Tag: season

It’s been a long time coming, but the God of Mischief is officially no more. At the end of the second season of Loki, the Asgardian finally finds his glorious purpose as a deity deserving of a new title: the God of Stories.

Throughout six movies and one live-action TV series since 2011’s Thor, no character in the MCU has had a more significant evolution than Tom Hiddleston’s Loki. He started as a villain, became something of an antihero, and then a full-fledged superhero. But by the end of the Season 2 finale, aptly titled “Glorious Purpose,” Loki has transformed into something beyond such simple narrative archetypes. He has effectively become the multiverse itself, the gatekeeper of all hero’s journeys past, present, and future.

Loki’s 12th and potentially final episode is the culmination of more than a decade of the Asgardian’s appearances in the MCU. It’s at once a satisfying conclusion for Marvel’s flagship TV series and a bittersweet ending for one of its most tragic and beloved characters. The Prince of Lies once desired a royal throne over anything and anyone else, whether that meant hurting his brother, his parents, or millions of earthlings in the process. In “Glorious Purpose,” Loki ascends to a throne at last—it’s just not the one he had once dreamt of.

At the end of last week’s installment, Loki learned how to control his time slipping, turning what was once a problem into a potential solution to save all his friends. He used this new superpower to return to the TVA, moments before the Temporal Loom’s destruction, as he tried to understand what they could have done differently to prevent the disaster. When O.B. suggested that they took too long to even attempt to fix the Loom, Loki entered a time loop of his own making, trying again and again to speed up their process just enough for their mission to succeed. Loki had played with time loops for much of the second season, but with Loki’s emergent mastery of time, the finale takes this narrative device a step further as he creates his own Groundhog Day.

For the beginning of “Glorious Purpose,” Loki retraces his steps over the course of the second season to see how every action can be executed faster, spending literal centuries this way to achieve an optimal sequencing, much to the confusion of his allies. (At one point, Mobius even pulls him aside and asks, “What the shit are you doing?!”) But when they finally succeed in expanding the capacity of the Loom to account for the growing number of branches, they realize their efforts—and lifetimes of Loki’s work—were all for nothing. “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse,” Victor Timely explains. And so what starts as a tour through the greatest hits of Season 2 soon extends to the first season, as Loki finally understands that the only way to prevent the destruction of the Loom and the TVA is to return to the moment when Sylvie unlocked the true potential of the multiverse, and stop her from killing He Who Remains.

At the Citadel at the End of Time, Loki finds himself in another futile cycle, trying and failing to save He Who Remains from getting stabbed by Sylvie in each attempt. Only when the TVA’s mastermind pulls Loki out of it, using his advanced time-twisting TemPad to freeze Sylvie in place, does the full extent of Loki’s impossible predicament begin to take shape. He Who Remains paved the road for Loki and Sylvie to find him at the End of Time at the end of the first season, and here, the villain reveals to Loki that everything that has happened since then—from his death to Loki’s time slipping—has all proceeded as he anticipated. All along, the Temporal Loom was just a fail-safe, designed to protect the Sacred Timeline from the inevitable multiversal war and nothing more. Despite Sylvie’s best efforts, free will was never a possibility. “Make the hard choice,” He Who Remains tells Loki. “Break the Loom and you cause a war that kills us all. Game over. Or, kill her, and we protect what we can.”

Beginning with this conversation with He Who Remains, Loki skips backward and forward through time to figure out what he must do, seeking counsel as he comes up with the words to rewrite the story of the entire multiverse. It’s a clever way of revisiting some of the most critical junctures in the series to display how far Loki has come, while also providing the chance for him to have one last chat with the show’s most important characters. At this point, Loki has learned how to transport his body through time and space, and he’s grown powerful enough to dictate time for those around him—much like HWR’s Time Twister. Though it seems as if Loki could return to any moment in the past, with Mobius, he chooses one of their very first conversations, when he was just learning about the existence of the TVA in the series premiere.

Loki picks a moment in time when he was still in restraints and when Mobius was no more than a TVA analyst trying to figure out what made a Loki tick. In some ways, that choice makes this version of Mobius more objective; he has yet to learn about all the lies and deceptions that the TVA was built on, and is still a faithful servant to an organization that prunes every variant and branching timeline without exception.

As the duo sit across from each other in the TVA’s time theater, they decide to skip the rewatch of Loki’s life. Mobius instead tells him a story about an incident involving a pair of Hunters, a thinly-veiled anecdote about himself. Mobius recounts how this Hunter once “lost sight of the big picture,” as he failed to prune a variant because he was just a little boy. Thanks to his hesitation, a couple of Hunters died in the process, and matters would have been even worse if his partner, Ravonna, hadn’t stepped in to intervene. “Most purpose is more burden than glory,” Mobius explains.

By now, it seems clear that Loki’s only option is to kill Sylvie. As Mobius’s story helps frame it, it is the burden that Loki must choose. And so Loki makes one final stop, finding Sylvie at A.D. Doug’s Pasadena workshop from last week’s “Science/Fiction” to tell his multiversal counterpart of the unfortunate reality. For one last time, they debate the need for the TVA, the choice between dying with freedom or living under unjust rule, and their positions of unparalleled power over the lives of everyone in every universe. Sylvie helps him recognize that protecting the Sacred Timeline isn’t enough; for all that she has preached about the necessity of free will, her position finally breaks through to Loki. “Who are you to decide we can’t die fighting?” Sylvie asks him.

Instead of returning to the End of Time, Loki goes back to the Temporal Core, to those familiar final moments before the Loom gets destroyed and the multiverse begins to decay. Rather than playing within HWR’s range of rules, though, Loki chooses his own path. He takes one last look at his friends before setting off to be forever alone, accepting the fate he was most afraid of. “I know what I want,” he says to Sylvie and Mobius. “I know what kind of god I need to be … for you. For all of us.”

The final climactic scene of Loki is a stunning visual sequence backed by an epic score from composer Natalie Holt, whose finest work in the series arrives near the end of this finale. As Loki replaces Victor on the gangway leading to the Loom, his TVA attire disintegrates due to the room’s temporal radiation, with his magic producing an iconic green costume in its place to match his new unofficial title as the God of Stories. A horned helmet manifests on his head, bearing a similar black-and-gold aesthetic to He Who Remains’s Citadel and technology. Loki destroys the Loom, dispersing the branches into the void before him as they begin to decompose. He proceeds to grab these vine-like threads, whole universes crumbling in the palms of his hands, and pulls them together through a portal to the End of Time. And as Loki wraps himself in the branches of the multiverse, imbuing them with his magic all the while, he sits on a solitary throne at his own Citadel, creating a new type of Loom that’s better suited for an Asgardian god: Yggdrasil, the World’s Tree.

Screenshots via Disney+

The 12th episode of Loki serves as the second-season finale, but it’s also something of a creation myth. So much of this season was built on the themes of ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth. And as Loki travels from one end of the series to its beginning, two episodes that share the title of “Glorious Purpose,” these paradoxes of time and infinity start to apply to the TV show at large. Was Loki the one who was responsible for pulling his friends—Mobius, B-15, O.B., and Casey—out of their lives to begin with? Was it Loki who created the TVA?

“Glorious Purpose” is the last chapter of a story that finds Loki sacrificing his desires to become a divine being with all the power one could ever dream of, and yet no one to enjoy it with. He has claimed his throne at the End of Time, a purpose of all burden, and no glory. Loki never actually declares its protagonist as the God of Stories, as he becomes in the comics, but it gives him the same fate, on the series’ own terms. Loki has now established a new multiverse for the rest of the MCU to live and grow in, one that is more alive and dynamic than the Sacred Timeline was ever designed to be.

The Epilogue

“Glorious Purpose” effectively ends with Loki restructuring the multiverse into a new type of World’s Tree. But rather than leaving the episode on something of a cliff-hanger, Loki tacks on a few brief scenes to show what happens in the aftermath of the Asgardian’s sacrifice. When Loki destroyed the Loom and took sole responsibility for managing an infinitely-growing multiverse, he all but ended any need for the TVA to continue existing as it had. But in its place, he has allowed a new organization to grow, find a new purpose, and do things a little differently this time.

O.B. has returned to the TVA to reassume his position as its tech expert, rebooting Miss Minutes—who will hopefully not try to kill them all this time—and writing a second edition of the TVA guidebook, with Victor Timely sharing an author credit. Casey and B-15 are both back as well and have received more power in what appears to be a more democratic restructuring of the TVA’s leadership: When they return to the War Room, it isn’t filled with a handful of judges or generals sitting in to debate among themselves, but one that is packed with new faces and more voices to reflect the shift in the organization’s mission and values. One interaction between B-15 and Mobius reveals that at least part of the TVA’s new goal is to monitor the other variants of He Who Remains and prevent the multiversal war from happening.

(In Mobius’s report, he cites an incident with a variant in a 616-adjacent realm that was handled. He’s referring to Kang the Conqueror and the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is thankfully the one time that that movie ever really came up this entire season.)

As for Ravonna Renslayer, whose fate had all been forgotten by Loki since she was pruned in Episode 4, we see her waking up in the Void. Just as Loki did in Season 1, Ravonna now finds herself in an unfamiliar world that exists out of time, facing down the realm’s guardian, the trans-temporal purple entity known as Alioth. It isn’t clear whether this is the end of the line for the former TVA judge or a tease that her story isn’t done quite yet; a shot of a pyramid and a Sphinx could be suggesting a potential connection between her and another Kang variant who appeared at the end of Quantumania, the time-traveling pharaoh known as Rama-Tut.

Meanwhile, the adult Victor Timely is nowhere to be seen. However, we see a young version of him back in Chicago. “Glorious Purpose” returns to that moment when he received his TVA guidebook in “1893,” except when Victor turns around to look at his windowsill, he sees that nothing is there—just the curtain blowing in the wind. In this new reality, Timely’s future is never altered, and instead of being put on a path that could lead him to become the next He Who Remains, the boy simply turns back to focus on making his candles.

Finally, the episode ends with two of the show’s most important characters behind Loki: Mobius and Sylvie. After Sylvie chewed out Mobius in “Heart of the TVA” for never even bothering to look into his past life on the Sacred Timeline, Mobius decides it’s time to leave the TVA and see what he’s been protecting all of these years. With Sylvie at his side, he watches from a distance as his variant counterpart, Don, plays with his two sons on the lawn in front of their home. “Where you gonna go?” he asks her, only to receive a carefree shrug in response.

“You?” she asks.

“I might just wait here for a little bit,” Mobius replies. “Let time pass.”

Sylvie leaves through a Time Door and Mobius is left alone, watching the distant life that he once had. It’s a wonderfully simple moment, as Mobius stands there in blissful peace, with just a tinge of sadness knowing that the family he’s watching is not his. It’s all the more devastating as the camera zooms back out to reveal that Loki is right there watching with him, from another place, at another time, taking solace in the fact that his sacrifice was not in vain. What’s in store for either Mobius or Sylvie in the future is, for once, completely unknown. And that’s the beauty of it.

What’s Next for Loki?

For Loki, the God of Stories doesn’t exactly get a happy ending. But as he watches his friends continue on in their lives with the freedom of choice they’d never had, the episode ends with Loki looking on with a tearful smile, suggesting that it was all worth it.

After all of Loki’s dastardly deeds during his time in the MCU, the Asgardian has finally become a god whom Thor, Odin, and Frigga would be proud of—making it all the more tragic that none of them are around to see him become the person they always hoped he’d become. While Marvel has yet to announce whether there will be a third season of Loki, this certainly feels like it’s the end. Any alternative would be a mistake, for as good as the series has been. Though Season 2 had its ups and downs, it returned Loki to the pinnacle of MCU TV, rivaled only by the lone season of 2021’s WandaVision. With two tremendous season finales, though, Loki has achieved what few of Marvel Studios’ movies or TV series have ever been able to, providing satisfying conclusions to a character’s story that wasn’t whittled down by a messy CGI spectacle or outsized concerns for promoting the next project coming down the pipeline. Loki’s character arc fully realizes his journey throughout the years, and he now holds a position of power in the MCU that not only allows the Multiverse Saga to continue, but also invests it with greater meaning, knowing that the Asgardian is the force that binds it all together.

As head writer Eric Martin sees it, the story of Loki has come to an end—at least as far as this series goes. “We approached this as like two halves of a book,” Martin recently told CinemaBlend. “Season 1, first half. Season 2, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don’t know. I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons.”

However, in an interview with Variety, executive producer Kevin Wright shared a different perspective on the character’s future, citing that “the hope” is for Marvel to one day reunite Loki with his brother Thor for the first time since 2018’s Infinity War. “The sun shining on Loki and Thor once again has always been the priority of the story we’re telling,” Wright said. “But for that meeting to really be fulfilling, we have to get Loki to a certain place emotionally. I think that’s been the goal of these two seasons.”

It’s a bit jarring to read the Loki producer saying that the “priority” of Loki is to essentially promote another MCU project, but hey, this is still Marvel Studios, after all. What’s in store for the former God of Mischief, his new responsibility to the MCU’s multiverse, and what Marvel will do about its Jonathan Majors–Kang the Conqueror situation can be dissected another day. For now, it’s time to appreciate a Marvel series that gave its title character a proper ending.