Loki Breaks A Major Time Travel Rule In The Marvel Universe
Sometimes, we’re pretty sure that the Doctor Who writers had the right idea when they decided to waive away any of their crazy writing as “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” That’s because more serious franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe have gone out of their way to establish firm time travel rules and then, quicker than you can practice your Thanos snap, they break them.
This occurred in the Loki season 2 premiere which proceeds to break the Avengers: Endgame rule that characters can’t affect the present when they travel to the past.
The Loki Season 2 premiere breaks the time travel rules explained by Hulk in Avengers: Endgame by showing the titular hero managing to change the present by changing his past.
Confused yet?
Before we talk more about Loki, here’s a quick primer on the time travel rules established in Avengers: Endgame. That film goes out of its way to establish that characters can’t just hop to the past and change their present circumstances by doing something like killing Thanos.
As Hulk patiently explains to both the characters and the audience, “If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past, which can’t now be changed by your new future.”
Obviously, this was only the first episode of the latest Loki season, and there are many possibilities that might explain the seeming discrepancy with Marvel’s time travel rules.
Hulk even goes so far as to explicitly explain that the kinds of time travel we see in movies like Back to the Future and The Terminator don’t work. Changing the past to change the future, he insists, never works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He sounded pretty confident at the time, but he might not have if he could have hopped into our particular multiverse and watched the season two premiere of Loki.
In that premiere, we see that Loki is facing a unique problem: he is a god seemingly unstuck in time, and he must deal with “time-slips” that randomly transport him between his own past, present, and future. To deal with the problem, he recruits TVA engineer Ouroboros to help him out. And the engineer is able to do just that, but only after Loki breaks that big time travel rule Hulk so painstakingly explained to us.
At one point, Loki gets sucked into the past, and he ends up telling Ouroboros about his time-slipping problem. Thanks to that conversation in the past, the clever engineer is able to build a Temporal Aura Extractor to help Loki in the present day.
The show even goes out of its way to show us that the Ouroboros of the present is remembering what his past self heard from Loki, meaning that the rebellious god really did manage to change his own future by changing the past.
“If you travel to the past, that past becomes your future, and your former present becomes the past, which can’t now be changed by your new future.”
-Hulk in Avengers: Endgame
Obviously, this was only the first episode of the latest Loki season, and there are many possibilities that might explain the seeming discrepancy with Marvel’s time travel rules.
For example, we could chalk this up to how time works differently in the TVA, or it might be that Hulk’s time travel rules were completely correct back before Sylvie destroyed the Sacred Timeline in Loki’s first season. Ultimately, we have enough faith in this Disney show that we think all will be explained, but if not, we may want to time-slip back to the past and keep ourselves from ever streaming in the first place.
