After a total of ten episodes, we’re probably getting used to “Loki” hitting a few snags with its confusing multiverse and time travel story. But what happens in episode 4 of season 2 is back on top. The supposed Kang variant, Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), was just established as a new central character who still seemed to be of great importance to the future of the series and possibly the entire MCU.
In the new episode ‘Loki’ he finally seems to be on the side of the good guys, supporting Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Co. at the TVA in repairing the timeline loom and so on to prevent possible catastrophic overload. He even agrees to go into dangerous proximity to the loom, which quickly ages everything (like Mobius in episode 1 of season 2), to personally fix the whole thing using his little loom prototype…
…to suddenly evaporate when the gates were opened, despite the protective suit! In fact, it has already been said that the aging effect has increased dramatically since Mobius’ detour here (although apparently even TVA specialist OB could not have predicted how much). After Victor’s dissolution, the loom finally goes out of control and covers everything in its vicinity in a blinding white light – ultimately leaving not only Loki but most of the audience shocked. All the theories surrounding Victor Timely now seem to be invalid… or are they?
No Kang and no one staying?
How wildly speculated and theorized about Victor Timely! Will the insecure scientist actually become the TVA founder, the one who stays, as the AI Miss Minutes and Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) apparently planned when they gave him the TVA manual of the True Timeline in 1868? Or will Victor even become the new MCU villain Kang himself, as we met him in “Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania,” where his dimensional and time-space ship bore a striking resemblance to Timely’s loom prototype?
Both questions (and many more) now seem to have to be answered with a clear “no”, after it already seemed that Renslayer and Miss Minutes’ plan would not work and Victor would take a different path than the one that remains. It is not without reason that after obtaining the TVA manual, his story is placed in an alternate timeline and no longer the true one.
Is Victor Timely really dead?
At the end of episode 4, it feels very much as if the Victor we have come to know as “Loki” has been completely erased and is therefore effectively dead. It therefore seems impossible that he will become anything or anyone. But of course there are (many!) backdoors. In a story that plays with parallel worlds, time travel and countless variations of different characters, no one is really dead (Loki himself is the best example here). Especially because after building up Victor Timely we can hardly imagine that we have seen the last of him.
So it’s always possible to bring out a Victor from the past or a completely different timeline. Or at least resort to another Kang variant, if you really should be that consistent and consider Victor’s death final.
But perhaps in the Marvel comics we also take an even bigger detour into Victor’s history, where as a Kang variant he not only travels from the distant future to the past, but also uses many robot copies of himself to achieve his goals. (a reference to this research could be the many mannequins in Victor’s laboratory in the previous “Loki” episode).
So was the now dead Victor possibly just a robot? However, we think this is rather unlikely, as the extreme aging/destruction of the loom would certainly have looked a bit different in that case and such a twist would come pretty much out of nowhere in the context of the series.
What happens in episodes 5 and 6 of “Loki” season 2?
But like I said: The possibilities for Victor’s return and plot progression are nearly endless in a series like “Loki.” And the ending of the most recent episode in particular makes it virtually impossible to predict which direction the story will take. After the apparent implosion of all timelines, the rest of the journey is completely uncertain.
In any case, “Loki” producer Kevin Wright teased us in the FILMSTARTS interview that in episodes 5 and 6 we are now going to “a really beautiful place” where we will delve even more into the big questions of the series, especially with relating to the study of identity.
What exactly that means and whether we might see Victor again, we will find out in the two remaining episodes of the second “Loki” season, which will be released on November 3 and 10, 2023 on Disney+.