Loki season 2 finale: Loki ends, surprisingly perfectly
"Glorious Purpose" is as good a conclusion as a Marvel project has managed to pull off in quite some time
TV Reviews Loki
If Loki is about any one specific thing, underneath all the comedy, the time traveling, the ’shipping and quipping and fun, then it’s a show about systems. Systems of control, systems of “protection,” systems of self-propagating evil. Systems that “have to exist,” because, we’re told, they have to exist. Systems that do not love you, cannot love you, because that’s not what these kinds of systems are for.
It’s why, for all the energetic, deeply entertaining running around through time that Loki Laufeyson does in the first act of Loki’s season (and, almost certainly, series) finale, his efforts are ultimately pointless…because he’s still trapped in the system set up all those infinities ago by He Who Remains. The Loom Loki burns literally centuries of his immortal existence trying to fix was never a life-raft— because why would a cosmic narcissist like HWR build a life-raft that might allow people to escape into a universe beyond his control? No, the Loom is, and always has been, a part of the system, a gun with its barrel pointed straight at the heart of reality—and Loki’s finger manipulated into being on the trigger.
We open tonight where we left off—a couple of times, actually—as Loki’s newfound ability to control his timeslipping kicks the show into the last (and best) of its many homages to other time travel stories: a quick-moving rampage through Groundhog Day, as Loki begins jumping back and forth through his own personal timeline, hoping to find a way to stop the Loom from going kablooey and taking all of the timelines with it. As with the 1993 classic, the sequence works beautifully thanks to one part premise, three parts leading man: After most of a season of playing the respectable second fiddle, watching Tom Hiddleston throw himself into Loki in his problem-solving prime is an absolute joy to watch.
The most obvious moments of beauty come with his subtle flickers of expression when O.B. tells him it’ll take “centuries” to learn enough temporal mechanics to speed up the process of fixing Victor Timely’s MacGuffin, followed predictably (but also hilariously) with a “Centuries later…” title card—a nice indicator of how Loki’s new powers have changed the rules for the finale, kicking us up into a more ambitious realm of science fiction. But my favorite touch is actually the slightly weary, oddly affectionate way he reminds Timely to please not set the multiplier down on the catwalk as he’s stomping out to fix everything, during what turns out to be the team’s final attempt to save reality, because “it’ll roll off the gangway.” The episode underlines it later, but the sheer “seen it all” exhaustion of that moment is Hiddleston at his best; “Glorious Purpose” implies far more iterations of the timeline than it actually shows, to excellent effect, relying on its star to help us imagine all the other timelines where things went drastically pear-shaped. Meanwhile, after two seasons of watching Loki’s know-it-all nature get brutally punished by the universe, seeing him once again be the most knowledgeable guy in the room, hints of that old arrogance breaking through, is incredibly fun to see.
It doesn’t work, of course, because Loki is trying to fix a problem that isn’t actually a problem. A comment from Sylvie forces our mostly-heroic god to tackle things from a different direction—kicking us into the second act of the episode, a twisted remix of last season’s finale, “For All Time. Always.” Said reprisal even comes with a brand new bit of condescending monologuing from Jonathan Majors, once He Who Remains notices that the Loki in his chambers, desperately trying to keep Sylvie from stabbing him, has suddenly gotten a whole lot more informed, and a whole lot more powerful, than the one who was there five seconds ago. As delightful as it is to see Majors and Hiddleston spar, now on something a bit closer to equal ground, though, their back-and-forth doesn’t actually resolve the same rock-and-hard-place dilemma Loki found himself trapped in a year ago: He’s still stuck between Sylvie’s implacable desire to see HWR RIP (to quote the man himself), and the overlord’s promise of multiversal war in the event of his death—and, more immediately, the destruction of all branching timelines by the Loom, which is designed to nuke everything but the Sacred Timeline (taking the TVA with it) any time things get out of hand.
Unwilling to play the rigged game, Loki goes jumping through time a little more, looking for a solution that doesn’t involve sacrificing Sylvie in the same way that HWR’s insidious, self-fulfilling system did, back when he declared all Variants unworthy of even a shot at life. Desperate, our hero ultimately lands all the way back in the other “Glorious Purpose,” seated across from Mobius in an interrogation chamber in the show’s very first episode. As with so much of this finale, the subsequent scene is a shockingly elegant affair, giving Hiddleston and Owen Wilson one last chance to play with each other—Mobius once again stripped of all built-up affection for Loki, with that hard edge from the show’s early episodes back in force—while also sketching in some vital missing pieces of the backstory between Mobius and Renslayer.
After a sort of grim pep talk on the nature of burdens and purpose, Loki returns to Sylvie in the record shop at the end of the world, all but begging her to give him permission to kill her to save everyone else. In a touch that redeems at least some of Loki’s odder storytelling choices over the last few weeks, she rejects the idea outright: She won’t die so that He Who Remains’ system can chug along, “protecting” a universe defined entirely by his control. This is Sophia DiMartino and Hiddleston’s last real scene together, too—built as it is on a series of two-handers, the episode is a sort of final tour of Loki’s best pairings—and they work together as well as ever. Sylvie’s fatalism has always given her a calmness that Loki lacks, and seeing her finally get through to him is a lovely moment, emphasized by Natalie Holt’s score, which starts to take up more and more space as we barrel into Loki’s final, vital decision.
Which is, as everyone else has predicted, accused, insinuated, suggested, and otherwise damned him with over all these years, to seize a throne for himself—in the most beautiful possible way. After a whole season of mostly playing by the Marvel house rules, directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead finally let themselves cut loose here and get abstract, obtuse, glorious, as Loki decides it’s time to finally take matters very literally into his own hands, wading out into a storm of time to take the reins for himself. In a series of mostly wordless scenes, we watch him destroy the Loom, grabbing handfuls of branching timelines in his bare hands as waves of radiation blast him free of all artifice or disguise. With the courage to get genuinely weird, the show invites us to watch him cut a path back into the End Of Time, literally pulling the timelines behind him, to where his new throne awaits. The old, familiar horns grow on his helmet. The soundtrack goes gorgeously, wonderfully nuts. And Loki sits down, bringing the timelines together. At first, it just looks like a newer, wider, greener version of the Loom—meet the new boss, maybe, same as the old boss. But then we pull back and twist, and see that it’s not a tool or a weapon or a shackle, it’s a tree, with Loki at its heart, a protector watching over all time. Always.
Last week, I wrote a bit about Loki’s struggles to reconcile its metaphorical elements with its desire to present a coherent plot. The show has been possessed, throughout its two seasons, by an urge to make at least some practical sense, because Marvel stories so typically do, walking from A to B with billion-dollar clarity. These scenes, though, are the inverse of that: Loki, a mythical creature, committing a truly mythical act, transcending plot in service of raw, emotionally affecting story. At the risk of mixing pantheons, it’s an almost Herculean decision—and while “literally grabbing the timelines and physically holding them together” makes no real sense, one of the nice things about telling stories about gods is that letting the metaphorical transcend the literal is a feature, not a bug.
Like so much of “Glorious Purpose,” this last action squares the circle of those parts of this season of TV that have been sometimes awkward and unpleasant, recasting them as the stumbling steps from self-important pretensions of godhood to the actual thing. (Which doesn’t excuse that initial awkwardness, mind you—if you tell a muddled story so you can resolve it later, you still told a muddled story in the moment.) But, all in all, this is very close to perfect Loki, in each of its three very different acts: funny, fast, ambitious, heady, a little silly, and acted, written, and shot as well as anyone could want. For a show that has so often skated by on potential and promise, the finale finally lives up to those lofty aims. Glorious purpose, indeed.
But, whoops, I let myself get away from those last bits of the episode, even if all that’s left, as that “After” title card suggests, is an aftermath. Benson and Morehead, having broken Loki free from conventional Marvel storytelling, seem to exult in a series of slow, elegiac scenes to bring the season to a close: The TVA will persist, watching the timeline for trouble, but no longer relentlessly pruning reality. (One bit strongly implies that Kang’s Day Out in Ant-Man 3 was nothing but an “Infinity Gems in the desk drawer”-style blip on their radar.) Ravonna Renslayer gets to see what happened to all those people she so enthusiastically, euphemistically “pruned.” And Mobius and Sylvie both head out into the timelines, seeing what they have to offer. They can afford to, now, as our final shot confirms; God is watching over them, from his throne at the end of time. The System loves them, at last.
Stray observations
- During his conversation with He Who Remains, Loki quotes from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; Tom Hiddleston apparently gave Natalie Holt a copy of it while she was working on the show’s soundtrack.
- Majors remains completely, improbably compelling as HWR; it’s a performance that shouldn’t work, too shot through with smug affectation, but he keeps it just this side of grounded.
- I kinda wish we could have seen the aftermath of the timeline where Loki dumbly asked Miss Minutes for help.
- Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s face as the Alioth bears down on her in the epilogue is fascinating; messy character, lovely performance.
- “You can’t scale for infinite.”
- Of course Renslayer shot baby Hitler when Mobius initially balked. Which informs so many of her snide little “everybody leaves everything to me” comments across the series.
- Seriously, though: How beautiful are those last couple of songs? Holt finds so many ways to play with the show’s basic five-note leitmotif, taking those minor chords and making them feel increasingly heroic as Loki ascends to his throne.
- Not much O.B. here—he got most of his farewell last week—but we do get to see him unbox the second edition of the TVA handbook (accompanied by a shot of Timely as a child, life no longer disrupted by Renslayer’s interference).
- I have no goddamn idea how any of this will work with Marvel’s bigger Kang plans (and don’t particularly care), but the suggestion seems to be that Loki and the TVA are why we’ll get “superhero fights” instead of “endless, unceasing war in all corners of reality.”
- On that same note: How incredibly nice is it to end a Marvel project without the incessant need to tease what comes next? This is a beautiful, slightly tragic stopping point for this character, and the series seems genuinely content to, well, stop.
- The tree of timelines is clearly meant to evoke Yggdrasil from Norse mythology, and god bless whoever resisted the urge to make that more explicit.
- And that’s a wrap on Loki season two! Like I said, I’m assuming this is the series finale, since it’s hard to imagine where you go forward from here. I’m mostly just gratified to have had the chance to share this experience with you, especially down in the comments—as well as the pleasure of seeing a show go out firing on all possible cylinders like this.
85 Comments
I enjoyed this, and most of the reactions I’ve seen so far seem to be positive, so naturally we’ll see how Giz shits on it.
Loki may not be my favorite MCU character, but his character arc, is by far my favorite. By a wide margin too, it’s not even close. From being the first big-Big Bad of the MCU to being arguably it’s most selfless “hero” at the end(for all time. always). Hiddleston nailed it every time. The exhaustion, the realization and the acceptance of his destiny all subtly conveyed in each scene and line delivery the last couple episodes was pretty great.Kudos to Benson and Moorehead for taking the MCU into the world of thoughtful sci-fi indies. Major props to Holt for the score. It’s not often score can bring me to well up with emotion, but it definitely happened in the final moments of the episode.
Loki’s arc and Cap’s arc are sort of the pinnacle of MCU storytelling for me. And it’s not surprise that both characters had more growth and covered a larger span of time (or space, or both) than many of the other MCU characters. To me, those two characters were the strongest from that initial crop of MCU stories, so to see them get satisfying endings was really nice for me.
Does that ending sort of make Kang no longer a threat and therefore allowMarvel to slip in a new villain (Doom), sidestepping potential Major problems?
I mean, the MCU can do whatever they want, but nothing about this specifically makes Kang and his variants a non-threat. The branched timeless of the multiverse exist, they’re just being “stabilized” by Loki. As the indirect mention of Quantumania shows, the Kang variants are starting to show up and if they start traveling the multiverses, they’ll still be able to cause the multiversal war foretold by He Who Remains. It’s not made clear exactly what kind of control, if any, Loki is able to exert over the branched timelines.
It seems like it could, but I’d struggle to see how it would have been planned that way since Loki filmed before Majors’ legal troubles surfaced.
It honestly . . . kind of does. If they don’t want to recast Kang, then they can just act as thought that’s all tied up (for folks who care – most won’t see Loki and won’t care) and move on to other stuff.
Holt should become Marvel’s main composer. Like, how are they not signing her right now for all major films?What a great ending for Loki!It’s weird how Variety says the Loki finale was freaking out Marvel because it painted them into a corner concerning Kang. I don’t feel that at all. In fact, I think it’s kinda easy to hand wave Kang away now. Maybe even start with a TVA take over of that Council of Kangs(without showing Major’s face?) ending it once and for all. But they can go anywhere now:1. Some sort of counter Loki forming against the Loki in the throne; born from bitterness and loneliness who wants to use the multiverse to not only save himself but his mother, his father, give Mobius his happy ending but also himself full power. This can bring our Loki into.2. Renslayer taking over as Kang – She takes over Alioth, takes out Kang(all Kangs) and becomes Kang. Gugu Mbatha Raw is a fantastic actress and if they can deepen the character, I think a lot could be done with it. She said the Pyramid after all, maybe she goes in there, finds some Rama-Tut left over tech and takes the power from there.3. DOOM – It’s not the TVA who takes out the council of Kangs but Doom. The Fantastic Four tend to travel dimensions but what if during those travels, Doom is with them , sees Loki and wants to be the man at the center and shape the world to his making; taking out the Kangs first. 4. Variants for Kang – With Loki at the center and his magic holding things together, variants become wilder and maybe we get multiple actors as Kang
Thank you. There is no reason to recast Majors and mess up their “plan.” Did he witness Feige kill a guy or something? Just recast, you have a clear opening.
It’s as if the anonymous “dealmaker” was slinging bullshit in order to sound important.
“It’s weird how Variety says the Loki finale was freaking out Marvel because it painted them into a corner concerning Kang.”Agreed. I was anxious that the Loki finale would just end up being about setting up the “next big bad phase” and not about… Loki. You
Yet looking at this you could basically never see Kang again and it would be fine.
It’s probably fair to guess whether there was originally a stinger set up to offer a look at another Kang Variant — Renslayer washing up near a pyramid in the Void suggested to me Rama Tut — and pulled in light of the Majors situation. But as things stand this episode was a suitable off-ramp from having to deal with him.
I feel like they could make “Kang” inevitable. No reason why only Victor Timely could create what he did, even though hes super smart. He could have just been the first to do it and crushed competitors. Now without Victor Timely (Johnathon Majors) getting the book, creating the TVA, etc.. Someone else (a different actor) could invent the time travel and become Kang
5. Just ignore him. Accept that Kang was the bad guy in Loki and Quantumania (sigh), and that’s it. Rename the coming Kang Dynasty film with a more appropriate subtitle, and there ya go.Kang’s appearances haven’t set up any directive to continue his story. He’s got a bunch of variants who could cause trouble, but it’s not like “he has 3 of the Infinity Stones”. Dumping Majors messes up the fan speculation that Mr. Fantastic was gonna be a Kang clone, but since that hasn’t been established, it’s a lost potential at best.
There’s still a stigma attached to being perceived as a “television composer” and therefore not good enough to be a “movie composer”.
I know it’s stupid, but if you think Hollywood never wants to take risks and is stuck in its ways, then you should see the head honchos involved with orchestral music.
I can only imagine. I am heartened to see someone like Hildur Gudnadottir break through. She managed to parlay her TV work with Trapped and Chernobyl (whose score is a masterpiece) into bigger movies like Joker, Tar, and Women Talking. Her sound is so interesting.
It’s rare but it happens, most famously with John Williams and Michael Giacchino.
She did also throw eggs at Simon Cowell on television. That shouldn’t have affected her career at all (because he thoroughly deserved it), but it did.
With each passing day, that Variety article looks more & more like they didn’t vet their source well enough.
There was even a small scene in there mentioning Earth 616 and the Kang of that world, so to me the most important aspect of any comic book story was upheld: Just tell a good story.
The canon stuff can be and will be rewritten later, all that matters now was a great story for Loki.
This was so excellent, on every level.
What a fucking condescending piece of garbage review.
Now that was a damn good finale.
Unpossible. There was no climactic CGI fight.
The mechanics and logic of all the time stuff breaks my brain the more I think about it so I just choose to enjoy the ride and not dive deep on it. And what a ride it was. Great finale. The arc of Loki from when he first showed up in the MCU up until now is arguably the best character arc in the entire universe so far. If this is this is the last we’ve seen of him, it’d be ok but Hiddleston is so good with the role I’ll welcome Loki back any time.
This is me in basically any show with a premise of timetravel and multiple timelines. I tend not to enjoy them very much because there’s a point at which I think too much about it and my brain hurts. (It’s been more than a decade and I still don’t want to talk about Source Code). There’s a fine line for me, and if I have to think too much about timelines I don’t find that enjoyable. Loki flirted with that line but kept me on board.
That might have been my favorite hour of filmed Marvel content ever. It was just so wonderful on all levels. And this recap nicely summed up why.
Soo happy with this – I kind of forgot that This Loki was originally going to die in the MCU, so the sacrifice makes sense – and it did it so beautifully Ugh – and now Daredevil Born Again is going to be terrible or something
What I especially enjoyed about the finale was it brought *this* Loki’s story to a close. I think a lot of viewers (myself included) kept trying to tie this one back to the one we had known from everything after Avengers.But he’s not. So while he knows the “sacred” ending is the one he meets in Endgame, he is able to blaze a new trail here.
Of course Renslayer shot baby Hitler when Mobius initially
balked. Which informs so many of her snide little “everybody leaves
everything to me” comments across the series.Shit that’s what I get for watching it late in the evening because I caught the conversation but COMPLETELY missed who they were specifically talking about. (Admittedly I also got flipped who they were talking about that made the hard choice)
Which, if true, actually ties it back to the jokes in Endgame about going back to kill Baby Thanos.
It looks like Kang is done until everybody forgets about Majors. Probably on a longer timeline closer to when they will bring back T’Challa.Secret Wars, Mutants, F4/Doom are the primary plan.
I do love a good melancholy ending.Also, Kudos to Benson… or Moorhead… or whoever it was… for that shot of all the branching timelines coming together to form a multiversal “Worlds Tree”.Good stuff.
I know I’m a little late to the party, but did the tree have frosty branches at the end? I read it as a not to his frost giant origins.
This season is peculiar in that while each episode is well assembled,
the overall story seems to be spinning plates. The TVA logistics make
even less sense.We never learn why HWR’s mysterious machinations so convoluted nor how Loki suddenly acquires time powers.
https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/loki-season-2-time-slipping-boogaloo/
So why bother with the entire TVA when The Temporal Loom does its work
for them without pesky human error? Just make a bigger R&A
Department to maintain it.
Time Lord Loki’s astounding feat is a grand scale inversion of the time he tried to genocide Jotunheim.
I was excited to see Ravonna Renslayer get more focus in the second season, but her ruthlessness get scant screentime. Hopefully we’ll see more of Ravonna in the next two avengers movies.
We never learn why HWR’s mysterious machinations so convoluted nor how Loki suddenly acquires time powers.HWR’s plan is going to seem convoluted because he’s dealing with infinite possibilities. Literally.He’s had to fight a time war, meaning between him and his variants he knows the “optimal” scenario that needs to play out for his preferred outcome and then ensure nothing else happens.As for how Loki got time powers, the guy has been to the end of time and back, made out with his alternate self, and become unmoored from reality itself. Then once he figured out how to control it, he had literal centuries to get better.
So why bother with the entire TVA when The Temporal Loom does its work
for them without pesky human error? Just make a bigger R&A
Department to maintain it.
The Loom doesn’t do the job for him, it’s a failsafe in the event he somehow fails at his job. Say, for example, if he’s murdered. That’s why he thought he had Loki beat. Because stopping Sylvie was the only way to save him, which in turn was the only way to save all of the branches.Or at least he thought it was.
I see no reason why she couldn’t solve the Kang problem. We’ve had a female Loki variant after all…
The TVA was the insulation which kept HWR’s “system of control” from continually short-circuiting.
I think it was less that Loki was suddenly more powerful and wiser, and more that Loki specifically asked him why the hell dont you ever fight back (which I guess technically counts as wiser). This tipped him off that this wasn’t the first meeting.
Kang was amazing in that scene just the quick shift in his demeanor and mannerisms and he even reached a new level of smug compared to last season.
how to pause … time …yet!
*self-amused laughter*
Majors owns the Kang role.
I saw some comments saying he’s hammy but I think that’s the right choice for a deranged arrogant timelord who lives at the end of time and sees no one and no thing as his equal. I don’t think such a persona *could* be grounded.
giving Hiddleston and Owen Wilson one last chance to play with each other
Not as long as shippers can write it’s not!
Hiddleston’s “Don’t set the multiplier down because it WILL roll off…” had all the barely-concealed exhaustion of a parent who REALLY wants to yell at his kid, but he’s in public in front of other parents and can only half smile as he whisper-screams at the kid who keeps making the same mistake. Perfection.
It’s also great because it hints at all of the failures we DIDN’T see without showing them.
Because you not only had “don’t set the multiplier down…” you had “yeah the button likes to stick sometimes.”He also mentioned something about Victor’s foot, thumb, and visor. And you had him reminding Casey to lock the helmet. Just…all kinds of great little things that you can just picture going absolutely terribly.
Delivery of “You are brave. You are being so brave” will never not be incredibly hilarious to me.
Positive reinforcement does wonders lol
Welcome to the Punxsutawney Pub, Loki.
You’re in good company here.
I suppose that this is a slightly better fate than being chained to a rock with a serpent dripping venom onto your face forever?
Like they say on The Flintstones, it’s a living!
Especially for Loki’s wife. She holds a bowl over his head to catch the venom, but when the bowl gets full, she has to go empty it, and during that time, the venom lands on Loki’s face.
It’s at that time, when Loki is writhing from the pain, that we get earthquakes!
Husbands! If they aren’t demanding you empty their ever-filling venom bowls, they’re writhing and screaming about all the venom falling on their faces. Either way, I don’t see the gutters getting any cleaner, am I right ladies? Sigyn and Skaði, you know what I’m talking about!
He’s bound by the entrails of his son as well. Norse mythology didn’t fuck around.
I forgot about that last part!Like I mentioned earlier, getting Tom Middleston’s Loki on the same screen as Tom Sturridge’s Sandman/Morpheus would be quite the coup of a crossover.
sometimes i feel like i’ve turned into a certified hater of mcu, but then something like this comes out and reminds me that i actually like this stuff quite a bit.overall loki was a great little project executed almost perfectly. and wow, a real ending!
Honestly, I saw this kind of ending coming a mile away: Loki remembering that he’s a god (meaning there’s no upper limit on what he can do) and getting his deus ex machina on. Yet I still enjoyed the hell out of it. Sometimes, it’s the journey (a Journey Into Mystery, you* might say) that counts.*(If, by “you”, you mean a comics nerd.)
Just because you can see the end coming doesn’t make it bad, though. It just means the story was well-constructed and reached an end you felt it earned.
Superheroes are all gods in other guises. Yeah this was Loki’s All-Star Superman ending, but that’s pretty great.
Gods and archetypes. I wish more reviewers understood that, and that superhero stories are modern myths.
Loki is a complex character, and it’s good to see him being heroic here. That having been said, I prefer him as a villain. At the very least, I like to see him creating mischief. He’s one of the few villains that worked for me in the MCU. My only hope is that he will go crazy trying to hold the time branches together. Somebody needs to whisper in his ear that this is all Thor’s fault.
This finale sure seems to put Loki on the opposite side of this whole multi-verse situation as Strange, right?Both were presented with an opportunity to save “everything.” But in Strange’s case he chose the path that sacrificed somebody else (Tony) so that he could still have a shot at a fairly normal life.But Loki chose to be the one who sits on the throne because he couldn’t sacrifice Sylvie to go back to what it was.Funny enough, both ultimately are the ones left “holding the knife” as Christine puts it…but one did so in an attempt to chose the timeline he preferred while Loki ensured they could all coexist.
Best thing Marvel’s done since Endgame, hands down. And the the music this week was awesome. That whole denouement was great. Not sure if these needs a S3, but I hope Loki shows up in some films, assuming Marvel sticks with the Kang plan.
If I had a nickel for every time someone on the internet has said “best thing Marvel’s done since Endgame” in the passed 5 years. I would be a millionaire. Can we please move on people?
Wrenchingly emotional. Powerfully tense and gripping. Elegiac and beautiful. Enticing hints at what could come next.But enough about the final episodes of Scavengers Reign. Loki had a pretty nice finale too! Hiddleston’s the best actor in the MCU. And the music was really lovely and worth commending.
Scavengers Reign needs a lot more love and publicity
Stuck the landing. Not a perfect show or season (episodes 2 and 3 were a bit talky and spinning their wheels) but better than most and I enjoyed most of it.
Anyone else feel like this was a one season show/story cut into two? The 12 episodes seemed to have a pretty definite beginning, middle and end to me.
Let’s not forget this, either. A nice inversion of Loki’s first appearance in the comics.
That’s a fantastic pull.
Wow, really great reference. Thanks!Also LOL at Loki’s awesome plan here. Literal-minded bullshit FTW
Well, he caused me to shed a tear as he trapped himself in his new tree, so round of applause for a masterful bookend.
This really should be the model for everything moving forward. Get creative, unique people. Let them work. Don’t micro-manage them to death in post. LET. THEM. WORK. This was the best MCU project in quite a while and there is a reason for that. Anything else I would say has already been well covered by the review and other commentors. Beautiful ending, fantastic series, gorgeous music, phenomenal season. I knew that Benson and Moorehead would bring something special and they sure did. I’ll be returning to this again and again. I cannot same the same for much else from the post-Endgame MCU. I just really hope they learn the right lessons from this. We’ll see.
The finale saved what was otherwise a season that was a bit too silly at times. My only qualm is that Jonathan Majors’ monologue came off as way too hammy for my tastes, leading me to conclude that Majors’ acting is a bit…dare I say…overrated. (And now I’ll run for cover).
It’s fine, no one’s running defense for that abusive PoS unless they’re MRA folks, and nobody cares about those folks lol.
I went to theatre school. Majors is a ham.
I was over him after about 30 seconds of that stupid fucking Victor Timely accent.
Now I know how “He Who Remains” felt at the end of time, because it’s equally alone here, being probably the only person in the world who hated this ending.Yes, it’s comics, fantasy, sci-fi, blah-blah-blah… Yet is the epithome of lazy “deus ex-machina” to have Loki, faced with an apparently impossible conundrum, to suddenly find out he has the power to do exactly the absurdly cosmic feat that up to that point he never displayed a single trace of having, even remotely. Learning to “timeslip” is one thing, I can suspend my disbelief to that. But it’s almost as if the writers realized they created a threat way over Loki’s capabilities and then decided: “Oh, he’s now the ‘god of stories’ and can do whatever bullshit we need to end this story”. “Wait, he never had this powers before now”. “Now he has. Fuck you”…Somehow this guy who suddenly became a cosmical entity and now can stand a shit ton of time radiation, hold infinite timelines in his hands, and control them, was once threw around by Hulk, like a ragdoll… “Oh, but he didn’t know how to use those powers back then, he learnt through this journey”. NO, HE DIDN’T LEARNT JACKSHIT, he never had these powers to begin with, and nothing happened to give them to him. “Oh, but he is a god”. So are Thor, Heimdall, Odin… None of them ever did anything even remotely like that. Odin had way more experience than Loki and never “learnt” this kind of bullshit. Thor would have loved to have these powers when Thanos showed up…
This felt like some of the best Russell T. Davies era Doctor Who episodes, in a good way.
This gives Marvel and excellent excuse to scrap Kang from future movies. It was that or re-cast, and now they don’t even have to address that.Currently, Deadpool is the only movie coming out in 2024, so they’ve got time; I’m willing to bet a fair amount that The Kang Dynasty gets a name change.
A couple of things:- I loved how Sylvie was the only one who kept realising Loki was time travelling and replaying these events over and over. She never says anything but you see it in her facial expressions. She’s the first to realise what he’s doing when he walks out on the gangplank to destroy the Loom as well.- The TS Eliot poem the quote is from is extremely relevant here. The quote is from the Little Gidding section of The Four Quartets, and that section is basically a map of Loki’s emotional journey through this season. There are a lot of lines about time repeating, and about the beginning and the end being the same. The bit Loki was quoting from goes like this:Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
A perfect choice for the series.
God, it’s so good to see classic poetry being quoted in pop culture again.
I’m an English prof, and my grinch heart grew three sizes when I heard “We die with the dying.”
I wasn’t sold on this finale at first; the stuff with the loom seemed like an attempt to graft a mechanical solution onto a metaphysical problem. Even in the discussion between Loki and He Who Remains, which was very well acted, everything seemed too abstract. But once I saw where they were going with Loki’s final act of heroism, and that the show was going to commit fully to the mythic imagery, it really clicked. It was maybe the first time that the magic side of the MCU absolutely worked for me.
I think the Loom-guffin was a bit of an issue all season. “We need to do some mechanical repairs” isn’t the most exciting plotline to power an entire season. But more than that, they kept how it worked and why it needed to be fixed extremely vague – I think in an attempt to stop the audience nitpicking the technology and time travel and focus on the story. But the problem was, that vagueness made it unclear why everyone was so hellbent on fixing it, up until episode 5 when we discovered everyone turns to spaghetti without it.
Considering there was a rug pull in the finale, and the Loom had a different purpose anyway, I think there was no reason to wait that long. They could’ve explained what the characters thought the Loom did clearly using OB The Plot Explainer in episode 1 or 2. We would’ve had much more drive in those middle episodes, and the reveal that it was all a lie in this episode would’ve been much more impactful.I still think it was a brilliant finale, but the first the first half of the season was unfocused. And that’s a lot of wasted time in a show that only has six episodes a season.
Yeah, you’ve nailed it here. I spent the first few episodes saying to myself, “This is not very good. None of this mcguffiny-technobabbly plot makes any kind of sense, so why should I care about it?” The series really started focusing in on the thematic ideas it wanted to talk about in the back half, but I don’t think the join between the the technical and the mythic was smooth enough for the conclusion to be truly satisfying. For example, if the climax of Loki’s character arc is going to be him realizing what kind of god he wants to be, then surely the series should have had more of a throughline about what being a god actually means? The MCU has always been rather vague on what makes the gods of Asgard, Gods, but there was such a sharp disconnect between the early episodes of this series, where Loki seems like a company man with less magic or mythic significance than Wanda or Dr. Strange, and the climax, where Loki weaves all of reality into Yggdrasil and holds it together from a golden throne of time, that I can’t help but feel that as moving as the finale was it wasn’t quite earned. I generally buy Loki’s character arc— my god, the tragedy of the lonely trickster god realizing that the only thing he wants is not to be alone, only to willingly sacrifice himself to an eternity of solitude in order to save the ones he loves— perfection. But while the emotional goal the showrunners were working towards was good, the underpinning plot just wasn’t coherent enough to make it feel like a natural and justified inevitability. When the rules of the TVA and this version of multiversal reality were so technical and mcguffiny— “This machine can do this but not that, and we need this other machine to do this other thing, and what we said was impossible a minute ago is now suddenly possible again”– it’s hard not to think that if the writers wanted, they would have just written another mcguffiny reason for why Loki could have fixed the CGI Space Wedgie in a less self-sacrificial way.
(A counterpoint to this: Not SciFi, but the first season of the ITV show Harlots is possibly the best example I’ve ever seen of a chaotic and dramatic season finale feeling like a natural and inevitable result of each character’s well defined desires and the rules of the world. Characters who have sometimes been allies are essentially forced to betray each other or work against each other, because circumstances and their previous choices now mean their wants/needs are mutually exclusive. And there are a dozen characters involved in the tangle, and even the most minor of those characters feel like they’ve been so realistically and consistently drawn that their choices are the obvious and only way they could act in the moment. Obviously a show about competing brothels madams doesn’t have the challenge of making coherent sense of time travel and the survival of the multiverse, though).
when he said he’s going to become god… gave me chills, just amazing!
I enjoyed the show the most of all the MCU shows, but it felt very small for a universe/time spanning series.In an entire universe, including all the alien species and planets we’ve seen, including the locations in the Thor films, the locations in GotG, the locations in Captain Marvel, and the locations in the Avengers films, all the characters (besides Lokis) are from the same planet, and literally the same country, the United States.In the span of all time, billions of years, all the characters (except Kang) are from about the same time (1960-2020ish), a tiny sliver in the scope of billions of years.They could go anywhere and any when, and they mostly spend all their time in like 2-3 places (TVA, End of Time, the US in the 1800-2020s).
Finally watched this entire season today.I really can’t believe how great a finale this was. And how satisfying an ACRUAL ENDING feels. And what a great ending. I really loved this crazy show. I’m surprised how emotional it felt to know with pretty much certainty that this is the last time we’ll see Loki. He’s been a character in our lives for 14 years. And in that time he’s been given a chance to grow more than any other MCU character. This really felt like the last of that era that I have any serious affection for. Think I’m going to have to do a full Infinity series rewatch!