Loki’s Victor Timely is a Marvel Easter egg planned from the beginning

The very first thing to learn about Kang the Conqueror, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s ultimate boss du jour, is that there are a million of him. Loki’s first season efficiently imparted that truth 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 totally different model of Kang to the display screen, and producer Kevin Wright says that’s precisely the level.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Loki season 2, episode 3.]

Image: Marvel Studios

Episode 3 introduces Victor Timely, first teased in a credit scene of Quantumania, a struggling Black inventor (and possibly 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 located the Time Variance Authority to police his personal timeline.

According to Wright, that play in opposition to expectation has been the plan from the very beginning, in a “30-page document” he’d penned for Marvel Studios’ inner 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.”

Who is Victor Timely in Marvel comics?

Victor Timely (as you may anticipate) is a title of some minor comedian guide Kang consequence. Publicly an inventor, minor industrial titan, and founder and mayor of the city of Timely, Wisconsin, Victor Timely was simply Kang in disguise. In the comics, Timely was an identification Kang constructed for himself after touring from the far future again to the twentieth century, in a scheme to determine a seat of mundane energy in that point interval, for the functions of conquering the age of superheroes that was to comply with.

And Loki’s Victor Timely is actually paying homage to one other Marvel Comics side of Kang: He wasn’t all the time a conqueror. Or… isn’t all the time a conqueror, or gained’t all the time be a conqueror? Suffice to say, Kang’s time-traveling methods have allowed Marvel superheroes a have a look at his entire life, together with his do-gooding teenage superhero from the future period as Iron Lad, and his timeline defending previous age beneath the title of Immortus.

That rigidity is alive in Loki: Is this Victor Timely destined for later tyranny? Or is he already a dangerous man and placing on a very convincing act?

“There’s something about that world and that character dynamic that was fun,” stated Wright, “But also exciting. Can Loki trust this guy? It pushes a lot of buttons for Sylvie; if she will be able to trust him, knowing what she knows. It gave us a lot of cool character drama to play with, while also letting us go to the Chicago World’s Fair, which was very exciting. And Wisconsin! Who doesn’t want to time travel to Wisconsin?”

Who certainly.