Here’s How Loki Resolved Episode 4’s World-Ending Cliffhanger
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Disney+ has finally rescued Loki viewers from that cliff we’ve been hanging off all week. (And not a moment too soon; arms were getting sore.)
The penultimate episode of Loki‘s second season arrived on Thursday night, burdened with the sizable task of explaining how Loki & Co. could possibly survive the apocalyptic blast that consumed the TVA in last week’s installment. But as we came to learn in Episode 5, the only people who truly survived the temporal loom’s massive overload were Loki and Sylvie, mischievous gods that they are; everyone else was sent back to the branched timelines where they’d originally been living quiet lives until the TVA plucked them.
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Following the temporal loom’s explosion, Loki found that he was still at the TVA, but now alone — and not long after the loom went belly-up, the entire TVA got spaghettified, anyway. But Loki also found that he had started to time slip once again, which allowed him to visit all of his pals and attempt to get their help stopping the TVA’s eventual destruction. Casey aka Frank was in the middle of escaping Alcatraz in 1962 (a reference to a real historical event, by the way!), but didn’t recognize Loki when he appeared. Hunter B-15 was a doctor in 2012 New York City, but barely had a chance to recognize Loki before he time slipped again. And Mobius, at long last, was working at a store selling jet skis in Pasadena, but also didn’t recognize Loki upon his arrival on that timeline branch.
Naturally, O.B. was the one to save the day here — not because he actually recognized Loki, but because he was a doctoral student pursuing theoretical physics and a part-time science fiction author. Loki’s time-space dilemma was O.B.’s Super Bowl! So, after constructing his own makeshift TemPad, O.B. helped Loki convince the rest of the gang that they play an important role in preserving the existence of… well, existence. Loki, O.B., Mobius, Casey and B-15 agreed to gather in one spot, which would allow them to recreate the same temporal aura they had right before the loom went ka-boom; as long as Loki could learn to control his time slipping and will himself to a certain date and time, the entire group could go back in time and prevent the TVA’s collapse.
But when Loki visited Sylvie on her timeline branch, she disagreed with Loki’s objective: Why should he take these people away from their happy lives and force them to join the TVA, when both Loki and Sylvie used to hate the TVA for doing just that to its employees? Eventually, Loki realized that perhaps his main goal wasn’t to save the TVA; it was simply to keep his new friends in his life, because without them, he’s alone.
With that revelation in mind, Loki left Sylvie behind on her branch and returned to the others, telling them that the mission was off and they should go back to their lives. But just as he was assuring the group that they’d be fine without the TVA existing, Sylvie appeared through a time door to say, “Actually, never mind, we need the TVA!” Not long after Loki and Sylvie had ended their conversation, Sylvie’s entire timeline branch had gotten spaghettified with zero explanation; Sylvie escaped the annihilation just in time, but she was now convinced that the TVA does need to exist, in order to prevent all of the other branches from getting decimated, too.
And yet, after Sylvie explained this, it appeared the gang was out of time altogether. One by one, in a scene that gave strong Avengers: Infinity War vibes, all of Loki’s friends (including Sylvie!) got spaghettified, disappearing into thin strands of time-space nothingness. A mortified Loki tried to grasp at the strands as they flew by him — and all of a sudden, in his despair, he time-slipped to a few seconds prior, just before Sylvie disintegrated. Then, he did it again, slipping even earlier, to just before any spaghettification had begun.
Loki’s intense desperation not to lose his people had finally allowed him to control his time slipping, letting him choose where and when to end up when he traveled through existence. “It’s not about where, or when, or why. It’s about who,” Loki told O.B. and the others. “I can rewrite the story.” And with a flourish of his arms, Loki brought himself back to the TVA, moments before the temporal loom went off the rails. Roll credits!
Loki fans, how did you like Episode 5? And what are your hopes for next week’s finale?
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