Season 2 Finale Reveals Loki‘s Glorious Purpose, Drops Quantumania/Kang Reference — Grade It!
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
It took a lot of “rewinding,” and centuries of studying, but Loki eventually came to realize his glorious-ish purpose in the Season 2 finale of the Disney+ series.
Having learned to finely control his time-slipping, Loki thought that saving Victor Timely from spaghettification was just a matter of him heading faster out to the gangway. Or a bit earlier. But nope, Timely unraveled time and time again.
More from TVLine
Loki kept slipping himself a bit further back in time, including to when Victor and O.B. first met, but that only led to Loki spending literal “centuries” studying physics, mechanics and such, so as to arrive at that moment with the throughput multiplier already built. From there, things looked a lot more promising — though Mobius, for one, had to ask, “What the s–t are you doing?!” upon witnessing Loki’s ever-erratic behavior. Victor suited up, made his way down the gangway, loaded the multiplier and launched it to dock with the Loom. And the Loom indeed begin to better manage the multiplying branches of timelines.
Until… it could handle them no more. As Victor noted, the Loom would never be able to accommodate infinite branches; it’s “like trying to divide by zero.” Or as Sylvie would ominously state, “As soon as the Sacred Timeline started branching, the Loom was doomed to fail.”
Meaning, the answer was to prevent the Sacred Timeline from ever branching, by keeping Sylvie from slaying He Who Remains. Yet when Loki time-slipped to just prior to that moment, he was never able to stop Sylvie from making the kill. Finally, when a frustrated Loki asks HWR why he doesn’t ever fight back, the Kang variant used his very special TemPad to “freeze” and then briefly disappear Sylvie, so he and Loki can talk brass tacks. HWR knows that Loki is time-slipping, and set that evolution in motion, in fact.
When He Who Remains brings Sylvie back, it is Loki who next manages to “pause” the action and vanish her again — because, he makes clear to HWR, this is far from the first time the two of them have had this conversation. He Who Remains informs Loki that the Loom problem isn’t one of “scaling,” as Victor Timely suggested, it’s that the Loom was designed as a failsafe; when overloaded, it’s programmed to delete all timelines except the Sacred one. So no matter what Loki & Co. attempt as a fix, “the outcome remains the same — you lose,” HWR sniffs.
Loki declares his plan to “change the equation” and break the Loom, though He Who Remains reminds him that do do so would be to invite a “brutal war where nothing survives, not even the Sacred Timeline.” HWR says that making hard choices is why he sits in the “big chair”/throne there at the End of Time, so if Loki thinks he can do better, he’ll need to make a hard choice himself: to break the Loom and cause war, “game over”… or kill Sylvie, “and we protect what we can.”
Loki this time slips back to his Season 1, Episode 1 TVA interview, and asks how Mobius and the TVA are able to prune lives, when needed — to make those hard choices. Mobius relates a story about a Hunter who hesitated to kill a Variant that would be responsible for 5,000 deaths, because at the time the Variant was just an 8-year-old boy. Because of the Hunter’s hesitation, timelines branched, more Variants appeared, and the Hunter’s partner — Renslayer, Loki comes to realize — had to prune the kid. “She knew the hard thing to do had to be done,” Mobius explains. “Most purpose is more burden than glory.”
Loki time-slips to the planning room that got spaghettified last week, and pauses its destruction to have a heart-to-heart with Sylvie. She picks up on the fact that she needs to die, but stops well short of giving her blessing. Instead, she asks Loki, “Do you want to be god who takes away everyone’s free will? You’re replacing one nightmare with another.” Sylvie says she has lived through an apocalypse or two, and in turn learned “sometimes its OK to destroy something,” like the Sacred Timeline.
“If theres a hope you can replace that thing with something better,” Loki muses….
Loki time-slips back to Victor Timely getting his aura scanned, but this time he marches down the stairs himself and pries open the blast doors. “I know what I want, what kind of god I need to be — for you, for all of us,” he tells Sylvie and Mobius, who follow too late to stop him. As Loki lurches down the gangway, his tattered suit transforms into a cape, with his horned helmet. He uses his godly powers to expand the branches inside of the Loom until the structure shatters. As the branches begin to die, Loki begins grabbing them. He marches up a set of invisible steps to a giant green gash in the distance, and as he steps through the opening, the branches come with him, disappearing. Loki continues his climb, to the remains of He Who Remains’ citadel, where he sits on a glimmering throne and bunches the branches together — into the World Tree/Yggdrasill that connects the Nine Realms!
“AFTER,” an on-screen card tells us, we see the new, tree loom-based TVA in action. O.B. reboots (a hopefully non-killy) Miss Minutes. Mobius pores through reports on He Who Remains variants, who, B-15 notes, remain unaware of the TVA’s existence. (Mobius notes that one HWR variant “caused a ruckus in a 616-adjacent realm” — the quantum realm of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — “but they handled it.”)
Mobius regards a folder on his desk with a Post-It that reads, “Your file as requested,” then catches up to B-15 to confirm that he has decided to leave the TVA, “to see what it is we’ve been protecting all this time.” B-15 assures her longtime colleague that if he ever wants his desk back, “it’s yours.” We then see B-15 report to a War Room populated with hunters, analysts and judges…. O.B. crack open a box of “second edition” TVA handbooks… Young Victor Timely circa 1868 not finding anything by his window… and Renslayer coming to in the Void, and being none too happy about it! As purple lightning crackles in the ominous sky above her….
And Mobius? He stands down the street from his home, regarding himself with his two sons. Sylvie walks up and notes it’s “weird that Loki’s not here, isn’t it?” Mobius nods. And as Sylvie walks off, we cut to the World Tree, with a regal and omnipotent, if heartbroken, Loki seated on the throne at its center….
Best of TVLine
Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter
