Spoiler Warning: Loki on Disney+If you saw the trailer forThor: Love and Thunder, you’ll notice that Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is united with his old flame from Earth, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), but his brother is, of course, absent. In one of the spicier scenes in the trailer, Zeus (Russell Crowe) flicks off Thor’s clothes, and the God of Thunder stands there naked before a court filled with who knows how many deities. If you look really closely at Thor’s back, you can see he has a new tattoo. It’s his brother’s helmet, with the words “R.I.P. Loki” written above it. So it seems, as of now, Thor remains mournfully unaware that a variant of his brother is somewhat within reach, just outside of time.
As most of us may remember, Thor lost his mischievous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) at the hand of Thanos (Josh Brolin) at the beginning ofInfinity War. ButEndgamecomplicated the MCU timeline a bit. Despite the Avengers' best efforts to steal and replace the infinity stones, thereby not changing the timeline from which they were taken, their “Time Heist,” as Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) so loved to call it, did not go quite as planned. In fact, quite a lot happened inEndgamethat has yet to be explained or accounted for. But for now, the thing we are going to focus on is Loki Laufeyson.
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Loki: The Series
When stealing the Tesseract (Space stone) from the fallout of Loki’s original invasion of Manhattan and the first time the Avengers assembled, Captain America (Chris Evans) planned to walk away with it in a suitcase until he accidentally bumped into an angry Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) who had been coming down the stairs. When the suitcase was knocked out of his hand and the Tesseract slid across the floor, Loki (the Loki who had yet to be killed by Thanos) picked up the Tesseract and used its power to warp out of the Avengers' tower and into a desert far away.
This is likely one of the biggest events spurred on by the Time Heist that had the most significant consequences for the entire MCU. After Loki warped away, he was apprehended by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) and set off a chain of events that would lead to the collapse of the central timeline and unleash thevariants of Kang the Conqueror(Jonathan Majors), one of the deadliest villains the Marvel Universe has ever seen. Not only that, but these branches of the timeline effectively create the multiverse. While Disney may not have intended to create an entire series out of one tiny moment inEndgame, it seems that this little loose end has given the MCU one of its biggest plotlines for the future.
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That being said, during his time in the TVA, Loki (or the variant of Loki that now exists outside of time) witnessed the regular course of his life as we had seen play out in the Marvel movies as we knew them. At one point, he even witnessed his own death – talk about an existential crisis. After accepting this new path his life would take him on, he became an agent for the TVA. And after going rogueduring theLokicomic series, aiding a female variant of himself, and destroying what had been a universal continuity of the timeline, he was left stranded in an unknown version of his reality in the finale. Whether it be a different timeline or a different universe in the multiverse remains to be seen, but at least Owen Wilson is still alive in it.
How These Things Tie Together
WhileThor:Love and Thunderis happening, Loki will most likely be stuck in this different version of the TVA, dealing with violent incarnations of Kang the Conqueror. Well, technically, it won’t matter whenLove and Thundertakes place because Loki could reenter the continuity anytime, given the technology he has access to. But what will matter is whether or not he wants to rejoin Thor in his world, given that the God of Mischief more often than not acts only in his own favor.
From Loki’s perspective, the next installment we’ll see from the series will likely occur closer to the time ofDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.Michael Waldron, who worked onLokiand theDoctor Strangesequel, said that ashe was writingDoctor Strange 2, he wanted to “make these things congruous.” So it’s a good bet that Phase 4 of the Marvel Universe, with all its different timelines and multiverses, might eventually find a path through the forest it is beginning to make for itself. Waldron went on to question, “how did the events of this movie play out through the lens of the TVA?” So he may be implying thatseason 2 ofLokimay look at the narrative continuity of the MCU fracturing in the same way that we as an audience see it on the screen. But these are big questions that hopefully we’ll see writers answer through their future Marvel projects.
