This one was surprisingly easy!
After the mess that was Iron Man 2, imagine my delight when Thor contained almost no overt references to specific dates. It doesn’t do much good in the way of reinforcing a clear timeline, but it also doesn’t further muck with what we’ve already established. There will be plenty of muck to come, so I’ll take the easy ones where I can get ’em.
Before we begin, let’s once again go over the rules:
Rule #1: Only the movies are canon.
Rule #2: Title cards are always true.
Rule #3: References to dates in spoken dialogue are always true unless they conflict with rule #2.
Rule #4: Written dates that are prominently displayed in the world are usually true, unless they disagree with rules 2, 3, or each other.
Rule #5: Props and background objects that can be tied to a specific date almost never count.
What is this? Continuity in dates between Marvel movies? I can scarcely believe it! That is assuming that the number in the upper left corner of Jane Foster’s computer display is, in fact, a date. If it is, that lines up with the date shown on Tony Stark’s computer the day before his birthday party in Iron Man 2. That would be another piece of evidence to counter the conclusion I arrived at last time (that Iron Man 2 takes place in November of 2008 rather than May of 2010), but let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet. These things have a tendency to not be as airtight as they appear.
And here it is, the only explicit reference to a date in the entire movie! And it’s in the context of a flashback! This movie is like Christmas!
Anyway, here we learn that Asgard’s war with Jotunheim took place in 965 A.D. That’s not hugely significant now, but it will be important a little bit later on.
Here we have almost the exact same shot from the credits tag on Iron Man 2 establishing definitively that most of this movie is concurrent with the back half of Iron Man 2 (y’know, whenever that was).
When Loki discusses Thor’s bungled invasion of Jotunheim following his brother’s banishment, he says it happened “today.” What’s strange is that by the time he’s saying this, it’s already the following day on Earth. I’m gonna chalk this one up to intergalactic time zones and move on.
And here’s where 965 A.D. becomes significant. As long as we assume the war between Asgard and Yotunheim was resolved within a year (and there’s no reason not to assume that), that means Odin “adopted” Loki in the year of our Lord 965.
More fake IDs! Again, there’s no real information to be gleaned from this, but it reaffirms that this is definitely after November of 2006 and prior to November of 2014. Moving on.
This is why I said not to put too much stock in the “5.06” number from earlier, because here we have one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s computers – days later – displaying that same number. Is this just a continuity error? Almost certainly, but let’s go ahead and say it’s a version number for whatever software this is for an extremely soft No-Prize.
And… that’s it! Like I said, this was an easy one. Not much information to go on, but at least it doesn’t mess much with what we already had.
The Timeline So Far…
David Daut 