Today, we look at how Thor’s sacrifice of the only way off of Asgard at the end of the first Thor film ended up being a fairly empty gesture.
Abandoned Love is a feature examining stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without actively contradicting an earlier story (so the more passive definition of retcons as being anything that is retroactively added to continuity, even if there is no specific conflict with a past story).
The climactic scene of the first Thor film involved Loki and Thor battling with each other over the fate of the Frost Giants. Loki wants to destroy them to prove himself to his adopted father, Odin, while Thor, you know, doesn’t want to destroy a whole race over Loki’s daddy issues.
In the end, Thor is able to defeat Loki, but in the process, he sacrifices the Rainbow Bridge, thus severing the only way for Thor to return to Midgard (Earth).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbMEw1mpvHE
It’s a whole big moment in the film. Thor has just met, and fallen in love, with Jane Foster, a human from Earth, so this means he won’t be able to see her again, and yet he’s willing to make that sacrifice in order to stop his brother’s evil plot.
And then….Thor returns to Earth in Marvel’s The Avengers a year later. The explanation given at the time was that Thor had to use “Dark Energy” to return to Earth, and that’s just it. Then the bifrost bridge is simply rebuilt at some point before Thor: The Dark World (so it really wasn’t all THAT big of a sacrifice, if they could just rebuild it in a couple of years). However, after it was destroyed again in Thor: Ragnarok, Thor has still been able to transport all around the universe, so….I guess he just uses “Dark Energy” a lot?
Obviously, at the time, there was a point behind the destruction of the bifrost bridge, but then they decided that rather than come up with some other way to get Thor to Earth for the Avengers, they just would instead hand wave the whole thing. There were later some comic books that were set between the films that explained how the bridge was fixed.
If you have a suggestion for a future Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com.
Clearly they were just being faithful to the comics, where the Bifrost also gets destroyed and then fixed off-screen when the plot requires it a bunch of times.
Earlier in the movie Loki mentioned (just before freezing the gatekeeper) that there are other hidden ways out of Asgard. And at the end the gatekeeper said there is always hope.