Disney released a slew of first looks and trailers for upcoming Disney+ shows as part of its 2020 Investor Day. Among these was a trailer for Marvel Studios' Loki, which sees Tom Hiddleston return as Thor's adopted brother, the Norse God of Mischief. In its first minute, the trailer provides an answer to the question fans of the MCU have been asking since 2019: what happened to Loki after the events of Avengers: Endgame?
Loki died by Thanos's hand in the opening of Avengers: Infinity War, but he returned in Endgame thanks to the Avengers' Time Heist to retrieve the Infinity Stones. The Avengers traveled back to the Battle of New York to find the Tesseract, where they encountered a past version of Loki. This version of Loki uses the Tesseract to teleport out of custody, but his fate after that was unknown until the trailer released.
Loki's trailer is full of story reveals, and one of the most important is the aftermath of Loki's use of the Tesseract. The trailer opens with a recap of the events of Endgame before showing Loki grabbing the Tesseract and teleporting through space. He then wakes up in the middle of a desert, still wearing his armor from the Battle of New York, implying that this is the direct result of his Tesseract travel.
While struggling to place himself in this new location, Loki encounters three of the desert's inhabitants, all of whom are wearing Mongolian clothing. Add this style of clothing to the desert location and it seems like the Tesseract transported Loki to the Gobi Desert, which covers Southern Mongolia and Northern China. Quite why Loki winds up in the Gobi Desert has yet to be revealed, but it would make sense that his wayward traveling is a reflection of the fact that he's not really in command of the Tesseract's powers. That at least would be a refreshing change to the trope of hugely powerful magical artifacts being used with great prowess by characters with no right to do so in movies and TV shows and actually fits with the MCU's misuse of the Infinity Stones over the years.
The rest of the trailer focuses on Loki's involvement with the Time Variance Authority, or TVA. It appears as if Loki will be detained by the TVA and later continue with his time-jumping hijinks, with potential stops in a post-apocalyptic New York and a Roxxcart supermarket. The trailer also introduces new characters played by Owen Wilson and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, as well as hints at possible appearances by Black Widow and Heimdall. Based on this first look, it's clear that Loki will retain the chaos and mischievousness that made the title character so popular in the first place. It will also hopefully explore Loki's identity and development following his loss in the Battle of New York. Finally, Loki also marks one of the first potential explorations of Marvel's multiverse - Loki may teleport halfway around the world to Mongolia at the start of the series, but stranger things are guaranteed to happen.