Just in case you’re one of the few human beings on the planet who hasn’t seen Avengers: Infinity War, then beware spoilers. Otherwise, you probably know that in the post-credits scene of Marvel’s latest blockbuster, a long-absent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) busts out a modified pager that, as its graphics indicate, is meant to signal Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) from across the galaxy. Why? Because she’s the titular hero in Captain Marvel, the upcoming ’90s period piece that will introduce the MCU’s biggest power player.
Aside from precisely how the remaining Avengers team members are going to recover from Thanos’s (Josh Brolin) reality-altering snap, the biggest question this left audiences with was, “Why hadn’t Fury called Danvers sooner?” Thanks to the new Captain Marvel: Prelude comic, we finally have an answer. As Polygon and many others who’ve already read the issue discovered, the one-eyed spy hasn’t played his biggest card yet because he thought, and hoped, the Avengers would reunite in time after Captain America: Civil War.
“Otherworldly threats are one thing,” he tells Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) in one panel, “but this rift caused between Stark and Rogers might be something neither one can ever come back from. We can’t afford that kind of infighting.” When she makes a quip about never meeting your heroes because they’ll only let you down, however, Fury wryly responds, “Not all of them.” He’s talking, of course, about Danvers, and Hill knows it. She even references making a call, but he refuses. “If we do our job right, then we’ll never be in a position of having to call her.”
Welp, so much for that. Then again, as writer Will Corona Pilgrim explained in an interview with Marvel.com, Captain Marvel is the “biggest gun” Fury has. “If he’s finally making that call after all this time and after all he’s faced alongside the Avengers, then he’s truly seeing the situation as a last resort.”