Loki episode 6 ending explained-The finale of Loki brought the six-episode first season of the Disney Plus series to a spectacular end. Aside from leaving us with the confirmation of a second season, the final episode heralded a new villain for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Who is he? Who plays him? What are his comic origins?
Who plays He Who Remains?
Loki and Sylvie enter the citadel at the end of time, where they find an eccentric, apple-munching man in lordly robes. The actor who plays the scientist known as He Who Remains is Jonathan Majors.
Majors is best known for starring in The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods (2020) and for playing Atticus Freeman in HBO’s recently canceled Lovecraft Country (2020).
Who’s the character in the comics?
Although his other name is never referred to in the finale, He Who Remains’ comic counterpart is Kang the Conquerer. The version we meet is a scientist from the 31st century who had the grand idea to create the Time Variance Authority to prevent evil variants of himself from destroying the multiverse.
In the comics, Kang is a baddy also from the 31st century who’s faced off against the Avengers many times (and in many incarnations) since his ’60s debut.
To really deep-dive into Kang’s comic origins, head into potential MCU spoiler territory here.
What did Sylvie unleash?
Thanks to Sylvie’s decision to kill He Who Remains, the multiverse can now branch freely. He Who Remains is no longer there to keep his evil variants in check — by feeding them and their timelines to Alioth, that big purple people-eating cloud.
We’ll likely meet the evil variants in Kang the Conquerer form, free to run wild and cause havoc, no doubt giving the Avengers their next big headache.
When will we see Kang the Conquerer next?
Deadline had reported all the way back in September that Majors would be playing Kang the Conquerer in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The threequel doesn’t yet have an exact release date, but it’ll arrive sometime in 2023, following a host of other MCU movies, including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Will we see Kang appear in one of his variant forms in the Doctor Strange sequel? Maybe.
When’s season 2 of Loki?
In a tiny mid-credits scene, we see official confirmation there’ll be a season 2 of Loki. This makes it the first MCU series to have a follow-up season on Disney Plus (not including animated series What If…?).
When will we see it? We don’t know yet. What we can go off is reports development had already begun last November, indicating the show’s timeline is as meticulously planned as the Sacred Timeline.
As for other Marvel Disney Plus series, WandaVision was only intended as a limited miniseries. The Falcon and The Winter Soldier have yet to confirm more episodes or whether there’s a chance the story will be continued in a big-screen adventure starring Anthony Mackie as the new Captain America.
How the Loki finale might impact the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse.
What If…?
The next MCU TV series will be an animated show that explores what could have happened if things in the main timeline went differently, things like what if Peggy Carter took the super-soldier serum or Yondu kidnapped T’challa instead of Star-Lord as a child. Before the Loki finale, this seemed like a simple throwback to the What If comic series, but now that we know there are vastly different universes bumping around in unspace, What If…? might actually be a canonical look at what some of those multiple universes look like.
Eternals
This is where it gets interesting. The trailer for Eternals establishes that the titular Eternals are beings of immense power who have been around basically forever, which raises the question as to why the heck they let the Avengers handle Thanos instead of stepping in to save half the universe. Their answer, via the trailer: “Throughout the years we have never interfered…until now.” One must wonder what huge recent event might spur a team of immortal god-like beings into action. Is it the rise of another, much worse godlike being who threatens reality more than Thanos ever could?
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Marvel, it’s time to stop being coy about this one. The incredibly persistent rumors that the third Spider-Man movie will unite Tom Holland’s Peter Parker with that played by Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man and Tobey Maguire from the OG Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy have been around for ages. Alfred Molina even spilled the beans about coming back as Doc Ock in an interview and no one from the MCU said anything about it! Loki has finally established a canonical reason for the Marvel multiverse to crack open and start crossing over, so let’s take this as a virtual confirmation that we’re getting a live-action version of the Spider-verse. For real this time.
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
This one’s pretty easy. Before appearing in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Doctor Strange will also be in Spider-Man: No Way Home, so whatever multiversal spider-shenanigans he encounters in that movie will likely lead directly into his standalone that literally has the word multiverse in the title. Wanda Maximoff will also be in Multiverse of Madness, and to tie the Loki reveal back into the very first Marvel TV show, it’s possible that WandaVision‘s post-credit scene means that Wanda will use the multiverse’s existence to find real variants of her fake sons.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
Finally, we arrive at the movie we thought would introduce Kang and, to be honest, still might! Since Loki’s version of the character was He Who Remains and the end of Season 1 shows a statue of the variant Kang the Conqueror, we might not actually lay eyes on Jonathan Majors as the Conqueror variant until Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in 2023. If Season 2 of Loki airs before this we’ll have more information on the Conqueror variant’s MO, but until then we know Kang is waiting for us at the end of time…or at least seven movies into Phase 4.