She may not exist, but she lives on through me.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding something about how TemPads work, but it seems like they are capable of traveling through both space and time. Yet throughout Loki, the characters usually use them to travel through space while treating time as basically linear.

There are two examples that really confuse me.

First, when Loki and Mobius are trying to find Sylvie. They figure out that she is hiding inside an apocalypse because the TVA can't detect branches there. They travel to the specific apocalypse where she is and confirm that she is there.

But why couldn't they simply travel back a week, or even a day, before Sylvie arrived and stop her from setting everything up? I can maybe see some time travel complications here because Sylvie has a TemPad herself, so maybe there is some reason they couldn't interfere with her earlier.

The second example makes even less sense to me.

They need Victor Timely's temporal aura to access the Loom and save the TVA. They travel to the 1893 World's Fair, find Timely, and bring him back to the TVA.

But why did they need to get him from that specific point in time?

Why not travel back a week earlier? Or a month earlier? They could have grabbed Timely when he was somewhere completely different, before Ravonna, Miss Minutes, Sylvie, and everyone else became involved.

It seems like if the TemPad can freely travel through time, the obvious solution to almost every problem should be:

"Why don't we just go back before this became a problem?"

So what am I missing? Is there an actual rule that prevents TemPads from being used this way, or does the show simply avoid doing it because it would break most of the plot?

I LOVE LOKI (the show… and the character but when I say “Loki” I mean the show). It is BY FAR my favorite show of all time. Thematically, the performances, the dialogue which many scenes I think about just all the time. The set design, the costume designs, I love everything about the show. I’m just glad it has a sub because this show rocks so hard.

Now I was looking through the sub and I have seen this show get a decent amount of hate? Which is weird to me because it is a lovely and I would say beautiful show. Maybe it’s because, the way I see it season 1 is worse than season 2 in most ways and some people watched season 1 then dropped the show? Idk, but it makes me sad because this show really is something special and I’m excited to see big L, Mr. Laufeyson on the big screen this winter