The Loki finale will change the MCU forever. After traveling through time and space Loki and Sylvie finally reached their goal: Jonathan Majors’ ‘He Who Remains.’ This eccentric character revealed he’s the last surviving Kang, a 31st-century scientist who discovered how to travel to other universes and made contact with his variants. This didn’t end well, so ‘He Who Remains’ created the TVA to prevent those variants from ever existing.
Things went from bad to worse when Sylvie plunged a sword into his chest, fracturing the timeline and instantly giving rise to a lot of Kang variants. These seem set to cause havoc across the MCU, with Majors confirmed to appear in Ant-Man: Quantumania and likely in other upcoming multiversal projects. But don’t assume that these variants will be as quirky and fun as ‘He Who Remains’ – after all, there’s a reason he’s known as Kang ‘the Conqueror’.
Majors touched on this in the new Marvel Studios Assembled documentary about the making of Loki. When asked about what was coming, he teased what’s next:
“As Kang begins to rear his head and do his deeds, in so many ways he has no choice but to be in opposition or to be different from He Who Remains,”
This raises the disquieting possibility that ‘He Who Remains’ is the best possible Kang, having abandoned plans to subjugate the multiverse. With him dead the more violent and sinister Kangs will rise to the top, presumably able to use their technology and knowledge of the future to manipulate the fabric of the universe
We may have something of a wait to find out though. Quantumania won’t hit theaters until February 2023, though there’s a chance he may cameo in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in March 2022. Beyond that Kang is a lock for Loki‘s second season as the cliffhanger ending showed one had already taken over the TVA. I can’t imagine how the MCU is going to deal with Kang, but they might soon consider Thanos a mere warmup.
