Loki’s Victor Timely may seem like a surprise, but he was in the pitch from day one
polygon.comThe first thing to know about Kang the Conqueror, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s final boss du jour, is that there are a million of him. Loki’s first season successfully imparted that fact with He Who Remains, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe underscored it since in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
But Loki’s second season brings a very different version of Kang to the screen, and producer Kevin Wright says that’s exactly the point.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Loki season 2, episode 3.]
Episode 3 introduces Victor Timely, first teased in a credits scene of Quantumania, a struggling Black inventor (and maybe conman?) debuting his Time Loom prototype at the Chicago World’s Fair. This, apparently, is the humble beginning of the man who’d go on to be a multiversal tyrant and found the Time Variance Authority to police his own timeline.
According to Wright, that play against expectation has been the plan from the very beginning, in a “30-page document” he’d penned for Marvel Studios’ internal use, “and also to get Tom [Hiddleston] excited.”
“Once you set the stakes — and season 1 was so much setting of stakes: The multiverse is out there; war is coming. This really awful bad guy is going to be coming that Loki is afraid of, and if Loki is afraid we’ve got to take that threat seriously — it’s very fun as a storyteller to then go in the opposite direction. You’re expecting the worst; some sci-fi villain from the future. And the next version of this guy to pop up in our story is coming from the past, and he’s just sort of a eccentric, quiet inventor that maybe is, like, a bit out of time and out of place.”
Victor Timely (as you might expect) is a name of some minor comic book Kang consequence. Publicly
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