Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ant-Man and Wasp: Quantumania.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ended with two surprise cameos that linked right back to our first meeting with Kang the Conqueror, the great adversary of the MCU’s Multiverse Saga.
After two hours of Kang’s chrono-baiting backstory, it wasn’t surprising to find the tyrant in what looked much like the early 20th century. What was surprising was that his startled audience contained two familiar faces — Owen Wilson’s Mobius making his big screen debut and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki returning to an MCU feature for the first time since he escaped his doomed timeline in Avengers: Endgame.
We last saw the pair in the finale of the first season of Loki, when mass damage to the timelines had robbed Mobius of memories of the mischievous Asgardian. So how and why are they there?
A timely intervention?
In Quauntumania’s first cut scene, we finally meet the multiversal threat we’ve been anticipating for years: the Council of Kangs. Multiple iterations were summoned by Immortus, a far-future form of the Conqueror, as he warned of “them” touching the multiverse. It’s safe to assume at this stage that the “them” he’s referring to is the Avengers or various superheroes linked to Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. In recent films, we’ve seen Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, Miss America, the Scarlet Witch, and others journey through and break the walls between the many universes parallel to Earth-616 – but superheroes don’t tell the whole story.
TV series Loki introduced us to the Time Variance Authority (TVA), the extra-temporal force that patrols the timelines, tackles incursions, and where — much to the Asgardian’s horror and bemusement — Infinity Stones are nothing more than lost property. The first season climaxed with Loki and his female variant Sylvie confronting the true force behind the TVA. Now instantly recognizable as a form of Kang, He Who Remains warned of his multiple variants’ threat to the multiverse and the mass disruption that followed that variant’s death altered the TVA that Loki returned to. The cliffhanger ending revealed Kang as a more overt head of the agency and that Mobius had no recollection of meeting the Asgardian.
It seems Loki has caught Mobius up in the meantime or found a way to recover the agent’s memories from another timeline.
In the second cut scene, the two are clearly working together to track down Kang variants. We — and they — are introduced to an interesting variant of Kang, also lifted from the pages of Marvel Comics.
In the comics, Victor Timely was an identity assumed by Kang on one of his journeys through the 20th century. By this time, Kang had met and battled the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. In the guise of Timely, the Conqueror established a respectable life in Wisconsin at the start of the 20th century. He became a small-town mayor while helping Phineas Horton develop the concepts that would lead to the creation of the android Human Torch during World War II. This version of Kang was deceptively troublesome. At a pivotal point in history — with a gift for social climbing as opposed to flat-out conquering — he was able to seed the early 20th century with technological ideas and concepts his other selves could pick up and use to their advantage in the future. It’s not surprising that first-class time tampering would catch the eye of the TVA during normal operations.
We know from Loki that things are far from normal at the TVA, but in attempting to convince Mobius of the immense threat posed by He Who Remains’ variants, Loki has tracked down the Conqueror in this incarnation.
It looks like Timely is wowing audiences with his scientific inventions, and true to this Kang’s comic roots, Mobius isn’t stuck by the Conqueror’s look. Despite not recognizing the threat, the time agent is willing to believe the overarching story Loki brought back from the Citadel and that a multiversal threat is brewing. The mystery is how the pair are operating apart from a TVA under Kang’s control and why Mobius doesn’t recognize the figure on stage – given the Conquereor’s love for statues of himself outside time.
Given Loki appears to be well into his plan to update Mobius and track down Kangs, it’s likely this scene will pop up at least two episodes into the second series of Loki, which is scheduled to hit Disney Plus in the summer of 2023. This is the first time we’ve seen a saga kick into gear while the MCU intertwines stories in movie theaters and TV. If scenes are set to be duplicated on small and big screens, there may be a step up in pivotal scenes on Disney Plus affecting the Phase 5 and 6 features. Despite Loki’s fear, could he and Mobius be about to storm the stage or fall foul of Timely’s (quite probably steampunk) inventions?
Whether it will drag all of the MCU’s audience across the two media is yet to be seen, but it’s a gift for Kang, who, as we’d seen a few minutes before, has more than enough variants to go around.