‘Loki’ might’ve already solved one of Marvel’s biggest MCU mysteries
We’ve only seen two episodes from Marvel’s newest MCU TV show for Disney+, but Loki is already more captivating than WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. It’s not just because fan-favorite Tom Hiddleston is back, reprising a role he mastered for more than a decade. And it’s not just because Loki is back from the dead, so to speak — the character died in Avengers: Infinity War, but a Loki variant escaped with the tesseract in Avengers: Endgame. It’s also because Loki will provide a few key answers to MCU mysteries, and it’ll also help outline the new rules of engagement for the next phase of MCU adventures.
The multiverse will play a significant role in Phase 4, and we expect at least two movies to tackle the subject very soon, including Spider-Man: No Way Home (December 2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (March 2022). Loki will tell us exactly how time flows, how time travel works, and what we should expect from the multiverse. If the first episode already made that essential connection with Endgame and started exploring additional concepts about these topics, the second episode might have delivered a critical revelation that we could have easily missed when first watching the show.
The revelation might be all the more important for the Marvel film we want to see most this year, Spider-Man 3, as Loki might have just answered one of our biggest questions about No Way Home. Mind you, some major spoilers might follow below.
The premise of Spider-Man 3 is one of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood. Sony and Marvel have not done a good job of concealing the fact that No Way Home will be a multiverse story involving Spider-Man and villain versions from the non-MCU movies — we’ve seen evidence time and time again that “ruins” this secret. Of course, the fact that we know Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire will join Tom Holland as different Spider-Men will not ruin the film. If anything, I can’t wait to see how everything unfolds, something I’d be hard-pressed to say about any of the previous Spider-Man movies.
But the fact that we’ll have three distinct actors playing the same character inside a multiverse is puzzling. What we saw in Endgame so far indicates that the characters from the primary timeline look exactly the same as the ones from alternate timelines. The same actors play them, after all. So why would we need Holland, Garfield, and Maguire to play three versions of Spider-Man? That’s question is even more interesting question if you’re already aware of rumors that say Robert Downey Jr. might play a different version of Tony Stark at some point down the road.
This is where Loki comes in handy. The first episode told us there’s a main Sacred Timeline and that the Time Keepers have a predetermined course of events for everything. The Avengers were allowed to travel back in time to beat Thanos, and everything we saw in the MCU was supposed to happen in this particular order. What’s not clear from episode 1 is whether the Sacred Timeline involves multiple realities flowing within acceptable margins of error, or if this applies to just one reality.
