Michael Waldron, the head writer on Loki and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, recently claimed he regrets defining the rules of the multiverse in Loki so clearly.
Waldron’s comments came in an interview promoting the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness film with Digital Spy.
He told the publication, “We worked pretty hard on Loki to make it as airtight as possible. But there were times when I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I wish I hadn’t have defined that so clearly. I don’t know why I had to be so specific in my time-travel television show about the rules of the multiverse.'”
He added, “But, I was glad that I came in with institutional knowledge of the multiverse and was able to get the creative team of Doctor Strange on the same page as me on everything. Because like with Loki, that’s the most important thing when you’re dealing with this.”
“You have to all have a shared language of all this stuff, otherwise it can get pretty confusing,” he declared.
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige previously stated back in July 2021, “And as you indicated before we started recording the multiverse is coming up in a big way. So there is interconnectivity there that people have already started to see and suss out.”
He continued, “And I had a meeting this morning with the whole broad Marvel Studios team going through the multiverse and the rules of the multiverse and exactly how to really deliver on the excitement surrounding the multiverse.”
While Waldron claims the rules of the multiverse in Loki were laid out very clearly, the actual show doesn’t actually do that. So it’s unclear what exactly he’s actually talking about.
If you actually watched Loki, I don’t recommend it, the show ends with Sophia Di Martino’s Loki variant called Sylvie killing Jonathan Majors’ He Who Remains and his death creating numerous branched timelines.
However, with He Who Remains’ death, the show implied that time would repeat itself until He Who Remains ends up back at The Citadel at the End of Time again. Majors’ character even tells Sylvie, “I’ll see you soon” and even winks at her as she kills him.
While the Sacred Timeline branches following He Who Remains’ death, there was still a major problem with whether or not the Sacred Timeline was just creating multiple timelines within a single universe or whether those timelines were separate different universes.
This problem reared its head when Loki is transported to another version of the TVA than the one that had been showcased throughout the entire series. The issue with this is that the show claimed that time operated differently in the TVA.
So it’s possible that Loki might have found himself in some kind of alternate dimension, universe, or reality separate from the one where the Sacred Timeline was.
If Waldron does indeed have clear definitions of what the multiverse is, he should probably share them so people can actually understand what Marvel Studios and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is even doing.
The more they do with the multiverse the more confusing and convoluted it gets, and on top of their insertion of identity politics it will drive audiences away as they struggle to make any sense of it and it loses its interconnectedness.
What do you make of Waldron’s assertions? Do you know what the clear rules of the multiverse are that he’s talking about?