WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD FOR LOKI EPISODE 1
The episode opens with Loki grabbing the Tesseract in 2012 during the events of The Avengers. He’s apprehended by Hunter B-15 and her Minutemen in Mongolia and brought to the Time Variance Agency to stand trial for his time crimes as a Variant. Eugene Cordero’s (The Mandalorian, Kong: Skull Island,The Good Place) Casey is handed the Tesseract as it seems harmless in the building.
A cute yellow robot removes Loki’s Asgardian clothes and puts him in a convict uniform. He’s told by the TVA staff walking through a device that photographs his temporal ora can melt you down if you’re a robot. Loki suddenly questions his own existence and if he’s a robot, he survives.
The adorable Miss Minute, a cartoon clock, has a Southern accent and explains who/what the Time Variance Agency is.
Miss Minute talks about a vast Multiverse war almost ending everything, an obvious nod to Secret Wars, potentially teasing Marvel Studios finally giving the Russo Brothers their wish. Three all-knowing Time Keepers emerged to reorganize the Multiverse into a single timeline, the sacred timeline. Variants stepping off the path of the timeline creating a Nexus and could lead to another Multiversal war.
Another variant was disintegrated for not having his ticket in the queue to be seen by a judge.
Judge Renslayer tells Loki that The Avengers using time-travel in Avengers: Endgame was supposed to happen, according to the Time Keepers. This comes after Loki volunteering to take them down after using time-travel themselves. Tony Stark used the Mobius strip to create a time-travel algorithm, which could explain why it was allowed to happen.
Magic powers don’t work in the TVA and means Loki’s powers are useless against the TVA, a lesson he has to learn the hard way. This is reinforced later as Casey has a desk drawer full of infinity stones, he mentions some of the TVA employees use them as paperweights. Highlighting cosmic powers don’t work there either.
Agent Mobius decides that he can use this version of Loki to help with track down dangerous rogue variants. The Loki Variant is considered a “pussycat” compared to the Variants that Agent Mobius chases. It’s in his nature to lose and they reiterate that Phil Coulson is dead as a doornail leading to the Avengers coming together to fight Loki leading to his capture before grabbing the Tesseract.
Agent Mobius looking into Loki’s history reveals that he was D.B. Cooper (a real-life criminal) and jumped out of the plane only to have Heimdall bring him home from Midgard. It happened because he lost a bet to Thor.
Also, showing him his future events from Thor: The Dark World and the death of his mother by his actions. He also gets to see Odin tell him he loves his sons before he dies and Thor embraces him in Thor: Ragnarok. Sees his death at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.
They need his help to hunt a dangerous Loki Variant that has been killing Minutemen, which might be Sophia Di Martino’s Lady Loki as a cloaked figure (possibly Lady Loki) took out a unit of Minutemen at the end of the episode.
I wouldn’t be shocked if we find out that Lady Loki is from a timeline where the male MCU characters have had their genders flipped, which might be how we get Jane Foster’s Lady Thor in Thor: Love & Thunder. Having Jane Foster becoming the Dr. Donald Blake proxy from the comic books that was never used in the films. Dr. Blake, a real human from Midgard with health/mobility issues, was able to transform into the Mighty Thor. Blake was sort of tossed away as a former flame of Jane’s and they used him as a cover-name for Thor.
THE RONIN 