Loki Season 2 has come to an end, and with it come some big changes for the state of the MCU and Tom Hiddleston’s namesake character.
While the series has been no strangers to cliffhangers, the Season 2 finale tied things up neatly while still leaving plenty of questions for viewers to mull over.
Loki Season 2 Ending Explained
Warning – The rest of this article contains spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 6.
While much of Loki’s second season has focused on the larger ensemble cast of found family Loki picked up in the TVA, the finale (borrowing the title “Glorious Purpose” from the series pilot) largely set them to the side to focus on Loki’s series-long struggle of finding out who he really is and what he really wants.
The episode picked up quickly from Episode 5’s cliffhanger ending and saw Loki spending literal centuries doing everything he could to ensure the Loom would be stable. These efforts ultimately failed, and Loki tried repeatedly to go back further in his story to find a way to either fix things or to discern a path forward.
It was revealed that the Loom was never intended to handle more than one timeline and, in fact, never could. It was a failsafe to ensure that only He Who Remains’ Sacred Timeline would survive.
In a confrontation with the Kang Variant, Loki found himself forced to make a choice: kill Sylvie to spare He Who Remains and prevent the timelines from branching, or allow the failsafe to trigger, restoring the Sacred Timeline and destroying the TVA.
This choice was, in many ways, the hinge on which the rest of the episode pivoted. Loki needed to find a way to come to terms with the idea of potentially needing to allow a lesser evil (killing Sylvie) in order to prevent a greater one (destroying the TVA).
What Loki did in the end was to carve his own path, as he has always done. He rejected his own selfish desire to stay with his friends and instead made a personal sacrifice to take He Who Remains’ place as master of time.
In his final moment in front of his friends, he told Sylvie and Mobius, “I know what I want. I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us.”
With that, Loki destroyed the Sacred Timeline, taking the dying branches into himself and forming a new Yggdrassil-style tree, allowing the literal branches of the multiverse to endure with him as the heart binding them all together.
This act of sacrifice allowed the TVA to endure, and with it, his friends, who were now free to decide their own destinies.
What’s Next for the Loki Who Remains?
Needless to say, the Loki finale’s ending has completely changed things for both the Trickster and the MCU as a whole. Loki has taken his place as the new master of the TVA, now working to patrol multiple timelines looking for Variants of He Who Remains.
Despite previous statements that the Loki finale left Marvel in a bad position regarding Jonathan Major’s role as Kang, it’s quite possible to argue that things have been wrapped up rather nicely on that front. With no post-credit scenes or anything beyond idle mentions of Kang and his Variants, Marvel Studios really has a lot of room to decide how to proceed.
Should rumors pan out and they make the decision to have Doctor Doom take the role of the lead villain of the coming films, they have both plenty of time to set that up and a decent (albeit abrupt) ending to Kang’s threat to the Multiverse.
Should they stick with Kang, either by keeping Majors or recasting, there’s still plenty of room to work with the outstanding threat of his Variants. Loki’s new position at the heart of the multiverse puts a target on his back that the Conquerors would be sure to set eyes on.
Either way, Loki, Sylvie, and all the TVA are positioned to play a role in the wider drama of the Multiverse Saga, even if Loki Season 2 did put a rather neat bow on their stories for the time being.
Loki Season 2 is now streaming in full on Disney+.
