Loki Expands the Marvel Universe on Disney+

A convenient escape from Thor leads to a whole new adventure for a mysterious foe

As Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe unfolds, the Disney+ streaming service has become something of a hub, housing all the previous MCU films while hosting new Marvel offerings.

This week brings Marvel’s third Phase 4 series, Loki, following WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

When we last saw Loki (Tom Hiddleston) in Avengers: Endgame, the trickster god was the prisoner of adoptive brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) when, by sheer fluke, the Tesseract landed at his feet, allowing him to teleport off and make an escape.

While Loki’s fate was never resolved in the movie, Loki begins immediately following the moment of his teleportation, which apparently landed him in a Mongolian desert.

What happens next is somewhat murky, but by all indications it seems that being in possession of the Tesseract—which can be used to travel through time and space—has allowed Loki to insert himself into various points in history, resulting in the creation of a divergent timeline under the devious control of the rogue God of Mischief.

This places Loki in the crosshairs of the Time Variance Authority, a universe-spanning organization tasked with keeping the timeline secure, and Loki ultimately winds up in TVA custody under the watchful eye of Agent Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson).

As Hiddleston explained in a recent interview, the Loki title sequence, in which the fonts of the four letters continually change, offers a big clue about the series.

“Loki is the quintessential shapeshifter. His mercurial nature is that you don’t know whether, across the MCU, he’s a hero or a villain or an antihero. You don’t know whether you can trust him,” said Hiddleston. “Who is this character who can wear so many masks, and changes shape, and seems to change his external feeling on a sixpence?”

Loki debuts Wednesday, June 9th on Disney+