It’s been a rough stretch for MCU fans. We take our wins where we can get them. The second season of Loki was a win.
But what if it was an even bigger win? What if, beyond its Aronofsky-esque meditation on loneliness, acceptance, and the beauty of self sacrifice for the preservation of life — beautiful, chaotic, unpredictable life — it was also an opportunity to pretend that Secret Invasion didn’t happen? Wouldn’t that be dope?
Well, we think it would be dope. What’s more, during the Loki episode “Glorious Purpose,” there’s a thread of dialogue that could just unravel Marvel’s least-beloved property, given a hard enough pull and the extension of a whole lot of disbelief.
To recap, Loki timeslips his way through a clip show of his adventures with the TVA, eventually landing back on the day when he first met his good buddy Mobius. Mobius shares a thinly-veiled autobiographical story about the time that he hesitated to prune a variant who was destined to kill a few thousand people in an unapproved timeline. The issue: Mobius arrived on the scene and discovered that the variant was an adorable little boy.
Maybe that’s nothing. The worlds of first-year philosophy and speculative time travel fiction are littered with the corpses of hypothetical baby future-murderers. It could be that this was just another in a long list of arguments in favor of visiting the past and shoving a stick in the spokes of Hitler’s bike when he was a kid.
…Or is it?
Then again, the MCU was recently the home of a high-profile little boy who grew up to kill thousands of people. What’s more, he did it in a timeline that felt anything but sacred – the one in the Disney Plus series Secret Invasion.
That’s where viewers were introduced to Gravik, the Skrull extremist with a collection of doesn’t-make-a-lick-of-sense superpowers shot through his body. During Secret Invasion’s second episode, we see Gravik as a child, making a lifelong friend in apparent child soldier enthusiast Nick Fury. The kid is already pretty intense by this point, having been orphaned in the war with the Kree, and goes on to become a remorseless killer who explodes oodles of people, replaces War Machine with a duplicate, and somehow manages to make a fight between two Super Skrulls boring.
But what this Owen Wilson-based theory presupposes is, maybe he didn’t do any of that. Maybe Gravik was the little boy that Mobius couldn’t bring himself to prune. Maybe Secret Invasion takes place in a timeline that shouldn’t exist, and the bright light at the end of the series isn’t just Fury and his wife climbing into a sci-fi dealie. Maybe it’s the timeline being pruned by Renslayer, the way Mobius said it was, a few variants later than would have been ideal.
Alternatively, maybe we’re just still sore that the MCU wasted Olivia Colman the way that they did. You mourn your way, we’ll mourn ours.
