By
Phil Owen
on November 10, 2023 at 10:46AM PST
This week on Loki, the series may or may not have ended. The Season 2 finale was not declared ahead of time to be a series finale, but it’s got all the hallmarks of one. Well, it’s got some of the hallmarks. It also left us with several wide-open story threads that simply weren’t mentioned at all in the final two episodes of the season–there are at least three characters whose fate after this season isn’t very clear at all.
Warning: The remainder of this article will be spent describing spoilers from the Loki Season 2 finale.
Now that Loki has the ability to time travel whenever he wants, he spends the first half or so of this episode pulling a Live, Die, Repeat–he’s living through the destruction of the Temporal Loom over and over again, each time getting a little bit closer to success. He spends literal centuries doing this, learning everything that Ouroboros and Victor Timely have to teach him about all this quantum physics stuff, before eventually realizing it doesn’t matter. Nothing they do will save the Temporal Loom, which always collapses under the weight of an expanding multiverse.
So Loki tries instead to save He Who Remains from being killed by Sylvie in the Season 1 finale. He makes a few dozen, or hundred, attempts at this–at that moment, Sylvie is not interested in anything Loki has to say, and he doesn’t want to kill her. But eventually He Who Remains pauses time during one of these attempts, and directly addresses the present Loki and taunts him for not figuring out the problem yet. Apparently everything that has happened in Season 2 was part of his original plan before he died
The issue, He Who Remains says, is that Loki and the other TVA folks don’t understand the purpose of the Temporal Loom, which was built to prune all the extra timelines in the case of He Who Remains’ death. The Loom was built to maintain one timeline, not a multiverse. It does the same thing He Who Remains did, but it’s the automated version.
Everything in Season 2, it turns out, happened in order to teach Loki about how difficult it is to manage all these timelines without a strong hand at the top. He Who Remains said they had a relatively stable reality because he sat there at the end of time wrestling with it all, and he can’t simply be killed and forgotten–he has to be replaced.
So Loki does just that. He goes back to when the Loom explodes and let’s it happen, then he walks out into the temporal radiation unshielded, transcends reality, and becomes the fully powered Loki, God of Stories, boss of the multiverse. Now he’s the new He Who Remains, and he’s keeping an eye over the multiverse with the help of the TVA–but not Mobius, who decided to go to Ohio and stalk his other self.
It’s kind of a poetic ending, but it doesn’t make any sense. Like nearly every Marvel movie and show since the start of 2021, it feels like half the plot was filmed and then ripped out of Loki Season 2. Renslayer was barely relevant this season at all outside of the Chicago episode, and the last time we saw Hunter X-05, in the fourth episode, he flashed green Loki eyes before never being referenced again.
There are dangling threads like that all over. I’d wager Loki got his planned ending, but I’m not sure anybody else did. And the result is I have a lot of questions. And while I’m concerned that many of them will never have answers, I’m gonna ask them anyway.
1. Is the Loki show over?
With the title character having apparently transcended all of reality by the end of this episode, it’s hard to see how a third season would work. We get a new Loki variant? Does Sylvie take over as the main one? Can they rebrand it as a TVA show? Both of those last two options seem the most likely to me, but the MCU is in such a weird state these days that they may need to send a money truck to Tom Hiddleston’s house because he’s the closest thing to a RDJ-level presence that the franchise has right now.
2. What was He Who Remains actually planning?
All of Season 2 has had more of a feel of an epilogue to Season 1, rather than a new extension of the story, and it turns out that that really was true. At the end of Season 1, He Who Remains promised that his death would unleash the multiverse and eventually trigger a multiversal war that could end all reality.
Instead, He Who Remains’ death was just another step in his long-term plan–he even claims credit for Loki’s time slipping, which, inexplicably, no one had previously even wondered about. Likewise, in the Season 2 premiere we learned about a lot of TVA stuff and people that had never been even hinted at before–General Dox and Hunter X-05 suddenly appear out of nowhere to become major TVA figures, as did Ouroboros and the entire TVA underbelly where the Temporal Loom is located. My guess, based on He Who Remains referring to the Loom as a failsafe that takes over the timeline pruning in the case of his death, is that all these new elements literally did not exist last season–they came into being as part of that same contingency.
The end result of all this is that Loki became the new He Who Remains by stepping out of reality to monitor the multiverse from an unfathomably cosmic perspective. Was this what He Who Remains wanted all along? There are a lot of pieces missing from this story, and so the next three questions are all outgrowths of this one.
3. Was Renslayer supposed to be important?
Ravonna Renslayer only appeared in two episodes this season, first showing up when she traveled back to the 19th Century to give the TVA field manual to a He Who Remains variant. It was the only thing she did that had any kind of impact this season. Then, for whatever reason, she simply wasn’t in the last two episodes of the season, before being shown for five seconds at the end of the finale. It’s as if the meat of her story was cut.
Meanwhile, where is she? There’s a pyramid in the shot, which evokes the Kang the Conqueror variant called Rama-Tut, who lives in ancient Egypt, but it otherwise looks like the chaotic world at the end of time that we saw in Season 1, with the purple glow and noise likely being the smoke monster Alioth. I believe that that wasteland could actually be Battleworld, which will be the setting for Avengers: Secret Wars, but I don’t have firm evidence for that.
4. What about General Dox and Hunter X-05?
Likewise, nothing about these two makes sense. Dox and X-05 shared an oddly tender moment together in the season premiere, something that Loki very pointedly took note of. And then General Dox had like two more scenes before she died, and not a single thing X-05 did this season tracks at all. The last time we saw X-05, he pruned Renslayer to send her to the end of time, and then flashed green Loki eyes. The character has not been mentioned since then, and his and Dox’s story remains 100% unresolved.
5. What actually changed as a result of all this?
The only interpretation of all this that I can see is that everything that happened in Season 2 was still going according to He Who Remains’ plan, with all these events basically preparing him mentally and emotionally for the task of taking his place at the end of time. Loki does it differently, I suppose–it’s tough to say when we don’t actually know what He Who Remains actually did in his day-to-day–but it seems that this was what he wanted.
The question, though, is why does this matter? Did all of this actually have any tangible impact on the rest of the MCU in such a way that we can draw an unbroken line of cause-and-effect from one thing to the other? No, I don’t think so. It’s safe to say at this point that the Loki show is just background lore–this doesn’t have any direct connections to any other stories that have been told so far. There’s only even a single reference to the rest of the current MCU in this whole season–Mobius makes a veiled mention of the events of Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania about five minutes before the end of the finale.
That lack of direct connections is something that will presumably change once Avengers: The Kang Dynasty comes out and reveals the full story of Kang and his variants, but I can’t help but wonder if there was a previous version of Loki Season 2 with more going on. So much has clearly been stripped out of this season, and as with this week’s other new MCU thing, The Marvels, the result is yet another MCU story that just doesn’t add up.
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