When it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Endgame stands as the best movie in the franchise to date and for good reason. The movie was a massive, action-filled adventure that saw Marvel’s beloved heroes come together for an epic last-ditch attempt to essentially fix what Thanos broke by undoing the Snap and bringing back those who were lost. It was a thrilling and heartfelt journey that saw some great battles and some deeply emotional scenes that marked the end of a major chapter in storytelling.
A key part of Endgame’s story and the heroes’ plan to save the world and those they love involved time travel: go back to points in the past, borrow the Infinity Stones, un-do things, take the Stones back. It sounds pretty straightforward but it’s also where the logic of the movie actually falls completely apart. While Avengers: Endgame is a good movie, nothing about the time travel in it makes any sense at all. Even six years on, trying to understand the time travel aspect of Endgame only makes things worse and, thanks to the things laid out in Loki, the logic is somehow even shakier.
Avengers: Endgame’s Time Travel Was Always A Mess
If there is one thing that is certain in the MCU, it’s that the time travel in Avengers: Endgame was a mess even as it was happening. We know it does not follow the so-called Back To the Future rules — the idea that if you interfere with the past, you aren’t messing with the events of the future. In Endgame, it’s established that, for the person travelling into the past, that action is already a set part of their “future” which means the “future” is also their past. It’s all part of a set reality and timeline so anything they do will not actually impact the course of their lives. That does seem to hold true. The heroes in the movie use the Quantum Realm to travel to various points in time and when they return, things haven’t actually changed even though some things in the pasts they’ve travelled to have changed.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences which is where things get a little strange. The Ancient One circa 2012 claims that removing an Infinity Stone from its place in times causes a new reality to fracture off so the stones have to be returned to the exact place and moment they’re taken from. That’s all well and good until you realize that 2012 Loki steals the Tesseract so that stone doesn’t make it back, and then there’s also 2014 Thanos who travels via the Quantum Realm and never makes it back to his own time because he dies in 2023 and we know that is a massive change to the overall timeline. And then there’s the whole Steve Rogers of it all. It’s one of those things that sort of kind of maybe makes sense but at the same time doesn’t make any sense at all.
Loki Makes Things Worse
If Endgame’s version of time travel wasn’t confusing enough already, Loki took everything and made it much worse by introducing its own version of it. Season 2 of the series introduces something called time-slipping. Time-slipping is a phenomenon that we see dragging Loki back and forth between past, present, and future and instead of creating a diverging timeline like you’d think something like that would, it actually rewrites the Time Variance Authority’s (TVA) history in real time. So, there’s that.
The key thing with Loki’s time travel is that it directly contradicts what we’re told in Endgame about interacting with the past doesn’t change anything — the Back to The Future Rule of it all. Loki is seen directly interacting with the past and those interactions influencing the future/present. One could argue that it’s not necessarily a contradiction; time travel in Endgame is facilitated through the Quantum Realm while time travel in Loki is done more directly with the TVA and their TemPads that has additional functionality so it is possible that we’re dealing with two different types of time travel and, thus, different impacts. But even with that, Marvel has created an idea of temporal adventuring that has no clear explanation, no clear rules, and gives you a headache if you try to make too much sense of it and with the multiverse only getting bigger, one can only assume things are going to get even more complex.
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