Loki season 2 finale: Loki ends, surprisingly perfectly

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.

Stream Loki now on Disney+