What Is The Multiverse War In Loki?

Contains spoilers for "Loki" Episode 1

The Loki (Tom Hiddleston) of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's main timeline dies pretty conclusively at the hands of Thanos (Josh Brolin) in "Avengers: Infinity War." However, the time travel shenanigans of "Avengers: Endgame" allow the less-benevolent Loki from "The Avengers" to grab the Tesseract and escape punishment — from the conventional authorities, at least. Disney+'s "Loki" shows us that the second the God of Mischief drops from the radar, he gets caught. The secretive yet extremely powerful Time Variance Authority — which exists to preserve the timeline that its founders, the Timekeepers, deem correct — find this rogue Loki and bring him back to their headquarters.

The TVA does its elaborate time-preserving thing because history has shown what happens if someone doesn't keep a keen eye on the events. In the first episode of "Loki," the animated Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong) explains that a great, destructive Multiverse War forced the Timekeepers to weave all the events into a single timeline. After this, they established the TVA so further chaos would be averted.

The casual revelation that the MCU has witnessed a war that's far beyond the scale of anything you've seen so far is a fairly big bit of exposition coming from a small, 2D-animated clock — especially since the series doesn't bother to elaborate this highly destructive event any further, at least not in Episode 1. So, what exactly is the Multiverse War?

Arguably, the biggest Multiverse War situation in the Marvel comics is the 2015 version of Secret Wars, the latest in the series of appearances by dangerous entities known as the Beyonders. The event involves a series of incursions, which effectively force the heroes of different Earths to fight each other for the fate of their universe, until only one remains. Interestingly, this is something the MCU has already played with by pitting Captain America (Chris Evans) against an alternate-universe version of himself in "Avengers: Endgame," so perhaps Miss Minutes is teasing a pretty huge upcoming event. 

Of course, before the MCU gets to the multiverse-level conflict of the 2015 version, it's probably fair to assume that we'd see the original Secret Wars, which involve a single Beyonder transporting a group of heroes and villains into a strange planet and forcing them into Mortal Kombat-style battles with each other (only without the fatalities). As such, if the event Miss Minutes is alluding to is indeed a tease for Secret Wars, the full-on Multiverse version probably won't happen until Phase 6 or so. 

Then again, there's always a chance that the Multiverse War concept ties into something that's already been announced. We already know that "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" will feature Jonathan Majors' Kang the Conqueror, an ultra-powerful villain with a history of messing with time. Or perhaps the war mentioned in "Loki" is just a long-gone event with no particular ties to the MCU at large, created solely for the purposes of the show. That's the thing about a series centering on the God of Mischief: You never know just what to believe.

New episodes of "Loki" are available for streaming on Disney+ every Wednesday.