#captain carter

L’été 2021 a marqué un tournant décisif pour l’univers cinématographique Marvel. C’est en effet dans la série Loki, sur Disney+, que le studio a pour la première fois théorisé la notion de « variante » et dévoilé la Time Variance Authority, cette organisation chargée de préserver la ligne temporelle sacrée en élaguant toute chronologie déviante. Depuis, le terme s’est imposé comme l’un des…

so I scoured other sources trying to figure out what, exactly, the intent was with these opening Loki scenes and for the most part they don't say anything. The screenplay I found doesn't say a thing about how haggard he looks:

The newer Avengers novelization, adapted by Alex Irvine, similarly doesn't say anything about Loki looking sick, although it does have one interesting detail:

Something overloaded, and a wave of energy rolled out from it, flashing across the skin of Fury, Hawkeye, and the assembled scientists. They flinched, but they also wanted to see what was going on... When the energy faded, a man was left on the platform. He was on one knee with his head tucked into his chest, as if riding out a storm [emphasis mine]. In the silence, they approached him. The energy blast had scattered equipment and materials across the floor. The man looked up at them and smiled as he stood. He was not a large man, not remarkable in any particular way. He had long black hair and wore black leather clothing, similar to what Fury was wearing. However, he wasn't a SHIELD agent. Fury didn't know where he had come from. Also, the stranger held a kind of spear in his right hand. Set into its head, a gem glowed the same icy blue as the energy that had spilled from the Tesseract. "Sir," Fury called as armed SHIELD agents closed nearer, "please put down the spear." The man looked at the scepter as if he had only just noticed he had it. Then, slowly, he looked back up at Fury, and a vicious smile spread across his face.

The art book describes the scene like this:

And it shows this concept art of Loki looking even nastier, alongside a frame from the film of Loki looking...still pretty sick:

The art book does actually reference the scene I was initially reblogging:

So in the art book we have Loki's "voice betraying audible strain" although that could be from unease/impatience considering the rest of that sentence is "as dark energy continues to build in the chamber," and then we actually do get "Barton helps a visibly weakened Loki into the back of the truck," which I think shows up literally nowhere except the film itself and this one description here. The thing that bugs me is that nowhere do they actually say why Loki is visibly weakened (it sure wasn't from very easily fighting off a few humans) or why concept art and the finished film both showed Loki looking pretty awful, although in different ways and to different degrees, when he first came through the portal.

There's maybe a clue here in the reference to dark energy, but you'd need another book entirely to get more info on that. Loki does say something to Thor about how Odin must have had to conjure an incredible amount of dark energy to send him to Earth, and the TDW prelude comic, which I think is still canon, adds that doing so took a massive physical toll on both Odin and Thor, such that Thor arrived unconscious. So if we're supposed to assume that Loki's use of the Tesseract also involved dark energy, then that maybe sort of implies he's so worn out purely from the journey--but it seems pretty ridiculous that you need, like, one and a half sources outside the actual film to know about that.

(interestingly, the art book also refers to dark energy in relation to Loki's possession of Clint, implying at the time that the scepter and Tesseract were meant to be related and nobody had any idea about the Infinity Stones, because that was retconned later...so it's also safe to say dark energy is just kinda whatever you want it to be.)

the art book has a couple other interesting things to say: "Loki is a pawn in a much larger game, manipulated by forces far more interested in the Tesseract's vast and heretofore untapped potential." some of what Tom's said in interviews about Loki's missing time between movies is echoed here too:

The original Avengers novelization, which I'm pretty sure is not technically considered canon, explicitly takes the stance that Loki is wrecked from portal travel:

(If you're thinking, hey, this looks interesting, perhaps it is a more nuanced take on Loki's motivations? It is not. Loki gets this one instance of mild sympathy from the narrator and then he's just a smirking, mustache-twirling Bad Guy.)

So all that to say...there is not a lot explaining what was meant by these scenes of Loki seeming genuinely ill after coming out of the portal, at least not from what I would consider to be truly reliable sources, but I have to very grudgingly admit that it does seem like the intent was probably just that he was in terrible shape because, somehow, the journey there by Tesseract through an unstable portal was that hard, because of reasons.