Your boy Loki is headed back to Disney Plus. Had everything gone according to plan, following the preordained course of events prescribed by the higher-ups, this would be something to look forward to – at worst, a return to form for the MCU in general, but probably just another in a series of compulsively watchable franchise entries. Instead, early reviews point to Marvel’s quirkiest series spiraling into devastating disappointment.
The only explanation is a nexus event, the kind described via a helpful educational cartoon by Miss Minutes back in Loki’s debut season.
The idea goes something like this: There’s really only one awesome way for history to play out – a version of events that gets the universe from the Big Bang’s Point A to the encroaching heat death of Point B without too much muss or fuss along the way. The way that your city council president showed up to work drunk last night, and the fact that you forgot to brush your teeth this morning? It’s all a vital part of the plan. This “Sacred Timeline,” to paraphrase the work of Robert and Rosalind Lutece, keeps the universe’s peas from touching its carrots, and must be preserved at all costs if large-scale skullduggery is going to be averted.
When, between Points A and B, some troublemaker, rabble rouser, layabout, or cad stumbles off the Sacred Timeline, it creates what’s called a “nexus event,” the effects of which can pinball out of control, creating “variant” versions of people and events and branching the universe off into a new reality. If you, for example, had remembered to brush your teeth this morning instead of forgetting to do so as prescribed by the Sacred Timeline, you might have had fresher breath. Your lack of halitosis might have compelled your coworker to see something in you they never saw before. A torrid affair might have started, leading to a love child who would grow up to develop a passion for spelunking. After an ill-fated cave dive 20 years later, that child might bring some long-dormant paleozoic bacterium back to the surface, dooming all humans and most raccoons to painful illness and eventual death. Meanwhile, back in the Sacred Timeline, you eat lunch alone and don’t realize that your mouth smells like you’ve been pickling something in it until you’re already on the train home.
Basically, that’s what a nexus event is. Also basically, that’s probably what happened to the second season of Loki. Maybe it’s not too late for the TVA to prune this broken universe.