We got a lot of bombshell revelations on this week’s episode of “Loki,” but none is bigger than the one at the very end
(This article contains some MAJOR spoilers for the fourth episode of the Disney+ series “Loki”) After last week’s rather leisurely episode, “Loki” hit us with a ton of plot twists in a row in the fourth episode. The fast and furious cavalcade of revelations over the last 20 minutes overloaded out brains just a little bit, as we struggled to comprehend the ramifications of one huge revelation after another. But let’s jump straight to the end, and the biggest surprises. The climax this week saw Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) finally take down the Time-Keepers — who are apparently just robots, puppets for whoever is actually running the TVA. Then, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) gets what she wants: to prune Loki. Fortunately, our Loki is not dead yet. Or at least he isn’t completely dead. This episode contains a mid-credits stinger, which follows up on where Loki went after he got zapped. Maybe this is another thing the TVA has been lying about this whole time. Maybe they aren’t actually getting rid of any of the variants they catch. In any case, in the mid-credits scene, Loki wakes up in what looks a lot like a post-apocalyptic Earth city. “Am I dead?” Loki asks no one in particular. “Not yet,” a disembodied voice answers. “But you will be unless you come with us.” Loki looks up, and seems pretty shocked by what he’s looking at: an old Loki wearing a pretty outstanding old comic book costume (Richard E. Grant finally shows up!), a Kid Loki, an alligator or crocodile wearing a Loki crown, and a Black Thor who’s wielding a version of Mjolnir that looks like it was made from a large wrench and a piece of a metal beam. It’s a lot to process, but first things first. Black Thor. There has never been a Black Thor in the Marvel comics — that is, a son of Odin named Thor who is Black. But there is a story in which there is a group called the Thor Corps, in which several Black superheroes — Falcon, War Machine and Blade, to name three — functioned as Thor, each with their own Mjolnir hammers and everything. The Thor Corps is from a place called Battleworld, a planet created by Doctor Doom after the multiverse collapsed one time.
