‘Loki’ season finale breaks the Marvel multiverse wide open
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Editor’s note: “Loki” spoilers through season 1, episode 6.
For all time. Always.
“All time” is now on the table following the season finale of “Loki” on Disney+. Marvel head Kevin Feige wasn’t kidding around when he said that this series would forever alter the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
After battling their way through the Time Variance Authority and besting a giant sentient cloud monster in the Void, Loki and Sylvie have finally made it to the Citadel at the end of all time. Once they have a quick chat with Miss Minutes (sympathies to everyone who thought she was going to be revealed as the Big Bad), it’s time to find out who’s behind all of this.
And it’s… some guy.
For casual viewers, the reveal of Kang the Conqueror may have been a little underwhelming at first. I mean, it’s just some dude in a purple robe, acting awfully strange. He doesn’t have any sort of impressive costume or armor, and his only seeming ability is that he is always one step ahead of Sylvie’s sword.
But that’s the thing: Kang is way more than just one step ahead.
Played with gleeful weirdness by Jonathan Majors, Kang slowly reveals what’s been going on, and it turns out the goofy TVA video Loki watched in the series’ first episode was 100% true about everything except the Time Keepers. There really was a multiverse war with timelines competing to destroy each other and attain dominance.
What the video left out, however, is that all of those timelines were being led by Variants of Kang, and the multiverse war was a giant battle of Kangs against other Kangs.
As “Loki” progressed, and got more and more bizarre, it kind of slipped my mind that everyone in the universe has their own set of Variants. That includes domineering, time-traveling genius super-villains like Kang. The Kang we meet is the one who came out on top in the war. He managed to harness and weaponize Alioth, the giant sentient cloud monster from the last episode, in order to rid existence of the timelines he deemed too dangerous. Then he created the TVA and cleaned the multiverse up into the Sacred Timeline, essentially to protect the universe from the worst versions of himself.
But my question is: Why leave the fate of the multiverse in the hands of a couple of mischievous Lokis? Kang claims he’s gone through all of the scenarios, trying to find the right person to take his spot, and Loki and Sylvie are the ones.
Neither of them ask about this, and Kang doesn’t volunteer any specific reason. He offers Loki and Sylvie a choice – they can return to the TVA as its new rulers, and take charge of maintaining the Sacred Timeline, or they can go through with Sylvie’s mission of killing whoever is behind the TVA and setting the timeline free.
However, Kang claims that killing him will essentially set the multiverse war back into motion, a chain of events that will once again lead to a bunch of Kang Variants duking it out for universal supremacy. And that will ultimately lead back to this precise moment, with a Kang Variant winning the war and (re-)creating the TVA so it can’t happen again.
Early on in the episode, Miss Minutes initially refers to Kang as “He Who Remains.” That is a comic-book reference to the last surviving member of the TVA, who sticks around in order to hit the reset button and kick-start a new universe.
Sylvie is ready to complete her mission, but Loki believes Kang. When he tries to convince Sylvie to take a moment and consider what they’re about to do, she takes it as yet another bit of Loki trickery.
“You want the throne,” she says, undoing a good bit of the character development she’s undergone in the past few episodes.
But that’s not the case. Loki has fallen in love, albeit with a version of himself, and his tender kiss with Sylvie is a nice emotional moment, even if it’s not really what I was hoping to get out of this relationship. I was under the impression their relationship was a kind of metaphor for learning to love yourself and realizing that you can indeed change. Perhaps that’s still the case. But we don’t get much time to think about it, since Sylvie opens a time door and shoves Loki back to the TVA, before plunging her sword into Kang’s chest.
She looks out the window of the Citadel to see timelines branching off at a rapid pace, and we never get to see what happens to her there at the end of all time and space. I’ll be pretty curious to see where that goes.
Meanwhile, Loki mourns the loss of his newfound love before going to warn Mobius about what has happened.
And it’s here where Marvel really pulled the rug out from under us and opened up the MCU for any and all possibilities. Mobius doesn’t know who Loki is. He assumes Loki is a TVA analyst and asks what division he’s from. And when Loki looks out into the TVA’s main hall, we get a slow pan to a crazy reveal: The Time Keeper statues are gone, replaced by a single statue of Kang in his comics-accurate costume. Sylvie’s decision has already altered the timeline so much that the TVA she sends Loki back to is now ruled openly by Kang the Conqueror.
“Multiverse of Madness,” indeed. Bring on Phase 4, Marvel.
A few un-pruned variants
• Unlike most everything else we’ve seen from Marvel so far, this truly does change the entire MCU. With timelines bumping into one another unchecked, literally anything is possible, from a universe full of X-Men mutants to the myriad possibilities that will be raised in Marvel’s upcoming “What If?” series. That’s exciting.
• I wasn’t too satisfied with the conclusion of Mobius’ storyline. Not only did he not burn down the TVA, he didn’t even figure out what Ravonna Renslayer is really up to. After handily disarming him, Renslayer simply stepped through a time door saying she was looking “for free will.” No clue what that means. In the comics, Renslayer is Kang’s girlfriend. I wonder if she’s going to travel the multiverse and ultimately end up with one of his Variants.
• The opening sequence did a really good job of illustrating what was at stake in this episode, as we zoomed through time and space as audio snippets from the entire MCU narrated the Big Bang and the consolidation of the multiverse, culminating in a gorgeous shot of Loki and Sylvie standing within the Sacred Timeline, in front of the Citadel.
• I’m going to be honest – I’m disappointed that Alligator Loki didn’t have some small role in the season finale. That said, we’re getting a second season. I look forward to learning more about what Sylvie does at the end of time, and whether our Loki makes a hero’s turn and tries to undo the damage Sylvie’s done, either from within or without the TVA. That said, there’s no set release date for the second season, so who knows where it will fall in the future MCU timeline?