Loki, Season 1

The 2012 Loki, who escaped with the Tesseract during the time heist, is arrested by the TVA for creating a branched timeline. He's recruited by Mobius to hunt a variant of himself — Sylvie, who has been bombing the timeline for years.

Why isn't everyone else from the heist arrested? Because most of them didn't branch anything. The heist was designed to avoid it — take the Stones, return them at the exact moment, no divergence — and it mostly worked. The 2012 New York failure is the single uncorrected error, so the TVA arrested the anomaly.

The show also implies the TVA was told to leave the heist alone; a Mobius line calls it "supposed to happen," which is one of its better jokes about determinism.

How can Mobius be a variant if he works for them? He Who Remains abducted people from across the multiverse, wiped their memories, and gave them manufactured lives. Mobius is a variant of some ordinary man from some timeline. In Season 2 he glimpses that other life — a father with two sons — and chooses not to reclaim it. Hunter B-15 and Ravonna Renslayer are in the same position.

The reveal: the TVA's "Time-Keepers" are props. The organisation is run by He Who Remains, a variant of a 31st-century scientist who discovered the multiverse, watched his own variants wage a multiversal war that destroyed nearly everything, and won by isolating a single timeline and pruning all others. Every TVA agent is an abducted, mind-wiped variant.

How he controlled everything: he built the TVA, wrote its mythology, and then wrote a script. He had seen every branch, so he knew exactly what would happen and could set the machine running and step back. Loki and Sylvie arriving at his citadel was in the script.

He offers them a choice: take over from him, or kill him and let the multiverse branch freely — which means his variants, some far worse, return.

Why does Sylvie kill him, and does Loki agree? Sylvie was taken by the TVA as a child and hunted her whole life, with one goal: destroy the organisation that stole it. Being offered stewardship of that same system is the one thing she cannot accept.

Loki disagrees, and argues they should stop and think, because the alternative is a multiversal war. They fight over it. She kisses him, pushes him through a time door, and kills He Who Remains alone.

On whether they "end up together" — they don't, beyond that moment. The show frames them as two people who understand each other completely and want incompatible things. Season 2 has them working together and still disagreeing. And yes, he was recruited to hunt her and switched sides; that's the arc.

The multiverse opens. This is the inciting incident of the entire Multiverse Saga.

Season 2 — what the Temporal Loom is. The machine at the heart of the TVA that takes raw, chaotic time and weaves it into a single stable Sacred Timeline. It was engineered for one timeline. After Sylvie's kill, branches multiply infinitely; the Loom cannot weave infinite threads and moves toward a detonation that would destroy everything.

After many failed attempts, Loki realises the Loom is the wrong solution entirely — it exists to limit the multiverse rather than sustain it. He destroys it, walks out into the raw timelines, gathers the dying branches in his hands, and holds them together himself — sitting alone on a throne at the end of time, at the centre of a great tree of living timelines.

So yes: he ends as something like the god of the multiverse. The character who spent eleven years demanding a throne gets one, and it is a prison.

This is the single most likely piece of setup for Doomsday. Loki is confirmed in the cast, and he is currently the thing preventing the multiverse from collapsing.

Where does Kang appear before this? He doesn't. Loki Season 1 is his first appearance — and technically not as Kang but as He Who Remains, a variant who explicitly says he is not the conqueror. Kang the Conqueror proper debuts in Quantumania (film). Victor Timely appears in Loki Season 2: a nervous early-20th-century inventor with a stammer who has no idea he's a variant of a multiversal warlord. He is neither good nor evil — the point is that Kang variants aren't all conquerors.

With Kang written out as the saga villain, both Timely and the Council of Kangs are now orphaned threads that lead nowhere.