Avengers: Endgame‘s time heist was a truly audacious plan, as the heroes headed back to key MCU events to borrow that timeline’s Infinity Stones. Most of the ‘past’ characters were completely oblivious to this, though a notable exception was Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One, who quickly surmised what was up. But thanks to Loki, we now know that the God of Mischief also recognizes shenanigans when he sees them.
During the opening flashback to Avengers: Endgame (which itself was a flashback to The Avengers), we saw the antihero escape with the Tesseract. He didn’t get far, though, having been apprehended soon after by the Time Variance Authority. But, while trying to justify his actions, he explained that he “only came into possession of the Tesseract because they traveled through time.” The key to figuring this out was, as Loki says, “trust me, you can smell the cologne on two Tony Starks.”
Aside from confirming that Iron Man is a longtime fan of Axe Body Spray, this also means that Loki almost instantly deduced that the only way there could possibly be two Starks is if there was time travel trickery afoot. Later in the episode, he proudly says he’s extremely intelligent and to be fair, figuring out the time heist confirms that.
Perhaps the one major wrinkle with the first episode was that the TVA skated over the Avengers’ own screwing with time. Their justification was that the Sacred Timeline foretold all that stuff and Captain America returning each Infinity Stone to its original place must have helped. Even so, it seems quite unfair that they can do what they did while Loki is sentenced to death for merely teleporting across the world. He didn’t even time travel!
I’m betting upcoming episodes of the show will take us back to other key moments in the MCU history whether we’ve seen them in previous movies or not. Fingers crossed, and see you next Wednesday.
