Odin appears only in the opening moments, and he does not survive them. He is mid-conquest alongside Hela when Surtur moves against Asgard before Odin has the chance to secure the Tesseract. He attempts to use it as a weapon against Surtur to save his home, and he fails. Asgard burns, and the Tesseract is lost to the cosmos, eventually crashing into a lake in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and setting everything that follows in motion.

His presence is entirely in the past tense by the time the main events unfold, but his failure is the engine of the whole story. Every consequence, every power, every battle on the shores of a continent he never knew existed traces back to the moment he reached for the Tesseract and it slipped away from him.