Loki finale theory: is Mobius's Black Sea boy Doctor Doom?

A line from Mobius in the final episode of Loki could tell us the origin of Doctor Doom ahead of Avengers: Doomsday. I mean that version of Doom specifically. Plenty of people have been messaging me about this rediscovered moment from season 2, episode 6, the series finale titled Glorious Purpose, the same title as the series premiere. Here I'm going to break it down and line it up with some new things we've learned about Avengers: Doomsday from these teasers.

Loki, starring Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson as Mobius, ended its second season in November 2023. In that finale, Mobius tells a story about a boy near the Black Sea who would grow up to be responsible for 5,000 deaths. My theory is that this boy could have been Victor von Doom.

What the Avengers: Doomsday teasers showed of Doctor Doom

One thing the first four Avengers: Doomsday teasers did not show was Doctor Doom himself. After many people asked, I checked: the figure reflected in the doorway of Steve's house is not Victor von Doom. I compared that silhouette with Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., and it's Chris Evans walking up the steps of the front porch. It's a specific haircut that Chris Evans can pull off and Robert Downey Jr. can't. His hair does not go that way.

If you want to go with my theory that the baby could be a young Victor von Doom, or that the shifting light behind the Doomsday Clock title screen could be Victor pacing in the background, then sure, maybe Doom is there somewhere. I do think the Sentinels fighting Cyclops are being controlled by Doom's magic runes. Then there's the detail of Doom apparently draining the oceans of Earth 616, which I'm assuming has to do with him pruning the adamantium corpse of Tiamut to build his Doombots. I have another water theory too, which comes up near the end of this piece.

We haven't had a clear look at Doom since the scene after the credits of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. We still don't know his origin. We don't even know if he was from the same Latveria represented by the flag and the empty seats at the Future Foundation in that film. What we do know is that he's going to look like a probably scarred Tony Stark, and that is still the weirdest part of all this.

How the Loki finale loops back to Mobius's story about an 8-year-old variant

It's possible Marvel Studios already told us how Doctor Doom's story began. In the Loki finale, Loki faces the inevitable destruction of the Temporal Loom and all of reality. He loops through centuries of cycles trying to find the perfect sequence of events for sending Victor Timely out to fix the Loom without getting him spaghettified. Ultimately he has to give up. He loops back further to the events of the season 1 finale with Sylvie and stays in the Citadel.

Getting nowhere there, he loops back to his questioning session with Mobius in the first episode, in the time theater at the TVA where Loki was first brought after his arrest. Instead of letting Mobius show him scenes from his life on the Sacred Timeline, a Loki with centuries of wisdom asks how the TVA chooses who lives and who dies. Mobius says they don't question the dogma and prune according to the proper flow of time.

When Loki asks what comfort there is in that, Mobius tells a story. A couple of hunters went on a mission near the Black Sea to find a variant who would be responsible for 5,000 deaths. There was a hiccup. In Mobius's words: "The variant is an 8-year-old boy."

Why I dismissed the Doctor Doom connection in November 2023

I didn't make this connection when the Doomsday teasers began rolling out, but I clocked the line and stored it away when I first broke down the episode on its premiere in November 2023. My reasoning then was that the Black Sea is in Eastern Europe, surrounded by Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. Latveria's precise location has shifted around in Marvel comics, though it's normally somewhere in Eastern Europe near Romania. So I said it could be Doom, but I didn't know, because Victor isn't known for having a brother. I dismissed it.

What I didn't yet realize was that days later, Variety would publish an article describing a Marvel Studios Palm Springs retreat for executives that had taken place two months earlier, in September 2023. Among the topics discussed was replacing Kang the Conqueror, the villain of the Multiverse Saga, with Doctor Doom as the villain of the fifth Avengers movie.

We have to remember that there were far stranger things in that Loki finale, like the Yggdrasil Sacred Timeline tree that got called back in the What If season 2 finale in December. A small line about a future mass murderer from the Black Sea area didn't stay on the front burner.

Ravonna Renslayer pruned the boy after Mobius hesitated

In that scene, Mobius goes on to describe how he hesitated to prune the 8-year-old boy, probably because in his life on the Sacred Timeline, Mobius had sons of his own. "One of the hunters, he paused. Timelines started to branch. More variants appeared," Mobius says. It happened so fast that his partner had to step in and prune the kid. A couple of hunters died, he says, because that one hunter lost sight of the big picture.

Loki then asks how Mobius lives with making these hard choices, and follows up about the partner who did prune the kid. "She actually became a judge," Mobius says, adding that she's the reason Loki is there instead of dust in a TVA vent. That was Ravonna Renslayer. She pruned this Eastern European future mass murderer after Mobius thought about sparing him.

Why the TVA pruning this boy points to a threat to He Who Remains

Some details in this story don't add up when you look back at the series. First, why would this boy's future of being responsible for 5,000 deaths not be part of the proper flow of time? The TVA allows all kinds of disasters and mass killings in history. The worst ones register as apocalyptic events. Loki season 1 episode 2 is about how the TVA has to be okay with mass human casualties happening sometimes. It is not their job to save lives.

What the series tells us is that the TVA's plan is pruning branch timelines that produce rival variants to He Who Remains. Whether or not the TVA knows it, their job is ultimately to stop other Kangs from popping up. That's what He Who Remains considers the proper flow of time.

So if Mobius and Renslayer were tasked with pruning this boy, the history in which he lived out that future must also have posed an existential threat to He Who Remains, in addition to taking 5,000 lives. This kid was destined to be a multiversal villain of some kind.

Could the "more variants" Mobius saw be other Doom variants?

Then there's the detail Mobius threw in about timelines branching and more variants appearing. He could just be describing what TVA analysts would often see on their big screen in the office: the Sacred Timeline and the chaotic branches that split off when hunters didn't do their job fast enough. More variants could simply mean more branches.

But Mobius was telling this from the perspective of a hunter in the moment, on the ground in the Sacred Timeline, who emotionally disassociated and hesitated to doom a kid to a fate he doesn't understand. Would that version of Mobius really have been checking the Sacred Timeline on any TVA screen in that moment? Could the more variants be other variants of this boy, who showed up by the Black Sea and tried to stop the TVA? What if there were other Doom variants on location there?

Why 5,000 deaths suggests a supervillain like Victor von Doom

Let's consider that this boy was Victor von Doom. We don't know exactly where Latveria is. It changes depending on which comic the map appears in, but it's normally in Eastern Europe, somewhere near Romania. It's not too crazy to assume it would border the Black Sea.

One person being responsible for 5,000 deaths suggests it wasn't some dictator who rose to power and used military forces to carry out a horrific genocide. Theoretically, another figure or group could have risen in his place to do the same, and many people would have been responsible for those killings. So we're talking about one man who, through his own actions alone, killed 5,000 people. That is a supervillain, and one whose existence threatens He Who Remains.

That starts to sound like Doctor Doom, especially if Robert Downey Jr.'s Doom is anything like the goofy Doom in the stop motion Come to Latveria animation that Marvel released on its official channel.

Could Doctor Doom be Tony Stark's twin brother, pruned to the Void?

Part of why many of us dismissed the Doom theory in November 2023 is that Victor von Doom doesn't have any brothers in the comics, and the kid in Mobius's story did have a brother. But that was months before we knew Marvel Studios would bring back Robert Downey Jr. to play Doom. So could the answer be the simplest explanation? Is this version of Victor von Doom Tony Stark's twin brother from the 616 universe?

I know it sounds soap opera, but let's play it out. Maybe Howard and Maria Stark originally had twin boys named Tony and Victor. The family could have been on vacation by the Black Sea when the TVA saw Victor's warlord future and his threat to the order of He Who Remains, and pruned him. Maybe that pruning even reshaped reality on the Sacred Timeline, so Tony believed he was always an only child, and Howard and Maria believed the same.

The pruned Victor would be tried by the TVA and sent to the Void, harboring a lifelong resentment of the TVA. He would grow up in the junkyard patrolled by Alioth that Cassandra Nova would one day rule, with access to all the pruned technology of other realities. The Void would be Victor's home turf, where he could build Battleworld. Could that be what Marvel was hinting at by putting a Secret Wars #5 comic with Doctor Doom on the cover on the ground of the Void in Deadpool & Wolverine? And when the Russos say these teasers are not teasers but stories, is that a clue they watched the Loki finale and plan to use Mobius's story? When Doom drains the oceans on Earth, is it a Tiamut thing, or does he start with the Black Sea he was pruned from?

Was the Loki finale written before Marvel swapped Kang for Doom?

Some will say the Loki finale was written before Marvel decided to swap Kang for Doom. My answer is that you don't know when any of this was written. Show me the scripts. You don't know whether they had final shooting scripts for any of it. This is Marvel Studios. The episode came out two months after Marvel executives secretly decided on the swap.

Season 2 head writer Eric Martin said he had to hastily rewrite episode 5 of the second season, and that a storyline he and the director considered their favorite was scrapped. Marvel made them change something big about Loki season 2, and it sounds like much of this was being reconfigured in the final months before we saw the finale and heard Mobius's story. The fact that so many changes were happening makes it impressive that the second season ended as well as it did.

Maybe the anecdote of a boy by the Black Sea who would grow up to kill 5,000 people was written before the Kang and Doom decision, independent of the studio's plans. But the line remains, sitting there as backstory Marvel could pick up: a way to explain Doctor Doom's origin without erasing the Kang architecture of its original plans. Here's your chance, Marvel, to establish that Doom was the threat that scared Kang even more than his other variants did.