Hela is Queen when we find her, presiding over the court at the Globe Theater with Thor beside her and Loki performing on stage below. She is poised and authoritative, exactly the kind of ruler who holds a kingdom together by sheer force of presence. When a rift tears open above the theater and the crowd scatters, Carter catches Loki on a rope and hauls him back down. Hela is not so fortunate. The vortex takes her before anyone can reach her, and she is gone.

Her death is the hinge on which everything else turns. Thor is crowned in her wake and immediately becomes the obstacle Carter spends the rest of her time in 1602 working around. The grief driving him, the rage he cannot govern, the king he briefly becomes at his worst, all of it traces back to the moment he watched his sister disappear into the sky. Hela shapes the entire arc of what follows without surviving past its opening minutes.