With Season 2 of Loki coming to Disney+, what better time to refresh ourselves on the long, complicated, and time-divergent story of Marvel's God of Mischief played by Tom Hiddleston? Loki went from a misunderstood trickster to a vengeful villain, and now he's poised to become... the last hope for the entire multiverse against Kang the Conqueror? Only someone as mischievious as Loki could pull off that kind of character arc.
Let's recap everything Loki by going through his entire MCU timeline in chronological order (or at least as much as that's possible with a character like Loki).
Thor (2011)
Loki’s story begins with abandonment which will surely not become a theme to come. Left to die by his father Laufey, ruler of the Frost Giants in Jotunheim, Loki is adopted by Odin, father of Thor and his other child Hela who won’t be mentioned for a long time for reasons. Loki and Thor are raised as brothers, though Loki grows to resent Thor for being quite literally, the golden child. Skilled in magic instead of brawn like Thor, Loki schemes as the God of Mischief to steal Thor’s future seat on the throne of Asgard for himself.
On the day of Thor’s coronation, Loki provokes his hot-headed brother into launching a counter-attack on the Frost Giants in direct defiance of Odin’s wishes. While the Asgardians battle, Loki discovers he is 1) adopted and 2) actually a Frost Giant. Loki’s plan works though, and Odin banishes Thor, leaving Loki to confront Odin about the revelation. Soon, Odin falls into the OdinSleep, and Queen Frigga has no choice but to crown her son Loki and name him ruler of Asgard.
But it wasn’t meant to last. Soon enough, Loki loses in battle to a once-again-worthy Thor, who went on his own journey of learning not to be an a-hole. Loki took the L on this one, but as he sees it: tomorrow is another day to begin anew.
The Avengers (2012)
Undeterred, Loki moves forward to become the villain who unites the Avengers. He makes new allies with Thanos and his Chitauri army. With the powerful scepter gifted to him by his new best bro, Loki lays siege to Earth and steals the Tesseract.
Loki has moved on from Asgard and at this point he’s about ruling Midgard, aka Earth. He allows the Avengers to capture him and breaks them apart from the inside. With Earth’s mightiest heroes unfocused, Loki opens a portal above New York City and launches a full-scale invasion of Earth, which only serves to inspire the Avengers to assemble and defeat his forces.
This is where time-travel hijinks create a branch timeline, but for now, let’s say Loki is headed for a cell and bookmark this spot for later.
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
Loki’s a bad guy, but he’s not like a bad guy. Loki does have softness and humanity to him. It’s the same soft spot many raging jerks have: his mother. Frigga was the one who taught Loki magic and showed him a mother’s love in his difficult childhood. So of course, she is killed due to Malekith and the Dark Elves in the attack on Asgard. Loki unwittingly contributed to her death by giving directions to Kurse, one of Malekith’s lieutenants, which he comes to realize and deeply regret.
Loki and Thor decide to team up for revenge and stop Malekith from plunging the universe into the darkness of the Aether, and it really seems like Loki has made a change for the better! He dies a hero's death for the betterment of everyo- oh actually, he faked his death and decided to take over Asgard in disguise as Odin. Lokkkiiiiii!
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
And Loki’s plan, actually works? For a while, Loki does rule Asgard, seemingly unchecked, and even gets into the theatrical arts with Matt Damon and a different Hemsworth. That is, until Thor sees right through him and unmasks the so-called Odin, King of Asgard. They join up, meet with Doctor Strange who doesn’t really seem to like Loki, and finally find the real Odin right before he passes away and reveals he has another child, Hela, who is very powerful and evil, is about to be freed, and she is really angry. Hela makes quick work of her little brothers, bats them away to parts unknown, and takes over Asgard with ease.
They wind up on Sakaar, where Loki lands some time before Thor and embeds himself into the upper rungs of society before Thor fights Loki’s old buddy from before, the Hulk. Despite everything that happened between them, Thor and Loki share a moment of brotherly bonding, with Thor finally seeing his brother for who he truly is, and Loki finally getting a taste of his own back-stabbing medicine.
Eventually the Revengers take the fight to Hela, and Loki chooses to fight alongside his brother to save their people. Maybe Loki can be trusted! Oh wait, no nevermind. Unable to resist his lust for power, he pockets the Tesseract on his way to help save the day.
Loki summons Surtur to defeat Hela, but Asgard is doomed. He hops aboard a barge with the Asgardian survivors and actually, this time, for real, decides to stay with Thor and his adopted people and help them start a new Asgard. It’s actually really sweet. And then Thanos ruins everything.
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Yep, Thanos is still at his Thanos-stuff at this point, gathering the Infinity Stones, wiping out life, and he and the Black Order followed Loki because… he just had to steal the Tesseract, which is of course an Infinity Stone. Thanos stops the ship dead, slays half the few Asgardians left, and swipes the Stone from Loki. It’s at this moment that Loki decides to commit to nobility and tries to protect Thor, Asgard, and everyone by attempting to kill Thanos, but his life is snuffed out. He dies at the Mad Titans hand and Thor is left to weep over his body and try to carry on without his tempestuous little brother. And that is it. Loki is dead.
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Just kidding. Thanos said “no more resurrections” but he didn’t say anything about split timelines and spin-off TV shows! Let’s go back to 2012.
As you may remember, the new “Loki” timeline begins mid time-heist in Avengers: Endgame when the team has gone back to the end of the original Avengers movie. It’s the moment when the original core Avengers took Loki into custody and Ant-Man and company from the Endgame timeline gave past Tony Stark a major health emergency which, combined with the chaos of an angry Hulk, gave Loki the opportunity to grab the tesseract and slip away somewhere in time.
This is a kind reminder that the 2012-era Loki of this show is the only Loki of this general vicinity that exists anymore: the Infinity War Loki had already perished standing up to Thanos and sacrificing his life for Thor; the character-developed good brother kinda-good-guy Loki we got to know and respect is no more and this Loki has his own journey of self-realization to tackle via this series, and that’s putting the crux of this whole thing pretty lightly!
Loki, Season 1 (2021)
Loki turns up in the Gobi desert and immediately threatens the locals villain-era style, before getting labeled a “Variant” and arrested by the Time Variance Authority. He’s hit, collared, and stripped naked before he’s processed in a fashion that’s both very mundane and completely bizarre. That’s the TVA for you: highly bureaucratic masters of time. Miss Minutes explains the Time Keepers brought peace to the entirety of existence eons ago by ordering the multiverse into the Sacred Timeline and the TVA exists to protect the true flow of time for all beings by stopping “variants” who veered off the normal timeline, who have the potential to create Nexus events, which could cause the multiverse to branch off into madness (sound familiar?) or cause a multiversal war. The TVA has to “prune” variants that could cause potential branching timelines and reset the timeline before too much damage is caused.
TVA Analyst Mobius M. Mobius pulls Loki from his sure-to-be-pruned fate to help him with something, which his boss Ravonna Renslayer doesn’t exactly love. Mobius helps Loki realize his goals of ruling were shortsighted and that he maaaybe has no free will and his fate is written, that his only “glorious purpose” that he’s always going on about is to lose and help others realize their own greatness.
Loki handles this poorly, runs around, watches the Infinity saga, and realizes maybe Mobius was right. He agrees to change his path and help Mobius with his case: stop whoever is knocking off TVA Minutemen teams across time and stealing their reset devices. Because that person is a Loki variant.
Loki sees his own patterns by reading about other Lokis: the killer Loki variant is jumping through time and hiding in naturally-occuring, zero percent survivability apocalypses. The Loki variant’s alterations to the timeline get naturally hidden by the inevitability of doom wiping out the location in the timeline. Meanwhile, Loki and Mobius bond over the mystery of fate and existence, the nature of morality, the source of meaning, the end of all things forever, and jetskis.
Chasing a lead to an Alabama superstore bound for doomsday in 2050, the Loki variant they’re looking for finds our Loki and uses magic to speak to him through TVA Hunter B-15 and various others in the store before revealing herself and using all the stolen TVA timeline charges to attack the Sacred Timeline. Loki follows her through a Tempad portal to the TVA and offers a fellow-Loki with lots of potential a team up before they quickly escape Renslayer by portaling to another doomed location, Lamentis 1.
They team up to get away before the destruction and the other Loki reveals she hates being called Loki, she’s to be called Sylvie (which helps us a lot in explaining things). They get aboard the only escape vessel there is, a special train for the wealthy while the poor get left to die in the apocalypse. They bond with each other, charm the other passengers, get thrown off the train, get left to die, see if they can change the fate of everyone who died, fail, go into Sylvie’s tragic and lonely past, maybe start to like each other, and get saved at the last second by the TVA.
Loki reveals to Mobius what he learned from Sylvie: the TVA agents are variants of regular people taken from their lives and put to work. Mobius steals Rennslayer’s device to confirm Loki was telling the truth and it rattles him more than a little, along with Hunter B-15 who Sylvie showed a bit of her former life when she was in her head. However, Renslayer discovers what Mobius did and prunes him right in front of Loki before taking Sylvie and Loki to the Time Keepers. The Loki duo make quick work of slaying the Time Keepers, revealing the immortal gods of time are essentially Chuck E Cheese animatronics. In the wake, Renslayer gets the drop and prunes Loki and he wakes up in a strange netherworld, surrounded by Loki variants.
He’s been sent to the place where all the pruned beings and matter go so they can be consumed by Alioth, a beastly reality devourer. Desperate to help, Sylvie prunes herself, allowing her to meet up with Mobius. Most of the Lokis, predictably, fight each other, while our Loki commits himself to standing behind Sylvie in her goal of getting to whomever is behind this while making good with Mobius who goes back to break apart the TVA. Sylvie and Loki take down Alioth and move beyond it, beyond the end of time, to the true string-puller of this whole thing, all of it, the whole MCU: He Who Remains, a variant of Kang the Conqueror.
HWR has gone a little bit loopy, what with his burden of knowing everything that has happened and ever will happen for all time and the knowledge that the fate of everything in all universes hangs in the balance between warring, conquering, evil variants of himself. He also shoulders the pretty hefty job of managing the flow of time and protecting this timeline via the TVA; single handedly holding cosmic harmony together for all eternity really wears a guy out.
He offers Sylvie and Loki a choice: stifling order or cataclysmic chaos. He gives them the power of choosing what happens next for the entirety of the multiverse. Kill him and accept free-will but also face the might of infinite megalomaniacal genius conquerors, or Loki and Sylvie take over his role and run the TVA how they want and control everything, because frankly, he’s so, so tired. Sylvie’s all in for Plan Murder and Loki wants to take a step back, think, and stop the destruction of everything that exists in the universe and all he holds dear, namely her. What a dork! That’s what Sylvie thinks anyway and she gets her way. HWR is skewered by Sylvie, the timeline branches, the multiverse descends into chaos, and Loki, who held it all in his hands, is stranded in an unfamiliar timeline where Kang is indeed the shaper of all. Loki ends up back at the TVA, and Mobius and Hunter B-15 are there as well but with no memory of Loki or what has occurred. The season ends with Loki looking up in terror at a massive statue of Kang the Conqueror erected in the heart of the TVA.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
In the post-credit stinger to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is set sometime in the past, Loki and Mobius are watching a demonstration by Victor Timely, a Kang variant. Loki recognizes Timely as a threat and seems to be teaching Mobius what they’re facing as they try to stop an inevitable multiversal war. In the comics, Timely is a Kang variant who founds a town in Wisconsin in 1901, so it seems likely this is what is being represented. And without spoiling, Timely is an extremely central Kang variant to the entire operation who Loki probably very much wants to stop.
This is a moment from Season 2 of Loki. Going into the new season, we’re wondering, can Loki reconnect with the Mobius from Season 1, and Sylvie for that matter? Has this version of Loki transcended the one that died in Infinity War? When are we getting a jetski payoff? We’ll find out quite soon when Loki Season 2 premieres!
