Because the Loki finale was such an enjoyable hour of television, I’m going to give you one last chance to get out of here before the spoilers start flying fast and loose. Be absolutely, positively sure you want to be here. Okay? All right. 

Comic book aficionados could have told you that there were a million indications that comic book villain Kang the Conqueror, a.k.a. He Who Remains, a.k.a. recent Emmy-nominee Jonathan Majors, showing up in the finale of Loki. (They don’t call the character Kang in the episode, or even in the closing credits—but for the sake of clarity, that’s what we’ll call him.) Still, many close-watchers, including myself, never envisioned that he would take up the lion’s share of the episode, monologuing and exposition-ing his heart out. 

We’ll get to who Kang is, the implications here for the wider MCU, and why a finale featuring, mostly, three people talking in a room felt so exhilarating. But first, as is befitting a time travel show, let’s start at the very end. 

The Loki creatives have cited several pop cultural influences on their show—but one that series director Kate Herron liked to come back to time and again was David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. (Loki’s credits are even inspired by Se7en’s.) That film features a villain (Kevin Spacey) who manipulates one of the heroes (Brad Pitt) into killing him. 

He does so by preying on the hero’s fatal flaw. In the case of Pitt’s character, it’s a hot temper. In the case of Kang and Sylvie, it’s trust.  

“Do you think you’re even capable of trusting anyone at all?” Kang adds, infecting Sylvie with a lethal dose of doubt. Sure, there’s some measure of free will operating in that citadel at the end of time. But as Kang explains to both Loki and Sylvie, he pulled all the strings to get them exactly where he wanted them. 

Loki fans don’t have to stretch all the way back to 1995 and Se7en to find clear inspiration for this manipulative showdown between Sylvie and Kang. Both series director Kate Herron and head writer Michael Waldron have cited the iconic sci-fi TV series Lost as an influence on their work as well. Last week’s episode, with its smoke monster and hatches, was just brimming with Lost allusions. But this week, the comparisons between the two shows run much deeper.  

If you’ve never seen Lost or don’t recall the details of a show that went off the air a decade ago, it features an ageless god (Jacob) who’s weary of holding chaotic evil at bay and a damaged anti-hero (Ben Linus) who’s manipulated into stabbing him to death. Both Sylvie and Ben Linus immediately seem to regret their choices. 

In killing one Kang, Sylvie has unleashed a horde of even worse Kang variants on the multiverse. That’s definitely not where the Lost comparisons end. Both Kang and Lost’s island god Jacob have tried to ensure that their positions will be filled by a worthy candidate. 

And by “worthy,” neither Jacob nor Kang mean they’re looking for saints. 

Both Loki and Lost are trying to grapple with themes of fate, free will, elemental evil, redemption, reality-altering love stories, and the question of whether someone can ever truly change their fundamental nature. Both shows also happen to involve time travel and a character who, thanks to a document (transcript or journal), knows everything that’s going to happen…right up until they don’t. 

I could keep you here all day making Lost allusions, but that’s not the only famous time travel text that seemed to influence the Loki finale. An iconic episode of Doctor Who, “Blink” also features a transcript from the future (or is it the past?)—and while you may not have watched that episode, you may have heard a nerd or two quote its most iconic line: 

And even those who are not nerds enough to have watched Doctor Who or even Lost will probably have dabbled in the most audience-friendly on-screen time travel story: Back to the Future. (Head writer Michael Waldron also cited Back to the Future as an influence on Loki. Steal from the best!) So let’s use that as a reference to explain what happens after Sylvie stabs Kang. As Kang explains to Loki and Sylvie, his tidy little TVA is the only thing holding back the possible onslaught of more vicious Kang variants. 

And so when Sylvie breaks the timeline and Loki travels back to the TVA, things look a lot different than when he left. Much like Marty McFly, waking up to find his loser dad is now a best-selling sci-fi author, Loki is the only one who remembers the previous timeline. 

Our first indication that something is wrong at the TVA is easily missable, because we might assume Mobius and B-15 are talking about Loki when they say “he.” 

But then it becomes clear that like the McFly family, Mobius and B-15 aren’t aware the timeline has been altered—and they don’t remember Loki at all. The “he” in question is probably Kang. Now, though, they’re not working at a TVA run by the Kang who hides in the shadows and uses cartoon propaganda and Time Keeper fictions to keep things running. No, this is a Kang who glorifies himself in the place of the Time Keeper triad. In other words, it seems likely a more villainous Kang variant is dominating this new reality. 

In Avengers: Endgame, time travel seemed to create realities that branched out rather than re-writing themselves. But as Waldron himself was careful to explain, that is just “the way the Avengers understand it.” Their conception of time travel doesn’t allow for an all-knowing conqueror at the end of the world, and a Loki variant with kicky highlights and major trust issues. Alternatively, it’s possible that Loki just mistakenly hopped a ride back to the wrong branch of time. Either way, he’ll have a big mess to clean up in the now-official Loki Season 2. 

Odds are Marvel fans won’t have to wait that long to see the fallout of Sylvie’s actions. The next show on the Disney+ docket in August is an animated series called What If…?  The show was originally pitched as a fun and fantastical ride that explored wild scenarios (What if Captain America were Peggy Carter? What if T’Challa were actually Star Lord?) and is based on an old comic book premise. But now it seems possible that What If…? could actually be an animated spin through this new multiverse going mad with variants. 

Speaking of Multiverses and Madness: both appear in the subtitle of the upcoming Doctor Strange film, co-starring Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, which will be released in March 2022.  When last we saw Wanda, she heard the voices of twin sons she thought she had merely invented. Were they calling to her from another multiverse? Loki head writer Michael Waldron told Vanity Fair that part of the fun of working on this show was “creating a disaster and just saying, “‘Yeah, we’ll leave that for the next writer.’” But then Waldron got hired to write the script for Doctor Strange and, as he said, had to clean up his own mess. So expect Loki and Strange to be directly connected. 

There’s also the long-gestating (and contested) rumor that Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire will appear in some form—perhaps as Peter Parker variants?—in Tom Holland’s next Spider-Man adventure, No Way Home, which will be out this December.  And, finally, Jonathan Majors—who ate up the screen in the Loki finale—is confirmed to appear as the antagonist in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which will be out in February 2023. In other words, Majors, in some Kang variant form or another, is here for the long MCU haul. 

Quantumania was written by Michael Waldron’s good friend Jeff Loveness, and the two say they worked in close collaboration on their respective projects. “Jeff’s dealing with the Quantum Realm and I was dealing with time travel and the multiverse,” Waldron told Vanity Fair. “Our conversations are probably illegal to have, digitally. We have to meet on a bridge somewhere.”

That’s enough about how Loki will ripple forward. In fact, all that forward momentum of these Disney+ projects is what critics often complain about. It’s probably time to talk about Kang himself, and why his appearance here in Loki was so effective. 

In the comics, the time-traveling Kang goes by many names: Nathaniel Richards, Immortus, Iron Lad, Rama-Tut. Some of those alter-egos are heroic, some villainous. But it’s accurate to say that in the comics, Kang, through quirks of time travel, has gone to war with his own alter-egos. So Kang’s explanation in the Loki finale that the thing he’s most afraid of is himself rings true. 

Jonathan Majors as Kang had to explain a lot in the finale, in long monologues that were almost entirely exposition. There is absolutely zero chance this episode would have worked were it not for Marvel hiring an actor as watchable and unpredictable as Majors. Every choice he made was a delightfully weird one, and I can’t remember a TV villain who announced himself with this much seductive, off-kilter charm since Andrew Scott strolled into BBC’s Sherlock as Jim Moriarty. 

By all laws of good television, the Kang reveal should not have worked. Here is a character that audiences (especially non-comic book readers) have zero connection to. Aside from phenomenally good casting, the Loki creatives also made some other very smart decisions. Firstly, they trusted the audience to sit and stew in the tension of that lengthy showdown. Waldron said before the season started that he “was watching Quentin Tarantino movies—Inglourious Basterds. Movies that luxuriate in long scenes of dialogue and tension building.” Waldron also rattled off some other surprising inspirations: Blade Runner, Before Sunrise, and Catch Me If You Can. It’s pretty easy, with the entire season in the rearview, to see where those dialogue-heavy influences came in. 

What was that long train date on Lamentis if not Before Sunrise? What was that tense three-hander between Sylvie, Loki, and Kang in the finale if not an answer to the brilliant tavern sequence in Inglourious Basterds?

Even Marvel fans will tell you that where the MCU sometimes goes mushy is in the big, CGI-heavy action set pieces that wrap up the third act of a given project. Even WandaVision and Black Widow—Marvel stories I loved—suffered a bit from this phenomenon. But Loki, astonishingly, didn’t end with one of those. Instead, we got long stretches of dialogue eventually punctuated by an emotional sword fight between our star-crossed Lokis, and concluding with an emotional betrayal. 

Even while Kang was yammering on (and I loved every yammer), the focus was still on the Lokis and their relationship. It all ended with a kiss, a stab in the back (not a literal one, thank goodness), and Sylvie shoving Loki out of her life. The show kept the focus on character and emotion, and kept the world-ending stakes surprisingly personal. 

As for everything that happened back at the TVA, I’ll admit that was a little soft and certainly not the most impactful use of Owen Wilson. No, we didn’t get Mobius on a jet ski. And, no, the payoff for Ravonna’s special pen didn’t exactly blow anyone’s hair back. But we do get an indication that Judge Rennslayer is several steps closer to fulfilling her comic book destiny as Kang’s love interest and partner in crime. In fact, she may have even helped the villainous variant we see in charge of the TVA in the show’s final minutes achieve his goal. 

But as the mid-credits promise that Loki (and likely Mobius) will return in a second season, we can just consider this a tasty cliffhanger. 

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