'Loki' Season 2 Comes Full Circle With an Epic Ending

The following story contains spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 6 "Glorious Purpose."

LOKI IS THE MCU's first—and so far, only—show to have produced a second season on Disney+, and so it's fitting that it received an accordingly epic ending. So we think, at least. "We approached this as like two halves of a book. Season one, first half. Season two, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don't know," head writer Eric Martin said in an interview with CinemaBlend. "I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons."

Of course, it wasn't the easiest road getting to that ending. Loki Season 2 was faced with several roadblocks from the get-go, the least of which being the two-year break in between the show's seasons, testing an audience's memory of what, exactly, went down during the first go-around anyway. There's also the matter of Jonathan Majors' ongoing legal trouble (he figures fairly significantly into the season), and the fact that the MCU has been in something of a slump—and seemed to be depending on the sure-thingness of Loki to dig it out.

Season 2 has been... a mixed bag. Loki is unquestionably one of the MCU's best-made shows; it's well directed, it's well shot, and it almost entirely eschews Marvel's typical overuse of green screen technology, instead choosing to film on sets and on location. But where Season 1 of Loki heavily relied on character development, only delving deep into multiversal lore (and such) in the final episode, Season 2 instead leaned on a lot of jargon and sci-fi babble that was hard to follow and even harder to understand. It then turned much of the season into a Macguffin chase, as we followed characters we like (Loki, Sylvie, Mobius, etc) chasing down a goal that we barely understand.

The final episode, thankfully, for the most part, came together. If you could follow close enough, the symbolism and impact of the Season 2 finale—which we'll touch on more as you read along—should still make a lot of sense, and hit pretty hard. We just wish getting there was a bit of a smoother road.

Below, we dive into everything that happened—and what, perhaps, you may have missed—in the Loki Season 2 finale.

So... what exactly happened at the end of Loki Season 2?

We're going to keep things simple, because otherwise it's just too much. In the penultimate episode of the season, when Loki found everyone living in their alternate reality—Mobius as a single father selling Jetskis, Hunter B-15 working as a pediatrician, Ouroboros living as a failed sci-fi writer and science professor, etc.—he learned two important things: these are real people and real realities being pruned out of existence, and, somehow (in a way that's not quite explained), he can control the time-slipping that has affected him all season long.

So after the entire reality he saw wiped out in Episode 5 went away, Loki spent the first part of Episode 6 going back and forth to the moments that failed, trying to fix the temporal loom and save the TVA. He tried everything—including asking OB for tips and even learning all of quantum physics (taking centuries to do so)—and nothing could change Victor Timely (Kang's not-so-bad variant) failing to fix the loom and save the TVA.

Loki kept going back further and further, trying one thing or another, until he ultimately had conversations with Sylvie, Mobius, and He Who Remains, that led him to a final conclusion: when Sylvie killed He Who Remains, any future of the timelines existing was destroyed. It was always going to fail. His options were to try something different—and HWR seemed to suggest that his best option was to kill Sylvie.

But Loki, who we've seen throughout the duration of the two Loki seasons go from villain (remember, he started as 2012 The Avengers Loki) to Anti-Hero, to, really, full-fledged good guy with friends and some care in his heart, didn't want to take that road anymore. So he walked to the loom himself, blowing it up with his magic.

As those friends wondered what Loki was doing, Sylvie put it plainly: "He's giving us a chance." We see Loki walk the same beltway that Victor Timely did earlier (to no avail), eventually destroying the lo0m and grabbing all the failing timelines himself.

Loki, as it turns out, was the only one who could save the TVA—and so from the moment Sylvie killed He Who Remains, he was destined to need to hold the timelines in place. He's now Loki Who Remains, possibly for the rest of time.

What happened to Loki after everything?

In perhaps the MCU's most bittersweet ending since Avengers: Endgame, Loki finally got the two things he's always claimed he wanted—a throne, and to serve his glorious purpose—in the most devastating way possible.

Loki went from perhaps the most selfish, evil character in the MCU—one willing to commit genocide on earth in The Avengers—to someone fully willing to sacrifice his life, isolating himself from the friends and family he had finally made, in order to essentially preserve the flow of all space and time and save the TVA.

His glorious purpose, it turns out, was perhaps the most important one in the entire MCU—and hardly anyone, not his brother, not his dad, and not any of the Avengers, will likely ever know.

What about the Kang the Conqueror/He Who Remains variants?

The Loki finale also gave Marvel an interesting option, if they should so choose: they can completely close the book on the Kang the Conqueror/He Who Remains storyline.

After Loki saved the TVA, we pick up 'after,' as we see a normal functioning TVA day. Hunter B-15 and Mobius are working business as usual, but rather than pruning entire timelines, they seem to instead be focused on tracking and pruning HWR/Kang variants; they even reference the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania when referring to a variant who "caused a ruckus on a 616-adjacent realm," also adding that it was handled.

If Marvel doesn't want to move forward with Jonathan Majors amidst his legal troubles—or doesn't want to move forward with Kang at all—the story could pretty easily be left here.

What is Yggdrasil, and has it figured into the MCU before?

Yggdrasil may look like a word that happens when someone accidentally smacked their keyboard with a fist, but it's actually a vital concept in Norse cosmology (fitting in nicely with the themes of Thor and Loki stories) that essentially represents the space and balance between life and death. It's figured into the MCU before, and here we see it in action; after Loki saved the timelines with his very powerful god-level magic, his new timeline structure takes the shame of Yggdrasil, otherwise known as The Tree of Life.

This isn't the first time the concept of Yggdrasil has made it into the MCU—in Thor, Thor told Jane that Earth is one of the nine realms linked together by Yggdrasil. In Captain America: The First Avenger, a drawing of Yggdrasil on a cave wall helped Red Skull find the tesseract. It's also been seen in What If... and in a dream sequence of Thor: The Dark World.

Will we ever see Loki in the MCU again?

That's a good question, and the answer can kind of go both ways.

Loki's ending here was... well, it was pretty epic, and pretty fitting for a character who has come such a long way. It would be a little funny to see him just pop up in a movie shooting one-liners again after such a dramatic conclusion. Loki's story seems to have truly come full circle at this point, and you couldn't fault anyone for wanting to leave it here for good.

That said, this is Marvel, and Marvel films and shows are based on comic books. And no one ever stays dead or retired for too long in comics. There's a chance that this Loki remains the keeper/holder of the TVA for eternity, but we see another Loki reunite with Thor at some point. There's a chance that this Loki—since he knows how to defeat Kang—comes in quite handy in, say, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty or Avengers: Secret Wars.

And there's also a chance they just let this be a strong ending, and close the book for good. We'll just have to see what happens in the coming years.

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