The Arrowverse Proves The Biggest Problem With Loki’s TVA

Warning! SPOILERS for Legends of Tomorrow‘s season 7 mid-season premiere.

Legends of Tomorrow pointed out a major problem with how the Time Variance Authority (TVA) of Loki operated. This is ironic given that the Legends are renowned for being a barely functional ragtag team of misfits, while the TVA was shown to be so efficient that few people knew they existed. This point seems doubly ironic, as it was not the heroic Legends who exposed the TVA’s shortcomings, but their own evil variants.

Legends of Tomorrow season 7 found the time-traveling Legends stranded in the year 1925, after their time-ship, the Waverider, was blown up by another time-ship. The Legends also found themselves pursued by robot assassins, who had assumed the identities of important historical figures whom the Legends had accidentally killed in their efforts to get back to their own time. The mid-season finale revealed that the source of the Legends’ problems was a corrupted copy of the Waverider’s artificial intelligence Gideon, who had also created a team of robotic duplicates to replace the Legends.

Legends of Tomorrow season 7, episode 8, “Paranoid Android,” followed the evil Legends as they attempted to undo all the changes that the Legends had made to the timeline in their efforts to locate Dr. Gwyn Davies, the inventor of the first time machine. These included reducing the number of fatalities caused by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986 and saving the life of a gangster’s girlfriend in 1925. In the middle of these missions, the robotic duplicate of Captain Sara Lance began to question everything the evil Gideon had told them about the real Legends, including how they were evil robots programmed by a madman to destroy the timeline. While the Legends’ actions were chaotic, Legends of Tomorrow‘s robotic White Canary couldn’t reconcile their heroic accomplishments with the evil Gideon’s story. This, indirectly, showed the main problem with the Time Variance Authority of Loki.

The TVA of Loki was charged with maintaining the Sacred Timeline, but there was no clear morality to their actions apart from a vague promise that the Time-Keepers who created the TVA were working towards eventually building a utopian society at some point in the far future. Even ignoring that the Time-Keepers were a front for He Who Remains, the organization was built upon effectively enslaving multiple variants of people from across the multiverse and killing off anyone who didn’t fit the grand plan who caused trouble. This was what prompted multiple Loki variants in Marvel’s Loki to fight the TVA, as it was determined by He Who Remains that no version of Loki should have any purpose beyond base villainy.

The Sara Lance robot rallied against this same idea of predestination, trying to turn the rest of the evil Legends of Tomorrow against Evil Gideon by pointing out how they had been manipulated into killing innocent people because of some arbitrary ideal of what the proper timeline should be. She begged her fellow robots to join her in thinking for themselves and emulating the real Legends, saying that they accomplished great, heroic things by “following their hearts, not their CPUs.” While the robot Sara Lance was reprogrammed at the end of the episode, her point about why a group that protects history cannot afford to be immoral exposed the failings of the TVA in Loki.

About The Author

Matt Morrison
(1836 Articles Published)

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Matt Morrison has been writing about comics since before the word
“blogging” was coined. He got his start writing for the
legendary DC Comics digital fanzine Fanzing,
before receiving his own column, The Mount. Since then he has gone on
to write for over a dozen websites, including 411
Mania, Comics
Nexus and The Cult of Nobody. He holds both an MS in Information
Science from the University of North Texas and a BFA from the
University of Texas at Arlington. Known as a font of comic book
history trivia, he has delivered lectures on the history of American
Comic Books, Japanese Manga, Doctor Who, and Cosplay at over a dozen conventions
and served as an Expert In-Residence for a course on Graphic Novels
for Librarians at the University of North Texas. In addition to his
work for Screen Rant, Matt is currently the Editor In Chief of
Kabooooom.com and writes reviews for No
Flying, No Tights – a graphic literature and anime review site
aimed at teachers and librarians. He also maintains a personal blog –
My Geeky Geeky Ways –
which hosts his extensive episode guide for the television series
making up The Arrowverse as well as his
comedic Let’s Play videos. What little spare time he has is
devoted towards acting, role-playing, movie-riffing and sarcasm. You
can follow his adventures on Twitter, @GeekyGeekyWays.

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