Loki on Disney+: Everything We Know About The Time Traveling MCU Show

Did you leave the theater after Avengers: Endgame with a whole bunch of lingering questions about your favorite characters? If so, don't worry. You are far, far, far from alone. And you also just might be in luck because several of the upcoming Disney+ MCU shows are angling to tackle some of those questions once and for all.

Take Loki, for example, who is about to get his own show about--well, himself, first an foremost, and the chaos one can cause with an Infinity Stone at his disposal.

Thanks to a first-look trailer which premiered during Disney's four-hour-long investors day teleconference, we have a pretty decent idea of what we can expect from Loki in Loki (boy, this is going to get confusing, isn't it?) as well as some of the other characters we can expect to see cropping up through all the universal globetrotting.

So, with that in mind, let's break down everything we've learned about Loki.

Don't worry, Loki won't be re-cast for the show. Tom Hiddleston is returning to play the God of Mischief, and he won't be alone. He'll be joined by a laundry list of great stars playing some mysterious roles.

• Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius
• Gugu Mbatha-Raw in a mystery role
• Sophia Di Martino in a mystery role
• Sasha Lane in a mystery role
• Wunmi Mosaku in a mystery role

The first trailer for the show premiered during Disney's Investory Day teleconference and gave fans an in-depth look at exactly what they can expect. And, perhaps more importantly, it introduced the concept of the TVA--the Time Variance Authority--to the MCU. We'll get into who and what the TVA is in just a second, but in the mean time, take a look at the trailer.

Loki is set to premiere in May of 2021.

The primary drive for the show will be Loki's interaction with the TVA--the Time Variance Authority. This is a concept taken right out of some vintage Marvel Comics dating all the way back to the late '60s. The TVA is functionally an organization tasked with supervising the multiverse and its various timelines--think time cops, who travel through existence and make sure everything is working as it should.

We don't know a ton about the MCU's take on the TVA, but based on the trailer, Loki's going to find himself in some hot water with them--and, perhaps, actually end up working with them. Would you trust the God of Mischief to prune troublesome timelines and maintain continuity for reality?

Yeah, we wouldn't either.

The simple explanation for Loki's "resurrection" after his death in Avengers: Infinity War is that it's technically not a resurrection at all. Instead, the Loki featured in the show will be the Loki we saw abscond from 2012 at the final moments of The Avengers after all the time-traveling shenanigans.

This, unfortunately, means that the Loki featured in the show will not be the same Loki who learned some valuable lessons about family and teamwork in Thor: Ragnarok, but rather a Loki who's most recent memory, in the words of Tom Hiddleston, is "being pummeled by the Hulk."

Initially, we had assumed it would be the tesseract sending Loki all throughout space--which would make sense, considering it houses the Space Stone. But it looks like Loki's travel is going to be aided by the TVA rather than any Infinity Stone. In the comics, the TVA uses technology which allows them to hopscotch through time and realities--something the Space Stone couldn't really do (at least, not as far as we've seen, it can move you through space but not through time or reality--those would be different stones.)

It's not completely clear whether or not Loki is going to be working with or against the TVA in the show, so whether he's getting his TVA technology "legally" or stealing it, remains to be seen, but that's the most likely explanation for his temporal mobility.

That, or the tesseract just doesn't work the way we thought it did, which, given the weird and fluid nature of the Infinity Stones, is a possibility as well.

We can't be completely sure which, if any, comic book stories Loki is going to be borrowing from, but there's one prominent Easter Egg in the trailer. At the end, we see him decked out in campaign gear, a very clear reference to his Vote Loki miniseries in which he--surprise!--decided to try and lie and trick his way into becoming the President of the United States.

There's a moment in the trailer in which Loki throws himself out of a plane after saying "brother, Heimdall, you'd better be ready." He's then teleported away by the Bifrost.

This is specifically interesting because Heimdall has been dead in the MCU since Infinity War (thanks to Thanos.) Of course, in a show about traveling through time and the multiverse, characters that are dead can absolutely have surprising returns either in the past or in different realities. But thus far, there has been no word of Idris Elba returning to reprise the role.

This possibility for "resurrection" and return extends to virtually every character in the MCU as well, so it might be best to expect the unexpected in Loki as the show progresses--you never know who might show up unannounced.