CONTAINS LOKI SPOILERS
Attentive Marvel fans knew that the Multiverse was coming to the MCU at some point in Phase 4 – they just didn’t know exactly when, or how. Would it be courtesy of a grieving Scarlet Witch in WandaVision? An unintended result of the Blip? Some Spider-Versal chicanery in No Way Home? As it turned out, the Multiverse’s arrival was actually a work of mischief, courtesy of Loki (or, Lokis to be precise) in the Disney+ series Loki – with consequences that will spiral out into the films and beyond for a good while to come.
In the Loki finale, our anti-hero (and his female variant Sylvie) destroyed the forces controlling the Sacred Timeline, and major branches immediately sprang forth: the birth of the Multiverse. As head writer Michael Waldron tells Empire in an epic new Loki Season 1 breakdown feature, that was always the (sorry) endgame for the series. “A nice lighthouse for us as a creative team was, ‘At the end of this thing we’re going to blow the lid on the Multiverse’,” he says. “And what better character to do that than Loki? The character who originally brought the Avengers together is now directly responsible for this next phase of madness.”
But the final episode didn’t just set up the Multiverse – it also introduced major new villain Kang The Conqueror… or, at least, his more benevolent variant known as He Who Remains, the orchestrator behind the entire TVA. And while Kang is going to be a massive Marvel player going forward (including in the now-shooting Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania), Waldron says that there was no pressure from Marvel to bring him in as part of the show.
“It seemed that there was a real appetite to do Kang, because Kang is a time-travelling Multiversal villain, and we were doing a time-travelling multiversal adventure. Marvel were cool with that, and they were excited about it,” he explains. “What really worked in our favour was that we’re in enough of a nascent stage of these MCU shows that the audience doesn’t know they’ll introduce a Big Bad like this in the finale of a TV show. So we got really excited about the idea of dropping that bomb ten minutes into the finale and letting everybody just go, ‘Holy shit!’”
Holy shit, indeed. Read Empire’s full Loki feature – talking the Multiverse, the TVA and the Loki variants, featuring interviews with Tom Hiddleston, Richard E. Grant, Sophia di Martino, director Kate Herron, and, of course, Waldron – in the Shang-Chi issue, on sale Thursday 5 August. All of Loki is streaming now on Disney+.