This Loki Season 2 Villain Has A Kill Count So Huge It Would Make Thanos Puke

Contains spoilers for "Loki" Season 2, Episode 2 — "Breaking Brad"

Remember how Season 1 of Marvel Disney+ original series "Loki" reveals that every member of the Time Variance Authority is actually a variant plucked from somewhere on the timeline? Remember how they realize that He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) kidnapped them, wiped their memories, and brainwashed them into protecting his precious Sacred Timeline? You'd think that kind of bombshell would stop the TVA dead in its tracks, but that's not really what happens.

In Season 2, Episode 1, "Ouroboros," Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and Mobius (Owen Wilson) approach the Judges' Council to demand that all pruning procedures be paused effective immediately. After all, if the TVA's sole mission is to eradicate variants and branching timelines, then it would technically have to start with the Minutemen in the mirror. Judge Gamble (Liz Carr) — whose lines in "Loki" Season 2 mean more than you realized – immediately agrees, but General Dox (Kate Dickie) is less swayed. In fact, she responds to B-15's impassioned speech by sending a fleet of heavily armed Minutemen to wipe out the rapidly branching timelines.

To be clear, each timeline features a whole breadth of sentient life, so even pruning a single one destroys more than Thanos (Josh Brolin) has ever snapped out of existence. And Dox and her team successfully prune 30% of the newly branched timelines before Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Mobius, and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) stop her operation, killing billions.

In 2023, our world — not Earth-199999 or Earth-616 — hosts a little over eight billion human lives. Assuming the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Earth has the same population, that still only accounts for a minor fraction of the lives lost in each pruned timeline since the superhero franchise is a galaxy-wide narrative with an untold number of planets, each of which hosts an untold number of sentient lifeforms. While we're at it, let's remember that each of these timelines comes packaged with animal and plant life too. And all of it dies when a branching timeline is pruned. Now imagine all of that death repeating over and over for every pruned timeline ... 30% percent of all existing branches.

Thanos craves balance, with the twisted logic behind his genocide being to create a safer, better-supplied existence for a smaller total population. It's evil and destructive, but at least he has good intentions. Conversely, the TVA's moral compass points in a slightly different direction because He Who Remains created it to ensure that time always flowed toward him. Seriously, the Sacred Timeline is only sacred because it ensures there's a single Kang variant controlling everything from behind the curtain. So while there was never a justification for what the TVA does, now that Sylvie has killed He Who Remains, it benefits literally no one.

"Loki" Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.