time travel in Avengers: Endgame was a mess even as it was happening<\/a>. We know it does not follow the so-called Back To the Future rules \u2014 the idea that if you interfere with the past, you aren\u2019t messing with the events of the future. In Endgame, it\u2019s established that, for the person travelling into the past, that action is already a set part of their \u201cfuture\u201d which means the \u201cfuture\u201d is also their past. It\u2019s all part of a set reality and timeline so anything they do will not actually impact the course of their lives. That does seem to hold true. The heroes in the movie use the Quantum Realm to travel to various points in time and when they return, things haven\u2019t actually changed even though some things in the pasts they\u2019ve travelled to have changed.<\/p>\nBut that doesn\u2019t mean that there aren\u2019t consequences which is where things get a little strange. The Ancient One circa 2012 claims that removing an Infinity Stone from its place in times causes a new reality to fracture off so the stones have to be returned to the exact place and moment they\u2019re taken from. That\u2019s all well and good until you realize that 2012 Loki steals the Tesseract so that stone doesn\u2019t make it back, and then there\u2019s also 2014 Thanos who travels via the Quantum Realm and never makes it back to his own time because he dies in 2023 and we know that is a massive change to the overall timeline. And then there\u2019s the whole Steve Rogers of it all. It\u2019s one of those things that sort of kind of maybe makes sense but at the same time doesn\u2019t make any sense at all.<\/p>\n
Loki Makes Things Worse<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Loki-protecting-the-multiverse-in-Loki.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
If Endgame\u2019s version of time travel wasn\u2019t confusing enough already, Loki took everything and made it much worse by introducing its own version of it. Season 2 of the series introduces something called time-slipping. Time-slipping is a phenomenon that we see dragging Loki back and forth between past, present, and future and instead of creating a diverging timeline like you\u2019d think something like that would, it actually rewrites the Time Variance Authority\u2019s (TVA) history in real time. So, there\u2019s that. <\/p>\n
The key thing with Loki\u2019s time travel is that it directly contradicts what we\u2019re told in Endgame about interacting with the past doesn\u2019t change anything \u2014 the Back to The Future Rule of it all. Loki is seen directly interacting with the past and those interactions influencing the future\/present. One could argue that it\u2019s not necessarily a contradiction; time travel in Endgame is facilitated through the Quantum Realm while time travel in Loki is done more directly with the TVA and their TemPads that has additional functionality so it is possible that we\u2019re dealing with two different types of time travel and, thus, different impacts. But even with that, Marvel has created an idea of temporal adventuring that has no clear explanation, no clear rules, and gives you a headache if you try to make too much sense of it and with the multiverse only getting bigger, one can only assume things are going to get even more complex.<\/p>\n
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the\u00a0ComicBook Forum<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Endgame stands as the best movie in the franchise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[40617,88,98128,15077,206,128802],"class_list":{"0":"post-279827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-avengers-endgame","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-loki","11":"tag-marvel-cinematic-universe","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-regular-feature"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Avengers](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Avengers-Endgame-poster-cropped.jpg\")
Image Courtesy of Marvel Studios<\/p>\n