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Loki finishes off its first season with the aptly titled ‘For All Time. Always.’, which has been the motto of the TVA and always awash with multiple meanings. The finale is unusual for the Marvel sort of product in that there isn’t a huge CGI action battle at the end — there’s instead a much smaller one and mostly a lot of exposition.
The initial moments of the episode show the ‘creation’ of the sacred timeline, but it’s also the one we’ve been watching in the MCU the whole time as we see characters tossing out some zingers followed up by real quotes from such people as Neal Armstrong, Greta Thunberg, and Nelson Mandela. It’s a bit on the biblical side with ideas of Creation and the Big Bang, but that’s only the beginning.
The allusions start in earnest when Miss Minutes offers temptations to Loki and Sylvie, the possibility of a new version of the timeline where the two can be together, where Loki can have the Infinity Gauntlet and rule Asgard and where Sylvie will never have experienced trauma at all. It’s a good sell, even if Sylvie realizes it’s fiction and Loki says that they are writing their own destiny. But the funny thing is, all of this really is fiction and they aren’t writing anything.
Back in the TVA we see more setup instead of payoff, although it’s entertaining — Ravonna gets a mysterious message from ‘him’ by Miss Minutes and is off ‘in search of free will’ after a fraught confrontation with Mobius. In a lightning fast flashback, it is revealed that Ravonna is a variant of some school teacher or principal named Rebecca and word has been spread in the TVA about the truth of their reality.
That’s a little rushed, but what still worked was the interactions between Mobius and Ravonna, both so convinced they are right and both feeling betrayed. And Ravonna is unable to prune Mobius herself, despite everything … it’s an interesting parallel to the Loki/Sylvie scenes because there we get the opposite result.
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Loki and Sylvie finally run into the one behind it all, someone dubbed ‘He Who Remains’ (played with fantastic aplomb by Jonathan Majors) who greets them while theatrically chomping on an apple. That’s another Garden of Eden allusion, the final temptation that might really be the truth. Although in the meta world beyond the show we know that Jonathan Majors will be playing Kang the Conqueror in later movies, here the show explicitly gives him no name.
Sure, he alludes to it with a few references to ‘conqueror’ and ‘having many names’, but the dude instead takes the opportunity to explain the MCU origin story. He is a scientist from the 31st century, a man who discovered the multiverse at the same time as other variants of himself. At first they had peace, until they didn’t — thus the tease and the ‘gambit’, that he is the devil you know (another biblical allusion, one he explicitly uses to refer to himself) and far better than the alternative versions of himself out there.
None of it would work without the manic, hilarious energy of Jonathan Majors here, contrasting expertly with the conflicting reactions of Loki (who is beginning to believe it because he has learned how to trust) and Sylvie (who doesn’t trust anything despite how it may hurt herself). After the two come at odds, Loki admits his feelings (in a manner of speaking), saying that all he wants is for her to be okay.
And then she kisses him and says she isn’t him — which may be both a commentary on the handwavey,incesty nature of their relationship and a way to differentiate their reactions to the He Who Remains dude and his spiel. Of course, then she knocks him back to the TVA so she can take vengeance.
After she kills the dude, he seems unperturbed (he believes that the multiversal war will simply lead back to the same situation again after all) but Sylvie breaks down in tears. She has had her vengeance but what has she truly gained and what has she lost? And then we see Loki, silently heartbroken as Tom Hiddleston shows off his sad acting skills.
Of course, then the episode decides to break our hearts in a fun little way, because it turns out that something has changed in the TVA — and Mobius no longer remembers Loki or their unlikely friendship. And he never got the jet ski! It ends with the creepy shot of a different version of the He Who Remains guy as a giant statue where once the masked Time-Keepers stood — things are now very different and there’s a multiverse out there too.
Overall, the first season of Loki was consistently strong, with great character work and a lot of fun little time travel ideas. It even pulled off the bait and switch in the finale which I was impressed by. The show had great production design and an absolutely legendary score by composer Natalie Holt, which means that boy am I glad that there’s a second season coming. Although we’ll have to wait a while for it. At least there’s What If? soon.
The first season of Loki is available on Disney Plus.
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