How Loki Just Closed A Huge MCU Loop Hole
“With time travel, they can do anything...”
In the wake of Avengers: Endgame turning to the time continuum to solve the issue of Thanos’ decimation of the planet’s population, the MCU caused itself a problem.
By presenting a scientifically sound (at least in this universe) explanation for time travel, the Endgame writing team opened the floodgates on what could and couldn’t happen next. After all, if you can just jump around in time with the right equipment, why wouldn’t anyone just do it constantly to solve every little issue?
But then, if you do that sort of thing, you remove all sense of threat to the universe. Sure, it means you can bring back beloved characters or drop others into entirely new time periods for some new japes, but when every stake is reversible, there are no real stakes any more. That’s why Doctor Strange’s Time Stone was always weighed down with the caveat that meddling with “the natural order” by time trickery was an abomination and an affront to true existence.
But that doesn’t cover ALL time travel, because why would everyone suddenly sign on to the moral structure of the Order of the Sorcerors? They’re weird outsider types who speak for a small part of the population and who live in shadow. The reality is, if “real people” found out about time travel and were given the chance, they’d do it.
And if, say, the MCU’s most notorious villain did, then all bets would be off. Which is precisely what the Disney+ Loki series is all about.
We’ve been primed to expect the show to be a series of stories in which Loki jumps through time, meddling with key events in human history. But don’t start thinking this is going to be some reverse Quantum Leap/Time Cop mash-up, because Loki won’t have it all his own way. Not according to the very first footage we’ve now seen of the show.
As part of Marvel’s Super Bowl advert for the Disney+ shows, we got a first look at Tom Hiddleston’s returning adoptive Asgardian son and the outfit he’s wearing in the huge 3 seconds of footage gives the game away.
That logo on his breast reads TVA - the Time Variance Authority, which sounds boring but which gives us a framework for the show that sets Loki as a time criminal and the agency as his pursuers through time as they try to mop up his meddling but also presumably attempt to kill him for breaking the timeline himself.
The Time Variance Authority is an organization from the comics Who protect the timeline of the Marvel Universe. Or seek to anyway - they’re not always that effective. If you use time travel to affect the timeline, they’re who you answer to and they’re who Loki will have to evade.
Their agents are artificial clones called chronomonitors, which begs the question of whether Owen Wilson - who was fairly recently announced as part of the cast - might be playing many many different Owen Wilsons. Any time someone meddles with the timeline, a new chronomonitor is born and they’re overseen by a group of judges, who often go rogue, which is always helpful.
So, the long and short of this is that Loki is going to show us as an audience why we can’t just except the MCU to jump around in time, changing realities and timelines with their newly discovered time travel powers. They now have someone to answer for in that respect and these “bad guys” are not ones to beat up or reason with - their soulless, faceless bureaucracy personified. The very enemy of everything Loki’s flamboyant individualism and rule breaking stands for.