Was That Kang the Conqueror in 'Loki'? Jonathan Majors' Role Explained (SPOILERS)

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 1 of Loki.

Is it just us, or are Marvel’s Disney Plus shows getting more confusing? We thought it was hard to keep track of what was going on in WandaVision, but Loki is on a whole new level. And thanks to the Season 1 finale, it looks like things aren’t about to get any less confusing. It appears that we have officially entered the multiverse. The timelines are branching, and we’re about to see all new heroes (and villains) from brand new realities.

But let’s back up and see how we got here. It’s all thanks to He Who Remains, but who exactly is that? Well, we know that the actor is Jonathan Majors, who was already announced to be the villain of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But for that film, he was said to be Kang the Conqueror. Is that Kang in Loki? The answer is sort of, but in true Loki fashion, it’s way more complicated than that.

In the season finale of Loki, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) come face to face with He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), who has been behind the TVA all along. He Who Remains explains that multiple variants of himself figured out how the multiverse works back in the 31st century. They shared their secrets across time and space with each other, but some variants had more villainous intentions than others, which led to a multiversal war.

To protect his own timeline, He Who Remains isolated it and called it the Sacred Timeline. He then created the TVA to protect it. But in doing so, he also destroyed free will. The entire universe that Sylvie and Loki know has been following a timeline that He Who Remains forms. Anyone who branches off must be eliminated, or the Sacred Timeline and all in it could perish.

In the end, Sylvie is the one to kill He Who Remains, who warns as he’s dying, “See you soon.” And indeed he is correct. Without He Who Remains keeping the Sacred Timeline in check and isolated from the multiversal war, the war returns to their reality as a million alternate realities are created. And with these alternate realities come more variants of Kang, one of whom is in charge of the TVA that Loki returns to in the end.

According to Marvel.com, we will be seeing the real Kang in Quantumania. But at this moment, we don’t know if we’ve seen the real Kang yet. The version of Kang we briefly see that is running the TVA at the end may be Kang, but it may be another variant, like He Who Remains.

In the Marvel comics, He Who Remains is the one behind the TVA, but he’s not a Kang variant. It appears that the He Who Remains in the MCU is more a mix of the Marvel comics’ He Who Remains and Immortus, who is a Kang variant. Nathaniel Richards, aka Immortus, in a sense, is Kang. He is a future version of Kang who discovered that any time jump that his past self made created divergent versions of himself. But he needs Kang to eventually become him. So he prunes away those timeline branches that created divergent Kangs.

But this is not what Kang wants. Kang wants the fight, the battle between these versions of himself. As we see at the end of Season 1 of Loki, the Kang running the TVA wants those branches to happen, which lines up with the Kang in the Marvel comics that wants a “jungle” of Kangs.

The Kang we see at the end of Loki is most likely the Kang that we will see in Quantumania. And he’s likely to be far more terrifying than He Who Remains. “You had to leave a lot of meat on the bone in terms of how evil he could be, because that's He Who Remains' whole thing, that it's not me who you should be afraid of,” head writer Michael Waldron told Marvel.com. “‘It's the other versions of me that are going to come.’”

Knowing that the He Who Remains and Immortus hybrid now exists in the MCU and so does a version of Kang and that millions of alternate realities were just created as a part of a multiversal war led by versions of this He Who Remains, we should expect to see a lot more of Jonathan Majors in the MCU. Without Thanos anymore, a vacuum of power for the next big bad for the next phase of the MCU opened, one Jonathan may fill.

And it seems that he might not be just one character, though he may just be one actor. With the multiverse expanding in the MCU, we may just see Jonathan become a million big bads all at once. And though he may be a part of Quantumania, it would be surprising if he didn’t play a role at all in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Season 1 of Loki is streaming now on Disney Plus.