Loki has always been a bit of an outrageous outlier in the Marvel-verse. Whereas other spinoffs – The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Secret Invasion – have taken place very firmly within the world we all know and are getting vaguely tired of, Loki chose instead to tread boldly where no series has ever trodden before.
Unfortunately, that also meant drawing on a library full of lore, so buckle up and let me refresh your memory. Series one introduced us to the Time Variance Authority (TVA): aka, if the Matrix was made out of paperwork. Here, Loki (who managed to escape the Avengers after they went back in time and changed the timeline) found himself captured by the TVA and at odds with an army of nattily-named Minutemen soldiers, charged with making sure that the ‘Sacred Timeline’ is protected; that is, that nobody messes with the flow of things and creates alternate timelines where they’re not supposed to.
