Warning: SPOILERS for Loki Episode 2 - "The Variant".
Is Loki's Time Variance Authority based in the future? The TVA is a significant new addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While its full history and scope have not been defined, the time police and their powers alter the balance of power in the MCU. When an awestruck Loki grasped what the TVA is capable of, he branded the organization "the greatest power in the universe" and began plotting a way to overthrow the Time-Keepers, who legend has it created and oversee the TVA.
The TVA's powers and authority are indeed vast and most beings in the Multiverse don't even know they exist, by the TVA's design. According to the TVA's creation myth, a multiversal war eons ago prompted the Time-Keepers to create one Sacred Timeline and the TVA was implemented to enforce it. The TVA's bureaucracy exists for the sole reason of preserving the Sacred Timeline and the organization employs Judges to sentence time criminals, Analysts to track variances, and Minutemen to hunt down variants (like Loki) and reset any branching timelines that have been inadvertently created. The TVA is both futuristic and retro, and with their technology, the time cops can see and enter any point in the Sacred Timeline. But where (and when) exactly is the TVA based?
Loki asked this question himself in episode 2 when he and Agent Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) traveled to Pompeii in 79 A.D. to follow up on the God of Mischief's hunch that the Loki variant (Sophia Di Martino) they are hunting is hiding within apocalypses throughout the Sacred Timeline. Of course, Loki immediately went rogue and launched into a speech where he spoke Latin and told the people they were doomed because Mt. Vesuvius was erupting. Loki then paused and asked, "We are from the future, right? What is the TVA? I mean, it's from the future. It sounds from the future. It's pretty future-y." Naturally, when dealing with an entity like the TVA that specializes in time travel, there's no simple answer and direct to Loki's question.
If the TVA is indeed the agency it purports to be, then it basically exists outside of time and space in the MCU. Since the TVA is based outside our common perception of time and space, then it can simultaneously exist in the past, present, and future. In Marvel Comics, the TVA was created in the distant future, but the creation story told to Loki (and the audience) by Miss Minutes made it seem like the Time-Keepers sorted the warring Multiverse into the Sacred Timeline in the distant past. But the TVA and its vast headquarters appear to exist beyond the Sacred Timeline and outside of the universe.
In Loki episode 2, when the God of Mischief was addressing the very confused people of Pompeii, he and Mobius were obviously from the future. They had time traveled nearly 2,000 years so they were beings from the future. However, the Loki variant who is the star of the Disney+ show is actually a Loki from the past (2012). This Loki didn't time travel to the future when he stole the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame; he merely fled to Mongolia within the same year before the TVA apprehended him. But the question is, after Loki was arrested, did the TVA bring him to the future? The answer to that question is unclear - but the TVA did bring him to their headquarters, which makes the question moot if it exists beyond time and space.
However, if the TVA turns out to be something other than the time enforcement agency it seems to be, then that opens up all kinds of answers and possibilities. For instance, the TVA could be lying, or unaware of a possible truth about the Time-Keepers, in which case the TVA may actually be based within a fixed point in the MCU and the Sacred Timeline. The answers to what the TVA really is and how it will ultimately impact the MCU going forward will hopefully be revealed before Loki ends. But at the very least, every time Loki time travels to any point in time before 2012, then yes, he and the TVA are from the future.
Loki streams new episodes Wednesdays on Disney+.
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June 22, 2021 at 12:10AM
