What is a Loki "variant?"
Everyone knows that Loki was killed by Thanos at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, but what the new TV series Loki presupposes is…maybe that’s just one “variant” of Loki!
A new, full trailer for the Disney+/Marvel series Loki just dropped (watch above!), and in it, we finally learn the full premise of the new show. Turns out, after Loki grabbed the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, he was picked up by the Temporal Variance Authority, a fancy time-travel police force that exists inside the Marvel multiverse. Owen Wilson’s character, Mobius, who works for the TVA, is asked by another TVA person (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) if he believes in this “Loki variant.” At another point in the trailer, we see Loki wearing a jumpsuit with the word “Variant” on the back.
So what’s up with that? Is this the same Loki we met in the other Marvel movies? Short answer: Nope!
Loki “Variant” explained
This version of Loki is clearly an alternate version of the Loki we met after the first Avengers (2012). This Loki never reunited with Thor in Thor: Ragnarok, and never briefly joined forces with Thor in the fight against Thanos. In short, we’re dealing with a Loki from an alternate universe.
In Endgame, Captain America was supposed to “trim the branches” of all the various alternate timelines, by returning the infinity stones to their “correct” locations. But, now, it seems that it’s possible that maybe Cap didn’t fix all the branching timelines. Instead, Mobius has recruited Loki to help out with some of the tangled mess of different timelines. Does that Loki actually trim some of those branches? Will he meet Cap or any of the other Avengers in the show? Time (and chaos) will tell!
