If you’ve missed out on the latest season of Loki, I might be able to guess why. While I hate to say it, it’s just a fact that Marvel hasn’t exactly been instilling much confidence in fans with many of its post-Avengers creative endeavors (with some notable exceptions, of course). But truly, truly, you are missing out on something really special if you pass on Loki Season Two. Because if you stick with the show through its convoluted plot lines until the end, you are rewarded with the phenomenal culmination of Loki’s character arc. From the beginning of Loki through to the final episode, we see his puerile selfishness and megalomania slowly morph into benevolence. The god of mischief became the selfless god who bears the weight of the multiverse.
When Loki, bent on conquest, came to Earth in The Avengers he announced himself to Nick Fury: “I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose.” “Glorious purpose” has always driven Loki. He wishes to accomplish something grand, something historic, that will make his life meaningful. He fights, plots, and manipulates his way through multiple worlds to make a name for himself, to fulfill a glorious purpose worthy of a god. But whatever name Loki makes for himself, it ultimately comes to nothing. Despite all his regal ambitions, Loki was born to lose.
Season One of Loki ended with chaos as the infinite timelines of the multiverse began branching out into oblivion. He Who Remains has been killed and now the universe itself threatens to fall apart at the seams. Even Loki find himself uncontrollably slipping between past, present, and future. In Season Two, Loki and his friends try to save the timelines by fixing the Temporal Loom, which refines raw time into physical timelines and powers the TVA (the Time Variance Authority). But the plan they concoct to expand the Loom and upgrade its ability to preserve the exponentially expanding branches fails and all is lost. Again and again and again, dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of times. Loki even spends multiple centuries studying physics to become as knowledgeable as the brilliant TVA scientist, Ouroboros, trying to uncover what they’re doing wrong.
In desperation, Loki time slips to his encounter with He Who Remains, who halts time to say something new to Loki. He Who Remains explains that there is no way to enlarge the capacities of the Loom as it’s a fail-safe. If and when the Loom is overloaded with branches, it fails and deletes every variant branch of time to preserve the Sacred Timeline. He gave Loki the ability to time slip in order to come back to this moment and realize that he had to kill Sylvie in order to prevent her from killing He Who Remains.
Loki says, ostensibly to He Who Remains, but perhaps most to himself, “We die with the dying … We are born with the dead.” Loki seems to suddenly recall these lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” as he reckons with He Who Remains’ gambit. A heavy realization arises: inevitability is the only available option, whatever Loki opts for. He Who Remains has set everything in place for the loop to continue on, and he intends for Loki to see there’s no way out of it. Loki digs in his heels that there must be another way that allows the branches to live, but He Who Remains warns that his variants are already afoot.
Loki: We’ll find them.
HWR: There’s too many.
Loki: I won’t stop.
HWR: Doesn’t matter.
Loki: Never stopped me before.
HWR: I know, champ … But the outcome to this equation remains the same. You lose.
Loki: I know. I know.
Loki dwells in this impasse for a while and then says, “I’ll change the equation.” He then time slips to speak first with Mobius and then with Sylvie. From Mobius he hears that “most purpose is more burden than glory,” that the hard, the impossible thing to do was what had to be done. He then meets with Sylvie, but he knows he can’t kill her to prevent He Who Remains’ death. She tells him that the choice between the Sacred Timeline or multiversal war and collapse is a choice between nightmares, that sometimes it’s okay to destroy something. Suddenly the equation comes out differently. If he’s born to lose, then perhaps he can use that to win. He agrees with her: “If there is a hope you can replace that thing with something better.”
Loki now knows what he has to do and what it will cost. He returns to the TVA at the moment they are trying to save the Loom. In a moment of his friends’ busyness, he looks at them and gives a sad smile, then goes below deck to the doors that open out onto chaotic temporal radiation and a ready-to-detonate loom. He closes the doors behind him, and as they all plead with him to come back, he looks at them, again with that sad smile, and says: “I know what I want. I know what kind of god I have to be. For you. For all of us.”
He then wades into space, through howling torrents of radiation, his clothes shearing away to reveal green Asgardian garb and a new headpiece with taller horns than we’ve ever seen before. He uses his magic to destroy the Loom, releasing the branches intact. But they are dying. He takes one into his hand and it suddenly glows green with life. They cannot live without the supply of his power. He gathers together into his hands every branch and sees a gap open where the Loom had been: He Who Remains’ throne is there.
Loki steps off of the gangway and ascends to that throne, bringing with him every timeline. He sits upon the throne and then, with effort, brings his hands together, joining together every branch into a tree of millions of universes, with him at the heart of it, sustaining their life. I could never have anticipated seeing something like this. Loki depicts what freedom truly is: the ability to accept the burden that arises from love’s demand, to deny self when love cries out what must be done.
In terms of the MCU, what Loki says refers to his status as a god and represents his ownership of how he must use his status. In our universe, though, it has a deeper resonance as it accurately reflects the God who is at work to redeem his creation. Because God, not out of an obligation from beyond him, but to be true to himself, had to enter into history to bear the burden of his creation in order to rescue it. This is what it means to be God, a point Paul also made in Philippians 2:6-8 when he asserts that Jesus “precisely because he belonged to the identity of God,” emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and submitted himself to death on a cross. Whatever attribute we may abstractly ascribe to God-ness, if self-giving love isn’t at the heart of it, underwriting everything else, then we’re not talking about God.
What’s fascinating is that Loki has said something like this before. At the end of Thor, as he dangles above the abyss, he shouts to Odin, “I could have done it, father! For you! For all of us!” But that was the need of an insecure child coming to speech, desperate for the approval of his father. Here, however, it is the gravity of a decision, one borne of love, the recognition of reality, and the dignity that comes with putting others first.
Loki accepts a truly glorious purpose, one he never imagined for himself, one he never would have written for himself in his most callow need. By the end of the first season Loki had renounced the desire for any throne whatsoever. Now he heavily accepts the burden of He Who Remains’ throne, but does so to save the universes He Who Remains would annihilate as well as his friends. He admits to Sylvie he doesn’t want to be alone, that it’s the thing he’s most afraid of. “Without them … where do I belong?” he asks. He must decrease “for all of us,” that the multiverse may increase. The sad majesty of the series’ final shot of Loki, seated Atlas-like at the heart of the multiverse, alone, his only satisfaction being that he has saved his friends and the multitudes of universes, shimmers with the aching beauty of unimaginable sacrifice.
The glory of Loki’s purpose — and God’s — isn’t the so-called glory of the despots who strive after kingship or godhood and leave corpses and devastation in their wake: it’s the glory of love becoming tangible in sacrifice. Whoever would have imagined Loki could pass through the purgation of grace that would allow him to use his freedom for the life of the multiverse? It’s an astonishing ending, one elevated far above many other recent Marvel offerings, one that refracts the glory of God in a heart-wrenching way, and one that makes me weep in a way no Marvel project has since Avengers: Endgame.
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2 responses to “The Most Glorious Purpose of All”
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what a glorious end for Loki. Loved the show and love this article! thanks!
Thank you, Blake, that is very kind! It means a lot to me that someone else sees the glory of Loki’s sacrifice.