Is anyone else quietly crying in their living rooms? Because I sure am. After more than a two-year wait, Loki season 2 has finished up, and wow, is that ending a gut punch. Here’s a breakdown of everything that happens in the Loki season 2 finale—and where Loki (Tom Hiddleston) might go from here.
In case you couldn’t tell, this article contains MASSIVE SPOILERS for the end of Loki season 2.
The loom is not the answer, Loki!
In episode 5, Loki has an epiphany: Once he learns to control his time slipping, he can rewrite the story. God of Stories, here we come!
But when episode 6 begins, it becomes clear that Loki doesn’t quite understand the assignment. Instead of making any drastic changes, he fixates on upgrading the Temporal Loom before it melts down. He goes back to the moments before the meltdown over and over again, trying to get everyone to move faster and faster so that Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) can survive the radiation.
After O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) and Victor tell Loki that it would take centuries to learn everything he needs to know about the Temporal Loom to try and fix it, my dude spends that much time trying to make this one moment go differently. Oh, Loki. Loki, sweetie, that’s not the answer!
Sure enough, as soon as he finally gets Victor out to the loom in time to launch the throughput multiplier, the timestream simply branches again, immediately outgrowing it and causing another meltdown.
Why? Because Loki isn’t actually rewriting the story at all. He’s changing minor details. He’s doing the cosmic equivalent of some light copyediting. But when the meltdown happens again, he realizes that reality needs some deeper revisions.
“You’ll have to kill me”
Loki goes back further in time, to his duel with Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) in front of He Who Remains. She keeps repeating the phrase “You’ll have to kill me” until Loki seems to realize that she’s right. After a tense discussion with He Who Remains—who knows all about Loki’s time slipping, and tells Loki that the loom is failing because it’s only designed to protect the Sacred Timeline—Loki tells Sylvie what he’s learned.
But, rather than watch Loki kill one of the people he loves most in the world, we get to see a different outcome. Loki goes back further, to his first interrogation with Mobius, and asks him how to choose who lives and who dies. After Mobius tells the heartbreaking story of how his hesitation to prune a child back in his hunter days got thousands killed, Loki figures out how to save the multiverse and break He Who Remains’ control over time. He goes back to the final moments in the Temporal Loom control room.
The God of Stories takes his throne
Loki goes out onto the gangway himself. As he approaches the loom, his TVA uniform disintegrates and he replaces it with new clothing: swaths of green fabric with no armor. A crown appears on his head, made of the same stone as the Citadel at the End of Time, and horns grow out of it. Loki has become the God of Stories.
At the end of the gangway, he uses his magic to break the loom apart. As strands of time swirl in space around him, he grabs them and infuses them with green magic. They start to attach themselves to him as he walks through space to the center of the timeline. The Citadel appears before him.
Back in his battle with Sylvie earlier in the episode, Loki repeated a line we heard last season: he doesn’t want a throne. His obsession with a throne back in his villainous days was just a misdirected desire to be loved and accepted—which is exactly what he got with Mobius and his other friends at the TVA. However, as he approaches the center of the timeline, a golden throne appears where He Who Remains’ chair used to be. Loki sits on the throne, tethered to the threads of time around him, and the Sacred Timeline turns into a tree.
Before I get to Loki himself, a quick word on the tree: fans of the Thor franchise and Norse mythology will recognize it as Yggdrasil, the World Tree that contains all the realms of existence in its roots and branches. At first, I wondered if the tree was just an allusion to the “real” Yggdrasil, but since Loki now exists outside of time and space, this tree is likely the same Yggdrasil that Thor describes to Jane in the first Thor movie. In taking control of the timelines, Loki has seated himself in the center of the universe—but he’s not exactly the king that he always thought he wanted to be.
At the end of everything, Loki is alone
Ouch, my heart.
Season 1 ends on a harrowing note: Loki, after having made the first real friends of his life, ends up all alone in a new version of the TVA. Now, after having strengthened those bonds even more in season 2—and telling Sylvie in episode 5 that all he wants is to get his friends back and avoid being alone—Loki is profoundly isolated. He’s charged with protecting all of time, and while he can watch his friends’ stories play out in the threads of time around him, he can’t take part in them. Loki is more alone than he’s ever been, and it looks like he’s destined to be alone for all of eternity.
Man, screw that. Can’t my boy get a happy ending for once?
The TVA changes course, and Mobius lets time pass
After Loki’s sacrifice, we see that things are sort of back to normal at the TVA. The monitor now displays Loki’s tree instead of a line, and a poster shows TVA agents tending the tree like gardeners. The TVA agents are now focused on stopping He Who Remains variants from rising to power. One variant has apparently caused a ruckus in a “616 adjacent realm.” This line is a reference to the Quantum Realm in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, in which Scott Lang defeats Kang the Conqueror. 616 is Marvel’s code name for the main Marvel universe (we also hear the term in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), which demonstrates that the TVA has embraced the multiverse.
The TVA agents seem more relaxed and happy. O.B. has published a second edition of the handbook, while B-15 and Casey are helping to lead a lively meeting in the war room. But Mobius is clearly unhappy.
And can you blame him? Loki was one of his closest friends, and now he’s gone.
Mobius requests the file on his life on the timeline and then goes to watch his alternate self, Don, play with his sons. Sylvie joins him. They watch for a moment, and Sylvie goes back to her life with only a brief remark about Loki: “It’s weird that he’s not here.” The scene ends with Mobius gazing at Don’s home, letting time pass—an experience he’s never at at the TVA, where time stands still. We then see Loki bearing witness from his throne, smiling sadly.
Where does Loki go from here?
If you’re anything like me, you’re praying that this isn’t the last we see of Loki. That ending is too heartbreaking to handle! Plus, the sun still needs to shine on Loki and Thor again!
Luckily, we know for a fact that Marvel isn’t done with He Who Remains. The next tentpole movie is Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, so we know that the time-traveling villain still has a part to play in the Multiverse Saga (even if he ends up being recast). Plus, the Loki finale shows Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) waking up in the Void at the End of Time as Alioth looms over her. It’s possible she just gets eaten, but she could get up to something in the Void.
After The Kang Dynasty, we’ve got Avengers: Secret Wars, which will most likely feature the collapse of the multiverse. With Loki now pulling the strings from inside time itself, it’s unthinkable that the MCU would simply never mention him again. I bet we’ll be seeing at least a little more of him before the Multiverse Saga is over.
In the meantime, though … I’m going to go cry into my pillow.
(featured image: Disney+)
