Loki finale review: The God of Mischief achieves his glorious purpose

Loki has wrapped up its second season, and wow, what a way to end things. There is so much to talk about when it comes to the second season, but that finale was something else!

Eagle-eyed fans may have picked up on the fact that Loki’s first-ever episode was titled “Glorious Purpose”…and so is the season 2 finale. It’s a pivotal full-circle moment that allows the God of Mischief to transform into something deeper and more meaningful.

This entire season has been very emotional; at times I forgot it revolved around a Marvel villain. Now, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) stands for something very different.

What is that exactly? Find out more below. MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

Loki takes on time and space

The beginning of this episode picks up right where we left Loki last week: moments before Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) tries to fix the Temporal Loom and is “spaghettified.” But things are different this time: our anti-hero (if that is what he is now?) has a mission and a purpose.

Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) informs Loki that the reason this didn’t work before was that they weren’t fast enough. They need to be quicker. And so, using his new ability to control his time slips, Loki returns to this moment in time over and over again, trying to speed things up. But each time, Timely is spaghettified into nothing.

It eventually occurs to Loki to return to even earlier moments in time, so they can fix the loom before there’s too much energy out there. He ends up going all the way back to when Timely and O.B. first meet. The hope is that they can work on the prototype faster, but given that O.B. doesn’t have all the information he will have, they hit another roadblock.

The only solution at this point is for Loki to learn all there is to know about physics, and then educate O.B. That shouldn’t be too hard, right? Well, according to Timely and O.B., it would take centuries, but that doesn’t stop Loki. So, he goes back in time (we don’t see this happen) and then returns “centuries later” to impart all that he learned. Loki, the God of Mischief and theoretical physicist!

When Timely gets back out there this time, he makes it all the way down the gangway and succeeds in augmenting the loom. He even makes it back before turning into spaghetti, so that means the mission is a success…right?

Nope. Given that the timeline branches are expanding at an infinite rate, there isn’t a way to scale the Multiplier to handle that neverending capacity. Things were essentially doomed from the get-go, but it took them a very long to make that conclusion.

He Who Remains returns

Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) realizes that this was always going to be a problem from the moment the timelines began to branch. It is in that moment that Loki realizes he has to go back to the moment Sylvie kills He Who Remains, which would prevent this all from happening in the first place.

But nothing as easy as it seems, and once again, the God of Mischief finds himself returning to the same point in time, trying to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains. Of course it’s a series of botched and failed attempts, until He Who Remains reveals something big. He pauses time to ask Loki how many times he has played out this scenario. It becomes obvious that He Who Remains wasn’t actually ever dead, and when he said “See you soon,” he knew everyone would come back to this moment.

But Loki has also has been at this for a minute, and can pause time just like He Who Remains can. “And what makes you think this is the first time we’ve had this conversation?” he asks.

He Who Remains reveals that the Temporal Loom is just a failsafe, and whenever it is bombarded with all the timelines, it will delete them all…except the Sacred Timeline.

It becomes obvious that Loki is not destined to win this battle, but this doesn’t stop him. He then time slips back to the series’ first-ever episode when he is being questioned by Mobius (Owen Wilson). In this encounter, our anti-hero sorts through his options. So he time slips back to the moment when Sylvie and everyone else gets spaghettified and delivers to bad news to her: to save time and space, he has to kill Sylvie before she kills He Who Remains, or lose the universe.

I love Sylvie’s dialogue here when she tells him that it is “okay to destroy something” as long as there is going to be something to replace it. It is such a powerful moment. It made me realize that we are always striving for the happy ending, but that isn’t where the story is always supposed to end. Life has to continue, sometimes with or without the “hero.” And that is the moment when everything changes for the God of Mischief.

Ending of Loki Season 2, Episode 6 explained

Now understanding his purpose, Loki time slips back to the moment before all is destroyed, and walks out into the gangway in place of Timely.

As he walks out, he transforms into the God we know as Loki, horns and all! It’s such a powerful, badass moment that I am still reeling from. He is able to destroy the Temporal Loom with his powers, but as he does so, he grabs all the dying timeline branches.

He walks towards the end of time, towards the throne that He Who Remains once sat upon. Loki takes the throne and essentially becomes the God who is now literally holding the threads of time in his hands.

The scene cuts to black with the words “After” popping up on the screen. We’re under the impression that time has passed, but how much time is unclear. But things are seemingly okay at the TVA, the branches are operating as they once were (thanks to Loki), but there is something a little bit different about how they look.

They are interwoven together like a tree, a tree that looks a lot like Yggdrasill, aka the World Tree from Norse mythology. If you have watched American Gods, then you know what this tree is and what it stands for. It connects the Nine Realms, which is very appropriate given who Loki is and his new job.

So Loki is now the God of…Time? We also quickly catch up with the other characers. Mobius is working on finding the Kang variants across the timelines (we see the one from Quantumania pop up on the TemPad) but is also curious about his life as Don, the Mobius variant from Ohio who sells jet skis). He visits Ohio with Sylvie and watches this life from a distance. Sylvie ventures off somewhere unknown.

O.B. has created a new TVA handbook that does not fall into the hands of the young Victor Timely as it once did. And then there is Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), who has been sent to the Void. A sign reads, “for all time always,” the motto of the TVA. What does this mean?!

And then, of course, the final shot is Loki, sitting in the middle of the tree, holding onto all the branches. He may or may not be happy, but there is a sense of contentment after finding that “glorious purpose” he has been searching for…

Loki seasons 2 will “close the book” on the show

Wow, WHAT A FINALE, YA’LL! I’m still trying to process it. I hope that this is it because it feels like a fitting way to end the series, and now. Although I’m okay with Loki appearing in other shows or movies.

Head writer Eric Martin spoke to CinemaBlend about where things go from here, and it appears that the show could be done after this second season. He said that season 2 will “close the book” on the series, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all over. It simply means that this particular story has come to a close. All that needed to be achieved and addressed has.

“We approached this as like two halves of a book,” Martin said. “Season one, first half. Season two, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don’t know. I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons.”

But when it comes to the MCU…nothing really truly has to be over, does it?

Episode Grade: A

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