The multiverse has been giving Marvel fans headaches for a few years now, and the only MCU project to provide us with any satisfactory answers about it so far has been Loki. Thankfully for us all, the acclaimed Disney Plus show is back for a second season, and it’s already done more for the franchise’s plot in one 48-minute-long episode than entire television shows (*cough* Secret Invasion) and movies (*cough* Quantumania) have done in the past.
If you had been wondering how exactly He Who Remains had won the multiversal war and stopped all the genius Kang variants from killing one another in their violent quest to rule over all time and space, the first episode of Loki‘s second season came through with the explanation.
What is the Temporal Loom in the MCU and how does it work?
Thanks to Ke Huy Quan’s fantastic new character in Loki — lone TVA engineer Ouroboros, but friends (or rather, a friend) call him O.B. — we now know the technology employed by He Who Remains to create the Sacred Timeline. More importantly, we’ve been given a clear visual representation of the device, that will undoubtedly serve as a nice reference when the ins and outs of multiverse theory start to jumble in our minds.
Quan, Hollywood’s resident expert on multiversal theory, tells Owen Wilson’s Mobius and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki all about the Temporal Loom in the new episode of the Phase Five series. It’s a collection of rings that refine raw time “into a physical timeline,” he says. The device captures the raw energy of the multiverse and weaves it into a manageable thread of parallel realities that all share the same baseline — this baseline being the events that lead to the existence of He Who Remains, only him, and no other kind of Kang variant that might threaten the Sacred Timeline. As we learned in Season 1 of the show, any threads that diverge from the Sacred Timeline are pruned by the TVA, and all new variants are taken into the organization and turned into brainwashed officials, who in turn, keep the system going.
Sylvie, a Loki variant that went rogue and decided to destroy the TVA by killing He Who Remains, caused the disruption of this contained arrangement. TVA officials are now aware that the Time-Keepers that they thought they answered to were android façades for their real master who is now dead. There’s also the small question of learning that they were taken from their timelines and submitted to dictatorial rule and indoctrination by this man for eons. It’s understandable, then, that carrying out their routine of timeline pruning and variant abduction is the least of their worries at the moment. As a result, new timelines are forming at an uncontrollable pace and the Temporal Loom is in danger of overloading and, well, probably exploding into multiversal chaos.
O.B.’s priority was sealing off the TVA so that the organization, which exists outside of time and space, could be protected from temporal radiation, long enough for him to somehow retrofit the Temporal Loom so it could accommodate so many new timelines. Ke Huy Quan is left in charge of saving the multiverse yet again and, frankly, there’s no one I would trust more for the job.