Warning: This article contains spoilers for Loki season 2, episode 2.
After so many attempted world dominations or universal conquests, it’s tough for the MCU to continually up the stakes with every new project. Sometimes the idea sounds good on paper — introducing Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder — but fall short in execution — he killed, like, two deities tops. Other times they end up way, way off the mark — Kang defeated by ants in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Loki season 2, given that it deals with the return of the Conqueror and a threat to the entire Sacred Timeline, is doing a fantastic job of hitching up the stakes higher than they arguably have ever been before. In episode 2, for instance, the death toll ratchets up to truly mind-boggling numbers after a shocking and dark twist. Yes, move over, Mad Titan, as it looks like someone has finally beaten you to the number one spot as Marvel’s most vicious villain.
Thanos has nothing on the death toll of the surprise villain of Loki season 2
And we thought Gravik killing thousands in the first episode of Secret Invasion was cold-blooded. As it happens, the very next Marvel Disney Plus show has offered up a villain who is even more bloodthirsty. And no, it’s not Jonathan Majors’ Kang or any of his various variants.
OK, so we’ve been told in Loki season 1 and Quantumania that Kang is responsible for the destruction of countless timelines, but these events are not something that have actually happened on screen. The super-dark ending of Loki season 2’s second episode, though, is surely the biggest mass loss of life we’ve ever witnessed in the MCU.
Back in the premiere, Loki and friends thought General Dox taking a whole troop of hunters to go search for Sylvie was overkill, and now it turns out what she was really planning was something much grander and more galling. Dox and her cronies bombed the many branched timelines that had sprouted up following the death of He Who Remains. Loki, Mobius, B-15, and Casey were left to watch helplessly as the alternate timelines died off.
Hunter B-15 tearfully laments the “millions” of lives lost, but if you think about it, the actual count must be trillions upon trillions. In Endgame, we learned that Thanos was responsible for wiping out trillions when he halved the population of a single universe. Well, these branched timelines each comprise an alternate version of the MCU universe. So all of them being destroyed equals a truly incalculable amount of death.
Nobody had General Dox, a loose adaptation of a character from a goofy She-Hulk comic, turning out to be a bigger killer than Thanos, and maybe even worse than what Kang will turn out to be, on their Phase Five bingo cards — and yet here we are.