While Loki might be permanently gone in the main MCU timeline, it looks like we haven’t seen the last of him. Despite being killed by Thanos back in Infinity War, everyone’s favorite trickster god made a return in Endgame during the Avengers’ time heist, which saw Tony Stark, Ant-Man, Captain America, and Hulk travel back to 2012 in the midst the Chitauri invasion in New York City.
With Cap and Banner splitting up to retrieve the Mind and Time Stones, respectively, the other two set their sights on the Space Stone, which was being housed in the Tesseract. Using a bit of engineering trickery, Ant-Man was able to induce a brief cardiac episode by fiddling around with Iron Man’s arc reactor. The plan was to snatch the Space Stone in the ensuing confusion, but due to an untimely interruption by an alternate version Hulk – who was angry after he was forced to take the stairs down the top of Stark Tower – the heist went awry, and Loki ended up teleporting away with the Tesseract.
His disappearance from this alternate timeline sets the stage for one of the previously announced Disney Plus shows, but a recent report from EpicStream reveals that another key MCU character could make an appearance in Loki’s new series as well. Speaking to Business Insider, Endgame co-director Joe Russo explained that Captain America’s quest to return the Infinity Stones to their respective timelines would require him to track down the fugitive god, saying:
“Loki, when he teleports away with the Time Stone, would create his own timeline. It gets very complicated, but it would be impossible for [Cap] to rectify the timeline unless he found Loki… The minute that Loki does something as dramatic as take the Space Stone, he creates a branched reality.”
It’s by no means an official confirmation, but it seems that in order to right all the wrongs caused by using time travel to “borrow” the Infinity Stones, Cap would have to track down Loki. And with any luck, fans will get to see this confrontation play out when the series begins airing on Disney Plus.