THE MULTIVERSE
WHEN KEVIN FEIGE told Empire, just before Loki started its run, that it “will have more impact on the MCU than any of the [Disney+] shows thus far”, he wasn’t telling porkies. By the end of its six episodes, two major (and one Majors) things had happened: the introduction of He Who Remains, the power behind the TVA whose timely demise will herald the arrival of Phase Four big bad Kang; and the creation of the Multiverse, the very thing the TVA was apparently designed to prevent. Move over, Phil Tippett: Owen Wilson’s Mobius is now the king of ‘you had one job’ memes.
That Loki would end with the creation of the Multiverse, in which infinite possibilities and infinite versions of infinite characters theoretically exist, was always the, for want of a better word, endgame here. “A nice lighthouse for us as a creative team was, ‘At the end of this thing we’re going to blow the lid on the Multiverse,’” says the show’s head writer and creator, Michael Waldron. “And what better character to do that than Loki? The character who originally brought the Avengers together is now directly responsible for this next phase of madness.”
Waldron is not using that word casually. His next gig after Loki was to co-write Sam Raimi’s upcoming MCU movie, Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. The title of that movie always served as an indicator that Loki might end with a tremendous split in the bumhole of the trousers of time — something Waldron confirms, albeit in somewhat circumspect fashion. “When Loki started, a Multiverse didn’t exist in the MCU and now it does,” he says. “So that means there’s a lot more shit to deal with for our heroes, and I guess Doctor Strange is exactly the type of guy you might expect to be in the centre of that stuff.”
Also potentially in the centre is Kang The Conqueror, a time-trotting tyrant who is a variant(s) of He Who Remains — or more accurately now, He Who Is Remains — a 31stcentury scientist who was the last survivor of a vicious Multiversal War between Kangs from every timeline. Now that that variant is firmly in the past tense, Kang is set to be the MCU’S future. Before he showed up in Loki, Jonathan
Majors was expected to debut as Kang in Ant-man And The Wasp: Quantumania, but now nothing is off the table. With Spider-man: No Way Home set to explore the Multiverse and introduce characters we last saw in the Sam Raimi and Marc Webb Spider-movies, there’s a good chance that Kang may pop up there first, as well as in the Doctor Strange sequel.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The final episode of Loki, which Waldron co-wrote with Eric Martin, was notable for the way in which it gave the floor to Majors for a showstopping monologue, painting a memorable portrait of a deeply fractured mind. “He’s just a tremendous performer,” says Waldron of Majors. “He was doing 20-minute takes. The monologue was expository, we always knew, and in the writing of it I knew we were gonna dump mythology here. It was about letting Jonathan find his way through it, and really build this version of this character. Because who knows what other versions we’ll see down the line?”
Given Kang’s importance to the future (and present, and past) of the MCU, it’s a natural leap to make to assume that the character was foisted upon Waldron when he signed on to Loki. Not so. “Because we knew it was time-travel, there was always the possibility of, ‘Well, is there any way to work Kang in here?’” he says. “It seemed that there was a real appetite to do Kang, because Kang is a time-travelling Multiversal villain, and we were doing a time-travelling multiversal adventure. Marvel were cool with that, and they were excited about it. What really worked in our favour was that we’re in enough of a nascent stage of these MCU shows that the audience doesn’t know they’ll introduce a Big Bad like this in the finale of a TV show. So we got really excited about the idea of dropping that bomb ten minutes into the finale and letting everybody just go, ‘Holy shit!’”
Ultimately, Kang proves such a threat that Loki (who also heralded the arrival of Thanos, lest we forget) ends the season gripped by fear of what might lie ahead. Which itself raises questions about what the God Of Mischief might do about this situation. It seems unlikely that Loki Season 2 will debut before the end of 2022, which seems like an awfully long time for Loki to remain out of time. So, might we see him pop up earlier? Perhaps in a certain magical, mad, multiversal sequel? “You never know,” teases Waldron. “You never know with Loki.” Time will tell.