Spider-Man: No Way Home - Official Teaser Trailer, just released from Sony Pictures

[Psyren]

At about 2:27, does it look to anyone else like the sandstorm is blocking the lighting bolt?

Spoiler: Lightning

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Not sure--it looks like the lightning is kicking up a cloud of dust and debris, just short of Spidey.

Alternatively, the dust cloud could be interposing itself between Spidey and the lightning, but that's not my sense of what's happening. It looks more as if the lightning is walking its way towards Spidey and churning up a cloud as it goes. I really don't have the sense that the dust in this scene is moving of its own volition.

There are two "lightning and sand" shots - one at 2:13, and the one you two are discussing at 2:27. The latter one could potentially be dust being thrown/churned up by the lightning, but the former definitely isn't - the sand is swirling in the air before the lightning even touches the ground. Personally I don't think it's a coincidence that both times we see lightning we see sand as well.

Hmm, well if he found the one winning path, then he had to have viewed at least the five years until getting to the events of Infinity War. It's probable that he would have learned that he'd permanently lose the time stone in the process of those events.

What are the chances, then, that he'd be curious to look a little farther into the future to get the most of his last chance with the stone? I'd say decently good.

I assume you meant the events of Endgame in the bold bit there.

However, you're also assuming he can do that. The time stone he has was present for the events of Endgame, by virtue of having been borrowed from the past and used for the Third Snap (to bring everyone back) and the Fourth Snap (to kill Thanos and his army), then returned to the past of that same timeline without creating a branch. So seeing far enough to know "we succeed in undoing the Snap" doesn't mean he saw anything past Endgame where there is no more time stone.

The wibbly-wobbly bit about this is that that the events of Loki start at the end of the first Avengers movie. The fact that Dr. Strange saw several million futures and that in Endgame they killed an alternate timeline Thanos as well as their own tells me that the multiverse was well established by the time Strange was looking.

See above - that he saw a bunch of possibilities and identified the one with the Third and Fourth Snaps as the "right one" doesn't tell us how far past those events he Saw.

That Loki's person frame of reference effectively "begins" at the end of the first Avengers movie but the actual events of the series itself take place both across the timeline entirely and also in various special realms that exist entirely outside any possible frame of reference. Who knows when the multiverse is technically established to exist? Arguably it already always had the moment it started.

This too. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it's quite possible that everything Strange saw with his divinations, however far they went, is now invalid.