A brilliant, insufferable surgeon loses the use of his hands, goes looking for a cure, and finds a discipline that has been quietly defending the planet the whole time.
Stephen Strange is the most gifted neurosurgeon of his generation and knows it loudly. The first film spends its opening being precise about this, because the whole arc depends on the difference between skill and use. He loses the hands in a car crash on the way to a dinner, spends his fortune on experimental surgery that does not work, and goes to Kathmandu on the strength of a rumour about a paraplegic who walked again.
What he finds there is not a cure. It is a discipline with its own hierarchy, its own libraries and its own standing argument about what is permitted, and Strange joins it by reading faster than anyone thinks is safe. He is a bad student in the way a very good one is: he skips whatever he has decided is ceremony.
The films use him as the person who knows the size of the board. He is the first character to talk about the multiverse as an engineering problem, the first to treat time as something you can be sued for touching, and the reason several other stories are able to happen at all.
Show detailsThe one future that works
On Titan, while the others argue, he uses the Time Stone to look forward at the possible outcomes of the confrontation and finds a single one in which they win. He then spends the rest of the film making choices that look, at the time, like surrender.
The film never says which of those decisions were the load-bearing ones, and that is deliberate. It also means every apparently uncharacteristic thing he does afterwards is doing work, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a plot device this large.
Major spoiler
He gives Thanos the Time Stone to keep Tony Stark alive, tells him there was no other way, and is one of the half who disintegrate.