Introduction
Time travel in Avengers: Endgame looks promising — it’s incredibly tangled. The gist of it: Screenwriters Steven McFeely and Christopher Markus devised a closed time-travel system that allows the Avengers to manipulate their own events without running into Catch 22s. Some time travel movies spend their entire running time expanding on and then revising mysteries. Endgame isn’t in the mood for that nonsense. It’s a recurring theme in the film: we’re not doing the Back to the Future sequels.
If the movie left you perplexed, here are the rules of Avengers: Endgame time travel and why they cooperate to bring anything within reach without sacrificing the values.
Reason for Loki not fixing
When Captain America effectively returned those six stones to where they came from, reestablishing concordance and equilibrium to the world, any other expanding truth corrupted by the evacuation of the Infinity Stones – as forewarned by the Ancient One – would have at long last been fixed. In any case, this isn’t how Loki from that time period escaped with its Tesseract, which – unbeknownst to all present – housed the Space Stone in 2012. When Loki grabbed the Tesseract from the floor of Stark Tower’s anteroom in 2012, he quickly vanished through an entrance (sadly). Regardless of whether 2019 Cap realized he needed to go back to 2012 to locate Loki and the Space Stone – which wasn’t on his time travel itinerary – the chances of finding the joke artist for a lone Avenger afloat in time are slim to none. This means that the ‘Loki course of events cannot be altered – at least not by Captain America.
Is Loki Alive?
Given the MCU’s time-travel concept, this is particularly muddled. It all depends on how Captain America and the rest of the team work out in the end. It’s possible Cap returned on time, lived his life on a different schedule, and then warped back as an elderly individual, taking with him an undamaged safeguard, to the fundamental truth. Either that, or he went back in time and lived his life in secret, just like the younger version of himself we saw in the MCU.
The problem is that the creative team can’t agree on how things should work. The Russo Brothers, who directed the film, believe in the main theory, which appears to be plausible considering how quantum time travel has been demonstrated up to this point. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, on the other hand, disagree, stating in a meeting with Fandango that they believe Cap lived his life in close proximity to his younger self.
If the key hypothesis is right, Loki is alive, but he’s on a different timeline, which would be perfect for the MCU’s planned Loki TV side project. If it’s set in a different timeline, he can do anything he wants there without the movies taking into account his actions. If the following theory is right, the main MCU may have another living Loki who hasn’t experienced any of the character growth from the second and third Thor films, which saw his character reclaimed and accommodated with Thor.
