Loki’s Kang Reveal Still Has A Major Mystery To Resolve

Kang the Conqueror’s next MCU appearance must answer a lingering question left by the Loki season 1 finale. The MCU multiverse is in full swing after WandaVision, Loki, What If…?, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, but how exactly this concept works is yet to be fully explained. Some multiversal variants look exactly like each other, while others have unique appearances and backgrounds. Similarly, the proliferation of alternate realities can be traced back to Sylvie’s murder of He Who Remains in the Citadel At The End of Time, but Doctor Strange’s tinkering with the fabric of reality could also be blamed for the current multiversal madness. While He Who Remains’ insight into the multiverse at the end of Loki seems like the only solid piece of information that can be taken as fact, he may also have withheld some key details.

He Who Remains created the Time Variance Authority to police what he called the “Sacred Timeline”. According to him, this was the result of a Multiversal War he waged against his evil variants, all of whom wanted to conquer other MCU realities. But contrary to what its name suggests, the Sacred Timeline isn’t one single continuity. Instead, it is a string of similar universes that are spared by the TVA because they all end in the birth of a benevolent Kang variant. Therefore, wildly different variants like Alligator Loki, Boastful Loki, and Sylvie Laufeydottir didn’t get pruned when they were born for departing from the MCU’s main Loki, but instead got eliminated when they made a decision that He Who Remains considered wrong.

This makes sense within the known plans of He Who Remains, but it doesn’t explain why he didn’t just use the TVA to build a single thread of events. He Who Remains could have easily designed a single timeline that satisfied his every whim down to the smallest detail, but for some reason he didn’t get to reveal, he provided multiple timelines with a surprising amount of freedom to diverge as much as they wanted as long as they aimed at the same outcome. It was precisely this freedom that created the possibility of malicious variants of himself to be born, and even though his doom didn’t come at the hands of a new Kang variant, it did come from a variant of a person that didn’t have to exist in the first place.

There’s also the fact that the TVA pruned all the offending variants instead of killing them. Supposedly, all of the pruned variants were sent to the Void because they steered their timelines into a future that He Who Remains deemed likely to bring forth a new Multiversal War. So, if these variants were so dangerous, why develop a highly advanced piece of interdimensional technology to send them to a makeshift multiversal prison instead of getting rid of them for good? A simple blade would have done the trick more permanently than the Time Variance Authority’s signature Time Stick.

While the visible destruction of the Sacred Timeline during the death of He Who Remains is enough proof that there is some truth to his final words, it’s also important to remember that He Who Remains is based on the comic book villain Immortus, who’s a less vicious variant of Kang the Conqueror, but is still known as a master manipulator and a villain to the Avengers. Whether He Who Remains was telling all the truth about the multiverse in the Loki finale is yet to be confirmed. The MCU’s multiverse saga is still in its early days, so movies and shows like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Loki season 2 will probably answer all the mysteries that still lie unsolved.

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