Crisis of meaning, part 2: The lie at the end of the MCU multiverse

He Who Remains is not great: How the TVA poisons everything

DID YOU EVER HAVE THE FEELING YOU WERE BEING WATCHED?

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Questions of meaning and nihilism in the MCU multiverse and the Spider-Verse have become inseparable from the multiverse-policing agencies in both sagas. The Spider-Verse has the Spider-Society, while the MCU has the Time Variance Authority or TVA, first seen in Loki but coming to the big screen in the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine movie. Because we currently have considerably more closure regarding the nature and workings of the TVA than the Spider-Society, let’s consider the TVA and the MCU first.

The MCU began in 2008 with Iron Man; one could say that it all began with a life-changing moment of moral clarity in the life of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. After leading an aimless playboy life from his youth, Tony’s life takes a dramatic turn as a result of a near-fatal explosion in Afghanistan and three months of captivity by international terrorists. “I had my eyes opened,” Tony tries to explain in his first press conference. “I’m not crazy,” he later tells Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts. “I just finally know what I have to do. And I know in my heart that it’s right.” Later he insists, “There is nothing except this.… There’s the next mission, and nothing else.” 

“There is nothing except this” reflects Tony’s withering new perspective on his life up to this point, which now appears meaningless to him. One way of approaching the idea of a meaningful life is that human beings have a deep-seated need for connection to something that is bigger than ourselves. We may pursue this sense of connection in different arenas—e.g., art, religion, philosophy, science, family, love, sex, drugs, service to others, philanthropy—and we may feel the need in different degrees at different times. Some go long periods of time without feeling it at all (Tony’s life has always been entirely self-centered, and it never bothered him before). For those who have their “eyes opened” to this need, though, everything else may be secondary. And those who find that sense of connection often feel that they have found their purpose in life—that they are in some way where they are meant to be, doing what they are called to do. Tony’s belief that he “has to” follow this singular course suggests this sense of purpose or calling.

Signposts of (perceived) meaning

Tony’s moment of moral clarity comes via a specific type of experience or perception of meaning: a phenomenon that Carl Jung called “synchronicity.” Synchronicity involves a convergence of events that impresses us as meaningfully related, although there is no ostensible causal connection.

Here’s an illustration of synchronicity from my own life. A number of years ago, early on a Friday morning, I awoke from a dream about an old friend from my college days with a strong impression that I should pray for him that day and specifically offer my Friday penance for him. The following Sunday I learned that, on the day I was praying for him, my friend was in a catastrophic accident—sideswiped by a large truck that totaled his car. To his own amazement, he walked away unharmed.

Probably most people reading these words have had at least one experience not unlike this: some less dramatic; some more so. There’s good reason to bring critical caution to such experiences! The law of truly large numbers describes how striking coincidences happen all the time by chance, and our perceptions and interpretation are well known to be colored by a range of cognitive biases. There’s the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in potentially unrelated phenomena, called apophenia (or sometimes pareidolia, usually in connection with perceiving visual patterns like faces). There’s also the tendency to notice or emphasize data that supports our preferred way of thinking and to downplay or simply forget data that doesn’t: a form of confirmation bias.

What do you see? As a kid I rode past this mural countless times, which adorned a now-defunct department store called Alexander’s. I cannot look at it and not see, among other specific entities, a cheerful, red-beaked puffin with a jaunty hat.

All of that said, any of us, even the most skeptical and rigorously rational, may, at particularly striking moments, experience a profound sense of apparent meaning in seemingly chance events: a sense of purpose or a higher power at work for our good (or potentially a malign power, if it seems as if the universe is conspiring against us!). Committed skeptics may consciously dismiss their own experiences in this regard as the blind workings of chance upon the treacherously irrational pattern-making faculties of their minds. Others may view them as possible signposts of meaning, moments when it seems the curtain of everyday life is drawn back and the pattern-making faculties of our minds discern a glimpse of the mysterious workings of some grand design. In such moments, depending on their beliefs and the vocabulary and conceptual tools furnished by their cultural milieu, people may invoke “providence” (or God), “the universe,” “fate,” “karma,” “the powers that be,” etc.

“Unless it was for a reason”

Tony’s experience of synchronicity involves a convergence of massively improbable circumstances. It begins with a nearly fatal encounter with one of his own company’s weapons: a weapon that fell into the hands of terrorists through corporate malfeasance and Tony’s own executive irresponsibility and moral casuistry. This in itself is already an irony so striking that, had Tony been killed or crippled by the misappropriated weapon, some might understandably see karma or fate judging him for his sins. Yet Tony survives, just barely, thanks to the ingenious efforts of a doctor whom the terrorists happen to have abducted. Finally, pretending to build a weapon for the terrorists, Tony creates a prototype suit of armor and manages a nearly impossible escape.

The convergence of all these improbabilities awes Tony, confronting him with the uselessness and delinquency of the life he has lived until now. “I shouldn’t be alive,” he says, “unless it was for a reason.” With this “reason” comes something Tony “knows” he “has to do,” something he “knows in his heart is right.” Whose reason, and the exact nature of the obligations that come with it, Tony doesn’t ask, and the movie doesn’t care—and that may be okay. If at certain striking moments a sense of purpose or intentionality in seemingly chance events becomes apparent to us, it may not be necessary either to give a name to whatever lies behind that apparent intentionality, or to have any particular theory regarding its nature, to take the hint and benefit from its gifts to us and the world.

When you’re sure that the universe, or something, has sent you a message

So far, so good. The problem is that the more we learn about the workings of the MCU, and of the MCU multiverse in particular, the more that sense of meaning in experiences like Tony’s moment of clarity (and the similar experiences of other characters) are undermined by revelations of what’s really responsible for how things pan out—particularly in the lives of pivotal figures like Tony.

The TVA and the Sacred Timeline

The most dramatic example of this undermining so far (not the only one, as we will see) comes from the TVA, introduced in season 1 of Loki. The series finds a multiversal iteration of Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Asgardian god of mischief, detained by the TVA, an inconceivably powerful, trans-dimensional bureaucracy. The TVA is charged with a quasi-religious mission of preserving what they call the “Sacred Timeline,” so named because its prescribed path is said to be determined by a trio of wise and benevolent divine beings called the Time-Keepers.

The story goes that there was once a wild and wooly multiverse in which interdimensional war broke out: something about Jonathan Majors’s Kang the Conqueror, a human multiversal warlord, along with a whole lot of Kang variants from other universes—an entire Council of Kangs, in fact—cooperating across time and space until some of them stopped cooperating and went to war with the others.

In the end, we’re told, the multiversal war was ended by the intervention of the Time-Keepers, who established the Sacred Timeline to prevent further such wars from breaking out in the future (or the past, or in any other segment of the Sacred Timeline). To this end they founded the TVA, agents of whom are charged with intervening in what are called “nexus events.” These are points of divergence at which a person making a fateful decision may somehow—in a way connected with or reflective of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics—realize more than one choice in branching realities, in effect simultaneously following multiple threads of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, so that the person himself or herself branches into multiple variants of themselves.

When you are definitely three wise and benevolent divine beings and the Sacred Timeline is a totally real sacred thing

The main Loki of the TV show is detained by the TVA because the only TVA-authorized version of Loki is the one who was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. In the Sacred Timeline, unsanctioned variants are ultimately ontological orphans, undocumented immigrants from a realm that’s been nuked out of existence. That’s because when nexus events give rise to alternate realities branching off in unsanctioned directions, these branches in time are “pruned” by the TVA before they grow out of control.

In fact, the TVA exists to prevent the multiverse—or, at least, to restrict the known multiverse to a manageable number of convergent strands united around important nexus events. The TVA is, as it were, a sort of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” management team (although of course they wouldn’t be allowed to say that, legally).

There’s always a man behind the curtain

No attentive MCU fan watching Loki for the first time, even in total ignorance of the comics, should be surprised by the revelation that the entire narrative on which the TVA is based is a big lie. The supposedly divine, wise, benevolent Time-Keepers are mere figureheads—literal puppets, mindless androids—created to put a divine façade on what turns out to be a very human enterprise.

The real mastermind behind the TVA is just one of the many variants of Kang the Conqueror and all the Kangs: a 31st-century scientist named Nathaniel Richards (played in multiple iterations by Jonathan Powers). Somehow one variant succeeds in isolating a single timeline without any of his counterparts. To keep it that way—to protect himself and his isolated reality from the interdimensional chaos wrought by his infinite variants—this Nathaniel Richards, going not by Kang but by “He Who Remains” (sometimes known in fan culture as “HWR” or “He”; I’ll just call him “H”), creates the TVA and the myth of the supposedly divine Time-Keepers and the Sacred Timeline.

He [Who Remains] has the whole world in his hands

The Sacred Timeline, then, is simply the timeline (or set of closely interconnected timelines) unique to and maintained by one lucky survivor of a multiversal war amongst countless different versions of himself. The shape of reality as we know it in the MCU—which of unlimited possibilities are allowed to become real, and which are nipped in the bud—is ultimately determined by H’s priority of preventing quantum indeterminacy and/or wayward choices from giving rise to a chaotic multiverse that will lead to renewed multiversal war.

This is the ultimate reason that things happen or don’t happen in all of MCU history up to the end of Loki season 1. In the season finale, H is killed, and the Sacred Timeline immediately starts branching off into a tangled, rootlike multiversal mess. (The second season of Loki creates a radically new situation, to be considered later.)

An ostensibly knotty question that Loki asks about this scenario is: Does this mean that no one in the MCU up until now has truly had free will, since the shape of their lives and which choices they are allowed to make has basically been scripted by a tyrant? Note the provocative reversal of the more familiar objection that a multiverse robs choices of meaning: For the anti-TVA resistance, free will as a meaningful concept depends on the multiverse! Strictly speaking, though, TVA oversight doesn’t negate free will. It’s just that everyone who makes a “wrong” choice (a choice contrary to the Sacred Timeline) is abducted, incarcerated, brainwashed, and/or erased from existence. (Perhaps I should say every version of anyone that makes a “wrong” choice, or every version that comes into existence as a result of making a “wrong” choice, or of someone else making a “wrong” choice, or of anything else not going according to plan.)

Here is a more pressing question: Why did the Avengers beat Thanos? Why did they beat Ultron? Why did they beat Loki and the Chitauri? Ultimately, according to Loki season 1, because it was in the script—not the screenwriters’ script, but the script of the TVA, of H, i.e., the Sacred Timeline. And it wasn’t in the script because H sided in principle with the Avengers over Thanos, or favored life over death in any particular universe! On the contrary, H ensured the outcomes he wanted by erasing entire universes from existence—with every intervention ending twice as many lives as Thanos. His guiding priority was not preserving lives, but preventing the specific kind of devastation resulting from multiversal war (a threat to himself, to begin with). So, for example, the Sacred Timeline is also the reason that hundreds of people were killed in the Battle of Sekovia in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Ultron ultimately lost because it happened to serve H’s interests, but if Ultron winning would have served his interests better, that’s what would have happened.

Where the iron meets the road

Do you want to know specifically why Ultron had to lose in Segovia, for H’s purposes? The exact reason that Loki and the Chitauri had to lose in New York? It seems it’s all about Iron Man. It’s always been all about Iron Man.

Remember in Avengers: Infinity War when Doctor Strange said he scanned over 14 million potential timelines and found only one possibility where Thanos is defeated? Let’s recognize, first of all, that none of those 14 million possibilities where Thanos isn’t ultimately defeated was ever going to be allowed to happen.

In the single victorious timeline that plays out in Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, Thanos first wins and wipes out half of all the lives in the universe, only to see his victory reversed five years later with the return of the slain, followed by his own defeat. These two events—the erasure of half the lives in the universe and their return—are surely among the most consequential events in the history of life in all possible realities. For the Sacred Timeline to have any coherence whatsoever, these two nexus points must be locked down; if there’s a top 10 nexus events in the Sacred Timeline, and two of the top five aren’t, in some order of importance, that Thanos first wins and then loses, I’d really like to hear the top five! (Incidentally, there’s a fascinating fan theory for why Thanos must be allowed to win first before ultimately losing. This theory is connected to the Eternals, whose story we’ll get to eventually.)

But this would also mean that there’s no strand of the Sacred Timeline in which Tony doesn’t become Iron Man. That’s because, on top of everything else he does, the defeat of Thanos is Iron Man’s final achievement—and, in over 14 million possible timelines, only Iron Man was ever going to defeat Thanos. (Of course one can always posit millions or gazillions of additional timelines that Strange didn’t consider, but the movies don’t encourage this; Strange acts as if there’s only one real hope. I choose to believe that Strange was not scanning random timelines randomly, but prioritizing the most promising of all possible timelines.)

When you’re a doctor with good news and bad news

Which would mean, of course, that Tony was right: There is a reason he was still alive. Surviving the explosion of his own weapon and his subsequent captivity by terrorists was not just coincidence. Rather, it’s because every possible timeline in which he didn’t survive was pruned from existence by the TVA—because in all those scenarios Thanos isn’t defeated, a nexus-event outcome too destabilizing to the Sacred Timeline.

Even Tony’s moral conviction that his survival meant something, that there was something he had to do that he knew in his heart was right, was scripted by the TVA. Any version of Tony that survived the explosion and the captivity, thought “Whoa, that was weird,” and went on with his shallow, self-absorbed lifestyle was also purged from existence. So, yes, it was all for a reason. The catch is, it isn’t a reason in any way indicative of any kind of actual moral structure to reality, a reason really implying any actual moral duty on Tony’s part. Iron Man was simply a utilitarian piece of apparatus in the Sacred Timeline.

For some viewers, this revelation may retroactively drain prior Marvel movies of drama and excitement, certainly on rewatchings. Authorial plot armor is one thing; we know the writers will work things out, but we suspend our disbelief. It’s quite another thing to be given a diegetic or in-universe reason (on the other side, as it were, of our suspension of disbelief) why the dangers during which we held our breath couldn’t possibly have happened.

For me, though, the graver issue is that this revelation undermines the apparent value of Tony’s experience of synchonicity and accompanying moment of moral clarity. That conviction that Tony felt in his heart that what he needed to do was right is now hollow. Not necessarily wrong, strictly speaking. Wrong isn’t the point. The point is that Tony (along with everyone else in the MCU) has been living in what philosophers call an epistemically perverse situation: a situation, that is, in which fundamental human perceptions and interpretive judgments about meaning and morality are radically unable to function as credible guides or plausible sources of insight into anything real or truly meaningful—into whatever mystery lies behind words like providence, karma, fate, the universe, etc.

There are no final proofs in questions of meaning. There are only beliefs; interpretive judgments; perceptions or intuitions that we do or don’t trust. The experience of meaning in synchronicity rests on an interpretation of dramatic convergences in our lives as signposts of a higher reality: a grand design ordered by some inscrutable cosmic mystery, something far larger than ourselves. H isn’t nearly large enough. He’s just one of us. Less than that: He’s a version of one of us who happened to win a multiversal lottery for a while. Any correspondence we might hope for between our sense of meaning and moral reality is shattered by the revelation that someone so trivial is the power behind seemingly meaningful events in our lives. His will, his goals, have no direct moral significance for what we should will or choose. The fact that he will wipe us out if we make a choice he doesn’t approve of doesn’t make that choice morally wrong, nor does his allowing us to exist make choices morally good.

For those who connect meaning to God (or, in the world of Marvel Comics, his nearest approximation, the One-Above-All), it’s always possible to propose that H and the TVA are all within his providence. The problem is that such providence, if it exists in the MCU, filters down to ordinary people through H’s big lie. H’s priorities may at times converge with the good, as we’ve seen, but they are certainly not unconditionally good in themselves, and the ways that they shape human history directly reflect H’s priorities, not God’s. Any signposts of meaning that Tony and others may think they see in their lives might be allowed by a higher power, but any message we might glean from them can be relied upon to tell us only about H. The universe has not sent Tony a message. The calls are coming from inside the house.

As dire as all of this admittedly is, I’m not ready to give up entirely on the MCU as an arena for potentially meaningful storytelling! Before pursuing that line of thought, though, let’s consider the situation at the moment in the Spider-Verse vis-a-vis the Spider-Society, whose secrets, whatever they are, remain to be seen.

NEXT – Part 3: What lies beyond the Spider-Verse? >

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