Loki: What’s hidden in plain sight in episode 2

What really happened during destruction of Pompeii

In a hysterical scene, Loki and Mobius travel to Pompeii, Italy in the year 79 A.D. just before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. There, Loki stands atop an ox cart, announces his presence in Latin, reveals to be from the future, and proclaims how everyone in Pompeii is about to die just as the volcano erupts – all to prove to Mobius that actions taken during apocalyptic events do not result in branching timelines, and that therefore the Loki variant must be hiding in one of them.

However, the actual eruption of Mount Vesuvius as shown in “The Variant” didn’t happen exactly as the episode depicted, either. For one thing, the destruction of Pompeii wasn’t so instantaneous. While The volcano did erupt in the early afternoon, it initially just spewed forth a thick plume of ash and smoke which not only blocked out the sun but also rained ash and soot over the entire city. This ash rain, also as lapilli, lasted for eighteen hours! A nearby settlement, Herculaneum, was also covered in volcanic mud, forcing the residents to evacuate to, as their bad luck would have it, into Pompeii itself.

Then sometime early the next morning, Vesuvius exploded, sending a cloud of super-hot ash towards Pompeii. Those who remained behind in the city died instantly from the intense heat burning their bodies and their lungs. It took a whole other day for the cloud to eventually disperse. By then, the entire city of Pompeii, along with an estimated 30,000 people, were buried under tons of volcanic ash and soot. All of this is based on direct eyewitness accounts, including from a then seventeen to eighteen-year old Pliny the Younger.

“But wait!” you say. “That implies that there were those who survived what happened at Pompeii.” That’s exactly right. It was during the eighteen hours when Vesuvius rained ash that some folks were wise enough to start leaving Pompeii as fast as they could. Those who stayed behind either couldn’t afford to evacuate or didn’t take the threat of impending doom seriously enough. After all, this wasn’t the first time Pompeii experienced volcanic activity, as an earthquake nearly destroyed the city some seventeen years earlier.

The point is, based on what actually happened during the eruption of Vesuvius, there’s the possibility that Loki did interfere with the timeline in that his speech could’ve warned those to evacuate after Vesuvius erupted. That would also mean his hypothesis that one can’t create branching timelines during apocalyptic events was also wrong. Then again, the MCU’s rules when it comes to time travel, as I’ve explained once before, can get rather complicated.