Loki: Captain America Really Did Mess Everything Up

In a matter of days, Loki will debut on Disney+ and follow the Asgardian trickster (Tom Hiddleston) as he helps Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and the Time Variance Authority on righting the timeline. One of the last movies Marvel fans saw in theaters was Avengers: Endgame, a movie that introduced the concept of time travel to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Furthermore, in addition to the concept itself, the movie laid down the universe’s basic rules for time travel and how to avoid ideas like the Butterfly Effect.

Throughout the three-plus hours of Endgame, the filmmakers behind the flick brought in the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) to help explain the rules of the timeline. Then, at the end of it all, Captain America (Chris Evans) still went back in time and messed everything up.

As the Ancient One explained, each time an Infinity Stone was removed from a timeline — or some other massive event took place — the timeline would then branch off into its own stream. Eventually, this timeline would be doomed into oblivion because the timestream would run into another or crumble away from reality.

Interestingly enough, Loki follows Hiddleston’s character, who used the Space Stone to leave Avengers Tower in the 2012 New York timeline. Unless the Space Stone now has time-traveling powers in and of itself, that means the MacGuffin remains in the same timeline, simply in a different location than where it’s supposed to be. That means if a change in location is enough to splinter timelines, Steve Rogers (Evans) going back in time to live a full life with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) would most certainly upset the status quo.

We know Rogers’ goal was to return the Infinity Stones to their right places in time in hopes of returning the timeline to normal, to its state prior to the Endgame time-traveling shenanigans. After that, however, he went back even further in time, bopping between timelines in an effort to live out his days with his dearly beloved.

We’re not saying Loki is completely innocent in this scenario, but using the logic we learned in Avengers: Endgame, it would seem Rogers’ actions were much more detrimental to the timeline than the God of Mischief using the Space Stone to switch locations. After all, we even see the Infinity Stone in the trailer, so we know he didn’t destroy it or do something drastic that’d change the timeline.

Loki debuts on Disney+ beginning Wednesday, June 9th.

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