Just a couple of months before the series is set to release on Disney Plus, Marvel has unveiled the official trailer for Loki season 2 trailer – and it features as much period-hopping, timey-wimey mayhem as we've come to expect. (It also features more Jetskis, McDonalds' uniforms, and key lime pies than we were anticipating, but that's not what we're concerned about here).
The clip also introduced 'timeslipping', which is seemingly causing Tom Hiddleston's titular anti-hero to glitch out at the most inconvenient of moments and reappear in, well, another time. Loki and Mobius (Owen Wilson) seek out Ke Huy Quan's new character OB to try and stop it, though he's not much help it turns out. ("It's impossible to timeslip in the TVA," he mutters sweetly, as an exasperated Mobius replies, "I know, but we just saw it happen?" This is going to get complicated).
Shortly after the promo landed online, fans of the God of Mischief have taken to Reddit to try and work out the rules of timeslipping and why, if it's caused by interferences in the timeline, it's not something that affected Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (and other Marvel properties like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).
"The belief is that it's because it was magic," Rifted-06 claimed on a discussion board. "America Chavez travels the multiverse with her powers but Spider-Man 2099 created watches to travel the multiverse, which is technology, and so technology causes glitching. The Spider-Men in [Spider-Man: No Way Home] came to the MCU though a spell as well so they didn't glitch either."
"These universes were never planned to be canon to one another and the rules aren't going to line up," another argued, pointing out the fact that Loki and Doctor Strange are straight Marvel productions, while No Way Home and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were Sony releases. "The Spider-people in ITSV didn't travel via technology but still glitched."
"I love the way how people are trying to find some cohesive logic where none is," someone else agreed. "The two franchises aren't connected and that's for the better. For both of them."
Comment from r/marvelstudios
Others also brought up the events in Avengers: Endgame, which saw Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and the rest of the team travel back in time to pluck the Infinity Stones from the past and defeat Thanos in the present. One fan suggested that because all of that was supposed to happen, it didn't affect the Sacred Timeline, and therefore... no timeslipping.
"They used the quantum watches thing that Tony invented. Even 2014 Thanos got his hands on that tech via Nebula and Ebony Maw was seemingly able to replicate it for the whole army," navjot94 explained. "Keep in mind they could’ve taken as long as they wanted to work on this and then just jumped to 2023 for the Endgame battle. Seems like if you use the right tech or magic, you’re good to go without glitching."
Whatever the reason, or logic, behind Loki's glitching, he and unlikely accomplice Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) were warned about the implications of killing Kang variant He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) – who Sylvie believed to be the evil mastermind behind the mysterious Time Variance Authority – at the end of season 1. She didn't listen, so we always knew the gang would have some sort of all-mighty mess to mop up in season 2...
Loki returns on Friday, October 6. For more, check out our check out our guides on Marvel Phase 5, Marvel Phase 6, and how to watch the Marvel movies in order.
