? "Discover" some Skrulls there and send in the Accusers. Want a casus belli to go to war against Xandar (again)? Claim their leadership has been replaced by Skrulls and go nuts! It's like the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the Reichstag fire, except you get to use it over and over again.
  • For all their advanced tech, the Kree also don't seem to have a better way of detecting Skrulls than simply asking them personal questions and pre-determined codewords. As reduced as their numbers are, the Skrulls can still be a threat. The Kree are determined to wipe them out because even a few could make for perfect spies in the service of their more militarily powerful enemies like Xandar.

Years on Hala are identical to Earth years?

• When Carol learns that the accident with Project Pegasus happened six years ago, she says that that's exactly how long ago the Kree found her with amnesia. But how would she know that was six years ago? Is Hala's orbit around its sun exactly the same as with Earth, so the years there last exactly as long? And even if they are, how would she know that, given that she just crash-landed on Earth without having done any previous research on it?
  • Perhaps her universal translator comes with a unit converter? I mean, it would need it to be worn beneath her civilian clothes, but it wouldn't be that far-fetched of a function considering the Kree are an interplanetary empire.
  • It's possible that most or even all habitable planets are of similar size, orbiting similar-size stars at similar distances, so that their years are also of roughly similar length as well.

Unarmed Carol

• Okay so one of the first scenes in the movie is a fist between Carol and Jude Law with the later establishing Carol can't control her energy blast. Yet when they don't have her carry any sort of Kree weapons in the field instead. Why? Even with the energy blast it just seems tactically unsound to send in someone who would be otherwise unarmed.
  • She may have trouble keeping her powers from activating in a fight, but its not a lack of control to the point where she would blast in a direction that an opponent was not in. And since she won't be sparring allies on this mission, and the Kree don't care a bit about Skrull casualties, Carol is given free reign to use her powers. To them she is a living weapon, so they may think it pointless to give her additional weapons.
  • I think Yon-Rogg was talking about Carol lacking control over her emotions, not her powers.

What is Goose doing here?

• So, Goose is not really a cat, but some alien lifeform that looks just like a cat, except for that little detail that I won't spoil. But what is it doing on planet earth? I doubt that either the Kree or the Skrulls would have brought one: they were terrified of it. But it isn't a sentient alien lifeform either, so it couldn't have arrived by its own means. And, in a related question, what is a cat, alien or otherwise, roaming free around a top secret military base?
  • Goose actually belongs to Dr Lawton/Mar-Vell, she might have adopted her as Evil-Detecting Dog since Goose seems to have a sixth sense about good guys and bad guys. Dr Lawton herself stated that Goose doesn't warm up to new people that quickly when she rubbed up against Carol in the flashbacks, as for how Goose was able to roam about the base? It's possible that she was always there with Dr Lawton and the base staff may not have had the heart to send her to a shelter when she died and 'adopted' Goose as a pet/mascot. Or Goose just remained out of sight on the base for years eating what she could. Given her *ahem* hunting skills it's doubtful that she went hungry...

Everybody calls him Fury?

• If Nick Fury is so insistent on everyone being on Last-Name Basis with him, then why is it that Maria Hill calls him Nick right before she turns to dust in Infinity War? Is this just a Continuity Snarl?
  • Maybe that was just his stance back in the 90's, and over the years, he gradually decided that it was okay for certain people to call him "Nick."
  • Referring to Fury by his first name in such an extreme situation is probably not the best metric for regular people using it. The only individuals on first name basis with Fury would be Alexander Pierce, a dear friend, and Steve Rogers, who is well... “the greatest soldier in history” so Fury is prepared for the exception.
  • If anything were to cause someone to break that rule, it would be finding themselves turning into dust.
  • Honestly calling him Nick is easy code for 'this is serious and I need you to pay attention to me', like a Full-Name Ultimatum. Calling him Nicholas on the other hand is easy code for 'I'm a skrull'.
  • In 1995, The X-Files was big. And in season one of that show, Mulder explains to Scully that he even made his parents call him by his last name. Maybe Fury was a fan and was going through a phase?
  • It's to show that, faced with her own demise, Maria is calling out to him as her friend, not her boss.
  • Maybe Fury simply loosened up on that one particular detail over the years. Or he was over-exaggerating in that scene to make sure Carol didn't start calling him by his first name.

Stan Lee Cameo

• In Stan Lee's cameo, he is reading a script and presumably preparing for his role in Mall Rats. He plays himself in Mall Rats, in which Marvel Comics exist and characters within them (including those of this franchise) are talked about by characters including Stan Lee ... but Mall Rats is apparently a movie within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Possibly the MCU's Stan Lee is only famous for creating Marvel characters who contractually can't be used in the MCU, like the X-Men and Fantastic Four.
  • It's probably the Watchers' fault somehow.
  • Stan Lee is just another guise of the Watcher.
  • Considering that the Marvel Universe is a multiverse (as we're finally seeing an MCU Multiverse film with the use of Doctor Strange, it could be possible that the Stan Lee in the MCU not only exists in the MCU, but has special abilities to see OTHER alternate realities, meaning that his Fantastic Four and X-Men comics may have been him looking into alternate realities where they existed but didn't exist in the MCU. Think of it like Stephen King and his novels and short stories. They all exist as a multiverse of various realities that tie into the Dark Tower Universe, in which King himself is a character in and also writes about in-universe. Stan Lee in the MCU may the ability to look at the multiverse and often created stories about some of the more interesting heroes he saw in them that didn't exist in the MCU. He may have started his career writing for the original Captain America comics as propaganda for the war effort, and due to it being popular, he used his ability to look into multiple universes to draw the creation of comics based on the Fantastic Four and X-Men, believing they would never exist in the MCU. However, due to the upcoming Phase 4, it's possible that the Fantastic Four and the X-Men were integrated into the MCU due to Tony's snap (Tony not only may have wanted to remove Thanos and his army out of existence, but he may have also wished for more heroes to exist to continue to protect the world after he was gone, and the Infinity Stones integrated the Fantastic Four/X-Men/Deadpool universe into the MCU as a result). Of course, this is a hypothesis.

What happened to Chewie

• In the comics, Goose was known as Chewie. I know it is a rather minor thing, but why change the name of the cat to one that would make less sense? Chewie is of course named for everyone's favorite Wookiee, but I mean why change it to Goose? I specifically say it makes less sense since his owner was part of a joint Air Force-NASA and Top Gun was a navy recruitment film. For those not in the know, Interservice Rivalry is rife in the branches of the US Armed Forces as can be easily seen by our page on it at This Very Wiki. Royalties are obviously not a problem so why change it. And if they had to change for whatever reason (like casting a white actress to The Ancient One, why not make his new be a reference to a famous Astronaut or make it Apollo after the Apollo program?
  • Maybe Top Gun is just Mar-Vell's favorite movie.
  • Or maybe it's because Critters already used the gag of a cat named "Chewie" appearing in a film with alien doppelgangers who turn out to be the good guys in it.

Carol’s magical dog tags

• Right so Carol crashed, exploded the powered-by-an-infinity-stone engine, absorbed the power of said engine and her dog tag was magically cut in two and one piece is apparently teleported a good five meters away from her while her clothes and hair are not even messed up by the explosion...wait, what? Also kudo to Yon-Rogg for finding the one relevant small piece of metal in the middle of a crash site. I mean, do you imagine the hilarity if he had found a random old Pepsi can instead?
  • I'll assume this is a genuine headscratcher and not just nitpickery. The filmmakers needed two readable pieces of dog tag for the story to work. Plain and simple. Sometimes objects just survive destructive circumstances. The tag is remarkably tough. It survived the blast but was sliced by some other debris. The Space Stone has a sense of humor and applied its power to an important item.
  • Weird teleportation hijinks are probably to be expected from exploding something powered by the Space Stone.

SHIELD's name?

• In Iron Man 1, Coulson first introduced himself to Stark as an agent from "Strategic Homeland Intervention and Logistics Division", not "SHIELD", and their further dialogue even implied that they still haven't come up with the "SHIELD" acronym yet. Granted, the scene was played to tease the comics fans while keeping the movie itself 'clean' should it failed to pave the way for a whole MCU that we know to thrive. However, it was also even told (somewhere, I think in one of the comic tie-ins for the Phase 1 movies) that Fury himself didn't realize that there was such a very convenient acronym to the long name of their clandestine agency. However, in this movie, it is shown that Fury, Carol and basically all the other characters are already referring to the agency with its "SHIELD" acronym. Was that minor plot thread in Iron Man 1 retconned by this movie?
  • The flashbacks at the beginning of Ant-Man set in 1989 showed the SHIELD building with the acronym, so it was in use well before Iron Man. The most common explanation was that Coulson was just using the full name to sound more professional.
  • That plot thread from IM1 was dropped a long time ago. The real world reason is because back then, the general public watching the movie wouldn't know what SHIELD means. A possible in-universe reason is that given how big of a nerd that Coulson is, he used the full name because it invokes a huge sense of importance.
  • The acronym is used all along, even in Iron Man 1. At the end of the movie when Pepper stumbles over the long name Coulson interrupts her and says "Just call us SHIELD." The initials-name was never 'unknown' or 'unused', Coulson just liked to introduce himself using the full agency name (Which is what a lot of real-life people do even if there is a handy acronym. In some cases the law requires you to use the full name for a first identification).
    • But didn't he also say "We're working on it" whenever someone pointed out how long of a name it was? I thought him saying "Just call it SHIELD" at the end was to tie back into that, not him saying the anagram had been there all along.
    • Maybe it's the organization's full name that they're "working on", not its initialism. It's possible that an alternative name was under consideration at the time of Iron Man - perhaps one that would better emphasize that they're a global operation, not just a national ("Homeland") one - and Coulson was avoiding use of the SHIELD term because he figured it might be changing anyway. As it happened, the Thor crisis reminded everybody in-the-know that the Earth, itself, is a "Homeland" requiring defense, so the name-change plans were dropped.
  • Coulson isn't just an action hero badass, he's also a spy. He's trained for a certain amount of subterfuge and infiltration, so he knows how to give the impression that he wants to give. For whatever reason, in Iron Man 1 he wanted to make himself and his agency look as mild-mannered, bureaucratic, and (above all) non-threatening as possible. When he introduced himself, he was deliberately downplaying the whole "cool action spy" aspect of SHIELD. Using the full name instead of the cool acronym helps with that, because it's cumbersome. You can get bored and stop listening halfway through hearing it. Throwing in the line about "working on it", would just be a part of keeping in character. It presents the impression of an agency that hasn't found its feet. And it means that Pepper isn't really on guard around him.
  • ALSO, Howard Stark was one of the founders of SHIELD. Does Coulson know how much Tony knows about that? Might he be trying to obfuscate exactly what the organization is and what its connection to the Stark family is? Given Tony's contentious relationship with his father, might that connection actually damage the relationship Coulson is there to build between SHIELD and Iron Man? Tony's also a bit of a loose canon who'll do something just because he's been told he can't. He wants to put Tony at ease so they can talk about his Power Armor, so muddling the actual reasons he's there until he can get his foot in the door makes sense. Coulson also changes the subject very quickly, to something contentious, distracting Tony from spelling out what the acronym would...spell out (possibly something he heard his dad talk about regularly by the acronym, rather than the whole name). If Coulson hadn't moved on that fast, maybe Tony would have broken into the conversation with "Wait, you're with SHIELD? The same one my pops worked for? Hard pass, buddy, but thanks for playing. See yourself out, and sorry but we don't validate parking."

Carol's suit

• So we see Carol steal Earth clothing along with the motorcycle she acquires. So what happens to her Kree suit after that? She doesn't seem to be wearing it under her clothes... but she obviously keeps it with her somehow, since she uses its tech to contact Yon-Rogg from inside the Pegasus base. After that, she simply walks out of Maria's house wearing it right before they take the Quadjet into orbit. So where was she keeping it the entire time?
  • It must be stored in the same area of hyperspace that the helmet portion folds into. Stuff the suit into itself like an ouroboros and you wind up with way less luggage that you can fit in your pocket.
  • She just made it transparent and put on other clothes on top to blend in, allowing her to retain all the protection it presumably provides, while not looking like she was "dressed for laser tag."
  • For all we know, Kree suits can collapse into a tiny parcel for storage and concealment, same as Quill's headgear folds up into an earpiece. Not an unreasonable quality if they're every required to work undercover.
  • We can see in Infinity War and Endgame that Tony's latter suits are made of nanotech that can be stored in a tiny parcel. Given that Rocket mention that Tony is only the greatest mind on Earth, we can expect that the alien technology used nanotech long enough to their nanosuits be more advanced that Tony's.

The Supreme Intelligence's form in front of Carol

• If the Supreme Intelligence takes the form of the person whom the recipient admires the most, why or how does Carol see Dr. Lawson and not Maria? It would make more sense because Maria is her best friend, they've had a far longer history together. It would stand to reason that Maria was closest to her and had more meaning to her in her life. By default, someone you are closest to would be the person you admire the most, and it does look rather disrespectful to Maria that Carol admires Lawson/Mar-Vell more than her best friend.
  • The Supreme Intelligence had to work with Carol's fragmented memories. Initially, it found a memory of Lawson but it didn't find any of Maria. Later on, Carol recovers her memories of Maria, but at this point I figure that the Supreme Intelligence just doesn't want to bother updating the avatar.
  • "Admire" can mean different things. Perhaps the Intelligence goes looking for someone the recipient looks up to as an authority figure, so that its orders are more likely to be followed. Maria might've been Carol's best friend, but they were of equal rank — whereas Lawson was her superior and something of a mentor figure. So the choice makes sense.
    • Considering what the Supreme Intelligence is, this makes the most sense. It doesn't want to be your friend, it wants to be perceived as an authority figure you'll want to respect and follow. That's probably going to heavily influence whose image it pulls out of you subconscious to use as its avatar.
  • Exactly. It wants to be the person who can give you a stern (if understanding) look when you're being "childish", and make you want to be quiet, listen, and "shape up" to earn their approval. Given the choice, it'll probably choose someone that you respect and look up to, and not the beloved friend whom you happily bicker with, talk over, and throw mashed potatoes at when you're drunk (even if you love and admire them more).

Leaving the Tesseract on Earth

• IIRC, Lawson is important because she invented a new kind of FTL engine. The engine is powered by the Tesseract. All this is important to the Skrull refugees because it will allow them to escape to a region of space where the Kree can't follow them. But then comes the end of the movie, and the Skrull refugees go out into space...and they leave the Tesseract behind. They leave it on Earth. Apparently they don't need it. Apparently they can escape the Kree without it! So why the heck was the Tesseract ever a part of this story? Why did Lawson think it was important?
  • Because she couldn't develop the FTL engine without it. Studying the Tesseract is what let her come up with it in the first place, just like Red Skull couldn't have made his weapons without it, or Strucker couldn't have made the Twins without the Mind Stone. The engine is based on the Tesseract, but it doesn't need the physical cube right in it to work.

Waiting on the ship

• Why did the Skrull refugees just wait around in near-Earth orbit for 6 years? The ship isn't broken. At the end of the movie they fly off to someplace where the Kree won't find them. So why didn't they do that in the first place?
  • Maybe the Skrulls needed information on the black box or the files at the Pegasus facility to complete the FTL engine, and Talos could find the black box but not the laboratory.
  • Because they didn't have the FTL drive. The prototype blew up in the incident that gave Carol her powers, and none of the Skrulls up there were able to make a new one.
  • When they leave at the end they have Carol with them, which is an effective deterrent against Kree attacks that they wouldn't have been able to fight off without her.
  • It's also possible that using the regular jump points would alert the Kree as well.

What happened to all the personnel at Pegasus?

• Maybe I misremember, but didn't pretty much everyone at Pegasus disappear after they put Carol and Fury into that waiting room? Everyone else we see thereafter is part of the SHIELD pursuit team, I believe. Nobody on-site shows up to ask what the heroes are doing in the archive department, or to receive the SHIELD team. So where'd they all go? My first thought was that the facility had been taken over totally Skrulls, who were alerting Talos that they had Carol... but Goose's presence in the base makes that a bit unrealistic (Skrulls are terrified of the thing, why would they keep it around?).
  • It could just be something mundane, like it might be a Sunday. Alternatively, when the SHIELD pursuit team arrives, they may just have moved all the base personnel to a designated safe area, or claimed it was a fire drill or something.

Does the universal translator work for text too?

• Nitpicking, sure, but I had to wonder: Carol mentions that she's using a universal translator to communicate with Fury, which is fine, but does that also mean she can read text on Earth? She's seen typing and reading a map so presumably she has to have a way to comprehend that too.
  • Carol can read and comprehend English road signs and maps because she's an Earthling from America.
  • Yes, but she doesn't know that at first. The simplest explanation for why she didn't notice anything odd about her ability to read the local language is that the universal translator normally takes care of visual as well as auditory inputs.
  • Perhaps the supreme intelligence did more than just block Carol's memories? Perhaps it left a filter in place that would make it harder for her to notice any little discrepancies like this. It would help stop her from realising that she wasn't really Kree.
  • Earth is known to the Kree, so it's possible that Earth languages are studied to some degree. Presumably at some point "Vers" noticed that she has skills and knowledge that she doesn't remember acquiring and she may have just assumed that she'd learned some obscure backwater language at some point. Or the translator does it for her.
• Possibly such translators do work for text. Remember that prison guard in Guardians of the Galaxy who was listening to Quill's confiscated Walkman? It'd explain why the guy didn't accidentally erase or damage the cassette tape by pushing the wrong buttons - a fairly easy thing to do, with old cassette players - if he could read what the labels on the buttons said.

What happened to Goose after the events of this film?

• We see Goose cough up the Tesseract in the post-credits scene, but there's nothing that indicates what happened to him after that. Did Fury keep him? Kill him? Put him in the prison area where they kept the Abomination?
  • Fury had a cat bed for Goose in office during the scene where Coulson brought in the artificial eyes. Most likely he kept the Flerken around.
    • Which begs the question - why in the world would he do that? How did he know that thing wouldn't gobble up some hapeless chump who accidentally steps on its tail.
  • What's the lifespan of the average Flerken? Goose might have died of old age before Iron Man.

Is Carol a Mutant?

• Yon-Rogg seems very surprised that Carol absorbed the energy from the explosion of the FTL core. Could any human in her place have survived and gained her powers, or is there something special about Carol that enabled her to absorb the energy and gain her powers (i.e. a latent mutant ability)?
  • The Maximoff twins also got their powers from an Infinity Stone (albeit a different one, and in a much more controlled environment), so either they and Carol are mutants, or there are just circumstances in which humans can survive and even benefit from exposure to the Stones. Carol did need a transfusion from Yon-Rogg to make it out okay.
  • We see in WandaVision that Wanda didn't actually get her powers from the Mind Stone. It merely gave a significant power boost to her already present magical gifts. We don't know how Pietro's powers came to be—-whether the Mind Stone bestowed them or enhanced powers that were already there, whether an enhanced Wanda subconsciously altered his biology, etc. and since he's dead they will probably never explain it. So there's evidence that Carol may have always had some latent abilities that were awoken when the core exploded all over her.
  • Unlikely. The Space Stone can be used to powered weapons, vehicles and drive cores, first seen in Captain America: The First Avenger. We can assume that, when Carol destroyed the ship, the explosion just transfered the FTL core's properties to her, transforming her into a living battery.
  • In the comics, Carol Danvers has the ability to absorb energy, so there's a good reason to believe she could have absorbed the energy from the core in an intense life or death moment, rather than just receiving and somehow surviving the energy from the core (which received it's energy from the Space Stone). Just because it hasn't been explained yet, doesn't mean it won't be in future properties. See above, re: Wanda's power origins.

Kree slaves

• Where are all the Kree slaves? It's mentioned they use them for battle by Yondu in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
  • The Kree in the movie are mostly doing covert missions, which require stealth and subterfuge. The Kree slaves have no love for the Kree, so they wouldn't be sent on a more secretive mission, as they would likely desert if there weren't Kree overseeing them.
  • Worse, slaves trained to be effective covert operatives might turn those skills against their masters.

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