Why The Avengers Didn’t Care That Loki Stole The Tesseract In Endgame

WARNING: The following contains SPOILERS for Loki  episode 1, “Glorious Purpose.”

The first episode of Loki reveals exactly what happened to the God of Mischief after he disappeared in Avengers: Endgame, but it still doesn’t explain why his theft of the Tesseract was overlooked. By the mythology established both by The Ancient One and reiterated by the TVA in Disney+’s new show, Loki’s actions created a timeline branch that required eradication to stop serious temporal repercussions.

Strangely, in Endgame, Loki’s actions are counted simply as an unfortunate delay in the Avengers’ plan to steal the Infinity Stones (before putting them back into place, per the Ancient One’s warning). They forced Captain America and Tony Stark to head back to the 1970s to steal the Tesseract and more Pym Particles, allowing for Tony to be reunited and reconciled with his father. In other words, Loki’s escape is a key part of the plot, but it never made sense that the Avengers were not concerned by it. The Ancient One had warned about how disastrous not restoring the Stones to their place in the timeline would be, but as soon as Loki disappears, he is all-but-forgotten.

The correct response to Loki’s escape during the Avengers Endgame time heist would have been blind panic. Not only was he creating a deviation in the timeline by stopping Thor from returning the Tesseract to Asgard, but he was wielding an artifact capable of making him impossible to find. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t chase him – the Tesseract was a skeleton key to anywhere Loki could imagine. In effect, the Avengers underestimated Loki, by assuming his escape would cause no issues to the timeline through blind ignorance. It was never their fault, though, because the rules the Ancient One told Bruce Banner didn’t account for what Loki did and didn’t do. They were flying blind from the start and there was no urgency to go back and fix the mistake.

Crucially, the reason for the ignorance to Loki creating a branch is that the Ancient One’s explanation was not thorough enough. She claimed that the Stones themselves controlled the flow of time and removing them would doom the timeline, which proved to be incorrect. The TVA, meanwhile, changed the way MCU multiverse branch theory was explained, removing the Infinity Stones from the equation entirely. But the Ancient One clearly wasn’t aware of the branch issue created by a deviation of will in a single timeline, because Loki’s movement through space but not time in Endgame would never have been a red flag to the Avengers. She warned that removing any single Stone from the timeline would cause a branch and some shapeless doom would arise, but Loki never time traveled, he simply went somewhere else on Earth. Even knowing the issues of needing to return the Stones, as Banner clearly communicated was vital when he returned to the present, there was no pressing need to go back to 2012 to find Loki and clean up the mess because there was no warning that the mess was even dangerous.

In effect, the Avengers were following the rules too closely and assumed that Loki wasn’t their problem anymore. By their known definition of branch theory, he did nothing wrong, other than create new events from the point he stole the Tesseract for the Avengers in that timeline to deal with. The Tesseract never left the timeline, ergo there was no threat to the fundamental flow of time, just where it went. The whole idea of a warring Multiverse simply never entered consideration. It’s the exact same loophole that allowed Captain America to return to the 1940s to live his happy ending with Peggy Carter – he didn’t break the Ancient One’s rules about creating doomed branches, he interpreted them exactly as she laid them out. And the fact that Lokiconfirmed that the TVA never had any issue with Cap going back to live his life again proved that different branches weren’t inherently an issue proved him correct. It just didn’t prove him correct the way he thought.

Loki releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.

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Simon Gallagher
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Simon is a veteran editor who has been writing online since 2010 – long before anyone wanted to read his work. He loves Clueless. Like, a lot.

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