Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for Loki season 2 episode 5
Summary
4 years after Avengers: Endgame changed everything for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Loki season 2 episode 5 has finally revealed the first real look at what “normal” life was like during the 5 year Blip following Thanos’ snap. Not only that, but the scenes set in 2022 in the latest episode of Tom Hiddleston’s Disney+ MCU show reveal the darkest tragedy of Infinity War’s ending: the reality faced by those left behind.
So far, the MCU has shown precious little of the events that happened during Endgame’s 5 year Blip, with Hawkeye’s Ronin flashbacks revealing the murder of Echo’s father, William Lopez, as the only memorable example. Aside from that, The Falcon & The Winter Soldier painted an indirect picture of the world during the Blip as the origin story for the idealistic Flagsmashers. Their displacement and dissatisfaction with the restored order of the world after Hulk’s Snap suggested at least some of Earth’s population were better off: perversely suggesting Thanos was right. Thanks to Loki, the missing part of Endgame’s Blip time-jump has now been revealed.
Loki Finally Reveals Real Life During The Blip
As Hiddleston’s God Of Mischief seeks to “get the band back together” to help undo the destruction of the Temporal Loom and the TVA, in order to save the Multiverse, he “accidentally” timeslips to 2022, and reunites with Owen Wilson’s Mobius. Living as a jet ski salesman in Cleveland, Ohio, with his two sons – Kevin and Sean – “Don” as he’s known on his timeline (before Loki gives him his Mobius nickname) is a seemingly disgruntled single parent with a big house and a pair of his own jet skis. That explains his fascination with them even after he becomes a TVA agent and has his mind wiped by He Who Remains.
More interesting than the details of Mobius’ life is the fact that the 2022-set scene offers the first real look at real life for those who survived Thanos Snap at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. And crucially, the single most defining thing is that everything is painfully mundane. Kids still don’t tidy up after themselves, single parents still worry about them burning down the house… It’s an MCU first (because Hawkeye’s flashbacks were anything but a look at normal existence during the same period), and it retcons a hugely important part of Avengers: Endgame.
How Loki Retcons Endgame & Reveals Its Harshest Reality
In Avengers: Endgame, when Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang is freed from the Quantum Realm after 5 years by the most heroic rat in movie history, he returns to a starkly different world than the one shown in Loki’s 2022 scenes. Far from either the idyll painted by the Flagsmasher’s manifesto or Mobius’ Cleveland suburban normalcy, San Francisco is a wreck. Garbage lines streets of boarded up houses with rusting cars left by snapped owners, and it’s impossible to avoid the air of grief that hangs over everything. The world Ant-Man returns to is a broken one, but Loki season 2 suggests something entirely different.
The real tragedy of what Loki’s 2022 timeline is of mundane life returning to normal.
The real tragedy of what Loki’s 2022 timeline depicts is the idea of normalcy: of mundane life returning to something like it was before Thanos’ invasion, to the point that Mobius’ flippant comment about his wife being “long gone” probably isn’t him revealing the end of their marriage: she was probably a victim of the Snap. In Mobius’ world, life found a way to endure through the most difficult of tragedies.
That harsh reality also echoes the 2021 comments of Marvel Studios producer Trihn Tran who spoke before the release of Hawkeye about how New York City was moving on from the Blip:
“The city has, and in many ways, recuperated and continued thriving… but the same can’t be said for all its citizens.”
In even the most unthinkably harrowing of times, humanity gets up, dusts itself off and lives again. That’s why the Flagsmashers and all of the Blip’s displaced people added to the theory that Thanos was right: because for them, life did get better. For Mobius in Loki season 2, life just had to go on as normal: he went back to work, he did his best to raise his kids without his wife by his side, and he endured. And that’s the great tragedy of Endgame’s 5 year Blip that Loki’s missing pieces of the jigsaw finally reveal.
New episodes of Loki season 2 release every Thursday on Disney+
