The Atlantic A Marvel Series That Cares Little for Marvel’s Universe For more than a decade, the studio’s films and shows have been paragons of careful continuity. So far, Loki does away with that. Loki . For 13 years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe built up the Infinity Stones as objects of grand power, capable of manipulating all existence when united. In Avengers: Infinity War, they turned half of the cosmos to dust; in Avengers: Endgame, the surviving heroes chased them down across time. In Loki, the Disney+ series released today, they’re nothing more than colorful paperweights. The cheeky gag befits a series about a trickster god, but it’s a surprising one for Marvel to pull. The studio has never dismissed its own storytelling this way—more than a dozen films insisted on the profundity of the stones. Yet in a single scene, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) learns that the objects he’s long sought—and by extension, the objects fans have long been conditioned to care about—are mere office supplies at the Time Variance Authority, the bureaucratic entity that has captured him. Not only that, but Loki’s told that the TVA controls time itself, and thus has “allowed” his every move. His actions have never been his own.