But I'm not here to discuss the similarities between the series, and here we're heading into spoiler filled waters so if you're in any way squeamish, turn your ferry around and head back to port. Or go and watch Loki then come back. Seriously, this is one of those occasions when Lucy Mangan doesn't know what she's talking about and that headline (which she presumably didn't write but nevertheless) is a disgrace!
Isn't it good? Isn't the Butterscotch Stallion just the perfect foil to Hiddleston's wall bouncing and basically having this post-Incident Loki copying most of us during one of the various lockdowns and rewatch the MARVEL films in chronological order in order to get up to speed character-wise just wonderful as well as heart-breaking? As every nerd with a NordVPN sponsorship has pointed out, that key moment from the trailer was just a flashback to a prank shows we do not know what's coming next.
Except, do we? The title Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness exists and there's plenty of evidence from other corners of the MCU that by the end of this series that there will be more than this one "sacred" timeline and that what we're watching here is the creation of that realm so rich with possibility. But how will this happen when this all powerful agency exists, protecting the timeline from intervention since the beginning of time it seems.
Here's my theory. Loki's going to herald the multiverse. More than that, the figure glimpsed at the end of the episode isn't just a Loki, it's the Loki who we've been following in this episode. At a certain point he realises that these super-beings have no right at all to dictate how time and reality work just to save their own skin and so he hatches a plan, or more's to the point follows the plan he's already watching evolve.
So it's this Loki who's travelling through time, toppling soldiers in order to steal the glowy boxes on the assumption that with enough of them he'll be able to destroy the Time Variance Authority and set the multiverse back on track, including realities were he lived, Frida lived, he's king of Midgard and all manner of other outcomes. From a certain point of view the Time-Keepers could be viewed as incredibly fascistic, destroying variants because they don't fit their plan.
One point of confusion I've seen is how there can be one sacred timeline when we've already seen other realities already in the MCU, notably in the obviously canonical Agents of SHIELD but also during Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 as Stan Lee describes some of his adventures to multiple Watchers, each presumably keeping track of their own reality or timeline. How can these realms exist if there's a sacred timeline?
Well, because there was a single sacred timeline until there wasn't. Even taking into account that the TVA themselves can time travel, or at least manifest themselves in any time period which I don't suppose is the same thing, Loki is pulled from the timeline in 2012, which means that Loki is set before the alternate reality episodes of SHIELD and Guardians of the Galaxy, not to mention whatever the results of the time travel in Runaways was (and yes that's canonical too).
Once Loki's topples the TVA, they're replaced by the Watchers, presumably an infinite number of them, observing the timelines and only intervening in the most dire of cosmic circumstances. Which means the What If? series isn't going to be just some fun anthology show, but a key part of the overall narrative going forward, demonstrating that there isn't one correct timeline but numerous possibilities. Perhaps Jordan Peele's voice will cameo as a "live action" Watcher in Loki.
I appreciate to some extent all of this is me trying to make fetch happen again, after it turned out the Evan Peters Quicksilver was just some guy and so there isn't yet some grand plan to co-opt MARVEL movie and TV content past and present into the MCU and explain the mechanics of the Sonyverse. But it'll be fun to look back at this blog post in five episodes time and see how wrong I was again anyway.
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