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<\/b>
\n(This article contains some MAJOR spoilers for the fourth episode of the Disney+ series \u201cLoki\u201d) After last week\u2019s rather leisurely episode, \u201cLoki\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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. \u201cAm I dead?\u201d Loki asks no one in particular. \u201cNot yet,\u201d a disembodied voice answers. \u201cBut you will be unless you come with us.\u201d Loki looks up, and seems pretty shocked by what he\u2019s 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\u2019s wielding a version of Mjolnir that looks like it was made from a large wrench and a piece of a metal beam. It\u2019s a lot to process, but first things first. Black Thor. There has never been a Black Thor in the Marvel comics \u2014 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 \u2014 Falcon, War Machine and Blade, to name three \u2014 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. This planet featured places from a bunch of different realities and jammed them all together like countries on a globe. The Thor Corps are the cops of this place. The actor playing Thor here, Deobia Oparei, is obviously not an MCU hero that we already know filling in as Thor. Whatever his deal is, it\u2019s probably not something from the comics. Probably. We can\u2019t help but wonder if that destroyed city could be on Battleworld. It would fit with all this multiverse stuff. But that seems very unlikely. As with all things MCU, we\u2019re probably not going to be able to figure out what\u2019s going to happen from reading the comics. That said, we definitely know a lot about that Kid Loki from the comics, and the Kid Loki stories give us a sneaking suspicion that we might know who that Old Loki is too: Ikol, whose name is just Loki spelled backwards. In the comics, Ikol is a big part of Kid Loki\u2019s story. As always, this stuff is exceptionally convoluted thanks to decades of muddled comics continuity. So keep that in mind. Kid Loki is the nickname for the reincarnation of Loki that debuted in 2010, created by writer Matt Fraction and artist Pasqual Ferry. The original Loki was killed during the events of the comics\u2019 Ragnarok storyline. Then, by stealing a body meant for Lady Sif, was resurrected as a woman known as Lady Loki. Then, after a bunch of evil machinations, Loki was restored to male form. Once again a man, Loki did some more evil things, changed sides at the last minute to help The Avengers, and then died (again). Thanks to his being super manipulative, Loki managed to get his name deleted from the book of Hel and was reincarnated as a young boy who lacked any memory of the evil things he\u2019d done in his former life. Kid Loki was roundly rejected by everyone who knew his former self, but he nevertheless tried to win them over and also be a better person, with mixed results. Again, this is VERY convoluted but basically Kid Loki joins the Young Avengers, sorta betrays them, dies more than once, and after being brought back through magic, apparently dies for real during the \u201cAsgardians of the Galaxy\u201d limited series of Marvel comics. Don\u2019t worry, by this point the original Loki had managed to return, thanks to the introduction of Ikol. He was created by \u2014 again, we\u2019re sorry, this is super confusing \u2014 Kid Loki. Created by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Stephanie Hans in 2011, Ikol started out as the remaining bits of original Loki\u2019s soul that existed within Kid Loki. After a weird struggle with that stuff, Kid Loki turned those remaining Original Loki soul bits into a magpie that he named Ikol (Loki, backwards) and condemned it to be his minion. Ikol becomes Kid Loki\u2019s companion and nuisance, and the two have a lot of adventures. Basically, Ikol exists to be the devil on Kid Loki\u2019s shoulder. Eventually, Ikol and Kid Loki sort of merged into a single being that basically restored something close to the original Loki to life. This, by the way, involved Mephisto, because of course it did. There\u2019s a lot more, involving a possible future version of Loki called King Loki, but we\u2019ll just worry about that later. As for Gator Loki, we don\u2019t have anything other than a silly version of Thor from the comics to go on here. Our best guess is he\u2019s a variant meant to be the show\u2019s version of Simon Walterson, a normal human in the Marvel Comics universe who was turned into a frog by a wizard and subsequently known as \u201cPuddlegulp.\u201d Puddlegulp teamed up with Thor \u2014 who had been turned into a frog himself \u2014 and ended up coming into possession of a sliver from Mjolnir. Puddlegulp forged that sliver into a mini version of Mjolnir called Frogjolnir, which turned him into Throg, the Frog of Thunder. He was, by the way, created by the legendary Walter Simonson in 1986 \u2014 though Puddlegulp didn\u2019t become the Frog of Thunder until 2017. That whole thing, obviously, was intended to be funny. Whether Grant is actually playing Ikol or if these are just other random Loki variants that ended up in this mysterious place is something we\u2019ll have to wait to find out about. And we have a lot more questions about that place, like whether all the pruned variants \u2014 like Mr. Mobius! \u2014 ended up there too. It probably is just some alt-Earth, and not Battleworld, but it\u2019s a fun possibility to consider. We could endlessly discuss all the ramifications of this crazy shot that\u2019s going to spark so much chatter online in the next few days, but for now we\u2019ve got a good starting point.<\/p>\n