Loki S2 E5 Officially Throws One of MCU's Core Rules Out the Window

Summary:

• Pretty clear time travel rules led to the events of the Loki TV series in the first place
• The show blatantly ignored them in the very first episode of season 2
• A new revelation clearly gets rid of the concept altogether, making any rules virtually nonexistent

From the very first episode of season 2, the Loki TV series rendered the entire established concept of time travel within the MCU virtually meaningless, violating the rules that were at the core of the series' entire storyline.

During the events of Avengers: Endgame, it was explicitly stated that changing the past doesn't affect the future, but instead creates an entirely new timeline, which led the superhero team to devise an elaborate heist to acquire all of the Infinity Stones.

However, the trip to 2012 New York didn't go as planned, resulting in Loki escaping custody, creating an alternate version of the character who eventually joined the TVA, which was the basis of the show's plot.

MCU Goes Against Its Own Foundation

Nevertheless, in the first episode of season two, we saw Loki directly affect the present by traveling back in time and talking to Ouroboros, allowing the inventor to develop a device to help the former god of mischief.

This event raised concerns among fans, who began to suspect that the show's creators had decided to discard the previously established rules in order to create a more interesting story.

Now, the just released episode 5 of season 2 confirms the initial suspicion and clearly suggests that the whole mechanism of time travel has been thrown out the window and now anything can happen within the cinematic universe.

After our heroes are left to face certain annihilation by the malfunctioning Temporal Loom, Loki suddenly time-slips to different points on the branching timelines, where he sees all of his TVA colleagues living the normal lives they had before being forcibly recruited.

At this point, the show's creators are already hinting that they are about to completely drop any kind of even remotely scientific explanation for how time travel works in the franchise.

Fiction, Not Science

Ouroboros, who is revealed to be a physicist and part-time sci-fi writer, tells Loki that he must learn to control the time-slip and that when science is useless, fiction can come to his aid, clearly nodding that the events that follow have nothing to do with reality.

At the end of the episode, which doesn't really add anything new to the plot beyond the backstories of the TVA employees, our protagonist suddenly learns how to control his newfound ability just as time itself begins to unwind around him.

This puts the final nail in the coffin of the time travel rules, as now not only is Loki able to prevent major events like the destruction of the Temporal Loom, but he is also able to jump through time without creating his "copies."

While earlier in the series we saw the hero encountering his past or future self on several occasions, now his consciousness simply returns to his body in the past, fully aware of the upcoming events, much like what happened to Wolverine in 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past.

All of this just goes to show the biggest problem with the vast majority of time travel stories, which is that the creators themselves end up caught in countless paradoxes and contradictions.

From this point of view, getting rid of the rules and explaining everything as pure fiction is a rather smart decision, as it allows one to concentrate more on the story instead of how to explain it scientifically.

The final episode of Loki season 2 will premiere on November 9, 2023.