Loki

1. Hidden in Norway for centuries, placed there by Odin
2. 1942 — Red Skull steals it (The First Avenger, film)
3. 1945 — Rogers boards the Skull's aircraft. The Skull touches it bare-handed; it burns a portal through him and transports him away. Rogers never holds it. It burns through the floor and drops into the Arctic
4. Howard Stark, searching the ocean for Rogers, finds the Tesseract instead. He never finds Rogers
5. It passes to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Howard co-founded, and sits in storage for decades
6. 1995 — a S.H.I.E.L.D. researcher uses it to build an engine; the explosion gives Carol Danvers her powers (Captain Marvel, film)
7. 2012 — S.H.I.E.L.D. is studying it as an energy source. Loki takes it (The Avengers, film)

This is revealed in Loki Season 1 (series), and it retroactively explains why nobody noticed a multiverse for eleven years of films.

Odin and his firstborn, Hela, conquered the Nine Realms in a campaign of extraordinary brutality. When Odin decided to stop and rule peacefully, Hela refused. He imprisoned her, erased her from the official history, and rewrote Asgard's founding myth as one of peace. He then had two more children: Thor, and — adopted from the Frost Giants of Jotunheim after a war — Loki.

Thor: Thor's arrogance restarts a war with the Frost Giants. Odin banishes him to Earth, stripped of power. He lands in New Mexico, meets astrophysicist Jane Foster, learns humility, and earns Mjolnir back. Meanwhile Loki discovers he was adopted — taken as an infant from Jotunheim — and, in a spiral of resentment, seizes the throne and tries to destroy his birth people to prove his worth. He loses, and lets go of the Bifröst into the void.

Loki does not die. He falls into the hands of Thanos, who gives him an army and the Mind Stone.

Loki arrives on Earth, steals the Tesseract from S.H.I.E.L.D., and enslaves several minds with the scepter — including Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and Erik Selvig. In response, Fury activates the Avengers Initiative.

The team — Stark, Rogers (thawed from the ice a year earlier), Thor, Banner, Romanoff, Barton — spend most of the film failing to cooperate. Agent Phil Coulson is killed by Loki, and Fury uses his death (and some doctored trading cards) to bond them.

Loki opens a portal over Manhattan and a Chitauri army pours through. The Battle of New York is the founding public event of the superhero age. The World Security Council fires a nuclear missile at Manhattan; Stark carries it through the portal into space, sees the fleet on the other side, and nearly dies. He survives, but the vision of what's out there gives him post-traumatic anxiety and an obsession with pre-emptive defence that drives his behaviour for the next six years.

Standing at the end of Phase One: Six Avengers. Public superheroes. Loki in Asgardian custody. Tesseract on Asgard. Scepter (Mind Stone) confiscated by S.H.I.E.L.D. — and quietly retained by HYDRA agents inside it.

Jane Foster is infected by the Aether (the Reality Stone). Malekith the Dark Elf wakes to claim it. Frigga, Thor's mother, is killed. Thor and Loki reluctantly ally; Loki fakes his own death, then secretly deposes Odin and rules Asgard disguised as him.

Stark and Banner secretly use the Mind Stone in Loki's recovered scepter to build a global defence AI. It wakes up, concludes that the only way to achieve peace on Earth is human extinction, and calls itself Ultron.

Thanos acquired it before 2012 and gave it to Loki inside the scepter to fund the Chitauri invasion, expecting both it and the Tesseract back afterwards. Loki failed; the scepter went to S.H.I.E.L.D., then quietly to HYDRA, who used it on the Maximoffs.

Thor escapes with Hulk, Loki, and Valkyrie — the last of Odin's elite guard, an alcoholic in exile after Hela slaughtered her sisters. They realise Hela draws her power from Asgard itself, so the only way to beat her is to destroy Asgard. Thor releases the fire demon Surtur and lets the realm burn. Asgard is a people, not a place.

Why does Loki take the Tesseract, and why does he come back? He takes it from Odin's vault opportunistically — Thor sent him to fetch Surtur's crown, and he grabs the Tesseract on the way out because it's leverage and because he can.

Important: this is not how the Loki of the TV series got the Tesseract. This Loki dies in the opening of Infinity War. The one who is alive today is a 2012 variant who branched off during Endgame's time heist — see Part Seven.

Thanos, with the Black Order, collects the Stones. He already has Power (taken from Xandar, offscreen). He takes Space from Loki — and kills Loki, and Heimdall. Thor is left drifting; Hulk is beaten so badly that Banner cannot summon him again for the rest of the film.

Was Loki ever on Thanos's side? He was coerced, not allied. The Avengers shows him visibly unwell and under pressure; Infinity War confirms it when Thanos reminds him he was given an army and a Stone and failed.

Sequence of acquisitions: Power (Xandar — the attack on the Nova Corps happens entirely offscreen between films, acknowledged only in a passing news report), Space (Loki), Reality (from the Collector, in a trap), Soul (Vormir — the Stone requires the sacrifice of someone you love, so Thanos throws Gamora off a cliff), Time (Strange gives it to him voluntarily to save Stark's life), Mind (torn from Vision's head).

• 2012 Rogers does not know. He thinks he's fighting a Loki illusion. Present-Rogers wins the fight by saying "Bucky is alive," which stuns him
• Howard Stark (1970) does not know. Tony introduces himself as "Howard Potts." Howard finds him oddly familiar and nothing more
• Frigga (2013) does know, instantly. She's a witch; she tells Thor she can see he's from the future and doesn't care
• The Ancient One (2012) knows, because Banner is holding the Time Stone and she can see the branch forming
• 2014 Thanos learns everything, which is the disaster

The 2012 Loki, who escaped with the Tesseract during the time heist, is arrested by the TVA for creating a branched timeline. He's recruited by Mobius to hunt a variant of himself — Sylvie, who has been bombing the timeline for years.

How he controlled everything: he built the TVA, wrote its mythology, and then wrote a script. He had seen every branch, so he knew exactly what would happen and could set the machine running and step back. Loki and Sylvie arriving at his citadel was in the script.

Why does Sylvie kill him, and does Loki agree? Sylvie was taken by the TVA as a child and hunted her whole life, with one goal: destroy the organisation that stole it. Being offered stewardship of that same system is the one thing she cannot accept.

Loki disagrees, and argues they should stop and think, because the alternative is a multiversal war. They fight over it. She kisses him, pushes him through a time door, and kills He Who Remains alone.

After many failed attempts, Loki realises the Loom is the wrong solution entirely — it exists to limit the multiverse rather than sustain it. He destroys it, walks out into the raw timelines, gathers the dying branches in his hands, and holds them together himself — sitting alone on a throne at the end of time, at the centre of a great tree of living timelines.

This is the single most likely piece of setup for Doomsday. Loki is confirmed in the cast, and he is currently the thing preventing the multiverse from collapsing.

Where does Kang appear before this? He doesn't. Loki Season 1 is his first appearance — and technically not as Kang but as He Who Remains, a variant who explicitly says he is not the conqueror. Kang the Conqueror proper debuts in Quantumania (film). Victor Timely appears in Loki Season 2: a nervous early-20th-century inventor with a stammer who has no idea he's a variant of a multiversal warlord. He is neither good nor evil — the point is that Kang variants aren't all conquerors.

Does Loki control the TVA by this point? Unclear, and the film goes out of its way not to say. Chronologically it's after Loki Season 2, so Loki is at the end of time holding the timelines — yet the TVA here still prunes universes and Paradox acts largely on his own authority.

Three different "Voids", none related, since the word keeps recurring: the deep space Loki falls into off the Bifröst in Thor (2011); the junkyard at the end of time where the TVA dumps pruned timelines, guarded by Alioth (Loki, Deadpool & Wolverine); and this one, the shadow manifestation of Bob's depression — a psychological entity, not a place.

Returning MCU: Chris Hemsworth (Thor), Chris Evans (Steve Rogers), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson), Paul Rudd (Scott Lang), Kathryn Newton (Cassie Lang), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi), Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Danny Ramirez (Joaquín Torres)

The mechanism is likely incursions — the universe-destroying collisions established in Multiverse of Madness — and Loki holding the multiverse together at the end of time is likely to matter.

Tier 1 — the load-bearing fifteen (~33 hours) The Avengers (FILM) → Age of Ultron (FILM) → Civil War (FILM) → Black Widow (FILM) → Infinity War (FILM) → Endgame (FILM) → Loki S1 (SERIES) → Wakanda Forever (FILM) → Quantumania (FILM) → Loki S2 (SERIES) → Deadpool & Wolverine (FILM) → Brave New World (FILM) → Thunderbolts* (FILM) → Fantastic Four: First Steps (FILM) → Spider-Man: Brand New Day (FILM)

1. Don't watch Loki Seasons 1 and 2 back to back on a first pass. They're separated by two years and by Quantumania, and Victor Timely's appearance in Season 2 reads differently after it.

Phase Four (2021–2022): FILMS — Black Widow · Shang-Chi · Eternals · No Way Home · Multiverse of Madness · Love and Thunder · Wakanda Forever SERIES — WandaVision · Falcon and the Winter Soldier · Loki S1 · What If...? S1 · Hawkeye · Moon Knight · Ms. Marvel · She-Hulk · Guardians Holiday Special

Phase Five (2023–2025): FILMS — Quantumania · Guardians Vol. 3 · The Marvels · Deadpool & Wolverine · Captain America: Brave New World · Thunderbolts* SERIES — Secret Invasion · Loki S2 · Echo · Agatha All Along · Daredevil: Born Again S1

And the one thing most worth carrying into December: Doom is not a villain-of-the-week. In the comics he is the Fantastic Four's antagonist first, and the fact that First Steps ends with him standing silently over Franklin Richards is the actual load-bearing setup — more than anything in Quantumania or Loki. Watch that mid-credits scene twice.