Captain Marvel's biggest post-credit scene raises important, Endgame-altering questions

Water is wet, Goose is cute, and, yes, Captain Marvel has post-credit scenes. Let's talk.

**SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Captain Marvel's post-credit scenes.**

Typically, when there are two post-credit scenes in a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, one has some clout and the other is just there for a good time. Captain Marvel's post-credit scenes delivered on just that.

The latter of the two, a clip of Goose jumping up onto Fury's desk before coughing up the Tesseract, no doubt got some laughs. At this point, we all know that the Tesseract, aka the Space Stone, was a bit busy between being recovered by Howard Stark at the bottom of the ocean and being poked and prodded by Erik Selvig for SHIELD. We knew Goose would cough the Tesseract up like an oversized, overpowered hairball at one point or another.

But, really, we're here to talk about the first of the post-credit scenes because, after it was all said and done, we got an Avengers: Endgame clip.

Fans have been debating about how Captain Marvel would make her Endgame appearance for months. Will she knock on the Milano's windshield after having found Tony Stark and Nebula floating half-dead in space? Will she be the third act savior, punching through the atmosphere in the final moments?

No. She's going to show up in what looks to be the beginning, responding to the call Nick Fury put out at the end of Avengers: Infinity War.

To recap: Several of the remaining Avengers are gathered together in the upstate New York Avengers compound, similarly to how we've seen them in Endgame trailers thus far. As the computer continues to calculate how many people have been reporting "missing" around the world after Thanos' snap (millions), we see Fury's tricked-out pager from the end of Infinity War go dark. Rhodey (Don Cheadle) walks in to tell Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johannson), "That thing just stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing."

As the three of them and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) rush to the pager, Bruce starts spouting science mumbo-jumbo, talking about how he's already bypassed the battery and that there's really no reason it should have gone dark. Determined to get the pager back up and running, the gang whips around only to find Carol Danvers standing behind them.

"Where's Fury?" she demands. Her hair is longer than when we saw her last and, maybe, she looks a bit older. Otherwise, she really hasn't changed much, physically, in the past 20 years.

There's something deeply satisfying about Natasha being the first Avenger to see Carol. For years, fans have begged for a Black Widow movie, and here we have the first female Avenger laying eyes on the first female MCU hero to get her own movie. For now, fans can only guess as to how Nat and the rest of the Avengers — including, supposedly, Thor and Rocket, who also survived the snap and seem to be hanging around the compound — will react to Carol showing up out of nowhere.

We know that Carol's powers severely affect machines and stuff running on electricity, so that might explain why none of the compound's security systems seemed to go off when Carol entered the building. That she was able to sneak up on them, Nat and Steve, especially, is both a testament to Carol's general badassery and the group's state of mind.

The only remaining question (other than, y'know, all of the questions) is about when Carol shows up versus when Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) shows up at the compound's front gates. Who gets there first? Will the Avengers realize they have lightspeed travel from Carol or (potential) time travel from Scott on their side first?

Does it really matter at this point? All that matters is that the gang's going to be together and now they have to figure this out. They're going to figure this out, right? They have to. Please.

Carol, help!