Despite only being six episodes long, each installment of Loki has continued selling me on the whole “weekly installments” thing. With only one episode left, there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered, the most important being “Who is responsible for creating the TVA?”
**Spoilers for Loki episode “Journey into Mystery.”**
Episode five of Loki was delightful, from the smorgasbord of variant Lokis to the fantastic CGI budget that is being spent very well, and all of the acting. It takes a lot to really sell that Classic Loki pajama costume, but Richard E. Grant did it with Academy Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe-nominated pathos. You love to see it. He understood the assignment, etc.
Still, what I found myself enthralled by is the person Sylvie describes as “the man behind the curtain.” I guess every timeline has The Wizard of Oz. With the discovery in last week’s episode that the Time Keepers were just robots, the new goal for Sylvie and Loki has been to figure out who exactly is in charge. Back at the TVA, Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer and Wunmi Mosaku’s Hunter B-15 are both curious about what the truth is. While B-15 has rebelled against her role as hunter, Ravonna has stayed loyal to the figurehead of the TVA.
Who that is, we still don’t know.
Best guess right now is Kang.
Kang the Conqueror has been floating around on the internet as the ultimate baddie of this season because he is both a time-traveling entity and connected to Ravonna in the comics.
The character was created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, which you can pretty much tell from his design alone. Originally named Nathaniel Richards, a possible 31st century relation to Mr. Fantastic himself, Nathaniel is a scientist in the future who becomes consumed by time-traveling technology created by Dr. Doom and tries to take over the world by traveling into the past. He gets stopped by The Fantastic Four once, and later The Avengers.
Eventually, he tears open a portal in time and flings himself into a future where his evil is law—wait, wrong show, but still accurate. He takes over a future Earth with advanced technology and decides to use these new advantages to continue his quest to conquer a better, more fertile Earth. By his side in this conquest is Ravonna Lexus Renslayer, his lover. They have a true, but toxic love—a lot of stabbing through the heart.
Our Rachel Leishman spoke about this when bringing up that the Time-Keepers—Ast, Vorth, and Zanth—were all defeated by Kang the Conqueror, but we don’t know how much of that lore is at play in Loki or what is really happening with the Time-Keepers.
Kang has already been cast in the MCU, with Lovecraft Country‘s Jonathan Majors, and will be the baddie in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. This will be the perfect time to tie Kang into the MCU world at large.
But that’s just my guess, and ultimately, I’m just along for the jet ski ride.
(image: Marvel Entertainment )
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