Well, it's fair to say we didn't see that coming, right?
The penultimate episode of Loki didn't reveal the show's big bad, but it now seems inevitable that Kang the Conqueror will be introduced as the one responsible for the creation of the TVA.
In "Journey Into Mystery," the God of Mischief found himself pitted against a giant creature made of smoke, and we're sure at least some of you started having flashbacks to comic book movie villains like Galactus and Parallax. However, Loki would later reveal that this was, in fact, Alioth, an obscure Mark Gruenwald creation first introduced in the pages of Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective #1.
Portrayed here as a "guard dog" for whoever resides in that castle, the version in the source material has an empire even bigger than Kang's, and the time-travelling bad guy had to create a barrier to stop the powerful being from entering his domain. Ravonna inadvertently released Alioth at one point, leading to an epic battle between the two for supremacy.
That's not something we're actually anticipating seeing in the Disney+ series, especially now that Alioth has been defeated. However, there are enough links between it and Kang for us to be pretty confident that the Conqueror will make his presence felt before all is said and done, thereby setting the stage for his story to continue in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
Another big Kang nod in this week's episode was the fact that the destroyed Avengers Tower had been rebranded with the "Qeng" logo. The CEO of that company was Mister Gryphon, an alternate version of Nathaniel Richards, a.k.a. Kang the Conqueror.
The pieces do seem to be falling into place for a Kang reveal, but it's best not to get too excited just yet; after all, Mephisto never did show up in WandaVision!