Listen, I have been a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for over a decade now, with Loki as my favorite character for the majority of that time, and even I get my brain in knots trying to keep up with the slippery, mischievous anti-hero.
Loki has tricked us and Thor into believing he was dead about four times in the past, up until the events at the very start of Infinity War where it looked like, that time, his death would be final. In a way, it was, but in all the ways that matter, it very much was not.
Didn’t Loki die in Infinity War?
Yes. Loki did die at the cruel, arrogant hands of Thanos at the start of Infinity War. The few of us who were fooled into thinking that would be the last we would see of Tom Hiddleston in the MCU felt understandably wronged to see such an iconic character suffer an ending as nonchalant. Thankfully, Kevin Feige and Co. had one more trick up their sleeves, and one movie later, we Loki-heads got to unclench knowing his story would continue.
To be perfectly clear, the version of Loki we followed across three Thor movies and one and not-even-a-half Avengers movies died in Infinity War. That part is heartbreaking because it means the growth we watched him achieve during Ragnarok was essentially for nothing. However, when the Avengers messed up their attempt to retrieve the Space Stone during their Time Heist in Endgame, they essentially contributed to releasing the version of Loki we knew up until the events of the Battle of New York (2012). This takes us to Season 1 of Loki.
How is Loki alive in the Disney Plus series?
After Tony, Scott, and the Hulk let the Tesseract and the space stone inside it quite literally fall at Loki’s feet, the God of Mischief used it to escape his imprisonment and create a separate timeline which landed him in a desert in Mongolia. The Time Variance Authority, aka the organization created by the Kang variant known as He Who Remains to ensure the protection of the Sacred Timeline, showed up, arrested Loki, took him to their headquarters at the End of Time, and pruned the new branch of time he’d created.
Loki was turned into a TVA agent and began working with them in monitoring the Sacred Timeline, which he ultimately hoped to control. Of course, nothing in the MCU ever goes exactly as planned, so Loki, and his variant Sylvie, ultimately caused the destruction of the Sacred Timeline, unleashing multiversal chaos and setting the stage for more, eviller variants of Kang to wreak havoc on time and space yet again.