Glorious Loki

Last night's finale of Loki season 2 was really good. It was appropriately epic and, while I think it fell short of being truly satisfying, it was certainly better than the first season.

I watched it at 11pm after having been awake since 4am so I may have missed some details. But we find Loki, who, in the previous episode, had expressed his anxiety about losing his friends, steadily being forced to do everything himself.

There's a lot of nice dialogue about what it means to have the power and position of a god. "With great power comes great responsibility" is by no means a foreign concept in the superhero genre but, in recent years, Disney and other studios have so steadily beat the drum for everything coming down to teamwork, it was refreshing to see a story about how, no, sometimes it takes one visionary. Hopefully it's the right visionary.

Loki uses his time-slipping ability as he tries to correct for every little mistake leading to the destruction of the Loom that seemingly keeps the branching timelines in order. That fails because he and his cohorts had been operating on a false premise--the Loom doesn't keep the timelines in order, it was only designed to protect one timeline while setting the others up for pruning. So Loki realises he has to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains, the event at the end of season one that set up season 2.

Sylvie is eternally committed to killing He Who Remains, even if her rationale is a little vague. Loki confronts her about it in this episode and the dialogue sounds an awful lot like modern political discourse. Sylvie says we have to overthrow the old regime at all costs because it's corrupt, and Loki says, what good is that if it means everyone ends up dead? She has no answer for that but, like a lot of revolutionaries, she doesn't seem to have spared room in her mind for contemplating that. Someone, somewhere, will surely take care of it, and this time it turns out to be Loki.

I wish it'd been made a little clearer what Loki was doing at the end, but it's certainly an epic sequence in any case. He strides out into space, his costume transforming into one more befitting a god, and takes the dying timelines into himself. He takes a lonely throne at the centre of what becomes a tree of timelines, seemingly meant to be Yggdrasil, the world tree from Norse mythology.

As an arc for Loki in the MCU, going back to the first Thor movie and The Avengers, it makes sense. There's a lot of talk about Loki being selfish but he had a very specific kind of selfishness--he wanted the recognition and validation that Thor had. That's why he wanted to see himself as one with "glorious purpose". Well, he certainly attained that. That's the kind of thing that takes commitment. Unlike Sylvie, who, after causing all the trouble, was happy to slack off in a cosy McDonalds life, Loki never for a moment stopped trying to unravel the knot, never stopped trying to find a way to be the one who saves the whole damned universe. His commitment was so strong he didn't waver even when he realised he had to spend centuries studying to attain the acumen of Ouroboros.

So now he's basically become Atlas, the god whose job was to hold up the world. Aside from that one episode earlier in the season, he really doesn't come across as a god of mischief. But whatever, it's a good story.

Loki is available on Disney+.