[Spoiler alert for the Loki season 2 finale, “Glorious Purpose.”] “I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose.” So said Loki (Tom Hiddleston) when the God of Mischief inadvertently assembled Earth’s mightiest heroes in The Avengers… only to escape from the Battle of New York of 2012 into a branched timeline. Since then, Loki has been out of time — and outside of time and space — working with Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and the Time Variance Authority to save the Sacred Timeline from a reality-destroying multiversal war waged by Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).
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Before we get to the end of Thursday’s Loki finale, “Glorious Purpose,” we have to rewind time and start at the beginning.
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Loki has spent the season slipping through time and burdened with glorious purpose: stop the Temporal Loom from melting down, which destroys the TVA, which is the only thing that can protect the Sacred Timeline against Kang the Conqueror. As Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan) explains, the Temporal Loom refines raw time into physical timeline. Because it’s not constructed to weave together the infinitely-growing branches that TVA General Dox (Kate Dickie) ordered be pruned, the Temporal Loom is overloaded. That means turning timelines into “spaghetti.”
After spending centuries mastering physics, mechanics, and engineering, Loki creates a device to help19th-century inventor Victor Timely (Majors) — a variant of Kang and He Who Remains — complete the Throughput Multiplier to stabilize the Loom and reweave the branches of time duplicating and expanding at an infinite rate, thus creating an infinitely-growing multiverse. No matter how many times Loki resets time, the branching timelines are doomed to end in disaster: the Loom melts down and spaghettifies everything every time. Always.
Loki masters his time-slipping to return even further in time: back to the first season finale to stop Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) from killing He Who Remains at the Citadel at the End of Time, thereby giving everyone free will — but at the cost of causing the timelines to branch off into the multiverse and inevitably leading to another multiversal war.
As it turns out, the Temporal Loom is He Who Remains’ fail-safe: when it’s overloaded with branches, it deletes ones that aren’t supposed to be there. Everything except the Sacred Timeline. Worse, there are an infinite number of Kang variants across the multiverse, and only He Who Remains can protect everyone from a multiversal war where nothing — not even the Sacred Timeline — survives. After propositioning Loki to take his throne and succeed him in his domain over time, He Who Remains then gives Loki a choice: break the Loom and cause a war that ends everything, or kill Sylvie and save something.
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“Do you really want to be the god who takes away everyone’s free will so you can protect that?” Sylvie asks Loki, who responds: “What good is free will if everyone’s dead?” But she’s lived through enough apocalypses to know: sometimes it’s okay to destroy something. But, Loki counters, only if “there’s a hope that you can replace that thing with something better.”
Loki time travels back to the present TVA, where his friends — Sylvie, Mobius, O.B., Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and Casey (Eugene Cordero) — were once wiped out by the Temporal Loom’s meltdown. “I know what kind of god I need to be for you,” Loki tells Sylvie. “For all of us.” Loki then exposes himself to the Temporal energy that should peel off his skin and turn him into spaghetti… but instead, he’s transformed. Revealing a new green suit with a cape and a crown, Loki unspools the timelines when he destroys the Loom with his magic. Loki then weaves together the blackened, dying branches, and infuses them with his glowing green magic.
“He’s giving us a chance,” says Sylvie, watching as Loki disappears into a rift in time. Loki literally holds the timelines together, replacing the Temporal Loom with Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse mythology. It’s there that Loki — the God of Stories — ascends to the throne and fulfills his glorious purpose: protecting time For All Time. Always.
Will There Be Loki Season 3?
The first season of Loki ended with a post-credits scene confirming that “Loki will return in season 2.” But the Loki season 2 finale doesn’t have an end credits scene, so the question is: will there be a Loki season 3?
“We are certainly thinking about how we can continue to tell TVA andLoki base stories,” series co-executive producer Kevin Wright told ComicBook. “What I would say is,season one and season two were always conceived as two chapters of thesame book. We want to close this book.” Wright added: “I think there’s a lot morebooks on the shelf, though.”
The Loki season 2 ending suggests that the God of Mischief the God of Stories is destined to return in Avengers: Secret Wars, as he’s — quite literally — at the center of the multiverse. While a third season of Loki hasn’t been announced yet, Marvel Studios will conclude The Multiverse Saga with the two-part Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (scheduled for May 1st, 2026) and Avengers: Secret Wars (May 7th, 2027).
All episodes of Loki are now streaming on Disney+.
