5 years on, it's clear Loki used the multiverse better than anything else in the MCU

"When you mess with time, it tends to mess back," Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark warned in Avengers: Endgame.

How right he was – but no one would have guessed Earth's Mightiest Heroes traipsing around 2012-era New York would have spawned a Marvel classic and laid the groundwork for the MCU's best, most satisfying redemption arc.

Enter Loki, a two-season time-travelling adventure that plucked Tom Hiddleston's trickster god from a timeline involving his hasty escape in Endgame and into the pleasingly lo-fi, analog corridors of the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a group of suits and soldiers that oversee the multiverse and are ready to stomp out any branching timelines that cause temporal headaches at a moment's notice.

Marvel has deployed the multiverse liberally in the past half-decade. It's been used for fan service (Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine), expansive sequels (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), and puzzling post-credits scenes (The Marvels), but – in Loki's case – the original is the best.

For All Time

Instead of using the multiverse as narrative crutch, Loki wields it as a tool to untangle the broken psyche of its most complex villain. Quickly, Thor's half-brother has his ego stripped away as he tiptoes towards the most selfless of goals: restoring balance to a tempestuous multiverse. But, first, Loki has one of the MCU's best villains standing in his way.

While much of its power has been robbed thanks to Jonathan Majors' arrest and subsequent firing, it's the scenes with He Who Remains that turns Loki from a brilliant slice of time-and-space action into something that would have lasting effect on the MCU as a whole – and really hammered home Loki's quality.

Where most of Marvel's output has concentrated on CGI-filled spectacle for its finales, Loki's first season settled on something paradoxically far more intimate and grander.

At the end of time, He Who Remains – a Kang variant – sits over a dying universe, only to be confronted by Loki and his own variant, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). After Sylvie stabs him, He Who Remains' iron grip on the universe is lost and the multiverse splinters off into countless unwieldy branches.

The second season spends much of its runtime undoing that multiversal mess, with Kang variant Victor Timely helping set up an Avengers crossover that never was with The Kang Dynasty.

But no matter. The infinite possibilities of the multiverse has helped rework Loki's endgame into the MCU's favor.

Glorious purpose

The Avengers: Endgame Encore re-release bolted on bonus scenes that helped reconfigure Loki and the TVA's role on the path to Avengers: Doomsday.

In an extended ending, Loki interrupts Peggy and Steve's dance to warn them of impending doom (and likely Doom). The TVA, meanwhile, has a front-row seat as over 3,000 timelines perish in the blink of an eye. Suddenly, Doomsday turns from the novelty of Doctor Doom facing the Avengers to an all-consuming apocalyptic event – and wouldn't have got there without Loki training its audience to understand the multiverse, as well as introducing characters it cares about overseeing the whole thing.

Thanks to the first season's montage-style recap of future Loki scenes to help his past self catch up on what could be, the show also neatly sets up Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars for what will be the completion of Marvel's unlikeliest comeback story and its most emotional reunion: a matured Loki meeting face-to-face with a Thor who has lost his home, lost his eye, and his one-time love, but has powered on as a hero and now has his own child to care for. There might not be a dry eye in the house if we get to see Uncle Loki, even for a split-second.

As Marvel seems to be scaling back its Disney Plus output (with the likes of Wonder Man and Daredevil: Born Again being canceled in recent weeks), Loki makes us nostalgic for a different time in the MCU, one where we were guaranteed half-an-hour of stellar character work, a sprinkling of outlandish cameos, and a connective tissue that made it essential viewing for Marvel diehards.

We didn't expect that when Loki made his sudden exit in Avengers: Endgame. But the MCU is all the better for it.

Avengers: Endgame is available to stream now on Disney Plus, ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday on December 18. Avengers: Endgame Encore is in theaters now.

Look ahead with our list of upcoming Marvel movies and check out how to watch the Marvel movies in order ahead of your next re-watch. See you next week as we revisit 2000's X-Men.