It’s safe to say that the season finale of “Loki” — yes, apparently just the season, not series, finale — just well and truly kicked off Phase Four of the MCU by introducing us to the multiverse. But “Loki” isn’t just pushing us into the future. It also gave us some interesting context for some of the stuff that happened in “WandaVision.”
For those who feel like “WandaVision” was released six years, instead of six months, ago, here’s a quick refresher. In the post-credits scene of the “WandaVision” finale, we saw Wanda in her isolated cabin after bringing down the Westview illusion and sacrificing her family in the process. Her body is going about its day, doing normal human activities like drinking coffee, but she’s simultaneously astral projecting, apparently studying the Darkhold — that’s the sinister-looking book that Agatha had — and exploring realities other than her own.
As she goes about her work, both the physical and the mental, she suddenly hears the voices of her sons calling out to her, implying that there’s some reality — maybe some messed up dimension like we saw in the first “Doctor Strange,” or an alternate reality — where they actually do exist.
Wanda is clearly shocked to hear them, which makes sense because, again, they never actually existed in the first place; they were just an elaborate piece of the Hex. Hearing them call out was, perhaps, our first concrete, explicit taste of the existence of a multiverse.
We just thought the multiverse had been there all along, set to come into play in a major way during “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
But we were wrong, as we saw when Sylvie ended up splitting the multiverse open in the “Loki” finale.
No matter how hard our Loki pleaded with her, he could not convince Sylvie to spare He Who Remains. She was too blinded by anger and a thirst for revenge that she couldn’t bring herself to accept the reality of what he was saying, and what would happen if she did kill him.
So, she gave Loki a kiss that we’re still trying to process and shoved him through a portal back to the TVA, leaving her alone with He Who Remains, who she promptly killed by plunging a sword through him. When she did that, the timeline branches exactly as he said it would, creating countless Nexus events, and thus countless realities.
That includes a reality where Tommy and Billy — and if we’re hopeful, maybe even Vision — exist. So now, thanks to Sylvie, Wanda could theoretically use her own abilities to explore those realities and find her boys. How specifically she can do that is a little fuzzy, but the point is, the “Loki” finale sets up the potential.
The simplest way to put it is this: Wanda was meditating in her cabin in a similar way to Doctor Strange checking out possible realities in “Avengers: Endgame.” And Sylvie just OPENED those realities by killing He Who Remains. Any and all multiversal scenarios are now possible, including the one we’re discussing here.
Now, because the Citadel and the TVA exist outside of time itself, the explosion of the multiverse can’t necessarily happen “at the same time” as anything else, making the “when” of it all one giant paradox.
It could be that the events of “Loki” culminate right when Wanda is meditating, resulting in an instantaneous crossover in realities, or it could be that they cause a ripple effect that just reaches Wanda and takes effect during that time. There’s really no way to know, based on how the MCU has laid this out so far.
Regardless, this change is going to affect so much of the MCU, and we think that “WandaVision” scene is an example of that. Realistically, this is going to affect a LOT of what we know beyond just “WandaVision” — we just haven’t seen how yet.
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