We’ve now seen one-third of Marvel’s Loki TV show, as two of the six episodes planned for this Loki adventure are available for streaming on Disney+. And so far, it’s fantastic. Marvel had to dive right into the meat of the story in the first episode, where it delivered the Avengers: Endgame connections we’ve been waiting for more than two years to see. Marvel went even further than that, as the first episode raises a few interesting questions about time travel and alternate realities. Both of the first two episodes presented new details about how the Sacred Timeline flows and how the Time Variance Authority (TVA) helps keep it in check.
We learned from episode 1 who the show’s villain is supposed to be, and this week’s installment explained to us how someone could mess up with the flow of reality. But right at the end of the second episode, we saw the most puzzling thing so far — the kind of occurrence that will have you pausing, playing, and rewinding the scene in search of clues. We’ll tell you all about it below — but first, we need to warn you that a few significant spoilers follow below.
After episode 1 revealed that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) would help Mobius (Owen Wilson) hunt down another version of Loki who has been attacking TVA teams all over the timeline, episode 2 revealed the identity of that Loki variant. It turns out that it’s a female version of Loki, who we’ll call Lady Loki. Sophia Di Martino plays this variant, and we’ve only just begun to see what her character is all about.
What we do know so far is that she’s a formidable adversary who has bested the TVA’s Hunter and agents at every point since she managed to escape. She stole plenty of Reset Charges along the way, and it was Loki who was able to track her down — either that or Lady Loki wanted him to find her.
At the end of episode 2, we see Lady Loki enact her attack plan on the TVA. She has been prepping near an apocalyptic event she used to hide her presence from the time police, and the fact that she was ready to begin the attack at the moment Loki, Mobius, and the Hunters arrived shows that she knew exactly what was coming. After all, she might have been hiding in a single place, quite possibly looping back and forth to escape a devastating death, but she has been planning everything all along.
When the TVA arrives, the Reset Charges are armed, and then Lady Loki stalls for time in typical Loki fashion to ensure they go off. This is the climactic end of the episode, as we learn that the Reset Charges are meant to go back in time and cause all kinds of chaos for the sacred timeline.
The TVA analysts see the attack in real-time since the Reset Charges explode in different time periods. These events appear on the tiny screens of those quirky TVA computers, and that’s when you’ll have to pause everything, rewind, and watch everything frame by frame.
Here are all the locations that Lady Loki bombed, complete with timestamps.
- 08.03.1522 – Phong Nha, Vietnam
- 03.31.1492 – Lisbon, Portugal
- 04.23.2301 – Vormir
- 10.25.1551 – Thorton, USA
- 11.22.1999 – Cookeville, USA
- 02.16.2004 – Asgard
- 10.03.1390 – Rome, Italy
- 08.13.1984 – Sakaar, Tayo
- 02.02.1908 – Barichara, (Col)
- 07.14.1708 – Porvoo, Finland
- 12.27.1382 – Ego
- 10.13.1982 – Titan
- 09.21.1947 – New York, USA
- 03.01.1984 – Tokyo, Japan
- 01.03.0051 – Hala
- 08.02.1999 – Kingsport, USA
- 09.24.1001 – Xandar
- 11.23.2005 – Beijing, China
- 07.10.1903 – Madrid, Spain
- 04.12.1887 – unspecified
The attack is so massive in scale that it could cause the Sacred Timeline to branch off into multiple, uncontrollable realities that might not be reset. This could lead to madness, as we’ve learned in the first episode. And we speculated that these events in Loki might set up Spider-Man 3 and Doctor Strange 2, assuming the TVA can’t fix them.
What’s interesting in the list above is that Lady Loki attacks locations in the universe that the MCU has already explored. We’ve got multiple timestamps in various places on Earth, but also other planets. Asgard, Ego, Hala, Sakaar, Titan, Vormir, Xandar are all planets that appeared in the Infinity Saga movies. The dates do not appear to coincide with any MCU events, however.
The dates related to Earth make no immediate sense either. That 1492 date stands out immediately, as that’s when Christopher Columbus set sail to reach the East Indies by going west. The 1947 post-World War date also stands out. This might be tied to the MCU, as a certain Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) was working for the government during those years and was still getting over having lost Steve (Chris Evans).
We’ll have to wait for episode 3 to see exactly what sort of destructions those Reset Charges could have done, or whether the timelines they spawned will be relevant to the MCU Phase 4 going forward.
