What are Alioth and The Void in Loki? After all the twists and turns in the Disney Plus miniseries, we’ve landed at the place where all time concludes, waiting to be eaten by an insatiable purple cloud of death. The Void is not a pleasant place to be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, nor does it bode well to be caught in Alioth’s path.
But what, exactly, is Alioth? We know it’s somewhat sentient, and it’s enough of a living being for Sylvie to use her mind controls on it, as seen in ‘Journey Into Mystery’. Who’s controlling it though? And how did it end up in The Void?
For that matter, what’s The Void, really? The Time Variance Authority says it’s where all time ends. Is that true? Is there any hope of escape for Loki, and the other Loki variants? When Alioth’s cloud dissipates, we see what looks like a building or castle, who could possibly be living there? We can provide answers for some of these questions, and educated guesses on others. As with anything in cosmic Marvel, things are about to get a little weird, and potentially very spoilery.
What is Alioth?
Stick with us: Alioth is an entity that consumes all it touches, and exists across multiple dimensions and timelines. In the comics, it was the first living thing to break away from the normal timestream, consuming all it could to create a domain of endless creatures on which to feed. It has, on at least one occasion, come close to making it impossible for other Marvel characters to move around the multiverse.
Its appearance in the comic books is similar to Loki’s, where it’s a giant purple cloud that can expand and contract, absorbing anything that becomes surrounded by it. Alioth is a truly existential threat: once it anchor itself to a timeline, it will feed until there’s nothing left. This version is considerably smaller, at least for now.
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One of Alioth’s major adversaries is Kang the Conqueror, only because Alioth is one of the few other time-conquering beings. In Marvel canon, Alioth has an empire that dwarfs Kang’s, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here – though it’s very likely Kang is behind all of this. In Loki, Alioth only seems to dwell around the Void, at the behest of someone, or something, that we’ll discover in the conclusion.
What is The Void?
The place where time ends, it’s where everyone pruned by the Time Variance Authority goes. Once there, they’re eaten by Alioth in horrifying fashion. Remnants of all sorts of different Marvel outcomes litter the wasteland, from a giant Yellowjacket helmet, to a helicarrier, and even frog Thor, and his Mjolnir.
There isn’t really anywhere directly comparable from the comics, and it appears to be somewhere constructed by whomever is behind the TVA. At the end of ‘Journey Into Mystery’, we see a fortress – does this hold Kang the Conqueror, or something else? Time will tell.
Kang is appearing in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, played by Jonathan Majors. Whatever happens with The Void and Alioth, expect Loki to have some ramifications for the Langs and the Pyms.