Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Loki season 2
Summary
- Loki season 2 reveals that Captain America's decision to stay in the past and marry Peggy Carter didn't actually create a deviation from the Sacred Timeline.
- Loki's Temporal Loom changes everything we assumed about the Sacred Timeline.
- This revelation has implications for the future of the MCU, as it explains how other Marvel movie timelines can coexist with the MCU without the TVA getting involved.
Marvel's significant Endgame change in the period since the Avengers finally took down Josh Brolin's Thanos, continuing the Infinity Saga's over-riding importance to the MCU. The implications of that reveal are not only major for Endgame, but also for the future of the MCU beyond Avengers: Secret Wars.
When Loki season 1 released in 2021, the show opened a significant plot hole that retrospectively changed Captain America's otherwise perfect Endgame ending. The ending saw Chris Evans' Captain America skip out of the main MCU timeline to return to the 1940s and get his happily after with Peggy Carter after returning the Infinity Stones to their correct places. While avoiding the temporal disaster the Ancient One predicted would otherwise happen, Cap's decision created a new multiverse branch, that Loki's introduction of the TVA should have made problematic. In short, Captain America's happy ending branch should have been pruned as a violation of the Sacred Timeline, and only an implied loophole (that He Who Remained allowed it for some reason as an exception) has been the only justification. Now, Loki season 2 has made that suggestion MCU canon in a genius way.
Loki Season 2 Reveals The Hidden Truth Of The Sacred Timeline
The first episode of Loki season 2 introduces the Temporal Loom, a huge invention of the TVA created to allow Jonathan Majors' He Who Remains to control the flow of time, as he revealed he was doing in season 1. Loki's lore previously revealed that He Who Remains managed to harness the power of Alioth to end the Multiversal War by defeating his own rogue variants and destroying their timelines, before consolidating the Sacred Timeline. What wasn't quite as clear was how He Who Remains kept control of the flow of time without using the Infinity Stones (which the Ancient One claimed controlled the flow of time in Avengers: Endgame). But Loki season 2 reveals that as well as using the TVA to prune rogue branches, He Who Remains used the Temporal Loom to form the Sacred Timeline in the first place.
Crucially, the other thing the Temporal Loom reveals is that the way everyone has thought about the Sacred Timeline is actually a lie. Simplified images of the timeline in Loki season 1 presented a single line, with individual branches breaking off from it, but season 2 reveals that the Sacred Timeline is actually a bundle of separate timelines bound together to form a rope, rather than a single thread. That seismic change means that as well as the main MCU timeline (either 616 or 199999 depending on who you believe), multiple other "universes" are actually part of the Sacred Timeline.
Why Loki's Timeline Revelation Fixes Endgame's Plot Hole
Fundamentally, Loki season 2 reveals that the Temporal Loom was always designed to tie branches together into one acceptable Sacred Timeline, so branches weren't all outlawed, it was simply that too many of them would destroy the order of the Sacred Timeline. As OB says:
"The Temporal Loom is the heart of the TVA. It's where raw time is refined into physical timeline. And it's not constructed to weave together so many new branches, so it's overloading."
In other words, He Who Remains allowed the existence of different universes and branches, as long as they could be tied together in a linear rope, existing parallel to one another, and not causing chaos. As the image of the unstable Sacred Timeline from the TVA's own monitors shows in Loki season 2's premiere, the Temporal Loom has a built-in threshold for branches, and it's only after that point that things start to really go wrong:
That is huge for Captain America and Avengers: Endgame, because it suggests that the branch that Cap created by returning to the 1940s on Earth-616 was just one of the multiple threads within the unified Sacred Timeline. It didn't create a deviation from He Who Remains' plan, because it was tied into the Sacred Timeline by the Temporal Loom, which offers the belated explanation behind why the TVA didn't appear to prune Chris Evans' veteran Avenger.
That also means that Captain America was able to live his life happily without looking over his shoulder for TVA hunters as Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie was forced to. While he may have had to hide his existence from those in the timeline he knew he was "killed" when he went into the ice, Captain America's true happy ending in which he married Peggy Carter was possible, after he'd been robbed of it by Captain America: The First Avenger's ending.
What Loki's Sacred Timeline Reveal Means For The MCU's Future
Even more intriguingly for the MCU away from Avengers: Endgame specifically, the new explanation of the Sacred Timeline also explains why the Amazing Spider-Man, Raimi's Spider-Man, Sony's Spider-Verses, Fox's Marvel Universe (which is confirmed to come into the MCU with Deadpool 3) and basically every other Marvel movie timeline "annexed" to the MCU were able to coexist with the MCU without the TVA turning up to prune them, despite their confirmed links to the MCU.
For the MCU's future movies, that also means that any future Multiversal War that ends with the Sacred Timeline being restored could still include the same alternate universes as threads within the larger timeline system. That would mean Deadpool could still exist outside of the main timeline, if Marvel Studios choose to isolate him, and opens up further possibilities with the Multiverse, without there needing to be a catch-all solution that makes other timelines impossible. Quite how that will play out will obviously be revealed in the Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars, but the idea that that would have to be a full reset to unify all timelines perhaps isn't quite true.
New episodes of Loki season 2 release every Thursday on Disney+
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