How do you top the end of time?
It’s an issue that looms over the final episode of Loki’s first season like a reality-eating cloud monster after the previous episode’s go-for-broke, journey into mystery and series creator Kate Herron and the inventive brains back at Marvel are left with quite the conundrum. However, this is Loki that we’re talking about here; the God of Mischief, the MCU’s great survivor and a fervent fan favorite to boot and if anyone is going to find a way to pull off a memorable finish, it’s going to be Asgard’s most notorious son.
However, in true Loki style, that memorable finish doesn’t quite happen in the way you’d expect as the show has a few, final rug pulls to play as the puzzle of time itself is solved, not by a huge, CGI action sequence, but with possibly one of the most important sit downs the entire franchise has ever witnessed.
Brace yourself, a conqueror is coming…
After enchanting the billowing matter-eater known as Alioth at the end of time, Loki and Sylvie succeed in opening a portal that leads to a creepy-ass castle floating on a desolate rock that’s surrounded by the Sacred Timeline and presumably the residence of whomever truly dictates the flow of time itself.
Not long after entering the aptly – if rather extravagantly – named Citidel at the End of Time, the two variants are met by an unexpectedly familiar face, that of Miss Minutes, who has been working for the mysterious creator of the TVA all along and teases that this “He Who Remains” could grant them their fondest wishes – which in Loki terms usually means death, a throne or both.
Meanwhile, Agent Mobius has returned to the TVA to find that the rogue Hunter B-15 is blowing the whistle on what the Time Variance Authority actually is by proving to its staff that they’re all mind wiped variants themselves, tasked to police the timeline for reasons unknown. However, even after Mobius tells the still defiant Judge Ravonna Renslayer that the cat’s finally out of the bag, his superior and one-time friend refuses to accept that the TVA’s rather inhumane efforts weren’t all for nothing and escapes to find answers for herself.
Back at the Citadel, Loki and Sylvie finally meet the man behind the curtain and are stunned at what they find. He Who Remains turns out to be a jittery, crazed, broken man who claims he’s been manipulating the history of time for eons in order to protect everything that ever was from the most dangerous force in all of known reality – him. Or at least countless variants of him who once started a multiversal war that saw entire universes wiped out and He Who Temains has been pruning the Sacred Timeline in order to make sure no other universes branch of and create other variants which would start the whole thing off again. However, he’s tired and his solution was to manipulate everything in order to get Loki and Sylvie here’s to this moment, to make them an incredible offer: take his place and run the TVA however they wish. But while Loki mulls this over, Sylvie’s thirst for vengence isn’t as easily quenched – even with all of reality hanging in the balance.
Sometimes, all you want from an MCU ending is one of those big, unsubtle, CGI-filled battles that blows the budget, ties up a bunch of loose ends and undoubtedly stresses out the effects people (sorry guys), but Loki’s always marched to the beat of his own, tricksy drum and as a result, his season finale doesn’t go at all like you’d expect.
However, this is undoubtedly a good thing, mainly because the God of Mischief has his last episode utterly hijacked by the need to lay out essentially the entire thrust of Marvel’s next couple of phases, explain a huge, overarching threat and (sort of) introduce the MCU’s next big bad and it does all this by sitting three people at a desk and literally have them hash it out like an eerie parent/teacher’s meeting. If you wanted a huge finish, you should have been paying attention last episode, because here we’re in the serious business of laying out what the entire franchise is heading towards over the next dozen years or so and for those adverse to scenes of a trio of people talking, For All Time. Always may seem more like a MCU board member power point meeting than a satisfying conclusion to a conceptually bonkers TV show.
However, a couple of things manage to keep the episode an enthralling, if hardly complete, experience and the first of this is the genuine sense of dread and foreboding that comes from every single word that eminates from the mouth of He Who Remains. Played in a noticably off-beat style by Lovecraft Country’s Jonathan Majors, the doom spouting madman is our first glimpse at what will become the MCU’s take on the time travelling Avengers bothered, Kang the Conqueror and his esoteric role (which techinally is nearly 40 minutes of pure exposition) manages to perfectly lay out the incredible stakes through his performance alone. Simply put, if Loki and Sylvie don’t take over his life’s work of halting the emergence of any of his destructive doubles (“If you think I’m evil, well, just wait ’til you meet my variants.”), Kangs will once again swamp the Multiverse, picking fights with one another as they go and it’s here we finally get to the true meat of Sylvie and Loki’s complicated relationship.
“We’re all villains here.” hints He Who Remains between obnoxious chomps of an apple and the fact that Sylvie refuses to give up her lethal vendetta against the man responsible for pruning her entire existence puts the two Lokis at loggerheads. While Sylvie is all “kill, kill, kill”, Loki believes that something try awful will come to pass if the female him runs her gibbering nemesis through, but the true tragedy is even after all they’ve been though together, they’ll never be on the same page. “You can’t trust.” Loki sums upsadly, “‘And I can’t be trusted.”. Its high drama that practically sparks with more electricity that Electro playing pat-a-cake with Raiden from Mortal Kombat.
If there’s an issue, it’s that by sheer design, the episode – and by extension, the season – technically doesn’t have an ending as all of the ramifications caused by Sylvie shish-kebabing He Who Remains with her sword is left more open ended than a barn door blowing in a hurricane. Neither Sylvie, Mobius or Renslayer have anything close to a satisfying finish to their arcs, He Who Remains is dead, Loki arrives back at the TVA to find no one has any memory of him and the only proof we get that a terrible future is on the horizon is that a statue of Kang now stands in the Time Variance Authority with no explanation whatsoever.
Of course, this is all by design thanks to the love of cliffhanger endings that the MCU loves to employ and the fact that we get a post credits sequence confirming that we’re getting a second season makes things a little easier to swallow – but after the more concise endings of WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s a shame that such an important episode ends almost literally in limbo.
Still, for the most part, Loki finishes in style – no lie.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 