James Gunn Solves Two Big Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special Mysteries

This article contains spoilers for the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

Not only does The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special give us an entertaining forty-four minutes of Guardians holiday hijinx, it also gives valuable insight into what the squad has been up to after Thor (Chris Hemsworth) left them at the beginning of Thor: Love and Thunder. Groot (Vin Diesel) is now a young adult, Kraglin (Sean Gunn) still doesn’t know how to use the arrow Yondu (Michael Rooker) left him, and Mantis (Pom Klemintiff) is Peter’s (Chris Pratt) sister. For everything that the special revealed, however, it also still left us with plenty of questions. Thankfully, James Gunn recently took to Twitter to answer a couple of them.

The first mystery relates to Knowhere, a former mining colony owned by the Collector (Benicio del Toro). It’s where the Guardians go to try and sell the Power stone in Guardians of the Galaxy and where the Asgardians leave the Aether in the post-credit scene of Thor: The Dark World. During Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) hunt for the infinity stones in Avengers: Infinity War, he leaves the floating Celestial skull in ruins after obtaining the reality stone from the Collector. When we return to Knowhere in the GOTG Holiday Special, the Guardians seem to have finally found a place to call home. We see Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Cosmo (Maria Bakalova) trying to repair a building, and the Guardians appear to be well-known and respected by most of the citizens we see. But that begs the question – why and how did the Guardians come to settle on Knowhere?

According to James Gunn himself, the Guardians surprisingly make quite a bit of money doing mercenary work and were able to buy Knowhere from the Collector. Since then, they’ve been doing what they can to help the colony rebuild.