Loki Season-Finale Recap: This Is the Bad Place
Perfect on paper, miffed in execution.
The final episode of Loki’s second season plays like a series finale, and it has some grand ideas. On paper, it’s exactly what a send-off for Loki Laufeyson ought to be, right down to its title, “Glorious Purpose,” which quotes his famous proclamation from The Avengers. However, the episode is burdened by a reliance on symbolism without meaning and on plot mechanics without a human core. It features some of the most mythical imagery in any Marvel story but struggles to find its own purpose. If this is the end for the god of mischief — a title Loki finally transcends — then it sadly isn’t worth much more than a shrug.
The one unimpeachable facet of Loki across both seasons has been Natalie Holt’s music, and this week, she introduces us to the story with an eerie, thumping score that matches the episode’s intro: Marvel Studios’ logo sequence running in reverse. This aptly brings us into a story in which Loki, having learned to control his “time-slipping,” gains the ability to go further and further back in time in order to relive certain events. It starts with the scenario from two episodes ago, in which Kang variant Victor Timely tries to help the TVA fix its “Time Loom” but is ripped to shreds by temporal radiation. Despite Loki revisiting this scene, the outcome is the same, forcing him to go back even further into the season and, eventually, into last season as well, trying and failing to save the day in numerous iterations for a period described by the onscreen title card as “centuries.”
The problem is that it doesn’t feel as though much time has passed. The repetitions don’t really pile up or increase in intensity through editing. Tom Hiddleston’s performance doesn’t get much more frayed either — compared with, say, Kang’s appearance as He Who Remains, with Jonathan Majors carrying himself like someone who has been at his lonely timekeeper job for eons. Other sci-fi stories have executed this narrative concept with much more precision in the not-too-distant past. Take the Tom Cruise–fronted action movie Edge of Tomorrow (or Live. Die. Repeat.), which sees Cruise’s character fail numerous times as he progresses through alien battles as if they were video-game checkpoints, learning from each failure but growing more weary every time he relives the same day. Even this episode’s closest cousin, NBC’s sitcom The Good Place, more effectively used montage to create a sense of rhythm and repetition.
“Glorious Purpose,” in effect, limits what ought to feel infinite, depicting it through Loki’s speed and efficiency rather than its emotional impact. There’s little sense that this reformed villain, who last week learned the value of friendship, has had to watch his comrades die a thousand deaths. Each time, the ends are logistical: Timely needs to go from point A to point B and insert machine X into slot Y in order to stabilize the Loom without so much as a conundrum rearing its head. A dilemma threatens to arise when, after centuries of Loki’s problem-solving, Timely finally completes his task out on the time bridge but takes too long to get back inside, sparking the possibility that he may die once more and may even continue to die despite the task being completed, forcing Loki to make (or work past) the difficult choice of one life versus billions. Wouldn’t that be something?
Alas, this scenario doesn’t actually arise, though another, potentially more potent one eventually may take its place. Despite Loki’s fixing the Time Loom, things still go awry, and he loses because the device can’t account for the infinite branches stemming from a vast multiverse, which forces him to return to the time this problem first arose: the season-one finale. The reason these numerous timelines exist is that Sylvie killed He Who Remains, resulting in the “Sacred Timeline” branching off in infinite directions. No matter how hard Loki tries to stop her, she succeeds in her task.
She does, however, hint at another possible dilemma, telling him, “If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me.” Unfortunately, this potentially rigorous drama goes largely ignored. At this point in his development, Loki is far too virtuous to even consider it, resulting in a frustrating structure in which the repetition of his fight sequence with Sylvie at the citadel isn’t about much more than fisticuffs. It’s deeply boring to watch a show trade in a trolley problem for a child’s toy model of a trolley, which can simply be lifted off its tracks and reset with ease. Oh, well. At least the scene is better lit this time.
As with last season, it all comes down to a verbal debate between Loki and He Who Remains with the exact same stakes as before. Keep He Who Remains in charge and a single timeline continues unencumbered. Depose He Who Remains and multiple timelines emerge and eventually his numerous Kang variants cause an all-out multiverse war. But without depicting the stakes of either scenario — this season has seldom (if ever) actually visited real timelines and portrayed their “pruning” — this once again becomes a mere preview for future Marvel films in which Kang is set to be the villain.
There’s a nugget of philosophy to be found within Loki’s seeming stalemate: the idea that this ability to control time makes him infinitely powerful (which does make for an interesting dichotomy with his seeming powerlessness to change the outcome), and his control over all of time makes him much more god than human, despite his experiencing meaningful human relationships during the season. Yet his dilemmas remain mostly abstract, rather than the episode rooting his choices in these notions of humanity and real relationships. What he loves never truly seems at stake, especially when the solution involves trying different iterations of the same thing and simply undoing the fallout when they go awry.
He travels even further back to his first meeting with Mobius, with whom a “Would you kill baby Hitler?” type of debate at least ends up grounded in Mobius’s actual past. (He didn’t, and it weighs on him.) But this isn’t actually the version of Mobius with whom Loki is friendly (not yet, at least), as though the episode were hell-bent on approaching potent drama but finding any excuse to avoid it through some sort of sci-fi specifics.
Eventually, Loki decides (vis-à-vis another conversation with Sylvie about burning things down and building them anew) that the only way out is his becoming the overseer of all time, the way He Who Remains once was. It’s the same dilemma that was presented to him in the season-one finale, only this time he has people to lose, making his sacrifice marginally more meaningful. However, the way this plays out onscreen is baffling, with operatic pomp and circumstance that lays its focus at the feet of abstract symbols for time and the lives of people, rather than something tactile or deeply felt.
It all goes back to the problem of the Time Loom, which has plagued this season since its premiere: It’s a device theoretically representative of the dilemma between one timeline and many — between determinism and free will — but it’s only ever treated as a machine. When Loki ventures out onto the time bridge, he pulls disparate “timelines” together, even though all we see him do in his brand-new costume is quite literally pull on enormous strings without a sense of proportionality for what they represent in terms of people saved or life lived. His fashioning a cape out of these threads en route to a gilded throne is a dazzling image, but parsing it requires intellectualization and rationalization of its meaning, rather than that meaning feeling embedded within its aesthetic construction. Holt’s score is once again magnificent, but her crescendo can’t help but complement empty noise.
In the end, Mobius gets a wonderfully touching moment as he revisits his life on Earth, witnessing it from afar in a still and silent sequence. Gentle sci-fi moments like these tend to crystalize what directors like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are capable of when they aren’t saddled with superhero bombast, though the episode’s conclusion is entwined with exposition about the MCU’s future. The new TVA keeps an eye out for Kang variants and whatnot as assistants to Loki — hopefully, willing ones, though apart from the central characters, it’s not quite clear.
That Loki ends up with what he always wanted — a kingdom but a lonely one — is certainly tragic, but the show’s mechanics obfuscate the exact nature of his tragedy. Does this throne require him to be some kind of active participant in shaping and protecting time, or is it a form of Sisyphean self-torture for all eternity? It’s hard to tell, but the image of him weaving the various timelines into an hourglass shape reminiscent of Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life, is one of the rare times a Marvel story has drawn on mythology to conjure some kind of understanding of scale and, fittingly, purpose. In other words, it looks rad, even if the majority of the episode is spent wading through stakes that mostly fail to feel human.