Warning: SPOILERS for Loki episode 5.

With a tongue-in-cheek gag in TVA mascot Miss Minutes, Marvel decided to level with them and it that they don’t understand it either.

Up until Avengers: Endgame, time in the MCU was assumed to be a straight line. With Ant-Man’s discovery of time travel, things started to get a bit more complicated and required a past version of The Ancient One to explain the concept of timelines to Smart Hulk. With the introduction of the Time Keepers, the Time Variance Authority, and the Sacred Timeline, Loki has had to provide brief expositional seminars to explain time, nexus events, and variants.

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While the Loki of the show starts his journey in 2012 at the battle of New York, a large portion of Loki takes place within the TVA, a place that sits outside of time. When Loki episode 5 introduces nexus events, and time loops.

An image of all the Loki Variants looking down a hole with President Loki

This isn’t the first time that Marvel has become confused by its own timeline, particularly with regard to the Asgardians. In Thor tells a story of Loki turning into a snake to trick Thor and stab him, he closes by saying “we were eight at the time.” As the two would never have been that close in age, it’s clear that Marvel briefly forgot the extreme Asgardian age gap.

Marvel has often made it difficult to follow the exact chronological timeline of the MCU. While the majority of the films have released in the same year that they are intended to take place, several appear out of order. Doctor Strange and The Multiverse of Madness, these problems will presumably either be fixed or made significantly worse.

Loki releases new episodes Wednesdays on Disney+.

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