Warning: SPOILERS for Loki episode 5.
With a tongue-in-cheek gag in Loki episode 5, “Journey Into Mystery,” Marvel subtly acknowledges that even they are confused by how the MCU’s timeline works at this point. The show has not only taken on time travel, but also more complex issues of timelines surrounding predestination and free will. As viewers have tried to wrap their heads around the functioning of the temporal organization with short tutorials from TVA mascot Miss Minutes, Marvel decided to level with them and admit that they don’t understand it either.
Up until Avengers: Endgame, time in the MCU was assumed to be a straight line. With Ant-Man’s discovery of time travel, things started to get a bit more complicated and required a past version of The Ancient One to explain the concept of timelines to Smart Hulk. With the introduction of the Time Keepers, the Time Variance Authority, and the Sacred Timeline, Loki has had to provide brief expositional seminars to explain time, nexus events, and variants.
While the Loki of the show starts his journey in 2012 at the battle of New York, a large portion of Loki takes place within the TVA, a place that sits outside of time. When Loki episode 5 introduces Loki to The Void, a point at the end of the Sacred Timeline where divergent timelines are sent to be destroyed by Alioth, he finally has to face the fact that time has become meaningless to him. Imploring the other Loki variants to explain what is happening, he says: “Look, it’s been a very, very, very trying past few days. Months? I don’t even know how long it’s been since New York.” This brief gag acknowledges that even Marvel does not know how much time has passed in the show, or how one would begin to measure that in a world of time travel, nexus events, and time loops.
This isn’t the first time that Marvel has become confused by its own timeline, particularly with regard to the Asgardians. In Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Thor announces that he is over 1,500 years old. The original Thor (2011) movie shows Odin discovering Loki after defeating Laufey during the Jotun’s assault on Midgard–Norway, to be precise. This scene comes with a timestamp of 965 A.D. which means that in Thor Loki is around 1,046 years old and would be 1,052 by the time of Avengers: Infinity War. However, despite their 448-year age gap and Thor being established as the older brother, when in Thor: Ragnarok Thor tells a story of Loki turning into a snake to trick Thor and stab him, he closes by saying “we were eight at the time.” As the two would never have been that close in age, it’s clear that Marvel briefly forgot the extreme Asgardian age gap.
Marvel has often made it difficult to follow the exact chronological timeline of the MCU. While the majority of the films have released in the same year that they are intended to take place, several appear out of order. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 follows on directly from the first Guardians of the Galaxy despite releasing three years later. Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain Marvel both take place in the past, long before the MCU began. Finally, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man And The Wasp, and Black Widow all take place within the MCU release timeframe, but before other films that had already been released. Loki has taken it a step further by originating the events of the series in 2012, jumping around an ever-diverging timeline, and spending a large amount of screen time in a place outside of time. In Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness, these problems will presumably either be fixed or made significantly worse.
Loki releases new episodes Wednesdays on Disney+.
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