Start with He Who Remains, since that’s where people get things wrong all the time. He may have been a tyrant, but his plan worked. His Temporal Loom was a failsafe, not a weaver, and it sliced up every branch that couldn’t fit into it, allowing just one timeline to survive and none of the Kang variants to trigger yet another Multiversal War. Cruel math, maybe, but math that maintained the balance.
And balance is important here, since incursions are not the weather that happens in the cosmos. They happen when realities get too close to each other to ignore. Multiverse of Madness introduces two causes of such incursions in one movie: America Chavez creating holes between universes before learning how to control her abilities and Wanda tearing her way through those universes while dreamwalking. Contact between worlds that weren’t supposed to come into contact with each other. And the Loom was there to ensure that contact would never happen.
Which makes the final act of Loki the crime scene that everyone laments. It’s where Loki spends hundreds of years in the time loop, understands that he cannot save both the machine and the branches, and turns down the only offer that he is given. He destroys the Loom, collects the falling branches into his hands and moves them towards a throne where he holds them together using sheer force of will. One image from Marvel Television, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.
That’s when the safety rails fall off too, as Loki didn’t fix the problem. He removed the mechanism that prevented the incursions from happening and took a place in the center of the Multiverse. Now an infinite amount of branches exists instead of a carefully curated handful, and the TVA stopped pruning the timelines and began guarding them. Which is aesthetically beautiful but useless, since a guard will not stop two universes from running into each other.
Rethink the suspect list with the above consideration in mind. Strange’s spell broke, Wanda dreamwalked, America traveled between worlds and Steve Rogers lived a complete life within a timeline that should have been deleted. Under the old regime, most of the above events got noticed and fixed before it even became a problem. Under the new one, everything stays here forever in a Multiverse without any defense mechanism against the incursions.
An obvious counterargument would be that Loki put a stop to the infinite genocide, and yes, that sounds like a way of laundering the tyrant’s guilt. Fair enough. Given Loki’s choice, most of us would do the same thing. But doing right and creating consequences out of that choice are two different things, and Marvel continues to insist that only one is possible. Loki traded a stable Multiverse based on mass killings for the freedom based on him. Not a system but a load-bearing individual.
And a load-bearing individual is what Doom needs to make his move. The Doomsday poster shows the God of Lies right in the center of the picture with Doctor Doom looking down on him. According to RDJ, Tony Stark chases someone who created incursions and Steve Rogers is one of the suspects. At the end of this chase stands the guardian of the tree. Doctor Doom doesn’t need to create a problem himself, Loki did that and then became a weakest link of that problem.
Doctor Doom is coming, and everything he needs is right there for him.
