Series Phase 4 — The Blip & New Beginnings (2023)

Loki (Season 1)

Name: Loki (Season 1)
Released: 2021-06-09
Duration: 300 min
Rating: 8.2
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Sophia Di Martino, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero, Ke Huy Quan

"Loki's time has come."

Released June 9, 2021 5h ★ 8.2TMDB ★ Essential

After stealing the Tesseract during the events of “Avengers: Endgame,” an alternate version of Loki is brought to the mysterious Time Variance Authority, a bureaucratic organization that exists outside of time and space and monitors the timeline. They give Loki a choice: face being erased from existence due to being a “time variant” or help fix the timeline and stop a greater threat.

Watch note

The TVA exists to maintain a single Sacred Timeline. He Who Remains (a Kang variant) is behind it all. Sylvie kills him — releasing every Kang variant into the multiverse. This act makes Doomsday possible.

Why It Matters in the MCU

The first season of Loki introduced the Time Variance Authority and the multiverse as the central mythology of Marvel's fourth phase, giving the character his own complete story arc in a spy-procedural framework that inverted every expectation about what a Loki series would be. Sophia Di Martino's Sylvie is the strongest original character created for the Disney+ format, and the He Who Remains finale — the literal endpoint of sacred timeline history — is the most consequential narrative decision in Phase 4. The second season resolves the multiverse architecture problem with a solution that is emotionally rather than technically satisfying: Loki's final choice to hold the branching timelines together completes his arc from self-interested trickster to willing sacrifice.

Watch These First

16 titles lead into Loki (Season 1) — 36 hours in total, 12 of them essential.

Captain America: The First Avenger Essential 2h 4m ★ 7.0
Thor Essential 1h 55m ★ 6.8
The Avengers Essential 2h 23m ★ 8.1
Iron Man 3 2h 10m ★ 6.9
Thor: The Dark World 1h 52m ★ 6.5
Captain America: The Winter Soldier Essential 2h 16m ★ 7.7
Guardians of the Galaxy Essential 2h 1m ★ 7.9
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 2h 16m ★ 7.6
Avengers: Age of Ultron Essential 2h 21m ★ 7.3
Captain America: Civil War Essential 2h 27m ★ 7.4
Black Panther Essential 2h 14m ★ 7.4
Spider-Man: Homecoming 2h 13m ★ 7.3
Doctor Strange Essential 1h 55m ★ 7.4
Thor: Ragnarok Essential 2h 10m ★ 7.6
Avengers: Infinity War Essential 2h 29m ★ 8.2
Avengers: Endgame Essential 3h 2m ★ 8.2

Create a watch plan for these 16

Opens the planner with just these titles, so you can set your own pace.

Where It Fits in the MCU

Loki (Season 1) sits at position 115 of 165 in the MCU's story-chronological order, placing it within the Phase 4 — The Blip & New Beginnings (2023) era. It is rated Essential — must-watch for following the main MCU narrative. Watching in story-chronological order provides the most coherent character development experience — individual arcs build naturally toward the franchise's major crossover events, with each film's post-credits scenes carrying forward into what follows.