The MCU is an ocean of pretty faces, and Thor’s is among the prettiest. Who wouldn’t fall in love with those baby blues? However, if you look closely at Thor’s face in the Thor: Love and Thunder trailer, you’ll see a delicate scar running up over his right eye. But wait a minute—didn’t he lose that eye at some point? How did he get it back? Read on to find out!
“Now you remind me of Dad”
In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor has to defeat his sister Hela, the Goddess of Death. Hela draws power from Asgard, and she’s hellbent on using it to conquer the universe and destroy everything in her way. In the climactic battle, Thor is hitting Hela with everything he has but just isn’t making any headway. Hela slashes at his face with her sword, and we see a gaping black wound where his right eye used to be. “Now you remind me of Dad,” Hela says, because Thor’s father Odin (both in Marvel and the original Norse myths) only has one eye. By the end of the movie, Thor is rocking an eyepatch just like his dad.
After the battle with Hela, Thor and the Asgardian refugees (see, they had to destroy Asgard to stop Hela) are attacked by Thanos’s ship, and Thor is picked up by the Guardians of the Galaxy. Rocket Raccoon has a fondness for stealing people’s prostheses, so he just happens to have a cybernetic eye on him. He tosses it to Thor and Thor pops it right in his socket, despite Rocket’s warnings that it really needs to be washed first. Thor thumps his head a couple of times to get the eye aligned, and then he’s good to go.
Why Does his New Eye Look Just Like his Old One?
Here’s where MCU continuity gets a little wibbly wobbly. When Thor gets the new eye in Infinity War, its iris is yellow, instead of the blue of Thor’s own eye. If you look at his face, you can clearly tell which eye is a prosthetic. In fact, the new eye is one of the ways that Frigga is able to tell he’s from the future during Endgame’s time heist.
However, something about the eye has definitely changed by the time we get to Love and Thunder, since in the trailer, his eye is blue again. Did he just change the color of the prosthesis’s iris, or did some deeper change happen? Do Asgardian eyes grow back?? There’s no way to know yet, but what’s clear is that aside from the scar, Thor has his old look back again.
Of course, if you loved the symbolism of Thor taking on an eyepatch when he succeeded Odin as King of Asgard, you were no doubt disappointed when Marvel canceled it out with Rocket’s now very realistic-looking gift. Still, though, I bet Thor appreciates having depth perception again.
Thor: Love and Thunder premieres July 8, and you can soak up both of Thor’s gorgeous eyes on opening weekend.
(image: Marvel)
