Loki wrapped up its first season on Disney+ today, and unlike WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier before it, this is indeed its first season: after the credits, we got a quick stinger where we saw a stamp come down on Loki’s TVA file. When it lifted, we read those fated words: Loki will return in season 2.
This is a big deal, and not just because Loki is probably the best of the Marvel series released so far and the one I’m most interested in seeing more of. It signals that Disney is confident enough to mix things up. Maybe WandaVision can stand as its own thing, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier can lead into a movie, and Loki can be an ongoing series. Given how many new Marvel series are in development, I expect to see a lot more experimentation, and that’s exciting.
In fact, Loki will both continue as a series and lead into some movies. Here’s the part where we talk SPOILERS for the season 1 finale, “For All Time. Always.”
Who is “He Who Remains” (Jonathan Majors) and what role will he play in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
In this episode, Loki and Sylvie finally meet the person who’s truly behind the TV, an enigmatic man known only as “He Who Remains,” played by Lovecraft Country star Jonathan Majors.
That said, the identity of “He Who Remains” was probably clear to comic book reads. This is a version of Kang the Conqueror, who on the page runs rampant throughout the multiverse conquering whole realities. Specifically, it’s a variant of Kang who’s a little less dictatorial than some of his counterparts, and who figured out a way to quiet the chaos caused by his other selves by creating the TVA and continually pruning the “sacred timeline.” In the comics, this version of the character is named Immortus.
At the end of the episode, Loki finds himself in an alternate version of the TVA ruled by a different version of Kang who has a statue of himself in the lobby; it looks like this one is more of a hard-ass than the somewhat daffy, weary Kang Loki and Sylvie encounter beyond the Void. What’s more, we already know that Jonathan Majors is going to turn up as the villain in the upcoming Ant-Man 3. The Ant-Man movies deal with quantum physics and multiple dimensions, so it would make sense to see Kang there. The upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness also deals with the multiverse, obviously. And we’ve heard lots of rumors about Spider-Man: No Way Home playing with the topic. And let’s not forget that the next Marvel series What If…?, is all about alternate versions of events from the MCU.
It looks like Marvel is setting up a huge storyline involving battles fought across realities, with Jonathan Majors’ Kang at the center of it all!
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