Loki, Scarlet Witch & Doctor Strange All Break The Multiverse At Once – Theory Explained

There is a theory floating around the internet that Loki, Scarlet Witch, and Doctor Strange all accidentally created the multiverse together, simultaneously–here’s how. Ever since the events of Loki and WandaVision, plenty of memes have abounded centering on an exasperated Doctor Strange having to restore the multiverse to order after the God of Mischief and the Chaos Magic-fueled witch broke it. After all, he was the orchestrator of the 5-year-long plan to defeat Thanos; why wouldn’t he also be the one to fix this mess, too?

The teaser trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home, however, tossed all those jokes out the window when it revealed Doctor Strange also appears to be at least partially responsible for screwing up time and space and leading to the multiverse. Granted, there’s a larger discussion to be had as to whether Doctor Strange casting a dangerous spell simply because Peter Parker asked him to was in character or not, and it’s entirely possible that Marvel cut the trailer in a misleading way, as it is wont to do. For now, however, it would seem Peter Parker’s inability to stop talking during the complex casting process led to the spell slipping away from Strange’s grasp and going awry, leading to time and space being warped.

That’s led a number of people to posit the theory that it wasn’t the events of any one Marvel TV show or movie, nor any one character that is responsible for breaking things and creating the multiverse. Rather, it’s the combination of Loki (really Sylvie), Scarlet Witch, and Doctor Strange each breaking a piece of it at the exact same time (or at least in close proximity) that created a wrench powerful enough to warp the space-time continuum to the extent of creating an entire multiverse. It makes sense. Though Wanda on her own seemed capable enough of creating that much force, nothing she did on her own seemed to be enough to completely break the universe. Sylvie and Loki certainly did some damage, but it’s not necessarily clear how quickly the separate timelines would have started noticing and crossing over into one another; He Who Remains’ story seemed to suggest it took a while the first time. And it’s hard to fathom how Doctor Strange’s memory-wiping spell, powerful as it is, would also be enough on its own to create a dire scenario where space and time are completely tangled.

The timing lines up, too: The events of WandaVision began about three weeks after the end of Avengers: Endgame when Wanda unleashed her enormous eruption of grief-driven chaos magic to create Westview. Concurrently, the Loki series began at the same time as Endgame‘s third act was unfolding, albeit in a different timeline. The main action of Loki took place over only a few days, but Loki spent some time being trained by the TVA before his first assignment, potentially a few weeks, meaning the events of the Loki finale, when Loki and Sylvie destroy He Who Remains’ carefully-ordered Sacred Timeline, would arguably happen right around the time of Scarlet Witch casting her spell.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is the one MCU project that doesn’t fit neatly into that timeline. Spider-Man: Far From Home takes place roughly eight months after the events of Endgame, and No Way Home after that. That leaves two possibilities: Loki and Sylvie and Scarlet Witch started the destruction, essentially setting up all the multiverse pins for Doctor Strange’s spell to knock down. Or the multiverse was already in chaos without Doctor Strange’s awareness, and it was only his spell going so wrong that alerted him to the problem.

However, it seems awfully unlike Strange to be asleep in the wheel like that. After all, in Thor: Ragnarok he confirms that he monitors every individual threat that could come to Earth, including Loki. It doesn’t make sense that he’d not notice the very concept of time and space breaking apart for months. The most logical explanation is that the actions of Sylvie, Loki, and Scarlet Witch started the multiverse, but Doctor Strange‘s spell hastened the repercussions, blowing the doors wide open and allowing other realities to intrude.

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