I’m not sure how you got this, to be honest. It showed Loki killing Coulson, of course, but Coulson was resurrected with the TAHITI project in Agents; this had nothing to do with time travel or multiverse, so the TVA wouldn’t care. And I can certainly see the TVA leaving out that fact when recounting things to Loki, to increase his guilt factor.
Well, Owen Wilson did say The Avengers were supposed to time travel so that means Thanos was supposed to be as powerful as he was and get the stones and snap the universe like he did, that way The Avengers could time travel like they were supposed to.
I don’t remember the “Time Keepers” in any comics I read. I think they are a movie/TV invention. There are cosmic entities in the comics that do have some control over “reality” and such. Eternity wasn’t too happy that Thanos had the power he did with the Infinity Gauntlet and threw a fit about it. But Eternity wasn’t in the movies version of the Infinity War.
I wonder if this 'in the past thing IS Secret Wars, so does that make the Time Keepers, Dr. Doom. Molecule Master and Dr. Strange??
I like it.
Deep cut. Almost certainly wrong but I like it.
I didnt realize they were wiping out entire timelines with the reset thingie. I knew it was sad from the music but I thought it was a local “Whoever interacted with the Variant” thing.
If its the entire timeline then they wiped out the timeline the Avengers fucked up. (Loki went to Mongolia not to a different time) Way to break it heroes. Wait…that cant be right. Cause its the same timeline they got the Time Stone from. Did the following scene take place:?
Cap America: “Here you go maam. Your time stone.”
Ancient One: “Thank you.” (Cap leaves)…timeline is wiped out from Mongolia… “Fuck”.
Are they also going to wipe out the Hawkeye steals a baseball glove timeline?
…open speculation not based on any spoilers below.
.
.
.
.
Here’s my theory. They are glossing over this in this episode, but the process of “resetting” is probably more horrific than it sounds. Each reset doesn’t just result in the wiping of the timelines. If you think about it, billions upon billions of people and aliens and things just die after every single reset.
The show is about Loki discovering his moral centre. And by the end of the show Loki comes to realize that destroying the new timelines is morally repugnant. So what would Loki do if he became the ruler of Midgard? He would conquer all the other realms until he became the “King of Space”. Then he would conquer all the universes to become the “King of the Multiverse”, setting up the Doctor Strange movie (which Loki Head Writer Michael Waldron is also writing).
And what would the King of the Multiverse do once he has conquered the Multiverse?
He would protect it, and protect its people.
And I think that this is what Mr. Mobius is setting up.
Its either this or Mephisto . 
Another theory: (Almost certainly wrong)…this whole “The Avengers were supposed to so we let them” is a whole bunch of bullshit from whoever the real big bad here is (Kang?) All he wants is a timeline where the threat of Thanos is removed and he can fill the power vacuum. Hence creating an alternative universe where Thanos dissapeers. (The one where he went into the future along with his whole army)
When Moebius was talking to the little boy in the church, there was a stained-glass window behind them, which featured a rather Mephisto-like being on it. 
I was thinking this too. That we are seeing Loki’s beginnings of ending up being one of the 3 Time Keepers or at least a protector of it. He did ask Casey in the room monitoring the Sacred Timeline if that was the Ultimate Power, or something.
With Mobius’ questions of, “…and then what? And then what? And then what?” Loki wants to interact somehow with the ultimate thing and being a protector of the Sacred Timeline could fill that need.
…nope, that’s not my theory 
My theory is the opposite. Loki doesn’t become the protector of the Sacred Timeline. He becomes the protector of the Multiverse. And Mobius is setting this up.
There is a fundamental ethical quandary here. Do the people in the other timelines have the right to exist? I think that’s the question Loki ends up asking himself. I think the way Mobius was treating the kid in the church shows that he is thinking the same way as well. The other time agents have a casual disregard for what happens to the other universes. But we don’t see that from Mobius.
Was he resurrected? We don’t know. This gives the Marvel team an in-universe out. (or an in-universe in, whichever way they want to go)
The cartoon said that people become variants by “veer[ing] off the path the Time-Keepers created…Maybe you started an uprising, or were just late for work.” The whole Tahiti thing could be Coulson veering off the timeline into variant-hood. Because the filmreel showed it, we do know that he was brutally stabbed. In the Sacred Timeline, SHIELD may not have gotten him to experimental surgery in time, or it might not have worked, or something else and he could be very, very, very dead (which is usually the result of being gored).
Of course, maybe not. But they’ve written themselves a way that they can use as much of (or as little of) the shows as they want. Maybe just season 1 is part of the real timeline, so Coulson is alive, but they get to back out before they get deep into the Obelisk stuff or the Inhumans.
They can now pick and choose whether to use all or part or none of the stuff that was part of Agents of SHIELD (or the Defenders) and just say “Danny Rand? he died in the plane crash - the one you saw was a variant. Colleen Wing was supposed to be the hero of that story in the Sacred Timeline.”
…one other thing: I was sceptical about Head Writer Michael Waldron. He had a lighter resume than Malcolm Spellman (Head Writer for Falcon and the Winter Soldier) and we saw how that turned out.
Only one writing credit prior to Loki. Then gets given the keys to a million dollar TV show and then a movie.
But looking into it a bit closer it looks like Waldron is one of those one-in-a-million writers. His early (unsold) scripts got rave reviews. He worked great in the writers room. Feige has also apparently picked him to write his Star Wars movie. And before the first episode was broadcast he posted this shout-out to the other writers in the room, and to his assistants. Anyone who publicly acknowledges the importance of the writers assistants gets a tick from me.
Marvel Phase 4 really is taking things in a different direction in more ways than one. I may start a thread about it. The commitment to diversity both in front of the camera and behind it really stands out. I may start a thread about it.
And shout out to the director as well: Kate Herron, who I think also did a fantastic job here. Both Wandavision and Falcon both had journeymen directors with decades of experience, Herron has much less experience than those two but made up for it in her intial pitch for the job.
Marvel shows have adopted a production template much closer to film than to TV shows that I personally think works better creatively, but which (understandably) is upsetting some in the industry. Normally the Head Writer takes the Showrunner position. With Marvel though each show gets two Producers attached to it that babysit the project from start to finish. The writer and director essentially share showrunner duties, but there is a “hand-off” from writer to director (once the writing is finished) that doesn’t happen on a traditional show.
More to the point: Loki never interacted with Coulson again after he stabbed him, so whatever happened to Coulson after that wouldn’t be included on the film strip of Loki’s life.
Yeah, Loki is absolutely going to break the shit out of the sacred timeline. I’ve been batting near zero in accurate predictions for Marvel shows, but considering that the next Dr. Strange movie is subtitled “and the Multiverse of Madness,” I’m pretty confident about this one.
Coulson in Agents of SHIELD is not canonical. Not only because their storylines potentially contradict a lot of what happened in the movies, but because Kevin Feige had no input, so just ignores them. That means the main Avengers all still believe that Coulson is dead.
I don’t know what Maria Hill and Nick Fury think, as they appeared in the show a couple of times…
I didn’t get the impression that they “die” so much as that they’re just anulled - they cease to have ever existed in the first place, or whatever existence they had just gets folded back into the Sacred Timeline a la the resolution of the philosophically and morally interesting but otherwise poorly done Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix”. The Avengers going back in time to get the Tesseract, Loki getting it and escaping, and them having to go further back to get it still happens, but Variant-Loki never goes anywhere else and has no impact on what happens to Sacred-Loki. The French girl in the Sacred Timeline might even still have some memory of what happened, but in a way that’s sectioned off in her mind and hard for her to make sense of. (If we’re going by my earlier theory about the true forms of the TVA staff, perhaps they appeared to her as angels.)
In a way, it kinda reminds me of the deliberately anachronistic setting of Archer - presumably sometime during the Cold War, with '60s cars and fashion sensibilities, '80s desktop computers, and smartphones.
I enjoyed it. I also think that Loki’s endgame will not be the protector of the sacred timeline, but to be someone who allows chaos (mischief) back into time. (Isn’t Kang supposed to be one of the baddies in the next MCU phase? He would need to be able to time travel without interference.)
Lastly, how does Owen WIlson still get work? He is horrible in anything he does (actually, he was okay in Midnight in Paris.)
I think it’s exactly that. See also The Venture Brothers. I don’t think there’s a cool trope name for it yet, but I think retro Jet Age futurism is definitely an emerging aesthetic.
And between the TVA, the very similar agency, Temps Aeternalis, in The Umbrella Academy, and the version of the Adjustment Bureau from the eponymous movie, it now seems to be the default aesthetic for the rather specific trope of timeline maintenance bureaucracies.
Probably the OP should decide about a new title. I believe something like ‘Watching the Loki TV series’ covers both the original question and the current discussion.
The first episode was really fun! Loved all the little jokes while the story slowly unfolded. Owen Wilson has just the right level of smarminess (is that the right word?) for this role. Really looking forward to the rest of the series.
I hadn’t viewed the second season of Umbrella Academy, but now am tempted to do so given what was said about an agency there. The agency’s workings made me think of Asimov’s The End of Eternity: that might make a good movie with some heavy rewrites.
We saw the timekeepers do several resets with the little bottle with colors that they pushed a timer on. But we never saw the results of the reset, just the timekeepers going back to their door. Did the Mongolians disappear? We could see Loki looking at the result, and his eyes seemed to go a bit wide.
Then you may just end up with Loki. 
Some thoughts:
This was the MCU show that I was looking forward to. WandaVision and Falcon/Wintersoldier were decent, but were fillers. Glad to see it came out (and 2 days earlier than originally announced!). I wasn’t disappointed, it was quite entertaining, and I look forward to the next episode.
Looks like it will be another 6 episode season, that seems to be the model these days. Getting away from standard season lengths has its benefits. Most traditional shows have “filler” episodes to pad out the season. Better to be left wanting more than wondering why they are still making that show. There’s plenty of room to tell a full story in 6 episodes, that’s still 2+ whole movies in run time. Shows like Babylon 5 or Stargate may be more re-watchable if they edited them down to 6-9 episodes per season.
I’m not much of a fan of Owen Wilson, but somehow, he seems perfect for this role. I’m not sure if I want him to say, “Wow”, or if I will appreciate him not doing so.
Loki said he did the D.B. Cooper heist because he was young and stupid, but that would have only been less than 50 years ago, a small fraction of his age. I assume he was being facetious, but also maybe the events of Thor and Avengers made him grow up more than mere centuries would.
I get the impression, given the bureaucratic nature of the TVA, that the timeline wars were fought less with soldiers and weapons, but with lawyers and court filings, reflecting the real life nature of combining the different Marvel properties into one coherent universe. If so, I hope to see some flashbacks to those dramatic legal proceedings. Maybe get a glimpse into the writing room, where overworked employees are furiously typing out the future installments of the sacred timeline.
If the Avengers were supposed to do their time heist, they still left a few open ends that can’t be fixed by Rogers putting things back. There’s a universe that Thanos and his minions suddenly disappeared from, nothing that can be done to fix that(though some may see it as an improvement). Was that timeline pruned, or was it meant to happen?
Did the TVA let Steve play out his fantasy life with Peggy, then reset it once he returned to the proper timeline? We never see him again either, maybe he was reset as well after handing off the shield. Maybe they intercepted him on his first jump, he handed over the infinity stones, and they let him and Peggy play time agent for a while until it was time to go back and give up the shield. Is Mjolnir laying around in the TVA somewhere, acting as the ultimate paperweight? Could Loki become worthy and pick it up, returning it to the timeline?
I do wonder if TVA employees, officers, and agents are actually part of the timeline, or are they outside of it? They may be the only beings with free will, and also the ones most aware of the consequences of exercising it. Where do they come from? I wonder if all of them started out as a variant, being recruited into the ranks as a condition for staying their execution, or “resetting” as they euphemistically call it. That could be the entire reason for the song and dance of a trial, not to determine their guilt, as they are obviously guilty if they are there, but to determine their usefulness to the organization.
Out of all the crimes that Loki committed, the one that he’s on trial for here is the one that’s really not his fault. The Avengers were meant to go back in time and retrieve the stones, and it was the Avengers whose fault it was that the tesseract ended up at his feet.
I don’t think that the Loki that they are going to be hunting is another variant, I think it is the same Loki, but in his future timeline, after having learned not only the ways and methods of the TVA, but also the harm and destruction that they are doing in the name of protecting the “sacred timeline”. Even though Loki was, in his timeline, recently expositing on the evils of free will, learning that there is no free will, that everything is predetermined, even his own fate will likely cause him to rebel against the TVA.
I wonder if this is going to be a bit like Tenet, with the first half being from the perspective of Loki chasing after his “variant”, and the second half being from his future self’s perspective being chased, and obviously eluding capture easily as he has already seen it from his past self’s perspective.
So, speculation, he’s stealing the time reset devices for a reason. I wonder what happens if they go off within the TVA. I assume that’s the end goal, which would not only destroy the TVA, but keep it from ever having existed in the first place, meaning that none of the work they had done in pruning other timelines ever happened… Time is a bit wibbly-wobbly, as they say.
This could certainly cause a bit of chaos in the timestreams, and lead well into a “Multi-verse of Madness.”
ETA: in the trailers, there is a scene with a woman sitting facing away from the camera, I think she looks quite a bit like black widow, was I just imagining things?
That one guy who’d never heard of a fish seemed to indicate that he’d spent his entire existence behind a desk, so I think the TVA guys - or at least some of them - are specially created beings made just for this job.
The one they use in Mongolian starts eating away the ground. I think the reset bomb is basically the same thing as the disintegration batons. Both items are referred to as “resetting” their targets, so I guessing they use the same process.
I think the show is setting up Loki with a semi-heroic purpose, but I don’t think it’s being a sacred guardian of anything. When they’re disabusing Loki of his delusions of purpose, they say something like, “you’re purpose is to make other people into their best selves,” and later when Agent Möbius says “I don’t think you’re a villain,” I think what they both saying is, “You’re an antagonist.” Coupled with Möbius pointing out that, for a god of mischief, he hasn’t been acting very mischievous, I think they’re aiming for Loki making himself over into a sort Star Trek Q character - someone who annoys and frustrates the heroes, but whose antics ultimately help them more than harm them