Finally, the God of Mischief has disappeared after much waiting. At the end of the second season of Loki, the Asgardian god finally finds his grand destiny as a being worthy of a new title, the God of Stories.

With six films and one live-action TV series under his belt since 2011’s Thor, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has experienced the most significant metamorphosis of any character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He started out as a villain, evolved into an antihero of sorts, and finally became a real superhero. But by the end of the Season 2 finale, aptly titled “Glorious Purpose,” Loki has transcended these simple narrative patterns into something more. He has become the multiverse itself, guarding the doors to all heroic adventures, past, present, and future.

The narrative of the Asgardian comes to an end with Loki’s 12th and maybe final chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, after almost a decade of appearances. Marvel’s flagship television series comes to a satisfying ending, but one of the show’s most beloved and tragic characters tragically passes away. The Prince of Lies formerly aspired to rule over everyone and everything, even if it meant harming his parents, his brother, or millions of people on Earth. When Loki eventually obtains a throne in “Glorious Purpose,” it’s not the one he had anticipated.

At the end of last week’s episode, Loki managed to turn his time slipping problem—which had been a problem—into a potential opportunity to save all of his friends. He returned to the TVA with this new superpower shortly before the Temporal Loom was destroyed, trying to figure out what they could have done differently to prevent the disaster. After O.B. realized that their attempts to repair the Loom were taking too long, Loki constructed his own time loop, in which he continuously attempted to expedite their efforts in order to achieve his goal. Loki toyed with time loops for the bulk of the second season, but in the end, he creates his own Groundhog Day to show off his increasing mastery over time.

To the dismay of his companions, Loki goes back and forth for literally centuries in search of the ideal scene for “Glorious Purpose,” retracing his steps during the second season. However, they discover that their efforts—as well as eons of Loki’s labor—were in futile when they eventually succeed in expanding the Loom’s capacity to accommodate the growing number of branches (at one point, Mobius even pulls him aside and asks, “What the shit are you doing?”). As a result, what starts out as a tour through the highlights of Season 2 swiftly expands to the first season as Loki realizes that the only way to prevent the Loom and the TVA from being destroyed is to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains and return to the moment when she realized the full potential of the multiverse. Victor Timely states, “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse.”

Loki finds himself in a needless cycle at the Citadel at the End of Time, where he keeps trying and failing to stop Sylvie from stabbing He Who Remains. The full extent of Loki’s unbelievable predicament isn’t revealed until the mastermind of the TVA saves Loki from it by using his advanced TemPad to twist time to freeze Sylvie in place. He Who Remains made it possible for Loki and Sylvie to find him at the End of Time at the conclusion of the first season. Presently, the adversary tells Loki that everything that has transpired since then, including his demise and Loki’s time travel, has gone according to his plan. The purpose of the Temporal Loom was always to protect the Sacred Timeline from the approaching multiversal battle. It was never supposed to be anything more than that. No matter how hard Sylvie tried, she would never be able to exercise free will. The One Who Remains counsels Loki to “make the difficult decision.” “Either murder her and we’ll defend what we can, or break the loom and start a conflict that will kill us all. The game is ended.

In addition to providing Loki with a final conversation with some of the most important characters from the show, it’s a brilliant way to revisit some of the series’ turning points and demonstrate how far the character has come. By this point, Loki has mastered the ability to move his body through space and time, and he has become strong enough to control other people’s time, akin to HWR’s Time Twister. However, even though it appears as though Loki could travel back in time to any point in the past, he choose one of their earliest exchanges with Mobius, from the

Loki chooses a time when Mobius was just a TVA analyst trying to figure out what made a Loki tick and when he was still bound. This Mobius is a little more objective because he hasn’t been exposed to all the false information that the TVA was built on, and he is still a loyal employee of a company that constantly eliminates every branching timeline and variant.

As they sit across from each other in the TVA’s time theater, the two decide not to relive Loki’s life. Instead of telling him a story about himself, Mobius tells him a thinly veiled anecdote about an incident involving two Hunters. This Hunter once “lost sight of the big picture” when, as a little lad, he neglected to prune a variation. A few Hunters lost their lives as a result of his indecision, and things would have gotten much worse if his partner Ravonna hadn’t intervened to help. Mobius says, “most purpose is more burden than glory.”

It seems clear by now that killing Sylvie is the only option left to him. Mobius’s story illustrates this point. After that, Loki makes one final stop at A.D., where he finds Sylvie. Doug’s Pasadena workshop from “Science/Fiction” last week to inform his counterpart in the multiverse of the unfortunate truth. They argue one last time about the necessity of the TVA, whether it is better to die free or live under oppressive control, and how they can control every person’s life in every universe. Despite Sylvie’s sermonizing on the subject, she eventually persuades Loki that defending the Sacred Timeline is insufficient.Asks Sylvie a question.

Rather than traveling to the End of Time, Loki returns to the Temporal Core, to those famous final moments before the Loom is fractured and the multiverse begins to fall apart. However, Loki defies HWR’s restrictions and makes his own choices. He sends his friends one final look before moving out to live alone forever and facing his worst fear. “I know what I want,” he says to Sylvie and Mobius. “I know the kind of god I have to be for you, for all of you here.

The epic music by Natalie Holt, whose best work in the series appears near the end of this finale, complements the epic visual sequence that serves as Loki’s last climax. The temporal radiation in the room causes Loki’s TVA clothing to crumble as he takes Victor’s place on the gangway leading to the Loom. Instead, his magic creates a famous green costume that matches his new unofficial status as the God of Stories. A helmet with horns appears on his head, resembling the black-and-gold design of He Who Remains’s Citadel and technology. After destroying the Loom, Loki scatters the branches into the emptiness in front of him, where they start to break down. Grasping these vine-like connections, he pulls them together via a doorway to the End of Time, sending entire universes crashing under his hands. In the meantime, Loki creates a new kind of Loom—Yggdrasil, the World’s Tree—that is more appropriate for an Asgardian god while he sits alone on a throne in his own Citadel and envelops himself in the branches of the multiverse, imbuing them with his power.

Not only is this the second season finale of Loki, but it’s also a bit of a creation story. A central theme of this season was the myth of the snake devouring its own tail in an endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth; these paradoxes of time and infinity also come into play when Loki travels from one end of the series to the other, a journey marked by two episodes that share the title “Glorious Purpose.” Was it Loki who had originally taken Mobis, B-15, O.B., and Casey from their lives? Was the TVA founded by Loki?

Although Loki grants its protagonist the same fate as the God of Stories, as he does in the comics, it never explicitly declares him to be such. Now that Loki has created a new multiverse, one that is more vibrant and active than the Sacred Timeline was ever intended to be, the rest of the MCU can live and develop in. The novel’s final chapter, “Glorious Purpose,” finds Loki giving up his wants in order to become a heavenly entity with all the power one could ever want—but without someone to share it with. He has declared that he will take the throne at the end of time, with no glory and just burdens.

The end of “Glorious Purpose” is effectively marked by Loki’s reorganization of the multiverse into a new kind of World’s Tree; however, rather than leaving the audience with a somewhat shocking epilogue, Loki includes a few extra scenes to reveal what happens after the Asgardian’s sacrifice. Since Loki destroyed the Loom and took full control of an ever-expanding multiverse, he effectively eliminated the need for the TVA to continue operating as it had, but he has created space for a new organization to grow, find a new mission, and tackle things a little differently in its place.

When they return to the War Room, it is full of new faces and more voices to reflect the shift in the organization’s mission and values, rather than just a few judges or generals debating among themselves. Casey and B-15 are also back, and both have been given more authority in what looks to be a more democratic restructuring of the TVA’s leadership. An exchange between B-15 and Mobius indicates that keeping an eye on the other iterations of He Who Remains and averting the multiversal conflict is at least part of the story. B.O. has returned to the TVA to take up his role as the organization’s tech specialist once more. He is also writing a second version of the TVA manual, co-authored with Victor Timely.

(This alludes to Kang the Conqueror and the happenings in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is fortunately the only time that film has really been discussed this season.) Mobius’s report describes an issue that was addressed that included a variant in a universe that was immediately adjacent to 616.

In terms of Ravonna Renslayer, we see her waking up in the Void, where Loki had forgotten everything about her since she was severed in Episode 4. Like Loki in Season 1, Ravonna finds herself in an unknown world that exists outside of time, and she has to fight the transtemporal purple creature known as Alioth, the guardian of the realm. A picture featuring a pyramid and a Sphinx may suggest a relationship between the former TVA judge and another Kang variant that appeared at the end of Quantumania—the time-traveling pharaoh known as Rama-Tut. It’s unclear if this signifies the former judge’s demise or if it’s merely a suggestion that her story isn’t finished yet.

While we can’t find Victor Timely as an adult in the interim, we can see a younger version of him back in Chicago. “Glorious Purpose” transports us back to Victor’s moment of receiving his TVA handbook in “1893,” but when he looks over his windowsill, all he sees is the curtain billowing in the breeze. Timely’s future remains unaffected in this new world, and instead of being thrust upon a path that would make him the next He Who Remains, the child simply returns to his candle-making.

As the episode comes to a close, Mobius and Sylvie—two of the most important characters in the show—are positioned behind Loki. Mobius believes it’s time to go from the TVA and discover what he’s been hiding for all these years after Sylvie chastised him in “Heart of the TVA” for never even attempting to investigate his previous existence on the Sacred Timeline. He observes his variant counterpart, Don, playing with his two sons on the lawn in front of their house with Sylvie at his side.She just shrugs casually at his question.

Once Sylvie leaves via a time portal, Mobius is left on his own to watch his former life from a distance. Mobius observes the family with a hint of sadness, even if it is not his own family. He stands there in serene happiness. It’s a moment of exquisite simplicity. It is made much more tragic as the camera pans back out because Loki is right there, watching with him from a different place at a different time, and finding solace in the knowledge that his sacrifice was not in vain. For once, it’s hard to guess what will happen to Mobius or Sylvie in the future. That is the reason it is so exquisite.

Loki’s story in The God of Stories doesn’t exactly end well. But the episode concludes with Loki smiling miserably, suggesting that it was all worth it as he sees his pals continue with the independence of choice they had never known.

Because of all of Loki’s bad deeds during his time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it is even more tragic that none of Thor, Odin, or Frigga are around to see him turn into the god they have always imagined he would become. It feels a lot like the end, even though Marvel has not yet stated if a third season of Loki will air. Any other path would be inappropriate, even considering how amazing the series has been thus far. Despite its ups and downs, Season 2 elevated Loki back to the pinnacle of MCU television, a status only eclipsed by WandaVision’s one-season run in 2021. But thanks to two fantastic season finales, Loki has done something that very few Marvel Studios movies or TV series have ever been able to do: it has satisfactorily concluded a character’s story that wasn’t compromised by a disjointed CGI extravaganza or undue worries about promoting the upcoming blockbuster. Loki’s character arc fully realizes his journey over the years and places him in a position of power within the MCU, allowing the story to continue and giving it more weight because the Asgardian is the one who connects the Multiverse Saga.

Head writer Eric Martin believes that, at least for this specific series, the story of Loki is over. Half of the first season, Martin had previously said to CinemaBlend, “We approached this as like two halves of a book.” We conclude with a look at Loki and the TVA in Season 2. Beyond that, I’m not sure where it leads. My goal was to portray the story as it unfolded during those two seasons.

In an interview with Variety, executive producer Kevin Wright, however, expressed a different opinion regarding the character’s future, stating that “the hope” is that Marvel will someday reunite Loki and his brother Thor for the first time since 2018’s Infinity War. “The main focus of the story we’re telling has always been the sun shining on Loki and Thor once again,” said Wright. However, before that meeting can be genuinely productive, we need to emotionally get Loki to a certain place. I think that’s what these last two seasons have been trying to do.

This is still Marvel Studios, which is why it’s a little shocking to hear Loki’s producer say that the character’s “priority” is to basically progress another MCU film. Another day, we may discuss what the future holds for the former God of Mischief, his new position in the MCU’s multiverse, and Marvel’s intentions with reference to the Jonathan Majors-Kang the Conqueror situation. Let’s appreciate a Marvel story that gave its main character a fitting climax for the time being.