Warning! Spoilers ahead for Loki episode 1.
Loki’s Time-Keepers loom in the background of the MCU show, but there’s a chance they’re actually a lie, meant to hide the true villain. Like WandaVision before, Loki is being positioned very much as a mystery, with the eponymous God of Mischief and TVA agent Mobius M. Mobius hunting after a rogue variant causing mayhem across the Sacred Timeline. But is it possible the show’s real villain is hiding in plain sight?
The first episode of Loki is packed to bursting with exposition about the TVA, the Time-Keepers, the MCU multiverse, and more. According to the show, the MCU was once a proper multiverse with countless diverging timelines, until those timelines went to war with each other and plunged the universe into chaos. In response, the Time-Keepers stepped up – three ancient, mystical beings with supreme cosmic power. The Time-Keepers distilled the multiverse into a single timeline, called the Sacred Timeline, and created the TVA to maintain order within it. Or at least, that’s what Loki is told when he arrives.
Looked at more closely, there’s a lot that doesn’t add up about the TVA and their Time-Keeper history. The agency is shady, amorphous, and exists entirely beyond the boundaries of the rest of the MCU. And The Time-Keepers themselves, despite numerous statues, paintings and cartoons declaring their greatness, are nowhere to be found. This could all be a coincidence, but in a mystery-driven show like Loki, it could also be something more. It could even mean that the Time-Keepers, as they’ve been described, are a lie and that they’re hiding Loki’s true villain.
According to the TVA’s cartoonish exposition video, the Time-Keepers created the organization to maintain order in the cosmos after refining the MCU multiverse into a single timeline. The beings are depicted as giant space-faring creatures garbed in mystical-looking robes and adornments, who presumably possess immense power. However, there are a lot of questions about the Time-Keepers that haven’t even begun to be addressed.
For starters, how did the Time-Keepers create the Sacred Timeline in the first place? Their role in the multiverse war is barely touched on, other than to say that they helped fix it. But that could mean any number of things. Maybe the Time-Keepers were simply part of the timeline that won the war, and subsequently made their reality the dominant reality. Maybe they have some other, more devious motive for keeping the timeline restricted to a singular flow. One thing is clear – the TVA reveres the Time-Keepers as basically gods. The agency itself and apparently all those who work for it were created by the Time-Keepers for that express purpose, which would naturally restrict agents like Mobius and Renslayer from questioning the Time-Keepers’ will.
In short, there’s a lot about the Time-Keepers that doesn’t seem to add up. And on top of all the hanging questions about their nature and motivation, they seem to be entirely out of the picture. When Loki enquires about their whereabouts during his trial, Renslayer brushes off the question by stating that the Time-Keepers are “very busy.” That presents an entirely separate, equally curious theory – that the Time-Keepers aren’t even real, and that they’re being used as a false front for someone else entirely.
With so much about the Time-Keepers either seemingly fishy or completely unknown, there’s a good chance someone behind the scenes is running a con on the God of Mischief. At the end of Loki episode 1, Mobius asks Loki to help him hunt down another rogue Loki variant currently causing chaos across the timeline. The final scene then shows a mysterious hooded figure laying waste to a squad of TVA hunters, with the implication being that the murderer is the variant in question.
This whole premise, however, could be a lie. It’s possible, if the Time-Keepers aren’t who the TVA says they are, that Loki is simply being manipulated into hunting someone who has nothing to with him. Or even if the rogue variant is a version of Loki, the protagonist Loki might still not be getting the whole story. Mobius seems sincere enough so far that it’s hard to imagine him lying to Loki outright, but until more is revealed about the TVA, anything is possible. It’s also possible that the whole story about the multiverse war and the creation of the Sacred Timeline is false, and that whoever the Time-Keepers are have another secret reason for creating and maintaining the TVA.
Given the information currently available after Loki episode 1, it’s hard to settle on any single theory of the Time-Keepers’ true identity. Their story is full of holes, but there aren’t too many clues yet as to who might actually be pulling the strings. However, the show has dropped allusions to a couple prominent Marvel Comics villains, any of whom could be secretly involved in the story.
First, Loki makes a big reference to Mephisto in its first episode during Mobius’ establishing scene. After a variant commits murder in 1549 France, Mobius leads a team of TVA agents to investigate. While there, he asks a local girl who it was that committed the crime, and she points to a nearby stained glass window sporting a grizzly depiction of the devil. Given that Mephisto has been rumored as a main villain of MCU Phase 4 since before WandaVision premiered, he could be involved in the plot of Loki. Later on, after Loki compares the TVA to a nightmare, Mobius jokes that nightmares are a different department – a possible reference to another rumored WandaVision villain, Nightmare.
The other most likely behind-the-scenes villain of Loki is Kang the Conqueror, a comics character already confirmed to be appearing in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. As a time-traveling imperialist, Kang could easily be secretly involved with the Time-Keepers and/or the TVA, and setting him up in Loki could make sense for the future events of Phase 4. Ravonna Renslayer, the judge who tries Loki’s case in episode 1, is even Kang’s love interest in the comics, so the connection is already there. Is Kang the one actually behind the Time-Keepers’ dubious scheme? That mystery will continue to unravel as the story of Loki unfolds.
Loki releases new episodes every Wednesday on Disney+.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/2TvDFQw
0 Comments