My son was off school recently, thanks to hurting his leg via his various sporting exploits. So, how does any 12-year-old with reduced mobility kill several hours?
The answer is, scroll endlessly through YouTube on their phone.
However, his parents i.e. me, and my wife, don’t approve of that sort of thing. It’s unhealthy.
How? Why? Well, like most parents, I’m not sure. But I’m oddly convinced it is the case regardless.
So, to compromise, we got our son to watch films instead. That’s also odd for modern parents who grew up in the 80s and 90s; the idea of watching TV being the “healthier” option.
It just feels weird, compelling your children to watch TV. It’s like saying “No ice cream until you finish your cheesecake!” Anyway, my son ended up watching several Marvel superhero movies. Because he’s a 12-year-old in 2024.
I’ll say up front that I have no issue with the MCU, and was a keen follower of it, up until Endgame. After that? Not so much. My good friend, the comedian Dan Thomas, compares it to the latter series of The Office (US), after Steve Carrell left. And I can’t argue.
So, my son ended up watching Endgame. Again. Meaning I was doing the same (I work from home and am easily distracted). As a result, I noticed something worrying: for all his nobility and moral fortitude, Steve Rogers, Captain America, has a horrendous approach to neurological healthcare.
I appreciate that this is quite the accusation to level at a beloved superhero, so allow me to elaborate.
**The following includes spoilers for Avengers: Endgame (2019) and earlier Marvel movies**
So, one of the big twists at the conclusion of Endgame is that Captain America uses the time machine to restore several items that were ‘borrowed’ from the past. But, rather than return to the present, he shows up as a much older man with a passing resemblance to Joe Biden, meaning he’s been living his life in the past.
Among other things, he reveals he got married. And a flashback shows us that it’s none other than Agent Peggy Carter, his lifelong romantic interest who he first met during World War II. He married her in the past and lived the life he would presumably have had, if he hadn’t been frozen in ice at the end of the war.
It’s clever writing, in a sense. In several previous Marvel films, there was mention of Peggy Carter’s husband, who she married instead of Steve Rogers, who’s never explicitly identified. Now we find out that he was Steve Rogers. But… a Steve Rogers from the subjective future, who had travelled back in time. Presumably, he then opted to stay in the proverbial shadows as familiar events panned out, lest he cause chronological chaos.
It seems all neatly wrapped up. But this causes a big moral concern.
Because Peggy Carter is still alive when Captain America is defrosted and returned to the modern world. She’s just, understandably, much older.
So much so, in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we see Steve Rogers visiting her in hospital, where she’s clearly suffering from some form of advanced dementia.
It’s a very bittersweet scene. She’s having a normal conversation with him one minute, seemingly very aware of who he is and why he’s there. Then, suddenly, she’s weeping, because he’s so young and she has no memory of him before he vanished in the 1940s. It’s a heart-rending portrayal of the terrible and unpredictable memory disruption of dementia (presumably Alzheimer’s, but there are a few possibilities).
Only, now when you see this scene, you have to factor in the knowledge that she’s actually looking at the man she’s been married to for decades!
She may not be distressed because he’s a ghost from the past suddenly appearing before her, but because she has innumerable memories of that face grown old and wrinkled over many years, and now it’s youthful again. What?
That’s one of the most harrowing things about dealing with dementia patients: their memories of their loved ones, they partners, children, families, are not spared. They can flat out not recognise their grown adult children because, in their current state, their memory is insisting they’re still actual children, in primary school.
But Peggy Carter? A legitimately younger version of her actual septuagenarian husband keeps appearing before her!
What if she tells her doctors and therapeutic team? “I saw my husband! He was here. But he’s a young man again.” That’s surely going to influence their prognosis, and therefore their treatment plan, meaning both will be based on flawed data and assumptions?
Speaking of, one of the things you do for dementia patients is keep their environment as consistent and routine as possible. You don’t want to tax their cognitive systems any more than necessary, So you keep their rooms the same, put clocks everywhere, serve lunch at the same time, all that stuff.
What you really shouldn’t do, is keep presenting them with two differently aged versions of the same spouse! Especially if those to different ‘husbands’ have very different memories of their time together. That’s just going to make matters so much worse.
And that’s assuming that old Captain America, her actual husband, is still visiting her in hospital. You’d assume he would: he’s the world’s most decent human and she’s the love of his life.
Although… he’d have to constantly avoid his younger self, because he knows he’ll be there (because he was this younger self).
Plus, if your wife’s mental capacity is undeniably compromised, she could blurt anything out at any moment? She logically must know about the whole time travel thing, because how else would he explain his presence in her life?
“I thought you were dead, Steve!”
“...I got better”.
Maybe, despite everything, Old Captain America felt he had to distance himself from his beloved wife, for the sake of the timeline? Leaving her to endure her condition effectively alone. After all, he knew it was coming! Which is a whole other can of ethically confusing worms.
The alternative is to carefully coordinate his visits to avoid his younger self, and thus inflicting on his wife a constantly changing reality, on top of the one she’s already enduring.
I don’t know what the solution is here. All I know is, Captain America’s choices ended up making his beloved’s life much more confusing and difficult.
Luckily, “secret time travel spouse” isn’t an issue that occurs much in typical dementia words, so there’s no pressing urge to update the treatment procedures.
My point is, yes I spent several hours of what was technically a working day watching a movie I’d already seen with my son. But now I’ve written an article about it, I can say I was technically working.
Dean Burnett delves into other facets of popular culture in his latest book, Emotional Ignorance. Get a signed copy from the Shambles shop.