Loki Season 2 episode 4 saw the end of Victor Timely. A character with whom you might have hopes of turning into the potential villain is now gone.
The Temporal Loom, a device meant to mend the tears in the fabric of time, went haywire. The explosion that followed was nothing short of catastrophic. As a result of which, the reality is gone. But what’s truly intriguing is that Victor Timely was the first to bear the brunt of this temporal disaster. He had bravely volunteered to fix the Loom, only to be instantly vaporized in a blaze of temporal radiation.
However, don’t cross Victor Timely off just yet. There’s a theory which says that Timely’s death was crucial to the multiverse.
He Who Remains is the reason why Victor Timely is dead
Whatever is happening in Loki Season 2 is per He Who Remains. For you to understand this better, let me highlight some points from Loki Season 1 Episode 6.
When He Who Remains starts explaining about the multiversal war to Loki and Sylvie, notice how he says, “Eons ago, before the TVA, a variant of myself lived on Earth in the 31st Century.” After that he goes on to explain that there were other variants of him. All of them co-existed in different universes at the same time.
This implies that He Who Remains does not know who the original is. Hence, he deliberately asked Ravonna Renslayer to deliver the TVA handbook to Victor Timely. Because of this Timely would get obsessed with time and would even create a prototype of the temporal loom.
Ravonna and Timely would then pop up on TVA’s radar. TVA would then ask Timely to fix the temporal loom in the TVA. All of this would finally lead to Victor Timely’s demise.
Victor Timely’s death is the reason why all the Kang variants exist
When Victor Timely dies by turning into a spaghetti, ‘Temporal Aura’ gets spread all over the multiverse. He exists across all of time & space when the Temporal Loom explodes. This results into an infinite number of Timely’s variants coming into existence across the multiverse.
This is similar to what happened to Scott Lang in Quantumania. At the Probability Storm, you see Ant-Man turning into spaghetti. But that was one of many Ant-Man. It all happens in the presence of the Multiversal Core. Every choice Scott Lang makes, results into a variant of Ant-Man. There’s even a version of Scott who never became Ant-Man & still works for Baskin Robbins.
In order for He Who Remains to come into existence, Victor Timely had to be exposed to radiation so that he could disperse across the multiverse. Even The Council of Kangs and Kang The Conqueror exist only because of Victor Timely’s death.
Related: The Marvels: Everything you need to know
Time is a condescending loop
The sacred timeline never had a Kang variant. It just had Victor Timely, a brilliant kid who was actually never a part of any multiverse until the TVA handbook got delivered to him. This created a branched timeline in the first place which led to the creation of infinite number of Kangs, when Timely entered the Loom.
He Who Remains not only paved the path for Loki and Sylvie till the end of time but also paved the way for Victor Timely to be in the TVA. He Who Remains wants the multiversal war to happen. The Council of Kangs will eventually come into existence. Then He Who Remains will stop the council, create the sacred timeline and recreate the TVA. He’ll then dye by the hands of Sylvie, which recreates him anyway.
This happens again and again and again because time is a condescending loop. A loop which may be broken in Avengers: Secret Wars.
According to the comics, Nathaniel Richards is the original who went back in time and caused variants to exist. But if this Timely theory is true, then Marvel might have changed a few things for the MCU.
This makes sense as Marvel has done so in the past with many origin stories and character arcs. Loki Season 2 is heading towards its end. It’ll be interesting to see how the future unfolds.