Warning: SPOILERS for Loki episode 2.

While Loki's first two episodes have already attempted to establish that everything the Avengers did in Endgame was within the accepted rules of the Time-Keepers and the TVA, that can't quite be true. Firstly, the criminalization of Loki's escape with the Tesseract doesn't work because it was a key part of the time heist's diversion that led to Captain America getting the required Pym Particles to return the Infinity Stones. And after Loki episode 2, the idea that Cap could even go back to fix the timelines needs some more explaining.

Before Loki's release, a lot was said about the show's fidelity to the established rules of time travel in the MCU. Or at least that Loki would respect what had come before while expanding on it further. The introduction of the Time-Keepers and their catch-all rule that whatever they decreed to be "acceptable" was. In hindsight, that was a clever way of closing most of Avengers: Endgame's nagging plot-holes, but as with the introduction of any rule designed to be concrete, leaving no wiggle room can be a recipe for even more scrutiny. That, inevitably, has led to questions on why Loki was immediately labeled a war criminal, despite the fact that the time heist would be impossible without him. Therefore the Avengers achieving their aim in line within the TVA's acceptable limits could never have happened.

Related: The MCU Just Made Loki Way Less Powerful Than Phase 1

More importantly, after the second episode, there's now a key question about how Captain America was able to go back into a timeline that had been branched by the Avengers' removal of the Infinity Stones. By the logic established by Mobius and the TVA, you cannot go back in time before a nexus event to undo it (and thus defeat any rogue Loki Variants without ever having to face them directly) because the timeline becomes unstable at the point of the event. It's a necessary rule to close the loophole that would have robbed Loki of all of its dramatic tension, but it makes Cap's time travel impossible within those same rules.

Young and Old Steve Rogers in Avengers Endgame and Captain America Banner in Falcon & Winter Soldier

As per the rules laid out by the Ancient One in Endgame, the removal of a Stone from any timeline would doom that timeline, which sits in line with the TVA's classification of a nexus event. It is those events that the TVA track and send hunters after to reset offending branches like the one created by Loki after his escape in 2012. Fundamentally, the confirmation that nexus events destabilize the timeline to the extent that they can't be entered again before said event determines that hunters have to clean up rather than prevent. Sadly, that means Captain America going back in time to each point in the Sacred Timeline before the removal of the Stones and the subsequent creation of unauthorized branches wouldn't work.

Even by the TVA's logic that the Time-Keepers were allowing everything the Avengers did in Endgame, the point between the removal of each Infinity Stone and their replacement doesn't come into what is "approved". The TVA do not control what constitutes a nexus event, by the very logic that their existence is determined by the agenda to stop nexus events from happening. So while Captain America was never classified as a temporal criminal in the same way Loki was in the opening episode, Loki has already established that this new MCU time travel science simply doesn't make sense.

Next: Does Loki Want To Overthrow The TVA? Why He Wants To Meet The Time-Keepers

Loki releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.

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