Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury definitely has experience dealing with important military leaders who’ve fallen off the grid and remained in stasis for a long time while the world has moved on without them. But unlike Steve Rogers, frozen in ice for over 70 years, the timeline surrounding Rhodey is much more muddled. Upon waking up, Ross looks over and asks the question on all our minds: “How long have you been in here?”, referring to Gravik’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) Skrull compound in Russia where humans who’ve been impersonated are being stored indefinitely. Parsing the clues, we might have actually have an answer to that.
First, there’s the matter of Rhodey’s hospital gown. The last time we saw him in a similar getup, he was placed in an MRI tube after getting blown out of the sky by Paul Bettany’s Vision all the way back in “Captain America: Civil War.” Also consider the fact that he collapses as soon as G’iah (Emilia Clarke) frees him, suggesting that he hasn’t healed from his debilitating spinal injury. The timeline certainly makes sense, as the Skrulls — both Talos’ (Ben Mendelsohn) and Gravik’s factions — have spent the last 30+ years in the MCU hiding among humans and playing the long game. It’s well within the realm of possibility that Skrulls managed to abscond with the wounded hero and, if true, the implications mean he still has no idea about everything that’s taken place in the years since … including the death of his best bud, Tony Stark.
Would Marvel really go for a retcon as disturbing as that? Well, perhaps that’s what ends up motivating Rhodes during his next appearance in the upcoming “Armor Wars,” originally meant to be another Disney+ series before shifting to the big screen.