Loki, the third Disney+ series of MCU’s Phase 4, ended with the multiverse coming into play. The series finale ‘For All Time.
Always.’ revealed the mastermind behind the Time Variance Authority (TVA) to be He Who Remains, a variant of Marvel supervillain Kang the Conqueror.
The final moments saw Sylvie and Loki fight and make up when she betrays him by pushing him through a TemPad and into the TVA. Sylvie kills He Who Remains as she’s driven by revenge.
However, it’s not before he explains that there will be worse versions of him, who’ll rise in his stead when the Sacred Timeline bursts into the multiverse.
A dejected Loki then runs to find Mobius, only to realize that he (his first true friend that he’s ever made) doesn’t recognize Loki anymore, or to frame it better, is a whole another version of himself.
And to top it all off, Loki looks around and sees He Who Remains’ statue in place of the Time Keepers Trio that we saw throughout the series.
Forget about a different person; Loki is in a whole another reality!
Director Kate Herron talked to THR and explained exactly why Loki ended up in an alternate version of the TVA,
So the way I see it in my head is that the TVA exists outside of space and time, but reality and everything as we understood it has completely changed in the last few minutes. With the multiverse branching, how do we know the TVA still exists in that way?
Kate Herron
We don’t know, and I suppose that’s a big question that will be answered as the show goes on. But in my head, the intention is that Sylvie thinks she’s sending him back to the TVA, but because of the way time and branches are crossing each other outside the window, Loki has unfortunately been sent back somewhere very different.
So reality has shifted just by the nature of what He Who Remains said, and the idea is that he’s in this alternate TVA now.
It’s a tiny detail, but it’s easy to spot. When He Who Remains is explaining the grand scheme of things, you can see that outside his window, the timeline had already branched quite a bit.
He also explains that as they were talking, the point of him being ‘all knowing’ passed. After all, they were standing in a Citadel situated at the end of time itself.
To explain it in one line, it’s as if the writer of a novel dying before he can add finishing touches to his story. And now that he’s gone, there are a million others who’ll try to give it an ending that they find appealing.
This analogy is kind of accurate, seeing how head writer Michael Waldron told Marvel.com that the creative team went through different endings before settling on the one that was delivered,
There were different versions of it [and] it was something that was developed over the hiatus. It was finally kind of locked in, like, alright, this feels right. We’ve maybe closed one chapter of the story, and that is something that gives us thrilling propulsive energy into whatever happens next.
Michael Waldron
So what I gather from this is that they can have an alternate reality where Mobius works at another version of the TVA but can’t have one where he’s riding a jet-ski? Come on, Marvel… Get this man a shield jet-ski.
In the THR interview, Herron praised Jonathan Majors and called him the perfect choice for He Who Remains,
Jonathan Majors is an actor that we were all just blown away by; I think everyone who knows his work is blown away by him. He’s an amazing actor, and the thing that I love about him is that he’s this chameleon. He’s so different in everything he does, and that’s exciting, obviously, when you’re asking an actor to play a character who’s going to have a lot of different versions of himself. So for us, that was a thrill.
Kate Herron
Majors is set to appear as Kang The Conqueror in the next Ant-Man installment, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which still has a long wait until its 2023 release.
About Loki
Loki is an American TV series created by Michael Waldron for Disney+ and Marvel. It is based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name and is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with events of the series taking place after Avengers: Endgame.
Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as Loki along side new faces like Owen Wilson, Gugu Mbatha Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Sophia Di Martino, Richard E. Grant, Sasha Lane, Eugene Cordero and Erika Coleman.
After stealing the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, Loki is apprehended by the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA) and their Time-Keepers. Loki is given a choice between fixing all the timelines he broke with the Tesseract and death at the hands of the TVA.
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