Tony Stark IS Doctor Doom (and His Glasses Prove It)

The theory: Tony Stark already became Doctor Doom

On December 18th Robert Downey Jr. walks back into the Avengers as Doctor Doom, and under that mask is Tony Stark's face. The way the films tell it, that makes no sense. Tony spent eleven years learning his lessons. He blew up his suits for Pepper, he told the team they needed to be put in check, and in Endgame he held enough power to rewrite the universe and spent it once, on everybody.

Here's my take. Victor von Doom is a different man in the movie, with his own past, and that's fine. But Tony has the thing that makes Doom, Doom. A genius decides the whole world needs his armor around it, and he builds it, or as Tony put it himself, "whether it impacted our precious freedoms or not." By that definition Marvel already gave us a Doom. Tony Stark is Doctor Doom, and his glasses prove it. So when Doom shows up wearing Tony's face, I think that's Marvel saying it out loud. The face is the payoff, not a stunt.

Exhibit A: the glasses

Everything Tony built was supposed to go with him. One thing didn't. Months after Endgame, on a school trip in Europe in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter Parker opens a case Tony left him. Tony's glasses are inside with a handwritten card tucked under them:

"For the next Tony Stark, I trust you. Say EDITH."

The glasses scan Peter's eyes and a dead man's security and defense system switches on. EDITH stands for "Even dead, I'm the hero." Then she lists what she can reach: the entire Stark Global Security network, multiple defense satellites, and back doors to all major telecommunication networks.

Tony did snap and die to save the universe, and you can't get much further from Doom than that. Then minutes after his glasses switch on, Peter grumbles about a classmate named Brad, and EDITH asks him a question first. Is Brad a target? Peter says yeah, he's a target, and EDITH says "Target is Brad Davis. Initiating strike." A drone strike, lined up on the bus Peter is riding with his class.

So the card is the plan, a successor Tony picked himself. The name spells out the creed. And the satellites and the back doors are the machine.

Exhibit B: the creed, said twice

Where does a hero get the idea for a machine like that? Go back to Iron Man 2. A Senate committee wants the armor handed over, and Tony tells them he's America's nuclear deterrent now and he's successfully privatised world peace. The gallery cheers. Then in The Avengers he tells Loki there is no throne, and that if the Avengers can't protect the Earth, they'll avenge it. He means every word. The heroes show up afterwards and clean it up.

New York scares him anyway. By Iron Man 3 he can't sleep, so he builds suits. In Age of Ultron a witch shows him all his friends dead, and later he tells Fury that what he saw was his legacy. That's the man who walks into the lab with Bruce Banner and Loki's scepter and says he wants the world safe, so the next time aliens roll up to the club, they can't get past the bouncer. Bruce asks if he's going for artificial intelligence without telling the team. Tony says they don't have time for a city hall debate, and then: "I see a suit of armor around the world."

It's a quiet lab with two scientists in it and nobody raving. Tony calmly decides the world gets his armor, and he keeps it from the team. That lab gives him Ultron.

Fast forward to Endgame. Thanos won, Tony drifts home from deep space half-starved, and he gets up to finish a fight with Steve:

"Alive and otherwise, that what we needed was a suit of armor around the world. Remember that? Whether it impacted our precious freedoms or not. That's what we needed."

Rhodey tells him he's sick and to sit down, and Bruce sedates him. The screenplay calls him slightly unstable. I can't tell you how much of that speech is fever and how much is Tony. But a man who's only raving doesn't quote an argument from years earlier word for word. The first half is the sentence he said calmly in that lab. The only new part is the freedoms.

The machine kept growing

By then he'd already built most of it. In The Avengers his program breaks into all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secure files. In Iron Man 3, JARVIS has a file ready on the Mandarin pulled from S.H.I.E.L.D., FBI and CIA intercepts, and a sky full of empty suits answers the house party protocol. In Age of Ultron the Iron Legion flies into a crowd in Sokovia and tells people they'll be informed when the conflict is resolved. Nobody in that crowd asked for them.

Then Ultron goes after the world's nuclear missiles, and somebody keeps changing the launch codes. Fury calls them parties unknown. It turns out to be JARVIS, scattered underground, still running his protocols. In Iron Man 2 Tony told the Senate he was the nuclear deterrent. A few years later his AI was literally sitting on the codes.

In Homecoming, Peter's suit comes with a tracker right next to the heater, an Instant Kill setting, and something called the Baby Monitor Protocol. "I record everything you see." Everything, all the time. It's a funny scene, and it also means a fifteen-year-old's whole life is on file because Tony decided it should be. EDITH is the finished version: a global network with satellites and a weapon, answering to whoever wears the glasses.

I can't prove JARVIS, the Iron Legion, Ultron, Karen and EDITH are one program. On screen it's the same job, rebuilt every time, and it climbs from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files all the way up to defense satellites. I went looking for one scene that puts any of it under the government or a panel or anybody outside the chain Tony set up, and I couldn't find it. Show me that scene and I'm wrong.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown

When Peter gets the case, Tony's message is Shakespeare: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. A king who can't sleep because of what he's holding. Then in Prague, Peter decides Tony trusted him to pick who should have EDITH, and he picks Quentin Beck. One spoken word, "Confirm," and every satellite and every back door changes hands between two people at a table. Beck is a fraud, and soon he's saying "EDITH, target Spider-Man" over London. The kid whose suit came with a Baby Monitor Protocol is now being hunted by the machine Tony built for the whole world.

Give Tony this much. At the end of Endgame he had all six stones and took nothing for himself. In the comics, when Doom gets a god's power in Secret Wars, he keeps it and crowns himself God Emperor. Tony gave that power away, and his life with it. The man stopped. The machine didn't.

Exhibit C: the same cave

Doom first showed up in 1962 in Fantastic Four #5, a genius in an iron mask who rules his own small country, Latveria. He believes he alone can bring order to humanity, he keeps it with an army of Doombots, and in Infamous Iron Man he walks into Tony's lab and takes the Iron Man name. Put that next to the films. A world kept in order by one man. Robot copies telling a crowd what's good for them. And in Far From Home the whole world asks who the next Iron Man will be, and the first man to answer grabs Tony's glasses.

In September Marvel put Endgame back in theaters as the Endgame Encore. The clanging that closed the original credits, widely read as Tony hammering his first suit in that cave, now plays over Doom's mask being hammered out in a cave. Joe Russo told Empire "there are clues in Endgame, things that are said, that will pay off in Doomsday." He didn't say which. My guess is the one Tony said twice.

And Downey was in the room for Doom before any of it. For Iron Man's fifteenth anniversary, Jon Favreau remembered Marvel had already met with Robert "for like Doctor Doom or something," maybe on Fox's Fantastic Four. It's one offhand memory, and Julian McMahon got that part. But before Downey ever told Loki there's no throne, Marvel had already talked to him about Doom.

The counter-argument

The strongest case against me comes from the people making Doomsday. At the Encore Q&A, Anthony Russo said "we are fully committed to Robert Downey as Victor Van Doom," and in October the Russos said "Victor von Doom is his own creation." Add the snap, the Accords and that speech to Loki, and that's the best case anyone can make that Tony isn't Doom.

I agree with them. Victor can be his own creation. The films already showed us a different man picking up Tony's machine and calling himself the next Iron Man. That was Beck, and all he needed was one word from Peter. A brand-new Victor can still pick up Tony's plan with the machine already built. And if this is all about money bringing Downey back, it doesn't explain why Tony said "precious freedoms or not" five years before Marvel unmasked him as Doom.

Verdict

Doomsday can give Victor any past it likes and nothing here changes, because Tony's words and Tony's machine were on screen for ten films before Doom ever showed up in the MCU. The plan, the creed and the machine he left behind for the next Tony Stark are what I mean by Doom. Doom didn't get Tony's face by accident. Tony had Doom's plan long before Doom had his face.

The full case, with every clip, the search party for Tony's missing glasses and the acronym I made for him, is in the video above.