The universe-altering shenanigans of the first season of Loki are still creating shockwaves months after their reveals. With the Multiverse in full bloom and entities like the Time Variance Authority putting the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe in a new light, fans have eagerly explored the implications for earlier movies. In particular, the God of Mischief's escape from capture during Avengers: Endgame -- so vital to the events of Loki -- has piqued the interest of MCU fans, and a recent post on Reddit has coined an interesting new theory that helps cover one of the scene’s shakier points of logic.
As explained in Loki, the TVA’s exists to maintain a single “sacred” timeline in which events unfold in a very specified order. When branches are created -- as Loki did when he grabbed the tesseract and vanished in Endgame -- the TVA “prunes” the timeline and abducts the “variant” who created it. But if everything in the prime MCU takes place as intended -- including the time heist that resulted in Loki’s escape -- Loki's classification as a variant doesn't make sense.
A number of plausible answers exist, the simplest being that his escape was the only part of the sacred timeline that went wrong. But the Reddit theory paints things in far more elegant terms. It states that the time heist itself was necessary simply because, without it, there would be no TVA. The time police -- and He Who Remains, whom they ultimately serve -- wouldn’t be able to do their jobs without it.
Tony Stark invents time travel during the events of Endgame, succeeding while the team’s other “big brain” Bruce Banner struggles to get the details right. Considering that Tony dies shortly thereafter while undoing the Snap and that the timeline is the only one in 14 million where that happens, that suggests that time travel is exceedingly difficult. Even a figure like He Who Remains might be confounded by it, and unless Tony is driven by extreme circumstances to push his scientific genius to the limit, it won’t happen.
A number of quiet facts actually support this conclusion. For example, the one-in-14-million timeline is created when Doctor Strange stops the conflict with Thanos on Titan and hands over the Mind Stone just before Thanos kills Tony. It’s not a hard leap to assume that Tony gets killed during most or all of Strange’s alternate timelines, preventing the creation of time travel and leaving the Snap in place forever. Acting at that moment -- surrendering the Stone in exchange for sparing Tony’s life -- was the only possible way to create time travel and undo the Snap.
It also works quite well as an explanation for the TVA’s technology. They exist in a temporal null space, able to visit any spot in the timeline required for their strange duties. Since they pull personnel from variant timelines, they likely do the same with technology. That means He Who Remains -- and Kang by extension -- didn’t invent the tech they used so much as appropriated it once the sacred timeline produced it. The convoluted events of Endgame become even more important since they might be the only point in all of history where the TVA can acquire the technology necessary to do their job.
On a metal level, this theory serves to inoculate the events of the MCU's Phases 1-3 from the likes of Kang, who can certainly cause trouble in enough other ways. But if time travel doesn't exist without the events of Endgame, then everything leading up to it needs to be preserved, lest the all-important device fall out of Kang’s hands forever. In the process, it neatly closes a plot hole that certainly required some explanation to set straight. Whether it proves canonical or not is almost irrelevant at this point, as it's a clever way to solve a lingering narrative issue, as well as bind an already complex timeline together.
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