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Spoilers for Black Panther below!

Continuing Marvel’s ten year tradition of post-credits stingers and teases for upcoming movies, Black Panther included two end credits scenes.

With the movie out in the UK and hitting worldwide this week, it’s time to talk about them.

This is your last warning: If you haven’t seen Black Panther yet, stop reading now!

Ready?

Civic Duty

The first is what you might have expected, given the end of the movie itself. T’Challa presents Wakanda’s anti-isolationist shift to a United Nations-style government body, announcing that his nation will now be open to sharing their resources with the world. Of course, remembering that as far as the rest of the world is concerned in the MCU, Wakanda is a third world, underdeveloped country, he’s met with some confusion–all while his new friend CIA Agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) smiles knowingly from the back of the crowd.

The stinger doesn’t overstay its welcome. T’Challa isn’t actually shown dropping the proverbial Vibranium bombshell on the poor unsuspecting world leaders, but the implication is enough. The landscape of the MCU, both politically and technologically, is about to change in a major way. This is a deceptively important detail, especially given the MCU’s upcoming movie slate.

With Wakandan tech made more accessible, the landscape for both superheroes and civilians is about to take a major leap forward–and it’s a safe bet that not every change will be positive, especially with the possibility of villains appropriating new tech too.

The real question is when–rather than if–we’ll start seeing the impact of publicized Vibranium and Wakandan tech. After all, we can venture a guess that Wakandan weapons stand a better chance against Thanos than standard military faire–but will they be ready in time for Infinity War?

The White Wolf

Black Panther‘s second post-credits scene is a bit more direct with its Infinity War connections. We see, first in first-person perspective, someone waking up in an isolated Wakandan village, surrounded by curious Wakandan children. That someone is revealed to be none other than Bucky Barnes, last seen being put back into cryostasis in–surprise–Wakanda, during one of Captain America: Civil War‘s post-credits scenes.

The Civil War stinger didn’t offer much context for Bucky’s decision to be returned to stasis, outside of his own fear that he may be “activated” and manipulated by his Hydra-implanted trigger word programming all over again. But thankfully, between the end of Civil War and the end of Black Panther, Shuri, T’Challa’s 16-year-old engineering genius sister, has been hard at work trying to solve Bucky’s unique psychological problem.

We get a wink to Shuri’s involvement during the movie itself when she offhandedly comments about being given “another broken white boy to fix” and an extrapolated look in Infinity War: Prelude #1, part one of a two part prequel comic released in January–not to mention the fact that Bucky was shown standing with the Wakandan army in the Infinity War trailer–so none of this is really all that surprising.

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Spoilers for Black Panther below!

The countdown to Thanos’s arrival in the MCU with Avengers: Infinity War has officially started thanks to today’s release of Black Panther, the final solo lead-up film before Infinity War. The landscape of the shared cinematic universe now includes the astronomically cool and hyper advanced Wakanda, and not a moment too soon, with the armies of Thanos’s Black Order quite literally knocking at Earth’s gates.

There’s just one problem: we’re still, officially, down one Infinity Stone. For all Black Panther gave us, the location of the Soul Stone wasn’t a box that got checked off–unless, of course, it was. There’s a chance that the Soul Stone was actually hiding in plain sight for the duration of Black Panther–did you catch it?

If not, don’t worry. The MCU has been playing fast and loose with not only the colors of the Gems, but the forms they take onscreen too, for the six years they’ve been in play. After all, the Space Stone isn’t a stone at all, but a glowing blue box called the Tesseract. The Reality Stone is glittering red dust called the Aether. The Mind Stone was blue for the better part of two movies before it was cracked open, turned yellow, and put in Vision’s forehead. You get the idea–these things are tricky, and Marvel hasn’t been making it easy to pin them down.

Bearing that in mind, there’s a decent chance that the Soul Stone is actually somehow connected back to Wakanda’s mysterious and powerful “heart-shaped herb.”

The herb, if you remember, is the source of the Black Panther’s power both in the film and in the comics, but its movie incarnation had the distinction of being neon purple and glowing on top of being mystically and spiritually empowering. Of course, the purple color might have been more of a distraction than a flag. Currently, the MCU’s Power Stone is sitting pretty in purple on the color spectrum. However, like the Mind Stone, the actual color of the herb itself may have nothing to do with the Soul Stone’s ultimate orange destiny.

Simply being neon and glowing does not an Infinity Stone make, but the rules established in the MCU over the last six years certainly throw a flag on that play. Wakanda has some strange properties, just inherently, thanks to its abundance of vibranium and its technological advancement, so there’s always the chance that the heart-shaped herd really is just a naturally occuring phenomena born of any combination of those two things.

It does have some strange characteristics, though. For example: Vibranium is a powerful metal, yes, but since when does it have anything resembling the mystical properties exhibited by the heart-shaped herb? And if the heart-shaped herb really is just the product of vibranium in the soil and the right atmospheric conditions, why would it only grow in one tiny cave? We know that the heart-shaped herb is a limited commodity–and one that’s presumably now extinct, thanks to events in Black Panther–but what about that specific plot of land made it so special and so powerful?

One possible explanation is that the heart-shape herb garden is, in fact, centered around or constructed on top of whatever vessel is containing the Soul Stone. That would explain the power-imbuing properties of the herb, as well as its ability to send those that consume it on rather on-the-nose soul-searching journeys that may or may not involve actually, genuinely contacting the dead.

That last part is important. In the comics canon, the Soul Stone’s (rather esoteric) powers include being able to send people’s souls into an idyllic alternate dimension, an offshoot of its endless desire to collect and consume souls. It really didn’t get its name for nothing. Another of its abilities is the “cold light of truth,” which enables it to reveal the deepest, most hidden parts of a person–another very pointed part of the transformative Black Panther dream state.

Obviously, for a human to be consuming parts of, or organisms created by, an Infinity Stone, it had to be diluted down in some way–we’ve seen what the Stones can do when they come into contact with people. It’s generally pretty gruesome. But another one of the Soul Stone’s properties is the fact that it’s actually sentient, and has a conscious will to collect souls. So really, it’s far from a stretch to believe that, if the Soul Stone really did wind up on Earth, it could have (consciously or otherwise) begun crafting ways for human beings to interact with it safely as part of its ultimate soul harvesting goal.

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