Steve Rogers' Return In Doomsday Reminds Me Of A Forgotten Doctor Doom Connection From 58 Years Ago

Steve Rogers' dramatic return to the MCU just in time for the fight with Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday is reminiscent of a storyline from the Silver Age of Marvel Comics. Despite Avengers: Endgame's ending, Chris Evans will be reprising his role as the Sentinel of Liberty in the upcoming Phase 6 film.

What will bring him back into the picture is unclear, but the first teaser for Avengers: Doomsday indicates his story will pick up sometime after he returned to the other timeline to start a new life with Peggy Carter. From the looks of things, he'll have to walk away from that - at least temporarily - to oppose Robert Downey, Jr.'s Doctor Doom.

Captain America Used Doctor Doom's Time Machine In The 1960s

Steve Rogers being involved in a story that involves both time travel and Doctor Doom brings back into relevance a key event from Captain America's past. In the 1960s, back when Bucky Barnes was still believed to be dead, Steve's greatest internal conflict revolved around the guilt and loneliness he felt from Bucky's "death."

Unaware that his thinking was being manipulated by Kang the Conqueror, Captain America infiltrated Doctor Doom's then-empty castle and used his iconic time platform to go back to 1945 so that he could see for himself what really happened to Bucky.

Kang, having successfully preyed on Captain America's obsession with the past, used Steve's time traveling to change the timeline. The Avengers, who went back in time to retrieve Captain America, wound up battling alternate versions of themselves, and finally, Kang.

At the end of the story, Steve Rogers at last accepted that Bucky Barnes was gone forever, that there was nothing he could have done to save him, and that he needed to move on from the past.

Steve Rogers' Time Travel Storyline May Draw Inspiration From 1960s Avengers Comics

It's possible that what Avengers: Doomsday plans to do with Steve Rogers and how it facilitates his return may draw inspiration from the comics. It could be that the movie will reveal that Steve's fateful decision to stay behind in 1949 - also motivated by an inability to let go of the past - was part of a convoluted plan to manipulate the timestream, but with Doom taking Kang's role.

This would go hand-in-hand with a popular fan theory that blames Captain America for Doctor Doom's shenanigans in Avengers: Doomsday. It's been heavily speculated that a timeline incursion caused by Steve's activities in the past somehow triggered Doom's arrival, which would make sense of Steve Rogers apparently serving as a main character in the film.