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The following interview contains SPOILERS for Season 1 of Loki. Michael Waldron is a busy man. After getting his start on animated series like Rick and Morty, Waldron is now one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hollywood. His first television series for Marvel, Loki, just wrapped up on Disney+. His next show, the pro-wrestling drama Heels, about a pair of feuding brothers (Stephen Amell and Alexander Ludwig) who are the stars of a small-town federation in Georgia, premieres on Starz in a couple weeks. He’s also working on the scripts for Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Marvel President Kevin Feige’s upcoming Star Wars project. He’s so busy, in fact, that our planned conversation last month got pushed back until this week. That actually worked out for the best, though, because it enabled us to talk about everything that transpired on the first season of Loki, and even discuss whether he’s going to be a part of the just-announced second season. During our phone call, Waldron also explained how his love of professional wrestling influences his writing, whether He Who Remains was always planned as Loki’s big villain, and whether he’s ever wanted to combine his loves of writing and wrestling by working for the WWE. Plus, he actually explained once and for all how time travel works in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which was very helpful. Now that the season is over, what did you think of the reaction to Loki? Did anything surprise you about it? No, I was thrilled with the reception. Audiences are really smart. And I think that we dumped a lot on their plate in the show, and they were up to the task and went along for the ride. So I was just very pleased that we didn’t lose anybody with all the crazy stuff we had going on. Right. How early in the process did you get involved? Did Marvel say to you “We want a show about Loki”? Or did they say “We want a show about Loki and time travel and the TVA and variants”? They wanted a show about Loki and the TVA. They had done amazing work, as they always do, just kind of like just laying the groundwork for what the general sandbox you’re going to be playing in is. That was what I came in and pitched on. And then it was me and my writing staff working on it and kind of figuring out like “Oh, you know what? Time travel basically is the multiverse.” And you sort of put all that together as a team. Michael Waldron / Photo by Cassie Mireya Rodriguez Waldron Michael Waldron / Photo by Cassie Mireya Rodriguez Waldron loading... Okay, so you mention time travel. That brings up a question I had from watching the show, and apologies if it’s about to get very nerdy. I’ll answer as best I can without canonizing something that I then have to unwind three years from now. [laughs] Okay, understood. So my question is if there is the one “Sacred Timeline” of the Marvel Universe that the TVA has been protecting for some significant stretch of time, then how can there also be so many alternate timelines and variants as well? Okay, The best I can explain it is our approach with time travel was the philosophy basically that time is always happening. So there are infinite instances of time always occurring at once. So you and I are having this conversation right now. There’s another instance of us having this conversation 10 seconds ago. There’s another instance of time of us having this conversation 10 seconds in the future. Generally, those three instances — you could literally say they’re all different universes in a way different timelines — are all the same. There are minute little fluctuations in each instance of time. So in you and I’s conversation, five times out of ten, I pick up and I say, “Hello.” And four times out of ten, I say, “Hey, nice to meet you.” And then maybe one time out of ten, I’d say, “Hey man, f— you. I don’t want to do this interview.” [laughs] Right. And that’s just how time works. There’s always like different permutations and instances happening. The TVA has their own barometer, their own gauge of what constitutes a deviation from the baseline, the way it’s supposed to go. The way it went that produced He Who Remains. That is their baseline. And so they are constantly calculating, “Okay, we see how time has always...” If you zoomed in on the timeline, it wouldn’t necessarily look like a straight line. It might look like almost the intertwined strands of a rope fluctuating and spiking here and there. When it becomes a problem for the TVA is when, according to their own rules, when could something branch off in a way that it could actually produce a new timeline that could produce a new version of He Who Remains? That is the practical thing that they’re guarding against. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I think it does. A colleague and I were constantly discussing these nerdy things during the show, and this was a big question we kept batting around. And we sort of came around to an explanation like this. So yeah, it makes sense to me. I would say all that with the caveat of what’s important is what we’ve seen on the screen. These things can always ... you know, how does the TVA really work? We don’t really know. But that was generally the time travel logic we were operating under.