Why The Cat In Captain Marvel Has More Meaning Than You Think
As of this time, Captain Marvel’s in theaters and with it comes a few thoughts on how some of the characters will affect the outcome of Avengers: Endgame. Nick Fury already served to summon Captain Marvel before he died, and Captain Marvel herself has already proven to be a stupidly overpowered hero, capable of lightspeed travel and destroying Kree warships with no effort at all. But there’s another character who happens to have the potential to turn the tides of things. As strange as it sounds, this would be Goose, Captain Marvel’s pet cat--or, uh, Flerken.
Goose is a pretty powerful and useful creature. If you’ve seen Captain Marvel you’ll also know this alien can be pretty terrifying when it wants to be. It’s such an interesting little monster in fact, that it’s pretty weird that we haven’t seen Goose as of yet in the present day MCU. What exactly happened to it? We think Fury may just be keeping it to himself under wraps as a way to keep S.H.I.E.L.D. -- when it was still a thing -- from going all “Area 51” on it. He's seemed to have adopted the pet in Captain Marvel. Heck, he has more interactions with it than Carol herself.
Goose’s Abilities
Goose only showed off one ability in the movie, but this one ability showed a number of different uses. At first, no one really believed that Goose was a Flerken, courtesy of both her appearance and the information coming from a less than credible source at the time. But it didn’t take very long for Goose to prove that she indeed was the equivalent of an intergalactic demon. She just a needed a little incentive to kill people was all, and being threatened tends to be a pretty good motivator for that.
During the finale of the movie, there’s a moment where Nick Fury finds himself in a bit of trouble, and either as a way to protect Fury or possibly even herself, Goose spits out a plethora of tendrils from her mouth and uses them to swallow a group of man-sized enemy soldiers. Just in case that wasn’t clear, the cat swallowed a group of man-sized soldiers. It doesn’t chew them, and it doesn’t eat them one at a time. It just takes the entire group into itself with no problems at all. One moment they’re there, and the next moment their gone.
Along with the ability to eat people in masses, Goose can also use her gaping maw to store and hide objects. When the heroes get their hands on a very familiar and powerful object from the MCU timeline in the form of the Tesseract, they have to play keep away with it from the bad guys. Having seen what Goose is capable of first hand, the group decides to have him eat the Tesseract whole, giving them the perfect way to smuggle the thing out from right under their adversary’s nose. Only problem is, the Tesseract comes out only when Goose wants it to. It’s only by the end credits scene of the movie that Goose spits it out like a hairball.
The magnitude of Goose’s abilities probably hasn’t been explored yet in full. In the comics, Flerkens are capable of a number of different abilities. They have the nested maws -- like the Captain Marvel movie displayed -- human-level intelligence, and house pocket dimensions within their bodies -- dimensions that be used to teleport to different places (they can also lay a rather scary ton of eggs in a short span of time). The movie hinted at Goose’s pocket dimension capabilities when they had him swallow an entire enemy force whole, along with the swallowing and spitting out of the Tesseract. Essentially, Goose is not only a living weapon, but an unsuspecting storage unit. Depending on how fond he is of Brie when she sees him again, she can have him help the Avengers fight against Thanos in case he still has a few more armies at his call. Along with that, anything that the Avengers need stored away for later use, they can Goose for it.
Goose’s Disappearance
Considering how crazy of thing Goose is, it’s weird to see that she hasn’t appeared in any of the other MCU films outside of Captain Marvel. She literally doesn’t appear in anything despite surviving the Captain Marvel film and being at Nick Fury’s side by the time the credits roll and finish. There are a few possible explanations for this, but only two seem likely from a storytelling perspective. The first is a bit dark, but appropriate, and would be one of the few reasons why Goose wouldn’t appear in Endgame.
Captain Marvel tells the tale of how Nick loses his eye. It teases the incident a few times throughout the movie, such as when Fury throws himself and his car into oncoming traffic in order to save himself from a Skrull, but in a twist of fate the culprit turns out to be Goose. Goose claws Fury’s eye out because the Flerken apparently isn’t very fond of being played with like a cat. A pretty douche move on Goose’s part since Nick was just being friendly, but then again, the creature does have the form of a cat, and they can be like that sometimes.
Nick losing his eye is the reason he’s supposed to have such a cynical view of the world. So maybe once Goose finally coughed up the Tesseract, Nick just decided to put him down. Being able to kill a bunch of people on the fly and seemingly out of nowhere, Goose is obviously a pretty dangerous threat if she can’t be controlled, and she the reason Nick is blind in one eye, and permanently scarred for life. If Nick did decide that it would just be best to put Goose in the ground, it wouldn’t be that unbelievable.
As for the second reason, Nick may have actually befriended -- or at least figured out -- how to handle Goose after he secured the Tesseract from him. Considering Nick trusts nobody and that he is the only person in S.H.I.E.L.D (as far as we know) that knows Goose is actually a dangerous alien, maybe NIck uses him to hide away his more closely kept secrets. For example, if there was a piece of intelligence that Nick didn’t want within S.H.I.E.L.D.’s data, or that Nick wanted to keep only to himself or entrust to Captain Marvel, he could have put the data on a drive or some other similar medium (like maybe a floppy disk for Captain Marvel?) and stored it within Goose.
Considering Captain marvel has been gone for over a two decades, Nick may have a lot of secrets stored away inside of Goose that the Avengers may find use for in their final battle with Thanos. Any information that may be inside of Goose, may also help to set up plot lines that come after Thanos’ defeat. Considering, How Captain Marvel turned out in the end, the Secret Invasion story arc is looking a lot less likely than before.
