While the MCU may be in a bit of turmoil at the moment, there is at least one clear bright spot. That would be Loki season 2, where even if you may have been mixed on its previous episodes, it’s hard to argue that it did anything but absolutely nail its season 2 finale last night. Spoilers follow.
It was an incredible episode, with Loki warping into points all around the timeline to see if there was something, anything he could do in order to stop the destruction of all timelines, only to realize that the path was to kill Sylvie to protect the Sacred Timeline of He Who Remains.
But the custom “solution” he discovers ended up being probably one of my all-time favorite Marvel sequences, where Loki braves the time storm and morphs back into a god, or rather a new kind of god, destroying the loom and carrying the multiverse timelines literally on his back to a resting place, a throne nestled inside a cosmic tree that is very much Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse fame. He becomes what comic readers believe is Loki, God of Stories, the all-powerful, multiversal, being that is now the heart of the universe. Incredible stuff.
And yes, that’s how Loki’s story should end, both the show, and this specific variant, the full realization of his journey.
But is that actually happening? Well, that’s a bit up for debate. To some extent, it feels like this story is over. Here’s writer Eric Martin:
“We approached this as like two halves of a book. Season one, first half. Season two, we close the book on Loki and the TVA.”
However, here’s producer Kevin Wright about a month ago when asked the question:
“That these are two chapters of the same book, and that season two is finishing that book, and there are other stories to be told there, but I think they would be new books, if that’s not too coy.”
I think the idea here is that there may be some way to continue Loki as a show with Tom Hiddleston as Loki, but in a place that would be wholly outside the TVA story and the finale for the specific variant of Loki we’ve been following for two seasons.
I…don’t think it should happen. As much as I do love Tom Hiddleston as Loki, I think sometimes things need actual endings. And it was such a fitting arc for Loki that I think adding anything else to the character, whether a multiversal variant or what have you, would only cheapen what they accomplished last night.
My guess is that there will not be a Loki season 3. Disney may take the win on this one and they are scaling back Disney Plus projects as a whole. There are reports that Loki writer Michael Waldron may be doing the Kang Dynasty, though another open question is if Loki’s finale could have erased Kang from the equation, a convenient off-ramp if Jonathan Majors’ legal troubles are too much for Disney to bear. But I don’t think Kang as a character is going anywhere, even if Majors is.
But yes, a truly excellent finale here for Loki. I’d consider it an all-time great MCU moment. Stellar job to all involved, especially Hiddleston himself.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.