In the season finale of Loki, we were introduced to “He Who Remains,” the shadowy figure who’s been pulling the strings behind the TVA this whole time. Played by Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors, he was charming, megalomaniacal and more than a little crazy, and he — or rather, other versions of him — is going to have a huge effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward.
If you don’t want to be exposed to more SPOILERS, best stop reading now.
Kang the Conqueror is “such a different villain to Thanos”
Although the episode named him “He Who Remains,” this character is actually a version of Kang the Conqueror from Marvel Comics. And even though Loki writer Michael Waldron told Marvel.com that this version of the character is a “very charismatic sociopath,” the other versions throughout the multiverse are much, much worse.
You see, this Kang — let’s call him “Kang Prime” — created the TVA after millions of other versions of himself throughout the multiverse fought an interdimensional war that wrecked untold havoc on millions of worlds. The TVA’s job is to make sure these versions can’t get the traction they need to start the war up again, but now that Sylvie has killed Kang Prime, the sacred timeline is branching off, and the MCU — all the MCUs — are in grave danger.
That basically makes Kang the next Thanos-level threat our heroes will face. And we’ve only seen a hint of what he can do. “You had to leave a lot of meat on the bone in terms of how evil he could be, because that’s He Who Remains’ whole thing, that ‘It’s not me who you should be afraid of,’” Waldron said. “‘It’s the other versions of me that are going to come.’ It was trying to really hint at that terrifying evil within without going all the way there.”
It’s a little disappointing that Loki was all just a prelude to this next threat, but there is another season on the way. And Marvel has always been very careful with how it sets up its next moves. “It sets the table for future outings with them,” Loki director Kate Herron told IGN. “It was a massive responsibility and privilege to bring that character to the screen. He’s such a different villain to Thanos. I remember what I saw in the outline when I first pitched .”
"We wanted to end Loki’s story well, but also there’s this cliffhanger of, ‘Where’s he going to go?’ It was an ending that we all knew we wanted…that the multiverse would be born and open again, and here he goes…That’s what’s so exciting about these TV shows, they are going to interconnect with the movies in a big way. I found that really exciting, not only as a fan, but just as a filmmaker.”"
And there are a lot movies coming up where a dimension-hopping villain like Kang could play a part, including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Spider-Man: No Way Home. And who knows how he might play into the many Marvel movies and TV shows beyond that?
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