Come June 9th, Marvel’s third MCU TV show will premiere on Disney+, but it’ll be the first show to launch on a Wednesday. Both WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier launched on Fridays, and each new episode was released on a weekly basis. It’s obviously not the slot change that makes Loki so exciting, however. It’s the premise of the show, which promises to resolve one of the few remaining loose ends from Avengers: Endgame. As a reminder, the Loki (Tom Hiddleston) we’re about to see isn’t the Loki who we’ve grown the love in the MCU. That Loki died in Infinity War and he’s not coming back. This one is the Loki from a different timeline. Rather than remaining a prisoner, as was the case with our Loki at the end of The Avengers, this one snatched the Tesseract and escaped when our beloved Avengers fumbled a plan to grab the Space Stone.
We already know from various Loki trailers that the Time Variance Authority (TVA) — the universe’s governing body that regulates time and space — has arrested Loki for his transgressions and forcefully employed him to embark on a particular mission. That’s what the show is about, and it’s an excellent premise. The Loki-TVA interaction will establish the rules of the multiverse, a topic that will be heavily explored in upcoming Marvel movies beginning with Spider-Man 3 this winter. And it turns out we already have a huge Loki spoiler on our hands, one that has massive implications for the entire MCU, including Endgame. You might want to avert your eyes because big Marvel spoilers follow below.
The marketing push for Loki is in full swing, something fans will immediately recognize. We saw the same thing happen with WandaVision and Falcon earlier this year. Hiddleston’s Loki interviews are popping up everywhere, but The Direct scored an interview from a publication that hasn’t come out — that’s the Summer 2021 issue of Disney’s D23 Magazine.
It’s one of the actor’s remarks in the interview that will put Endgame in a totally different perspective. According to Hiddleston, the TVA has “predetermined what happens in the past, the present, and the future,” which a very exciting detail about the MCU given what we’ve seen so far. Here’s the full quote:
If you have done something to alter history or alter the course of the future, according to the TVA, you get pulled into their headquarters and processed as a time criminal. You could literally have done anything. The TVA is an organization that orders and polices the passage of time. They have predetermined what happens in the past, the present, and the future – in a straight line. And if you do anything that deviates from that, or creates an alternate branch of reality, you get hauled into the TVA and charged with crimes against the timeline, and you’re a time prisoner. It will come as a surprise to no one that Loki is one of those time criminals. He has pushed the boat out. He’s broken too many of his restrictions.
Hiddleston’s quote is meant to explain why the TVA arrested Loki. The God of Mischief messed with the order of things one too many times, apparently, and it’s well beyond the TVA’s margin of error.
But the fact that everything is predetermined indicates that the TVA had always known what Thanos was about to do, not just in the main timeline, but everywhere else. It always knew the Avengers only had one shot at beating him, and that involved a pause of five years to regroup and come up with the time heist plan. And the TVA tolerated the Avengers messing with time and impacting other realities the way they did, fully knowing what the results would be.
This implies that the TVA also knew what Loki would do, so the arrest wouldn’t even be a surprise to them. It’s what was always going to happen. This indicates that the TVA really needs Loki to accomplish whatever tasks are at hand that involve messing with time and space again. And we do know from the Loki trailers there will be plenty of time traveling in the TV series.
Loki director Kate Herron also teased in the same article that we’ll see why Loki taking the Tesseract has been such a big deal:
With Loki taking the Tesseract, fans will see exactly what that action means and what a bigger ripple he’s made in time doing that. It causes him to be more reflective about his actions and why he’s done what he’s done.
What’s also interesting from these quotes is that the TVA sees Loki as the person responsible for what happened. But the reality is that it was the Avengers’ fault that Loki got the Space Stone in the first place. In Endgame, they lost access to the Tesseract in an unexpected chain of events. Yet the TVA did not go after the Avengers for impacting that timeline by allowing Loki to escape. And the Avengers created other timelines when they borrowed the Infinity Stones. In one of them, there’s no Thanos, as the Mad Titan came to the MCU’s main reality to collect what he thought was an easy win.
