Does Loki Season 2's Time Slipping Violate Avengers: Endgame's Time Travel Rules?
This article contains spoilers for the season 2 premiere of "Loki."
A new season of "Loki" is finally here and, with it, a whole fresh set of headache-inducing complications regarding the nature of time travel and timeline branching and all that multiversal good stuff. What's not to love?! For Tom Hiddleston's God of Mischief and his fellow compatriots at the Time Variance Authority (TVA), like Owen Wilson's Agent Mobius, the opening minutes of the premiere (you can check out my review for /Film here) introduce a major problem for our heroes to solve: time slipping. Painfully (and gruesomely) pulled through time at random intervals, Loki's unwilling hijinks pose a pretty significant obstacle in his efforts to prevent the destruction of, well, all of time and the very fabric of the universe as we know it.
In any case, the unexpected addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's time-travel lore actually introduces a whole other wrinkle to the proceedings, too. When Loki and Mobius make their way to the TVA's Repairs and Advancement division, they encounter Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), the only man with even an inkling of how to stop all this time slipping. In the course of one immensely entertaining sequence, we watch as Loki gets pulled into the past and attempts to explain his situation to a much younger O.B. He eventually succeeds in getting O.B. to create the Temporal Aura Extractor conveniently needed to fix this mess in the past, which he then remembers in the present ... but, wait, doesn't that directly contradict the "rules" as established in "Avengers: Endgame," where changing the past doesn't change the future?
It's complicated, folks. Stick with me and I'll untangle this web Marvel's weaved. Oh, and pay attention, because there'll be a quiz at the end of this article.
Running out of time(lines)
Oh "Loki," you just couldn't make things simple for us, could you? I can't imagine anyone's interested in rehashing the Great Time Travel Wars in the lead-up to "Avengers: Endgame," when even the movie's actual writers and directors disagreed over precisely how the narrative mechanism actually works in the MCU. Well, here we go again, because "Loki" season 2 is forcing us all to take a step back and reassess the nitty-gritty details of completely made-up tropes.
First, let's address the established lore. In "Endgame," Professor Hulk takes great pains to lay out the fact that, scientifically, it's impossible for time travel into the past to affect what happens in the future. (You can refresh your memory with this hilarious clip.) Instead, any significant alteration simply creates a new branched timeline where its future is now unwritten and totally up for grabs. So when the Avengers staged their little time-heist to gather all the Infinity Stones to defeat Thanos, they weren't changing their own pasts — they were creating new timelines (which were subsequently set right once Steve Rogers went back to put them all back into their proper places on the timeline). Still confused? Yeah, well, join the club.
In fairness, this pretty much lines up with the explanation featured in "Loki" season 1, but it's the premiere of season 2 that potentially throws a wrench into things. If all that is true, how does Loki's conversation with O.B. in the past suddenly make it so that he has the Temporal Aura Extractor ready to go in the present? It's apparent that Loki's actions in the past are having an effect in real-time in the present, so what gives? The answer, other than "Just go with it," might be found in the TVA itself.
Working overtime
You've got to hand it to the "Loki" writers for figuring out their very own "Get out of jail free" card. Whether by painstaking planning or fortunate coincidence, previous episodes of the series may have provided the most straightforward solution to what obsessive nerds might've considered an unforgivable, canon-breaking lapse. In season 1, Mobius tells Loki that time doesn't work the same way in the TVA as it does on the Sacred Timeline. That explains how all the TVA agents, despite the reveal that they're all variants as opposed to original creations of the Time-Keepers, can live hundreds and hundreds of years without looking any worse for wear. But it could also provide an easy out for the time-slipping conundrum and Loki's ability to travel into the past and change the future. The TVA's just built differently!
Of course, the real answer is that the writers simply made the correct choice to throw canon out the window in favor of crafting one of the highlights of the young season so far. It's undeniably fun and funny to watch the clever editing tricks cutting back and forth between Mobius and present-day O.B. with Loki and past O.B., oftentimes completing each other's sentences while separated by hundreds of years. It would've been writing malpractice to deny viewers of such entertainment just because some other vaguely connected MCU movie stipulated different "rules" for time travel when it was released four years ago. In other words, as much as I've indulged myself in falling down lore-filled rabbit holes every now and then with my favorite franchises, let's not get too stuck in the weeds. I get the feeling the God of Mischief himself would agree.
New episodes of "Loki" air every Thursday on Disney+.