Ebony Maw

Ebony Maw was a villainous character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. He was a member of the Black Order, a group of powerful aliens adopted by the warlord Thanos. Maw believed in Thanos' vision of universal balance and sought to help him obtain the six Infinity Stones that would allow him to erase half of all life in the cosmos. He was portrayed by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.

History

Avengers: Infinity War

Ebony Maw and the other members of the Black Order joined Thanos as he sought out the Infinity Stones across the universe. After acquiring the Power Stone on Xandar and decimating its population, they would intercept the Statesman, a starship ferrying Asgardian refugees to Earth. There, Thanos obtained the Space Stone and wiped out half of the Asgardians. Knowing that two of the Stones were on Earth, he sent his adoptive children there to obtain them.

Maw, along with Cull Obsidian, arrived in Greenwich Village in New York where the Time Stone was located. The Stone was under the protection of Doctor Strange and Wong, who were aided by Iron Man and Spider-Man. Wielding immense telekinetic abilities, Maw fought against the heroes and succeeded in subduing Strange, taking him captive aboard his Q-Ship.

Aboard the Q-Ship, Maw tortured Dr. Strange with a series of needle-shaped devices in order to learn how to remove the Time Stone from Strange's Eye of Agamotto. However, Iron Man and Spider-Man had stowed away aboard the ship and made it to the control centre where Maw was torturing Strange. When Iron Man confronted him, Maw was confident that there was nothing the armoured Avenger could do to him without also putting Strange at risk. However, Iron Man did not attack Maw directly, instead firing a smart bomb at the wall and breaching the hull, resulting in Maw being blown out into space and dying instantly. Spider-Man was able to prevent Strange from meeting the same fate by using his webbing to pull the sorcerer back inside while Iron Man used a nanomachine spray to seal the hull breach.

Avengers: Endgame

Five years following the Decimation, the heroes who survived Thanos' Snap devised a means of safely travelling back in time in order to obtain the Infinity Stones and undo the effects of the Snap. The way this worked was that the past timelines that the Avengers travelled to were actually alternate timelines accessed via the Quantum Realm, thus whatever they did in those timelines would have no effect on their present. When Nebula and War Machine travelled back to an alternate 2014, a link was established between the 2023 Nebula and the 2014 Nebula. This allowed Thanos to learn about how his future counterpart had succeeded in his plan to cleanse the universe and how the Avengers were attempting to undo his victory.

Thanos, Maw and the Black Order would find a means of following 2023 Nebula back through the Quantum Realm and into her timeline where they fought against the Avengers for the Infinity Stones. This time, however, the heroes were victorious: Iron Man was able to use the Stones to eradicate Thanos and his entire army, but at the cost of his own life.