WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Loki Episode 1, "Glorious Purpose," streaming now on Disney+.
In the wake of Avengers: Endgame, the explanation for time travel left a lot of fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe scratching their heads. But with Loki confronting those issues, it seemed as though they would finally get their answers. However, while the new Disney+ series sets its sites on those very problems, it misses its target completely and only creates new ones.
As a TikTok user recently noted, the explanation for the Time Variance Authority's recriminations to Loki pointing at the Avengers' interference with time just doesn't make sense, and, if anything, it just raises more questions.
As helpfully explained by a cartoon played for Loki following his arrest, the TVA is responsible for pruning unnatural variations to the timeline that create branching realities not meant to exist. Endgame's plot largely revolved around the Avengers executing a Time Heist to collect the Infinity Stones necessary to reverse Thanos' destruction of half of all life, and over the course of their adventure, they inadvertently allowed Loki to escape his capture and avoid much of his destiny in subsequent MCU appearances. When Loki points to the Avengers' own interference with time, the TVA alleges that the heroes' interferences were meant to happen, while Loki's were not.
As the TVA explains, there's a Sacred Timeline that it seeks to protect, and that reality remained secure even during the Avengers' interference because they did what they were supposed to do. But there's a glaring logical inconsistency with the idea that the Avengers followed the correct path and Loki did not. In truth, Loki's actions could not have happened if the Avengers did not act as they had, and the heroes' actions thereafter could not have happened if the God of Mischief had not interfered.
The order of events is that the Avengers travel back in time and bungle their attempt at obtaining the Tesseract so Loki gets ahold of it, which forces Tony Stark and Steve Rogers to head back to the 1970s to get the Cosmic Cube from that point in time. If Loki was not supposed to steal the Tesseract, Tony and Steve wouldn't have needed to travel back again. With that logic, the two heroes would be every bit as much a variant as Loki is.
However, rather than being a continuity error, this may be a hint that there is some funny business going on with the operation of the TVA. Agent Mobius insists that right and wrong is not the purview of the agency, and yet, its decisions seem completely arbitrary and its methods frustratingly obscured by endless bureaucracy. There have already been dark implications about the nature of the TVA agents, who live their entire lives within the offices of the TVA, but such holes in the logic of their conduct may point to their more sinister motivations as an agency.
The premiere episode of Loki did a lot of setup in terms of introducing its characters and concepts, but such conflicts will need greater depth before they're satisfactory. If these are not setups for deeper plotlines then they may just be plot holes, and as frustrating as that is, fans may need to wait to see the future before they know if the present explanation for mistakes of the past is satisfactory.
Loki stars Tom Hiddleston as Loki, Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna Lexus Renslayer, Wunmi Mosaku as Hunter B-15 and Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Sasha Lane and Eugene Cordero. The series premieres June 9 on Disney+.