How does killing He Who Remains in the future change the past?

Question

In the last episode of Loki, killing He Who Remains changes the reality in the TVA. And he says that killing him will unleash his evil variants. But how?

How does killing a person in the future undo what they did in the past? It would make sense if Sylvie killed him in the past, before he makes contact with his other variants.

Also isn't it established in Endgame that time-travel can't change the reality? If you travel to the past and change something, you create a new time-line. The other still exists. So Sylvie sends Loki back before killing Khan, then a new time-line is created. This way Loki's reality shouldn't change.

What am I missing?

Answer 1

It doesn't. Refusing to police the timeline does.

To answer your question directly, killing He Who Remains changes nothing about the timeline as it exists at that moment. The problem is that the TVA polices and prunes the timeline so that it doesn't branch and create new, alternate timelines.

The show makes it clear that the universe is chock full of possible branching points and that new branching points pop into existence all the time. We know that this can happen due to people time traveling as illustrated by Loki and Sylvie throughout the show but it also seems plausible for variants to be created entirely on their own as a natural occurrence.

Either way, once He Who Remains is out of the picture, no one is left to dispatch the TVA to prevent new nexus events. The timeline branches rapidly from there and the TVA is sent into a scramble.

Thus, the multiverse is born!

This answer does a good job explaining that there have been some mixed signals from Marvel as to how the changes to the timeline are affecting the TVA but the fact that there are changes to the TVA at all actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Here's why:

The TVA is composed entirely of variants, as is Kang himself. If we follow Kang through this process, every time the timeline branches, a new universe comes into existence with its own potential Kang variant. That variant follows the same path that He Who Remains outlined in his conversation with Loki and Sylvie:

1. He discovers the multiverse.
2. He finds a way to communicate with his own variants.
3. They share technology.
4. They wage war.
5. The winner establishes the TVA to secure peace.

It's entirely expected that a new Kang with a new pool of variants to recruit from is going to create a new TVA.

Answer 2

The Citadel at the End of Time, where He Who Remains lives, really exists outside of time. As such it isn’t in the future or the past in relation to the main timelines and so time travel doesn’t really make sense. The Endgame explanation for time travel simply isn’t relevant here.

It’s also worth highlighting the below quote from the intro quotes in the last episode.

Alan Watts: We think of time as a one-way motion.

_{Loki, Season 1 Episode 6, “For All Time, Always”}

Here the quote is talking about the fact that time simply isn’t one way/linear. That’s how we’re used to thinking about it but the philosophical theory is deeper than that. I won’t pretend to know it thoroughly or understand but in short and generalising it’s about another way of thinking on time and how it’s circular.

As such then it means time is constantly moving and so it’s not that once something has happened it has happened. Time is constantly happening again and again and therefore there really is no concept of past or future. Even more so when you exist outside of said time.

This question may also be relevant for you to look at.

Answer 3

Let me add something to what TheLethalCarrot said. From his vantage point in the future/outside of time/whatever, He Who Remains dictated the flow of the Sacred Timeline. Using the TVA, he had every "branch" of the Sacred Timeline which wasn't to his liking reset and pruned - i.e. effectively destroyed.

It seems reasonable to me to assume that, in this way, he prevented there being any branches of the timeline where variants of himself, or anyone else, discovered a way to communicate with other branches, since a multiversal war would quickly follow in that scenario.

Therefore, once he was killed, the TVA stopped functioning (he dictated their moves after all), and a multiversal war started, sometime in the past.

As to why that also changed the TVA, which supposedly also exists in the future/outside of time, see this question.