Question: In Avengers Endgame at the end when Captain America goes back in time to return the Infinity Stones how exactly could he replace the Space Stone considering the only way to get it out of the Tesseract was to smash the case, what did they have a spare case laying around? He wasn't carrying the Scepter of Loki either and that's what the Mind Stone was in. What he's just going to walk up to someone and say hey I found this glowy thing laying around here ya go and then bugger off to the next one, what the heck?!
It's just the Ancient One seemed to think it was super important that the stones were replaced as they were when they were taken out of the timeline and if they aren't in the same condition what then will happen, time variance requiring a hard reset or prune that timeline entirely sending all that to the void at the end of time?
The Space Stone was inside the Tesseract, that's the original configuration, the Mind Stone was embedded in the Staff Loki used so if you take the stone out of the staff and don't replace it exactly then what's Loki going to use to mind control people or what's SHIELD going to power their weapons with if the Tesseract is all out of whack? That's a big time variance that changes things.
Originally posted by Nuke Nixon
The Space Stone was inside the Tesseract, that's the original configuration, the Mind Stone was embedded in the Staff Loki used so if you take the stone out of the staff and don't replace it exactly then what's Loki going to use to mind control people or what's SHIELD going to power their weapons with if the Tesseract is all out of whack? That's a big time variance that changes things.
The movies over. The end game was the end. Everyone who survived lived happily ever after for the most part.