The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has left too many topics open over the past few years—remember the giant hand that emerged from Earth in Eternals? Apparently nobody in the MCU does that. There’s been no bigger recent spoilers than that at the end of Loki Part 1. At the time, we knew what happened was going to lead to the MCU’s next big bad thing, but we didn’t get the point. its meaning in the next section. Present.
But now, six movies and five TV seasons later, the MCU follows that villain for the first time in Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania. It’s a kind of indirect tracking, but it’s enough for us to make some pretty solid inferences.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, as well as Loki Part 1. The article also makes speculations about Loki Part 2.
In the final episode of Loki Season 1, Loki and Sylvie met He Who Remains, played by Jonathan Majors. This character is secretly running the Time Variance Management Agency, or TVA – the organization that maintains a stable timeline and prevents the multiverse from spiraling out of control. He gives Loki and Sylvie a choice: They can kill him, freeing up the timeline and allowing the multiverse to take root and allow everyone to find a better solution to keeping time steady, or they can leave things as they are.
But if they kill him, He Who Remains warned, worse alternate versions of him will fight each other across the multiverse for control of everything, possibly ending all reality. . Sylvie, tired of his perpetual manipulations, brought him out of his misery, opened up the multiverse and let Loki see if he could save things at TVA.
Except TVA was different. No one, not even Owen Wilson’s Mr. Mobius, remembers Loki or anything that he and Sylvie did. And now there’s a large statue of Jonathan Majors, which once housed statues of the Timekeeper.
What we do know then is that Kang the Conqueror is currently playing in the MCU multiverse. That’s the point of this whole story: freeing Kang and ushering in the next big arc of the MCU saga. So we know there’s a new status quo. All reality has changed right under everyone’s feet. But we didn’t know How Exactly, it has changed.
But after watching Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, we already have enough information to figure it out in time for Loki Part 2 this summer.
In the movie, we learn that Kang has a long history in the Quantum Realm. In fact, Janet Van Dyne’s entire time in the Quantum Realm revolves around him: first when she helps him repair his multiverse, and then when she helps the inhabitants. Other of the Quantum Realm fight against him. She lost that war and returned to the wild parts of the Quantum Realm far from the city, and that’s where Ant-Man and friends found her in the previous movie.
That Kang from the Quantum Realm was just one of many Kangs, and he was intentionally exiled there because the other Kangs didn’t like what he was doing. But this Kang isn’t exactly a good person, and our heroes end up having to fight and kill him.
In the mid-credits scene, we learn that the other Kangs are pretty upset about one of them being killed. Not that they were particularly interested in him, but because whoever killed him was probably a big threat to the rest. And so, the main Kang of this scene, the villain of the Fantastic Four, Rama-Tut, gathers the entire Kang Council – that is, all the Kangs with good relations – to speak out.
For a full, detailed explanation of Kang, you’ll want to read on this explanation which gets all the way into the weeds. For the short version, we should look at Kang as opposed to Loki and Sylvie. Loki and Sylvie are variations of each other – different versions of the same character born from different universes. But the other Kangs are instead a person who has lived forever in different times, who has diverged because Kang himself interfered in his own past and future.
Think of it like this. Loki and Sylvie are products of the multiverse–but Kang create a person by interacting with his past and future selves.
What is Kang doing with TVA in Loki Season 2
Given what happened in Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, it’s not too difficult to guess what task TVA will be tasked with under Kang’s rule: Instead of hunting down and eliminating all rogue variants, They will hunt down Kangs that are not suitable for them. programme. There are some of them from the comics, including some who are actually good people.
In the post-credits scene, we see Loki and Mr. Mobius follows Victor Timely, a prominent Kang in comics living in Wisconsin in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who introduces advanced technology to the past that is ultimately used by heroes, including the Fantastic Four, decades later. That could certainly be what the Kangs Council wants to strangle, especially with Fantastic Four ready to make a big splash in the battle against Kang.
Hopefully this story will start to be explored elsewhere in the MCU. Even though Avengers: The Kang Dynasty is only two years away, Marvel has barely done any work to establish its arc. Even now I’m just making well-founded conjectures about Loki Season 2, because Quantumania doesn’t actually make any direct or indirect reference to the events of Loki Season 1 – it shows the outcome of those events, but not how we got here from there.
Fingers intertwined, we get some solid answers this year–Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Marvels, mini-series Secret Invasion and Loki Season 2 are all pretty good candidates for more details on Kang.
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