Naturally, spoilers ahoy for Loki season 2, episode 5.
Unless the Marvel Cinematic Universe is planning on a major rug-pull, it’s becoming increasingly clear – some might even say obvious – that Loki has been establishing Tom Hiddleston’s trickster as perhaps the single most important and influential character in the Multiverse Saga.
With the TVA at the center of a storm that’s reportedly set to reach a head across Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars, the God of Mischief has been positioned as the de facto audience surrogate caught in the midst of a temporal maelstrom, and his newfound power only seems to enhance that fact.
After last week’s jaw-dropping cliffhanger that potentially rewrote the rules of the entire MCU, Loki has mastered the art of time-slipping and used it to his advantage, giving him the ability to seamlessly navigate through his timeline at will to create a new past, present, and potential future.
For the second week in a row, though, it flies directly in the face of the franchise’s time travel rules as established by Avengers: Endgame, and casually tosses the whole agonizing side of time-slipping to one side. It makes sense within the context of Loki and what we’ve been told so far, but you can’t help but shake the feeling that it feels a little too… convenient, in a way.
The Multiverse Saga has become so unwieldy and convoluted across its film and television projects that downsizing and dovetailing was always going to be required eventually, and it’s nothing if not convenient that Loki has gifted its title hero the ability to tamper with time immediately after the latest report dubbing the MCU as falling into crisis emerged.
Of course, we’ve got one more week left to see how it plays out, so let’s hope it doesn’t just become another MacGuffin in the grand scheme of things.