LOKI Explained: Who Are The TVA, Time Keepers Mobius M Mobius And Kang The Conqueror Theory

Loki Episode 1 introduces some of Marvel’s most powerful characters into the MCU. The TVA are the kind of people that use the power stone as a paperweight and in this, we’re gonna be breaking down everything you need to know about them.

This includes who the organisation are as a whole, what’s going on with the Time Keepers and our theory on why Kang The Conquerer could be behind it all.

Full Spoilers ahead so if you haven’t had the time on your hands to check it out yet then I highly recommend that you click away now.

Timekeepers 

I think before talking about the TVA we have to talk about the Timekeepers as they’re basically what the entire organisation is built around.

Now the thing you have to understand about the Marvel Universe is that it’s very much cyclical and when it dies it very much respawns the next one which starts again with some slight variations on what came before. Upon its death, the universe goes into what’s called a heat death and from this something new is created.

In the comics, the Time Keepers were created by He Who Remains who was the last surviving member of the TVA from the previous universal cycle.

It’s very much a chicken and the egg situation in which we don’t really know what came first and he who remains created the Time Keepers to avoid the mistakes of the past.

Interestingly the first attempt to make them resulted in the time twisters which just so happens to be the name of a device in the show.

He Who Remains didn’t want the previous issues from the prior universe to develop once more and he made the Time Keepers to protect not only the timeline but time itself.

There were actually four created but one was exiled to Egypt which we’ll talk about later on.

Timekeeper’s Role

Their main jobs were to unravel any issues caused by time travel and thus they founded the TVA who would follow their orders to keep things on the straight and narrow.

They’ve gone head to head with The Avengers several times and upon the emergence of Scarlet Witch, they quickly identified her as a Nexus being.

Now they’ve also worked alongside Immortus who you might also know as Nathanial Richards aka Kang The Conquerer. They sent him out to stop the Scarlet Witch from having children but as with most time travel shenanigans he ended up causing events that led to her relationship with Vision.

IncaseIn case you don’t know who Kang The Conquerer is, he’s likely going to be the next big bad in the MCU and Johnathan Majors has been cast as the villain in the upcoming Ant-man Quantumania. Ravonna Renslayer also features in the show as a judge and she was an object of Kang’s affections, thus it is possible that he could be popping up.

The Time Keepers and Kang are mortal enemies and due to the antagonist constantly using time travel to achieve his goals, they’ve often hired the TVA and helped the heroes from behind the scenes to defeat him.

Are They in Charge?

Now because we don’t really see the Time Keepers in the show I actually think that they might not exist anymore and that it could be Kang controlling the events that we see play out in the series. I would love to see it if the fourth timekeeper that was exiled was somewhat changed in the show to actually be Nathanial and we could learn that he had overthrown the three to alter time for his own ends.

Something just seems off with the TVA and the way that they are worshipped as deities.

Interestingly in the comics, The Time Twisters actually came back and pretended to be the keepers. They sent Immortus out to absorb the energy of Scarlet Witch and shortly after he started working against them.

Since then they’ve used their powers to control events to the best of their abilities and though it is possible to escape their grasp and defeat them, the majority of the Marvel Universe is the way that they wished it to be.

Who is the TVA?

Now their main tool is the TVA or rather the Time Variance Authority. Not only are they the monitors of the timeline, but they are also judge, jury, and executioner when deciding what timelines are allowed to exist. Using their temporal charges they can pretty much prune an entire branched reality from existence and decide the flow of history.

Comic Book History of the TVA 

Though we didn’t see time travel in the MCU until the events of Avenger’s Endgame, in Marvel comics it’s actually far more common than you might think. Lots of people go back and change time and whether events are drastically altered or if the butterfly effect creates new variants, the TVA are there to clean things up.

Now they first showed up in Thor 372 and through Justice Peace, we saw how the organisation operated. This storyline which spanned the aforementioned entry and the following one merely introduced them and it wasn’t until issue 353 of Fantastic Four that we learned more about them.

Here they arrested Marvel’s first family for crimes against time travel and we discovered their headquarters in the null timezone. The man put in charge of their case was Mobius M Mobius who is of course played by Owen Wilson in the show.

Who is Mobius?

Now the Fantastic Four managed to escape and several TVA files were lost during this. Mobius was nearly demoted and he attempted to capture the Fantastic Four once more in order to write the wrongs of his own past.

Throughout the comics, he’s worked alongside the Kang Dynasty in Chronopolis which depending on what fan theories you read may have been the miniature city that could be spotted in the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man And The Wasp.

Mobius has remained somewhat a mysterious figure and we haven’t really had an origin story for him. He has however made his presence felt in the comics and he did appear during She-Hulk’s trial when she was charged with attempting to warn a past version of Hawkeye of his death.

Now though he tends not to get his own hands dirty in the source material, the show seems to be something that’s gonna have him more on-site than his comic book counterpart.

I have seen episode 2 of the show already as I got early access to the first two from Disney. I don’t wanna spoil too much but he does have a way more active role than what I’ve ever really seen in the comics and it’s clear that he wants to stop this variant of Loki no matter what.

Minute Men and Miss Minutes 

Now with him taking a bit more of a back seat in the comics, he tends to use the time cops that the TVA have or the chronomonitors as they’re called in Marvel Universe. The MCU has changed them up slightly to be called the Minute Men and this is likely because Miss Minutes seems to also be someone quite high up in the organisation. Though she initially seems just the face or mascot of the group, we can see in the elevator shots that there is a floor that leads directly to her.

So she may be an actual living entity or if we’re wrong about Kang, perhaps she is one of The Timekeepers.

Now as for the Minute Men, the show has them possessing far more personality than they do in the comics. In those, they are pretty much faceless individuals that are created through quantum technology. They don’t really have a life, certainly don’t know what a fish is and only spring into existence at the offshoot of a new reality.

These work all hours of the day and you could say they’re working OVERTIME.

Are you having that!?

Every reality comes with them and as they exist within the main timeline, when a branched reality is born they come along with it much in the same way that everything from the main timeline is duplicated too.

It’s a lot to get your head around and I think the show is going more with the idea that these are just agents who are assigned to bring in temporal offenders so that they can be seen by a judge.

What do they say to the click when it’s time’s up, hands up! Like hands…hands on a clock.

Now though they hold pretty much the entire power of the universe in their hands, they are not all-powerful and their powers are limited to things like human error and the constant beauroracy they have to deal with.

Evading the TVA

Managing all the events that they have to throughout time and the paperwork that goes with it is very time-consuming and though they will most likely get around to fixing almost every problem, some do slip through the net.

The ending of the first episode has also shown that it is possible to evade them too and strike at them when they least expect it. We catch a mysterious variant of Loki waiting until they are investigating an oil dig carried out by a time traveller and here they strike them. This variant has also managed to evade their capture and this shows that they are not all-powerful. Now the next episode does unravel a lot of the mystery surrounding this character but until then I’d love to hear your thoughts and theories on the TVA.