Loki may just have introduced the MCU’s next big villain

Disclaimer: Full spoilers for the season finale of Loki below.

Go in Loki, I honestly thought it was going to be a fun time-traveling trips that would be more focused on developing the main character, rather than expanding the meta-narrative of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After WandaVision than Civil war.

Therefore, I was wrong.

Wednesday’s surprisingly subdued finale ended up having bigger implications for the MCU as a whole. The last time we left Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), they had just defeated the cloud beast Albion and opened a portal to the End Times Citadel. (Can I just say I loved how fucking cartoonish this show was?) After entering the Citadel and having a brief chat with Miss Minutes, who appears to be more than just a fancy AI used by the Time Variance Authority, they are hosted by The One Who Remains (Jonathan Majors).

Although he is never called by name, it is almost self-explanatory that the one who remains is in fact Kang the Conqueror. Plus, there’s the fact that we learned last year that Majors would be playing the character in Ant-Man: Quantumania.

The episode was a surprisingly talkative affair, with He Who Remains explaining his role in shaping the multiverse and protecting it from one of its most dangerous threats: himself. He explains that several variations of himself have discovered that there are multiple realities all stacked on top of each other. Some of the variants only wanted to learn and share knowledge among themselves, while others had decidedly less noble activities. (Considering the word “conquer” is in its name, it doesn’t take much to imagine what those activities were.)

Whoever remains gives them an ultimatum: Let him live and stay where he is, protecting the timeline from all its variations, or they can kill him and potentially start another multiverse war.

Sigh. If only I could go back to 2008 and tell myself at 16 that there was going to be a multiverse war. I’m pretty sure the teenager’s response would have been “Wait, Marvel has a multiverse?” I had thought it was DC’s thing. “

Either way, Sylvie and Loki are fighting because Loki is like “Yo, this man says if we kill him we might just start a new level of hell on reality.” Sylvie, meanwhile, was like, “All my life I had to fight, Loki. You don’t know what this man took from me, Loki. Now you better get up, before I let you.

Spoiler: she kicks him out of the way, then drives her blade into the heart of the One Who Remains. This sends the multiverse into chaos, with the timeline surrounding the citadel fragmenting into multiple avenues.

Unfortunately, given how things are being announced so far in advance these days, we know a lot about where the MCU is heading. We already know that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Path Home will deal explicitly with the multiverse. We also already know that Majors is set to return as Kang. then The ant Man. Based on all of this information, it looks like Kang is positioning himself as the next big bad in the MCU. The next Thanos, if you will.

I am very curious to see what is the end of the game here. Are we going to see Kang flout the Avengers through their separate films? Will Loki Does season 2 act as a prelude to the multiverse war? Made What if… from Marvel?, actually have more relevance to the larger story than we originally thought?

I don’t know, but I can’t wait to see how it all turns out. Personally, I find the idea of ​​Majors potentially embodying multiple versions of Kang incredibly cool. His performance as The One Who Remains was charismatic, at once tragic, manic and at times charming. I’m always happy to see Black people win, and I love that an actor of the caliber of the Majors was given what looks like an incredibly crucial role in one of the most popular franchises in the world.