It’s Been Six Years and The Best Marvel Movie Still Doesn’t Make Sense At All

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Currently, Avengers: Endgame is widely considered the best movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s easy to see why. The film is a huge, action-packed story where Marvel’s most popular heroes team up for one final, desperate effort to reverse Thanos’s destructive snap and restore everything that was lost. It’s a thrilling and moving experience, filled with spectacular battles and genuinely emotional moments, that effectively concluded a significant era of storytelling.

Time travel is central to the plot of Endgame, with the Avengers going back in time to collect the Infinity Stones and try to fix things. However, the way time travel is presented in the movie doesn’t really make sense. Despite being a good film overall, the time travel rules in Avengers: Endgame are confusing, and even after six years, they remain problematic. The Disney+ series Loki actually highlights these inconsistencies, making the time travel logic even more flawed.

Avengers: Endgame’s Time Travel Was Always A Mess

Time travel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically in Avengers: Endgame, was always confusing. Unlike the rules in Back to the Future – where changing the past would alter the future – Endgame establishes a different logic. The film suggests that for a time traveler, their actions in the past are already part of their established timeline. Essentially, the past, present, and future are fixed, so anything a hero does while traveling through time won’t actually change their own lives. This seems to be consistently true in the movie: even when the heroes travel to different points in time using the Quantum Realm and alter events in the past, their present remains the same.

Taking an Infinity Stone from the timeline has consequences, and things get complicated quickly. According to the Ancient One, removing a stone creates a new, branching reality, meaning the stones need to be returned exactly when and where they were taken. However, this idea doesn’t quite add up when you consider that Loki stole the Tesseract in 2012 and it wasn’t returned, and Thanos traveled from 2014 but never went back to his own time, ultimately dying in 2023 – a significant change to the timeline. And then there’s the issue of Steve Rogers’ actions. It’s a situation that seems to almost make sense, but ultimately feels illogical.

Loki Makes Things Worse

The time travel rules in the Marvel Cinematic Universe were already tricky thanks to Endgame, but Loki complicated things even further. Season 2 of Loki introduces “time-slipping,” where Loki is unexpectedly thrown around to different points in time. Unlike typical time travel which creates alternate realities, time-slipping actually changes the history of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) as it happens.

The time travel in Loki seems to break the rules established in Endgame. Endgame suggests that changing the past doesn’t alter the present, but Loki shows direct interaction with the past causing changes to the future. You could argue these are different types of time travel – Endgame uses the Quantum Realm, while Loki uses the TVA’s technology – and therefore have different effects. However, Marvel has created a confusing system where the rules of time travel aren’t clear, and it’s difficult to follow. With the multiverse expanding, it’s likely to become even more complicated.

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2025-11-08 17:40