Loki Episode 1 Explained: Timeline And Multiverse! Disney+

Hello and welcome everyone. Loki episode 1 is out now and here we are with our explanation article. There will be numerous spoilers for Loki’s first episode. So make sure you have watched the episode first. so let’s get started.

The series picks up where Loki mysteriously left in the middle of Avengers Endgame. While handcuffed, the Tesseract falls at his feet, and he picks it up, transporting himself to the middle of the Gobi desert in Mongolia. There, a police force enters through a wormhole with TVA patches. They freeze time so Loki can’t escape and strap something around his neck that somehow limits his God-like powers. It turns out TVA stands for the Time Variance Authority. They manage beings that create variances in time. In one of the episode’s best scenes, he gives a ticket to stand in a line of two people and watches a cute animated 1960s style video explaining why the TVA does what it does. Time jumpers like Loki created variances for mundane reasons that have repercussions like intergalactic wars. Oh, and if you argue with the guard, they zap you to nothingness.

Loki visits the TVA judge. It’s sort of like being put on trial with no rights and defending your VISA in the United States. He has no lawyer, no evidence to exonerate himself, and creates some laughs for the gallery when he arrogantly tries to use his powers to escape. That’s when Captain Mobius makes an appearance in the MCU for the first time. We first meet Agent Mobius when he is investigating a church with a stained glass window of a devil. He then gets an alert that the TVA has an interesting find, and many do not know who they have in their possession — the God of Mischief himself.

Loki was about to be “reset” after being found guilty, but luckily Mobius steps in. . The judge lets him have Mr. Mischief but tells him it’s on him if anything goes wrong. Mobius gives Loki a history lesson that is meant to catch the viewer up if they forgot who the character is or if somehow you are new to the MCU. They go through how he killed Agent Coulson and how his actions will lead to his mother’s death. This sends Loki into a rage, where his new agent friend assesses him as the Fredo of his day. This man knows how to build rapport.

But luckily, Loki predictably escapes after Mobius leaves the room for a minute or two. He ends up in a room where reset variants’ possessions are kept for safekeeping; thrown in drawers, and long forgotten. When Loki threatens a staffer to give him the Tesseract, he finds it in a drawer. He pulls it out, placing it on the counter when something catches his eye, like opening up the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. He is staring at stones. Lots of them. A couple of dozen. And they are all Infinity stones. He realizes he is standing in the middle of the most powerful force in the MCU. He ends up back in the interrogation room, where he rewinds the video file to see the last time he saw his mother, his father, and brother, Thor. And eventually to where Thanos snapped his neck in an alternative time variance. 

Mobius enters the room where Loki looks defeated, realizing even Infinity stones have no power within the TVA. Mobius can’t offer him his old life, but he can offer the God of Mischief some salvation. He wants to have Loki help him hunt a variance offender that is hunting down TVA agents known as the Minute Men. But why Loki? Well, Mobius drops the shocker of the episode. The variant they are hunting is Loki. And this where we Jump back to the 1850s in Oklahoma, and some minute men jump through a window into a field. A hooded figure sees they have stepped into his trap and pulls a Braveheart. He lights a match, flames spread, and all four are killed.

As we saw in the closing minutes, a hooded figure attacked Time Variance Authority hunters, setting fire to a field. As we learned earlier from Mobius, this figure is believed to be Loki. Well, not the Loki who's working with the TVA, but another variant.  This fugitive variant seemingly has it in for the TVA, and while that might fit with Loki, why are they so sure that's who this person is? Yes, that child Mobius met pointed at a stained-glass devil, but Loki isn't the only horned character in the MCU.

Well, we have to look back to the start of the episode. Remember when Loki had been brought into the TVA and had to go through several levels of security? One clerk passed him through a gate and created a snapshot of his temporal aura. It took me a while to hear that phrase clearly but it's basically the fingerprinting system of the TVA, and how they manage to link variants to each other.  While the audience, and Loki, had to be taught about the nexus events, it appears as if the timeline variant is much more aware of the work of jumping between timelines and the risk of a “multiversal war”. We wonder if the fugitive variant of Loki is actually trying to throw the universe into haywire?

And so that's the big mystery heading into the next Loki episode. Who is this fugitive variant? Are they actually Loki? What is their goal? And with that, we will bring this article to an end.  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.