PicoBlog

The Short Take:

Wow. This finale doubles — nay, triples down on the loopy, mind-melting time travel storytelling, yet still maintains a firm grip on Loki’s emotional arc. I can’t believe they pulled this off.

[SPOILER WARNING: For all time. Always.]

Image Credit: Looper

The Long Take:

When he’s wearing a collared shirt and suspenders, it can be easy to forget that Loki is a Norse god. In this series, he acted a lot more like a time cop than the god of mischief. And in the larger context of the MCU as a sandbox, this was the intended fun of the exercise. Pluck a character we thought we knew from one context and place him in a completely unfamiliar environment to find out what new narrative terrain we can chart. 

This finale, however, brilliantly reminded me that Loki never actually stopped being a Norse god, even when he swapped out his iconic horns for a skinny tie. The gradual merging of two storylines — Loki’s evolution as a mythological figure and his attempt to solve the TVA’s problems — constituted a payoff so jaw-dropping that it largely wiped away any quibbles and concerns I had in past weeks. I’d still say that Loki Season 2 was not as strong as Season 1 due to structural inconsistencies, and if I stop to think too long I begin to wonder what episodes 1-4 were really for, plot-wise. But if this is what we were working towards all along, then it was worth it. 

More specifically, once I realized that Loki had decided to give all the burgeoning branching timelines a chance to live their lives and to save all of his friends by breaking the Temporal Loom and replacing it with himself, everything I had questioned before didn’t matter. I mean, HE IS PHYSICALLY HOLDING ALL THE BRANCHES. IN HIS HANDS. A wave of awe washed over me.

They were bringing it back full circle. They were not only reappropriating the phrase “glorious purpose,” which was once a villainous creed and now a cosmic destiny. They were building a new, self-contained myth for Loki. So much of what I associate with gods and goddesses from the world’s pantheons is the explanation that their stories provide for what we mere mortals enjoy and suffer. Atlas held up the Earth and sky. Demeter brings famine as she searches for her kidnapped daughter, Persephone. (So I guess my main reference point here is Greek mythology, but still.) There’s something extremely mythological about Loki ascending his new “throne” as the guardian of all time. It pulls a very timey wimey office comedy into the the realm of epic myth, and that transition felt as seamless and organic as it did surprising and awesome. 

Image Credit: Inverse

If I had to nitpick, I’d say the loafers without socks made me do a double take. I didn’t realize Norse gods shopped at J. Crew these days.  

Anyway, a big part of this “I never saw it coming but, boy, does it make perfect sense now that I’ve seen it” resolution to this season’s conflict (This series? This feels like it could be a series finale, but we’ll have to wait and see.) is that when Loki grabs hold of all the branches of time, to stabilize the infinitely growing multiverse, the branches form a tree. Shout out to my very observant colleague, Mark, for pointing out that while we assumed the TVA logo had an hourglass in the middle, it may have in fact been the timeline tree all along.

If we are to put this tree in the context of Norse mythology, it would be Ygdrassil or “the world tree.” Earth, or Midgard, is but one of nine realms linked to this tree. I don’t think that this means we’re about to divide the MCU up into nine realms. That would be too difficult to map onto the Marvel cosmology we already know. But it does serve as a fairly striking analogy for the MCU’s multiverse, with all the different universes bundled and entangled.

The final, climactic moment in which Loki’s glorious purpose becomes clear, was actually seeded earlier in the episode when Loki visits some of his friends to get advice about what he should do about He Who Remains and the Temporal Loom. He specifically time jumps to the very first episode of the series, in which he still sports his captive variant TVA jumpsuit and time collar. It’s the initial — and arguably most consequential —  conversation between him and Mobius because Mobius shows him his entire life and inspires him to team-up with him and the TVA. Mobius doesn’t know he’s talking to a more worldly, more heroic version of Loki from the future, but he is able to give Loki a proper pep talk just the same. 

Even though the story he tells about (what I think is) Ravonna pruning one of his own sons when he himself could not (despite wiped memories), his words about accepting and carrying a burden for the greater good hits hard. And, more importantly for this season’s own time loop coming to a close, we once again hear Loki — old, as of yet unreformed Loki — say that he deserves to be king of everything. Well, as Sylvie says to Ravonna, be careful what you wish for. A seat at the end of time is not a power grab; it’s a power give. There are few feelings as exhilarating as when you see all the puzzle pieces in a serialized story click into place, and this finale fully delivered that feeling.

Loki stepping into his cosmic role as the one true time keeper, merging his TVA self with his Norse god self, is what ultimately makes this season a success story, but, god or no, this turn of events works on a much more micro scale, at the level of the character we have been watching in this series to date. Loki’s sacrifice is as much an emotional payoff for his own growth and development as anything else. We know he has never felt like he fit in anywhere. Always playing second fiddle to Thor and developing complex hangups about his place in his family, especially once Odin reveals that he was in fact “adopted” for diplomatic reasons. He can’t decide if he wants to be a hero who fights alongside his brother or the screw-up who will always take the easy, selfish, or chaotic way out. It’s heartbreaking to see that the second he gains some self-awareness about his love for his TVA friends and his desperation for a sense of belonging, he must sacrifice his ability to be with those he loves. As we learned last week, volunteering for an eternity sitting alone in a chair gives up the one thing he wanted most — to get his friends, his TVA family, back. Ironic that he finally makes a decision that earns Sylvie’s respect (she recognizes that he’s giving them all a chance by saying as much aloud), but cannot be with her to enjoy their reconciliation. 

I do not wish for the largesse of Loki’s final decision to overshadow all the fun time loop antics that led to this decision. His Groundhog Day (called it, by the way) trial and error, and the flippancy that he inevitably develops the more he tries and errs, initiating a rolling laugh that just kept going the entire first half of the episode. Seeing him adopt O.B.’s temporal techno-babble, taking centuries to learn everything O.B. already knows, was especially fun. And Hiddleston’s performance reminds me SO much of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. Quick-witted and playful while also showing how centuries chipping away at the same catastrophic problems has changed him and the way he looks at the world. He’s tired, and burdened by being the only one who knows. The only one who can. 

By the time Loki realizes that he can’t save the Temporal Loom with the throughput multiplier, but rather must return to his and Sylvie’s confrontation with He Who Remains in the Season 1 finale, I couldn’t look away. The wizard’s duel between Loki and He Who Remains worked so well because the episode did such a good job of establishing, through repetition, Loki’s ability to use his new-found time jumping to level up his abilities.

Their conversation was a lot to process, and I’m eager to go back and watch it again. But even if I wasn’t following every twist and turn in their time loop chess, the dynamic of an over-confident, omniscient He Who Remains being caught off guard by a Loki who has developed powers to rival his own was enough to keep me on the edge of my seat. I’m so happy this episode gave me ample opportunity to fist pump cheer Loki on. Part of me was quietly hoping that we would return to the most consequential choice Loki and Sylvie made at the end of Season 1, and I’m very satisfied with how they returned to that moment without merely reliving it. It’s an axis point through which to generate new/more story. 

In short, Loki a show about time loops that also creates its own time loops. That’s not only brilliant, but nearly impossible to pull off. The episode title, “Glorious Purpose,” is actually a repeat of the Season 1 episode 1 title. That tells me that this entire two-season story had been plotted out from the beginning. One big time loop that we have now closed.

This dual layer time looping, at the in-universe and the meta-narrative level, makes perfect sense to me because narrative in general, but more so cinematic storytelling specifically, was always already a form of time travel. Very few fictional stories are told comprehensively from start to finish, in a linear fashion. They jump around in time, flashing back to a character’s memory, for example. Zooming in on some events and omitting others. The juxtaposition of disparate moments in time creates new meaning — creates the story. By time jumping across centuries and lingering in some moments, replaying them over and over again until he gets them right, and skipping over countless others, Loki becomes a storyteller.

Image Credit: The A.V. Club

It’s difficult to speculate what all this means for the broader story of the MCU. The two-season arc of this particular variant of Loki feels very self-contained. We could easily refer back to TVA Loki holding the multiverse together in a giant timeline tree, but it would be a passing morsel of exposition and nothing more. If we were to continue telling Loki stories, it’s much more likely that we would start again with yet another Loki variant. If He Who Remains can figure out “reincarnation, baby” and basically make moves from beyond the grave, so too can Loki generate a free (TVA) agent version of himself while this version, in this moment in time, still holds it all together.

Whatever they decide to do, I hope they do not cheapen the sacrifice this Loki has made. The episode did such an amazing job of showing how bittersweet and melancholy life in the TVA is after Loki saves them all. They must all decide how to move forward with their newfound free will and, in Mobius’ case, in their newfound knowledge of their double lives. I hope the creators behind this series weigh that heavily as they decide how to proceed, or not proceed, with the series. 

Like Loki, I know what I want — more Loki — but I also recognize that maybe it’s best that I never get what I want.

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