‘Loki’ Head Writer Says ‘Avengers: Endgame’ ‘Laid the Foundation’ for Time Travel in New Disney+ Series

Marvel fans have been patiently waiting for the release of the new Disney+ series, Loki. Premiering on June 9, the six-episode series revolves around its title character, Loki, and is set directly after the events in Avengers: Endgame. 

One of the more intriguing elements of the series is its inclusion of time travel. Time travel has already been explored in earlier Marvel productions such as Endgame, but Loki’s entire premise revolves around a special group called the Time Variance Authority. The TVA is a bureaucracy that’s dedicated to overseeing the timelines of the multiverse and preventing catastrophic changes to history.

The Disney+ series’ head writer, Michael Waldron, recently detailed how Avengers: Endgame helped set up time travel in subsequent Marvel works such as Loki. 

‘Avengers: Endgame’ laid the foundation for time travel in the MCU

Waldron discussed the complex concept of time travel during a recent interview with Collider.

“I guess I can just say we certainly had to pick a path,” Waldon said. “It’s like Endgame laid the foundation for what time travel is in the MCU. It was our job to build that out further and to identify, ‘Alright, how does this work? How does it look? Is time travel magic? Is it scientific? Is it engineered, is it cast?’ Those are all questions we had to ask and define for ourselves.”

According to Waldron, many of those questions will be answered when viewers get to see the TVA interrogate Loki on the show. 

“I think that what’s fun about the TVA is it takes something remarkable, like time travel, and really packages it in a very soulless, sort of bureaucratic way,” Waldron said. “That’s what was exciting to me, as a writer, was to take something so magical and just make it utterly soulless.’”

Time-traveling in ‘Loki’ was harder to pull off than in ‘Avengers: Endgame’

Interestingly, Waldon also noted that it was harder to convey the idea of time travel in Loki than in Endgame because the series isn’t a one-time experience. Fans will have more time to pick apart inconsistencies in the show, which will run for a month and a half. 

“So that was our challenge and also just the fact that it’s one thing to do a time travel movie where you watch it, you walk away, maybe you realize some of it didn’t make sense, but that’s okay, it’s a movie. We got six episodes,” Waldron said. “Folks are going to have a week in between each one of these things to pick them apart. I kept telling our writers, ‘Look guys, they’re going to hold our feet to the fire. We’ve got to make this as airtight as we possibly can, so it can withstand a week of scrutiny every episode.’”

The writing team had to work together to streamline time traveling in ‘Loki’

Primarily debating about how time travel works. Loki’s writers had to work collaboratively to ensure that all of the ideas presented in the show make sense. 

“All over our writer’s room, our white boards were just covered in timelines. And it’s just, ‘No, time travel works this way,’ ‘No, time travel works that way.’ That was the great challenge of our show – because the Time Variance Authority is an organization that literally manages and polices all of time, we had to define what time is to them and what time is in the MCU. How does it move? What is time travel? How does it operate? And so, we had to essentially create an institutional knowledge among the writer’s room.”

Loki premieres on Disney+ on June 9.