No character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has undergone a more notable transformation than Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, who has appeared in six films and one live-action TV series since 2011’s Thor. He began as a villain, developed into a kind of antihero, and then emerged as a true superhero. However, Loki has evolved into something more by the end of the Season 2 finale, appropriately named “Glorious Purpose,” from these straightforward narrative patterns. He now serves as the gatekeeper of all heroic escapades, past, present, and future, thus becoming the multiverse itself.

After more than ten years of appearances in the MCU, Loki’s 12th and maybe final episode marks the conclusion of the Asgardian’s story. Marvel’s flagship TV series comes to a gratifying conclusion, but it also marks the sad end of one of the show’s most cherished and tragic characters. Once upon a time, the Prince of Lies had a desire to rule over everything and everyone, even if it meant causing harm to millions of people on Earth, his brother, or his parents. In “Glorious Purpose,” Loki finally wins a throne, but it’s not the one he had originally imagined.

After learning how to manage his time slipping at the conclusion of last week’s episode, Loki was able to transform what was previously an issue into a possible way to save all of his pals. In an attempt to ascertain what they could have done differently to avert the catastrophe, he used this new superpower to travel back to the TVA just before the Temporal Loom was destroyed. After O.B. Upon hearing that it was taking too long for them to try to fix the Loom, Loki created his own time loop in which he kept trying to speed up their process just enough to make their objective successful. For the most part of the second season, Loki experimented with time loops; but, in the end, he makes his own Groundhog Day, demonstrating his growing control of time.

Much to his allies’ dismay, Loki spends literal ages going back and forth in order to find the best sequence for the opening of “Glorious Purpose,” retracing his actions over the course of the second season. But when they eventually manage to increase the Loom’s capacity to accommodate the increasing number of branches, they come to the realization that their efforts—as well as lifetimes of Loki’s work—were in vain (at one point, Mobius even pulls him aside and asks, “What the shit are you doing?”). Victor Timely says, “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse.” Thus, what begins as a tour through the best moments from Season 2 quickly expands to the first season as Loki realizes that stopping Sylvie from killing He Who Remains and going back to the moment when she realized the full potential of the multiverse is the only way to stop the Loom and the TVA from being destroyed.

At the Citadel at the End of Time, Loki is caught up in yet another pointless loop where he keeps trying and failing to stop Sylvie from stabbing He Who Remains. The entire scope of Loki’s unfathomable situation doesn’t become apparent until the TVA’s mastermind rescues Loki from it by utilizing his sophisticated time-twisting TemPad to freeze Sylvie in place. At the end of the first season, He Who Remains cleared the path for Loki and Sylvie to find him at the End of Time. Now, the antagonist informs Loki that everything that has happened since then, including his passing and Loki’s time slip, has gone just as he had planned. The Temporal Loom was never intended to be anything more than a backup plan, meant to shield the Sacred Timeline from the impending multiversal conflict. Sylvie could never have free will, no matter how hard she tried. “Make the difficult decision,” He Who Remains advises Loki. “If you break the loom, you’ll start a battle that will kill us all. The game is over. Alternately, murder her and we’ll defend what we can.

Loki seeks advice as he travels across time to determine what action to take, starting with this conversation with He Who Remains. With the intention of rewriting the history of the entire multiverse, he seeks guidance along the way. In addition to giving Loki the opportunity to have one last conversation with some of the most significant characters from the show, it’s a brilliant way to go back to some of the pivotal points in the series and illustrate how far he’s come. By now, 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. 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 series premiere, when he was still unaware of the TVA’s existence.

Loki selects a point in time when Mobius was merely a TVA analyst attempting to determine what made a Loki tick and when he was still bound. This version of Mobius is more objective in some aspects since he hasn’t been exposed to all the lies and deceptions upon which the TVA was founded and because he is still a devoted employee of a company that consistently prunes every variant and branching timeline.

The two choose not to revisit Loki’s life as they sit across from one another in the TVA’s time theater. Rather than telling him a story about himself, Mobius gives him a thinly veiled anecdote about an occurrence involving two Hunters. According to Mobius, 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 become much worse if his partner Ravonna hadn’t stepped in to help. According to Mobius, “most purpose is more burden than glory.”

It appears obvious by this point that killing Sylvie is Loki’s only choice. Loki has to make a decision regarding the burden, as Mobius’s tale serves to illustrate. Loki then makes one last stop at A.D. where he finds Sylvie. Doug’s Pasadena workshop from “Science/Fiction” last week to inform his multiverse counterpart of the regrettable truth. They argue for 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. Even though Sylvie has preached to Loki about the need of free will, she eventually convinces him that safeguarding the Sacred Timeline is insufficient. “Who are you to say that we must battle to the death?Sylvie queries him.

Loki travels back to the Temporal Core, to those well-known last moments before the Loom is shattered and the multiverse starts to deteriorate, rather than to the End of Time. But Loki makes his own decisions and doesn’t follow HWR’s set of rules. Before leaving to live alone for all time and accepting the fate he was most scared of, he gives his pals one last glance. “I am aware of my desires,” he declares to Mobius and Sylvie. “I am aware of the type of god I must be for you. For everyone 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.

In addition to being the second season finale of Loki, the 12th episode is also somewhat of a creation story. Ouroboros, the myth of the snake devouring its own tail in a never-ending cycle of life, death, and rebirth, was a major theme throughout this season. Furthermore, these paradoxes of time and infinity begin to apply to the TV show as a whole when Loki travels from one end of the series to its beginning, two episodes that share the title “Glorious Purpose.” Was Loki the one who had initially taken his buddies, Mobis, B-15, O.B., and Casey, from their lives? Was the TVA founded by Loki?

The final chapter of the novel, “Glorious Purpose,” finds Loki abandoning 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. 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.

Loki’s reorganization of the multiverse into a new kind of World’s Tree effectively marks the end of “Glorious Purpose.” But instead of ending the episode on a somewhat shocking note, Loki adds a few extra scenes to reveal what transpires after the Asgardian’s sacrifice. The necessity for the TVA to continue operating as it had was essentially eliminated when Loki destroyed the Loom and assumed complete control over an ever-expanding multiverse. However, he has given room for a new organization to develop, discover a new mission, and approach things a bit differently this time around in its stead.

B.O. has rejoined the TVA to take up his role as the organization’s tech specialist once more. He is also authoring a second version of the TVA manual, co-authored with Victor Timely, and restarting Miss Minutes, who should not attempt to kill them all this time. When they return to the War Room, it is filled with 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 they have both 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 a portion of the TVA’s new mission.

(This refers to Kang the Conqueror and the events in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is thankfully the only time that movie has truly come up this entire season.) Mobius’s report mentions an incident with a variation in a 616-adjacent universe that was addressed.

Regarding Ravonna Renslayer, we see her awakening in the Void. Loki had forgotten everything about her since she was chopped off in Episode 4. Ravonna finds herself in an unfamiliar world that exists outside of time, much like Loki did in Season 1, and she must battle the transtemporal purple creature known as Alioth, the realm’s guardian. A picture of a pyramid and a Sphinx may allude to a possible relationship between the former TVA judge and another Kang variant who made an appearance at the conclusion of Quantumania—the time-traveling pharaoh known as Rama-Tut. It’s unclear whether this marks the end of the road for the former judge or if it’s just a hint that her story isn’t over yet.

Victor Timely as an adult is nowhere to be found in the interim. But back in Chicago, we get to glimpse a younger version of him. “Glorious Purpose” takes us back to Victor’s moment of receiving his TVA handbook in “1893,” but when he looks over his windowsill, he finds nothing there—just the curtain billowing in the breeze. Timely’s future is unaffected in this new world, and rather than being set on a course that would make him the next He Who Remains, the child just goes back to his candle-making.

The episode concludes with Mobius and Sylvie, two of the most significant characters in the program, standing behind Loki. Mobius thinks it’s time to leave the TVA and see what he’s been hiding all these years after Sylvie gave him a hard time in “Heart of the TVA” for never even bothering to dig into his prior existence on the Sacred Timeline. He stands back from the scene with Sylvie by his side, watching his variant counterpart, Don, play on the lawn in front of their house with his two sons. “Where are you going?He asks, but all she gives him is a casual shrug.

After Sylvie exits through a time door, Mobius is left by alone to observe his past life from a distance. Mobius stands there in peaceful happiness, a twinge of melancholy knowing that the family he’s witnessing is not his. It’s a beautifully simple moment. The fact that Loki is right there watching with him, from another location, at another time, and finding comfort in the knowledge that his sacrifice was not in vain, makes it all the more heartbreaking when the camera pans back out. For once, it’s impossible to predict what the future holds for Sylvie or Mobius. That’s what makes it so beautiful.

The God of Stories doesn’t exactly have a pleasant ending for Loki. However, when he witnesses his friends carry on with the independence of choice they had never known, the episode closes with Loki grinning tearfully, implying that it was all worthwhile.

It is all the more heartbreaking that none of Thor, Odin, or Frigga are alive to witness Loki’s transformation into the god they have always dreamed he would become, after all of his evil acts throughout his tenure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Although Marvel has not officially revealed if a third season of Loki will air, it feels very much like the finale. Even with how fantastic the series has been so far, any other course would be incorrect. Even though Season 2 had its highs and lows, it brought Loki back to the highest point in MCU television, surpassed only by WandaVision’s single season in 2021. However, thanks to two outstanding season finales, Loki has accomplished something that very few Marvel Studios films or television shows have ever managed to do: it has given satisfying wraps to a character’s story that wasn’t diminished by a disorganized CGI extravaganza or excessive concerns for promoting the next big thing in the works. Because the Asgardian is the one who unites the Multiverse Saga, 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 go on and giving it more significance.

The tale of Loki is concluded, in head writer Eric Martin’s opinion, at least for this particular series. Martin previously told CinemaBlend, “We approached this as like two halves of a book.” Half of the first season. We wrap up our discussion of Loki and the TVA in Season 2. I’m not sure where it goes beyond that. All I wanted to do was convey the narrative in its entirety across those two seasons.

Executive producer Kevin Wright, however, offered a different viewpoint on the character’s future in an interview with Variety, saying that “the hope” is that Marvel will eventually bring Loki and his brother Thor back together 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,” Wright stated. However, we need to emotionally get Loki to a specific position before that meeting can truly be fruitful. That, I believe, has been the aim of these past two seasons.

Although it’s a little startling to hear the producer of Loki state that the character’s “priority” is to essentially advance another MCU movie, this is still Marvel Studios. We can debate what lies ahead for the erstwhile God of Mischief, his new role within the MCU’s multiverse, and Marvel’s plans regarding the Jonathan Majors-Kang the Conqueror scenario on another day. For the time being, let’s enjoy a Marvel series that provided a fitting conclusion for its lead character.