Victor Timely’s ‘Loki’ Device Could Have a Connection to ‘Quantumania’

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Loki Season 2.

The Big Picture

• In Season 2 of Loki, a small unnamed device created by Victor Timely could have a significant impact on the future of the MCU’s main storyline.
• The device resembles a miniaturized version of Kang’s Time Chair from Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and it is a more advanced version of a probability drive.
• The device could play a crucial role in fixing the Temporal Loom and allowing for more branched timelines to pass through, setting the stage for a multiversal conflict.

As it approaches its final set of episodes, Season 2 of Loki is going completely bonkers. From self-pruning in different timelines to shocking twists at the end, it has it all, and, not only did it give us one of the MCU’s most gruesome deaths, but it also introduced a small device that could make a huge difference in the future of the franchise’s main storyline. We’re talking about Victor Timely’s (Jonathan Majors) “greatest invention,” the one he couldn’t leave Wisconsin without in the previous episode, which was installed into the Throughput Multiplier developed by O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) and Casey (Eugene Cordero). This device isn’t named on-screen, but it must be quite powerful if it can keep the TVA’s Temporal Loom from collapsing, right? Luckily, we have some guesses as to what it may be.

How Exactly Does Victor Timely’s Device Work in ‘Loki’ Season 2?

As we said, this small device doesn’t even have a name yet, and, even if it did, we probably wouldn’t be able to decipher what exactly it does — “Throughput Multiplier” is hard enough. But its appearance is indeed somewhat familiar. When Victor Timely grabs it in his lab, it looks an awful lot like a miniaturized version of Kang’s (also Majors) Time Chair in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It was his ship, the one he used to travel through time and space and that is broken by the beginning of the movie. Kang asks Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) for help finding the missing piece in the ship’s engine, which he calls the Multiversal Power Core. They are able to fix the Time Chair — somewhat, and Kang goes on to conquer the Quantum Realm, but the main piece, a probability drive, remains missing until Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) shows up, and Kang can’t leave his exile without it.

This missing part is actually a more advanced and complex version of the device Timely creates in 1863, a probability drive. It has a temporal radiation charge so big that it creates a probability storm around it and turns whoever approaches into spaghetti — we see one of the Scotts turning into Giant-Man and falling apart the same way it happens to Timely in Loki. It works by calculating all the possibilities of it appearing anywhere in time and space, an effect that also extends to the temporal radiation a little further around it, which is why we see the many different Scotts popping up in Quantumania. Each of them represents a different decision he could’ve taken at that moment, and the Timely device does something similar for the Temporal Loom.

When Timely, O.B., and Casey are working on the Throughput Multiplier, they explain how the whole piece works: it should be launched at the Loom from a distance, then it docks with the Loom’s superstructure and enlarges its rings, allowing for more branched timelines to pass through. This enlargement probably happens not in a mechanical way, but rather a mathematical one, allowing for more calculations of timeline possibilities to be made by the Loom and, thus, fitting more branched timelines (“enlarging the ring” being merely a metaphor easier for us dummies to grasp). Unfortunately, for Timely, the temporal radiation at the TVA Loom was already so big, that it turned him into spaghetti instantly, but it was essential that he helped the TVA crew to try and fix the Loom, as we’ll see.

Is Victor Timely a Part of He Who Remains’ Plan in ‘Loki’ Season 2?

It’s marvelous how Victor Timely managed to have the exact part that O.B. and Casey’s Throughput Multiplier was missing. It’s almost as if it were part of a greater plan. At the beginning of Season 2, we see Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) and former TVA Judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) go back in time to the early 1800s at the behest of He Who Remains (also Majors) and slip a TVA Handbook through a window, where a young Timely would get it and be inspired to learn about the institution and how time-managing mechanisms work. A few years later, at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Timely demonstrates his own smaller-sized Temporal Loom while keeping the prototype for the Multiversal Engine Core in his laboratory.

At the end of Season 1, He Who Remains explains to Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) that his being killed would have catastrophic consequences for the TVA and trigger his variants to start another Multiversal War. And, after that, the multiverse would eventually be rebooted and He Who Remains would end up creating the TVA and be its head anyway. We are now seeing the chess pieces moving precisely in the direction that was mentioned, with hints of how to reboot the TVA being dropped along the way of Loki and his friends’ adventures. The prototype of the Multiversal Engine Core is one such hint.

Is O.B. Going to Finish the Multiversal Engine Core in ‘Loki’ Season 2?

Right now, the Temporal Loom has imploded and Victor Timely has become spaghetti. We can’t know whether his death was part of He Who Remains’ plan or not, but it surely surprised us — it’s a Kang variant dying inexplicably, after all. But Timely’s mission with the Multiversal Engine Core prototype is technically accomplished already. He meets O.B., they trade pleasantries, and it’s likely his notebook was left behind before he was turned into spaghetti. His notebook is every bit as valuable to O.B. as the TVA Handbook was to him, which makes us again think about how this whole season’s arc is a snake eating its own tail.

This becomes clear when O.B. mentions that he learned everything he knows from Victor Timely, but he never specifies how this learning took place. This week’s episode ends with the Temporal Loom collapsing at the weight of so many branched timelines, another step in what He Who Remains told Loki and Sylvie. Having dealt with this before eons ago, he knows everything that is going to happen, this catastrophe certainly being one of them. But he also knows that, for everything to repeat itself, a few things must happen with certainty.

Victor Timely creating the prototype for the Multiversal Engine Core is one of them. Without it, other Kang variants wouldn’t be able to travel through space and time along the multiverse and there wouldn’t be a Multiversal War to begin with. This would definitely be better, but, as a Kang, He Who Remains also revels at the idea of having power, so in his mind, there must be a multiversal conflict and there must be all this destruction, otherwise he would never have any power whatsoever. Now that Timely has created the Multiversal Engine Core and shown Ouroboros how it works, O.B. can perfect this design and eventually make it a component of the Throughput Multiplier. And, in other corners of the multiverse, Kang variants can now stumble upon this design to create the Time Chair, allowing for the events of Quantumania and the whole future of the MCU to take place.

New episodes of Loki Season 2 premiere Thursdays on Disney+.

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