(We’ve got a major spoiler for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” in here, including the full details of the post-credits scene)
The drama between Disney and Sony over Spider-Man has finally ended with Peter Parker remaining in the Marvel Cinematic Universe for at least another couple year, and that, fortunately for us, means that we can continue to ponder the ending of “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and try to figure out what it means for the MCU’s future.
But “Far From Home” has more going on to set up the future of the MCU than just developing Peter Parker’s role. That’s because of Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) is more involved in this film than he has been in any MCU flick since “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.”
Throughout “Far From Home,” Fury and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) are kinda fumbling around trying to deal with the apparent threat of the apocalyptic Elementals, turning to Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Spider-Man to deal with them.
Obviously, trusting Mysterio doesn’t go so well, and it’s pretty interesting that Nick Fury would be fooled by a con man like that. But the “Far From Home” post-credits scene sheds some light on how such a thing could have occurred: that wasn’t actually Nick Fury. Instead, it was the shapeshifting Skrull Talos (Ben Mendolsohn) from “Captain Marvel” disguised as Fury, with another Skrull disguised as Hill. And the real Fury was actually out on a spaceship or station with a bunch of other Skrulls the whole time.
That’s one hell of a twist, and it potentially has some big ramifications for all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though we should probably not get ahead of ourselves on that front.
So what does this mean? Well, in the context of “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” it almost certainly means that we didn’t see the real Nick Fury in this movie until the post-credits scene — it was probably just Talos the whole movie. You may recall a scene earlier in the movie where Fury is talking on the phone and mentions something about Kree sleeper cells — without any further context, it would seem that topic is more of a concern for Talos than it would be for Fury, since the Kree and Skrull are at war with each other.
The bigger question is where even is the real Fury. The ship or station he’s hanging out on doesn’t look like Mar-Vell’s secret lab from “Captain Marvel,” so it’s pretty much impossible to guess where he is or generally what’s going on there. There’s a good chance, however, that he’s in Earth orbit rather than some far-flung corner of the universe — Earth should still be his main concern, after all.
But that’s just a guess, since in the brief glimpse we get out the window of the ship we just see stars. Anything is possible, and it’s likely that this post-credits scene is setting up “Captain Marvel 2” or some other upcoming film like next year’s “Eternals.”
If you wanna get real big in your thinking about this, you could reasonably speculate that maybe Talos has secretly been Fury for a bunch of other MCU movies, with the real Fury hanging out in space for decades. But that’s a tough idea to prove, given that if Fury had a secret space station with a bunch of alien buddies on it at his beck and call it would have come up sooner. Plus, we all saw him die in Thanos’ snap, and he didn’t revert to a Skrull before dusting out. More likely is that after Captain Marvel returned to Earth in “Avengers: Endgame” she brought some of her Skrull refugee friends with her.
It was heavily implied that Captain Marvel had not been back to Earth since 1995, so this arrangement with Fury is a recent one. But anything is possible, I guess. This scene has so little context to help parse the big picture from it. And that’s probably on purpose — I mean, they put this scene in a “Spider-Man” movie, which is a pretty surprising spot to jump back into the cosmic stuff.
But this being the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’re surely going to get to the bottom of this whole thing eventually. It just might not be soon, because another “Captain Marvel” movie is probably at least two years away. But “Eternals” should bring us back into the cosmic parts of this universe in November 2020, so maybe we’ll get some answers there.