The MCU is no stranger to time travel. It’s woven within the fabric of many of its stories, with Avengers: Endgame using it to change the course of Marvel.
Disney+ Loki series is the latest film to take on time travel, but not in the way you think. If you recall, Loki (played by Tom Hiddleson) debuted in the first Avengers film. In Endgame, Loki died, but thanks to the film’s time travel storyline, he is now alive and in possession of the Tesseract which he used to escape before being thrown in Asgardian prison. The show follows THAT Loki and his interactions with the Time Variance Authority (TVA) – an organization that polices time.
Michael Waldron, head writer on the show, created his own rules, which expand on the time travel ideas that Marvel has already set in place. He spoke to Collider as he tried to explain the organization (in the least confusing way possible) and what fans can expect to see on the show.“I think that what’s fun about the TVA is it takes something remarkable, like time travel, and really packages it in a very soulless, sort of bureaucratic way.” He says. That’s what was exciting to me, as a writer, was to take something so magical and just make it utterly soulless.’”
General moviegoers who love the MCU but don’t read the comics may be unfamiliar with the TVA. They are an authority we’ll be seeing a lot in the future. This is how he breaks the organization down and how it will impact Loki’s life going forward. The Time Variance Authority is an organization that literally manages and polices all of time, we had to define what time is to them and what time is in the MCU. How does it move? What is time travel? How does it operate? And so, we had to essentially create an institutional knowledge among the writer’s room. A foundation of what constitutes a broken time law and what doesn’t — which is about Loki breaking a time law — and then you have to move all that stuff as far to the background as humanly possible because you don’t want the audience focusing on the rules of time travel during your show.”
That is a lot information! Well, you can get any answers you’re looking for June 9, 2021 when Loki premieres on Disney+
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