Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Episode 1 of “Loki.”
For a long time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was built around Thanos’ hunt for the Infinity Stones. We saw Thanos kill entire populations in search of the Infinity Stones. It eventually led to a war with the Avengers — as seen in “Avengers: Infinity War” — that ended up with half the universe’s population erased.
But a brief scene in “Loki” might have shown us that, well, the hunt for the Infinity Stones was small chickens compared to what’s happening next.
In “Loki,” our god of mischief tries to escape from the Time Variance Authority, which captured him after he stole the Tesseract and disappeared to Mongolia (as seen in “Avengers: Endgame”).
While there, he finds a box that is packed with Infinity Stones. He’s told that people use them for paperweights. Yes. People at the TVA use Infinity Stones as paperweights because they matter so little there.
According to The AV Club, this quick scene actually has huge consequences for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not a quick reveal, twist or cliffhanger that we’re used to seeing in Marvel shows. It means a lot more.
Per The AV Club:
The show doesn’t hang on the reveal the way ‘WandaVision’ did when it insisted that the name ‘Scarlet Witch’ was a huge twist (it wasn’t), and it doesn’t make the viewer wait an extra week for the payoff like ‘The Falcon And The Winter Soldier’ did when Sam Wilson finally got his Captain America suit. But the drawer full of Infinity Stones is as big — if not bigger — for the future of the MCU. It reveals for the first time that there is a power beyond the Infinity Gauntlet and Thanos, which is presumably going to be an important thing in future Marvel movies like ‘The Eternals’ (which even had a joke about the Avengers in its first trailer).
There’s also a connection to the comic books here, too, according to The AV Club. The comic book storyline “The Infinity War” — a sequel storyline to the “Infinity Gauntlet” arc, which first dealt with the Infinity Stones and the Infinity Gauntlet — raised the stakes of the previous story.
The storyline “established that there was a more powerful thing than the most powerful thing; you just had to step out of the universe to find it,” The AV Club reports.
All to say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe — which was centered around Thanos and the Infinity Stones — has raised the stakes entirely, creating a new cosmic enemy for the heroes to fight. The stones mean nothing in the larger scale of the universe’s war, which means we’re due for some crazy, huge story moving forward.