The Kang dynasty has arrived, as He Who Remains predicted.
Kang’s era has arrived, exactly as He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors as Kang) promised at the end of Loki season one if Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) did not agree to keep his sacred chronology intact.
And, indeed, everything altered the instant Sylvie chose wild revenge over Loki’s love, culminating in a reset that unleashed more Kangs into the multiverse. So, of course, it led to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantamania, where we saw Kang the Conqueror, who wants to be liberated so he can repair the shattered multiverse—which was caused by his variant’s errors. See, Kang variations all appear to believe they are correct and the others are incorrect, resulting in an all-out conflict.
Before we get too deep into the spoiler zone, if you haven’t seen Quantumnania and its end credits, or if you need to catch up on Loki season one, stop here.
The MCU’s Nexus Events
It’s fascinating that Quantamania came after all of the great MCU incursions—the choice of Sylvie in Loki season one, Peter Parker’s request in Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Wanda and Stephen overpowering their multiversal selves in Doctor Strange’s Multiverse of Madness. It gives audiences a chance to think about what Kang the Conqueror says about the multiversal conflict between all Kang versions, whom he set out to kill and prune for what they did. The Kangs appear to be doing this for control, producing enough intrusions to destroy the multiverse. It’s a fate that the MCU could face.
When varieties fight, everyone loses.
Now, I believe He Who Remains set out to find worthy opponents to himself… er—himself and found them in Loki and Sylvie. Consider this: the minute he realises he’s about to die, he realises that all of the Lokis in the vacuum collaborated to get him here, past even the Alioth he made to destroy Kangas. Maybe the Kangs will journey into the abyss at some time to try to grab the Time Variance Authority seat, but will they be able to get past themselves? And if they did make it, would they be able to defeat the Alioth? It took two Lokis working together, with the assistance of additional Lokis, to accomplish this. Why? For it is the power of love, which we see as the source of all MCU universe problems: Sylvie, Peter, and Wanda created incursions for those they love. This is critical since it is what eventually defeats Kang the Conqueror in Quantamania. Unless, of course, he did love previously… love a certain woman named Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who has had her memory erased. Perhaps Kang the Conqueror almost loved someone and that was viewed as a threat to all Kangs, so he was exiled and befriended someone else who had lost those they loved, such as Janet Van Dyne.
But, at their core, Kangas do not trust one another. When the big three Kang varieties convene in the first end credits scene, they hardly take each other’s word for Kang the Conquereor’s “death” and very much refer to the rest of their “lesser” forms as fodder to send out to take on the central menace of the Marvel heroes. The apparition of the Kang in a suit known as Mr Gryphon, CEO of QENG Enterprises, speculated to have owned Avengers Tower because we saw his name on the pruned tower in Loki, was one of the important things I witnessed here. Maybe Gryphon will play the business mogul seeking to get his hands on every piece of Stark tech in order to assist the dynasty.
What does Victor Timely have to do with Loki season 2?
The second end credits scene shows an early Kang, Victor Timely, who in the comics went back to 1901 and built the town of Timely, Wisconsin, reigning as mayor to make it an industrial competitor to Edison while ushering in an era of robotics and computer science. We see him unveiling an early prototype of what could be a steampunk version of the temporal core’s engine, seen in Quantumania, that allows him to move through the multiverse, and also possibly the start of the TVA’s use of it, put in place by He Who Remains, in his presentation introducing himself as Victor Timely and his Astounding Temporal Marvels.
Among the crowd, we see our favourite Disney+ chaos detectives, Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Loki, dealing with the fallout from Season One. This puts Loki and Sylvie on the verge of their roles as they begin to stop Kang’s variations. He Who Remains did predict they’d see more of him, and perhaps more of Loki, because, as Loki discovered with his versions, they frequently fail but do not die, a fact He Who Remains realises upon his death. Because they are chaos at their heart, and life is confusing and unpredictable, it would make sense for them to climb to timekeeping in the Multiverse Saga. We’ll see how their trip unfolds in Loki season two, which will be released later this year.
