Loki Season 2 Creates An Avengers: Endgame Plot Hole - Or Does It?
With every new instance of time travel in pop culture comes a new set of rules. "Back to the Future" employs the butterfly effect philosophy, whereas "Lost" maintains that "whatever happened, happened." "Loki" Season 2 implements its own rules after the god of mischief (Tom Hiddleston) returns to the Time Variance Authority at the end of Episode 6 of Season 1 and begins being violently transported to different places in time against his will.
In an effort to rectify this, he and Mobius (Owen Wilson) visit Ouroboros, aka O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), down in Repairs & Advancement. Loki is then ripped through time and speaks to O.B. in the past while Mobius speaks to him in the present, and O.B. suddenly remembers the conversation he had with Loki centuries earlier. While entertaining, this sequence directly conflicts with all the time travel in "Avengers: Endgame," which purports that altering anything in the past would just make another timeline.
Fans are calling this an obvious plothole, but "Loki" writer Eric Martin has pushed back on that. "It shouldn't be possible," he acknowledged in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "OB sees this [Time Slipping], and it's like, 'We don't actually have time. We don't age. This should not be something that can happen.' And so there are different rules in the TVA itself, and we don't even quite understand what that means yet." But if there is one show where rules are made to be broken, it's "Loki."
Loki doesn't adhere to any rules
From his introduction in 2011's "Thor," Loki has lived outside the law and done whatever he wants, making him the perfect character to take on the TVA, a realm outside of time and space. This allows writers to get creative with the fan-favorite series, but it isn't meant to be to the detriment of established lore.
"It's not that I was trying to not work within the rules we've established," Eric Martin continued. "I was just trying to continue to grow them. I really didn't want one scene to be something that broke the paradigm, although it was a scene that came to me and just stuck immediately. So that's very much the scene that we talked about in the room."
Never one to follow the rules, Loki tests the boundaries of time and even romance, falling in love with his own variant, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). Decisions like these are made so that the franchise can thrive — sticking to the same ensemble team-up movies is doing no one any favors. Instead, fans are chomping at the bit to experience something off the beaten path, and "Loki" rises to the occasion.