Loki Trailer: Marvel, Avengers, and Time Travel Explained (Full Breakdown)

The Loki trailer set the stage for a time-traveling, world-bending, nothing is real, and everything is awesome series on Disney+ -- so I think we should dig in. The Loki trailer is worthy of a deep dive breakdown which many of you have been requesting on Twitter, so we're going to take our best swings at this thing with theories which might turn out to be so accurate that you'll consider them spoilers but if they're not you'll almost certainly be wondering why I get to have this much fun as a job. The video above will supplement the many details below as the footage described from the Loki trailer can be seen in real time!

The trailer starts in Avengers: Endgame, Loki gets the Tesseract, you know how this part goes... but it cuts to Loki traveling to another location through what looks like the same effect as the Bifrost which was shown in real time in Thor: Ragnarok. I personally think this could be a mislead, because we've seen the Tesseract, aka the Space Stone, be used to open portals for people like Loki and Thanos in the past. It's described as opening a portal through space, not transporting things through space.

Either way, Loki ends up somewhere in a desert, this definitely looks like a nod to the first Iron Man when Tony Stark wakes up in the desert after escaping the cave. The hat on this fella on the right would indicate we are not in ancient times, just not in a culture that we've spent much time in in the MCU.

Loki ends up at the TVA, which is short for the Time Variance Authority, this is essentially like those people from Umbrella Academy, if you watched that Netflix series or read that comic. They're basically time cops who patrol the multiverse to make sure people don't mess with time too much and the Avengers just messed with time in Endgame but they did their best to set everything back the way they found it -- with Loki being the exception so he's on their radar.

Owen Wilson is crashing the party, it looks like he's going to be Mobius M. Mobius from Marvel Comics, first appeared in Fantastic Four #352, and he is very familiar with Loki as demonstrated when he says things like, "We both know you love to talk. "Mobius is named after the impossible Mobius shape, which we saw in Avengers: Endgame when Tony Stark cracked time travel.

We see what looks like a TVA cop getting hunted down by what I think could be an alternate version of Loki. The title shows Loki in a whole bunch of wildly different fonts, and we're expecting to see Lady Loki in this series, among other versions of the character, so I'm thinking that maybe Mobius has gotten to know these alternate Loki's which can only be so different from our main MCU Loki, and this Loki might be used to either track them down or reel them in.

In some sort of meeting hall at the TVA, there are three faces on the wall -- this could be Justice Peace, Justice Goodwill, and Justice Love -- it could be an homage to the Living Tribunal, or it could be three different version of Kang the Conqueror -- a time traveling super villain who is confirmed to appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and has existed in different enough forms throughout time to have these three wooden faces be in honor of his time travel-ness.

It looks like Mobius gives Loki a history lesson about himself, complete with the statue he built of himself in Thor: Ragnarok during Thor's absence and when he was defeated by the Avengers in the first Avengers movie. I think that's another mislead, it's just a smart marketing play to show the Avengers in a trailer since we all watched that movie and I'm not sure how they would be so dialed into Loki's memories and projecting them like this. It wouldn't be the first time Marvel mislead us with a trailer. I mean, remember when the Hulk showed up in Wakanda in Infinity War? Yeah, me either.

But, if it is a history lesson of Loki's life, maybe he's not so thrilled to see himself die by the hands of Thanos and the TVA uses this as leverage to make him work for them? Like, "Help us fix the timelines or we'll just toss you back to that one where the Mad Titan chokes you to death in the first scene of a huge movie and you don't get to be in it?"

We see a Roxxcart store, clearly some sort of subsidiary to Roxxon, which is a very common corporation from Marvel Comics and one which appears in the Netflix shows several times over -- so this could fuel theories of Daredevil and the gang existing in a similar but different reality from the main MCU and Loki pays it a visit?

Inside the Roxxcart store, Loki leads some TVA cops to some sort of suspect who I'm going to guess doesn't deserve to be apprehended and those sort of moments could appeal to the good guy hiding in Loki.

Mobius recruits a little girl, can't tell who she is going to grow up to be but the glass on the wall seems to honor Mephisto, a powerful demon villain who we think might show up in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It could also be Azazel, Nightcrawler from the X-Men's dad, and he's actually fought Mephisto, but, I don't see why there would be this shrine to him, so I'm more on the it's Mephisto train.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw's character is seen here, she looks like some sort of high-ranking TVA official, the kind who can pass judgment on the TVA's behalf and it probably isn't very forgiving. To that, Loki says, "Well I can flip my knives," just like he did in Thor: Ragnarok.

This shot of a woman sitting on a purple planet is very interesting, because it really looks like it could be Natasha just chilling as a planet goes to absolute shit, like what would she care, she's already dead… but it could be Sophie di Martino's Lady Loki. That would make more sense, but it just really looks like Natasha and the purple area gives of Vormir vibes… maybe after her dive she is the new Red Skull and keeper of the Stone? Or maybe Lady Loki is on Vormir while the TVA is mining it, trying to get the Soul Stone without having to sacrifice someone? Either way, Loki is in this same area in a hurry to get somewhere .

Perhaps the most interesting shot of te trailer is Loki in a completely obliterated New York City My initial thought is that this is New York if Loki hadn't lost in The Avengers or if Iron Man hadn't stopped the nuke from hitting the city...but it looks like Stark Tower has already turned into Avengers Tower, which would mean this destruction happened after 2012? And somehow just this one little fire hydrant survived? Is there like a dog-Loki that's going come pee on it? I'm really not sure, but this definitely isn't the main MCU timeline.

We also see Loki posing as DB Cooper, possibly having some fun with the real world mystery of what happened with real world DB Cooper, a bank robbery who jumped out of a plane and disappeared with a lot of money, never to be heard from again. The short hair might mean this is not our main MCU Loki, or maybe he just switches it up half way through the show, but either way he is talking to Thor and Heimdall before the Bifrost pulls him out of the air, so we might see them in the show, as well.

Last thing for this already too long video, Loki is seen paying homage to the 2016 Vote Loki comic issue #1. He has a band of rag tag soldiers at his side, dressed up paying homage to various Asgardian looks like bike handle bars for Loki's horns and one guy has a hammer like Thor's. No telling where they came from but you can bet whoever their talking to said something Loki wasn't ready for them to hear. Maybe he's talking to another Loki that's claiming to be the real Loki, prompting these Loki-ites to swap their allegiance?

What Easter eggs and references did you catch in the first trailer for Loki? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram.