The first half of Loki season 2 had me concerned we weren’t heading anywhere interesting. The Loom is broken, we have fix the Loom. The key to fixing it is a Kang variant who will someday build the TVA itself. We found him, he’s quirky. Okay.
But it turns out Loki still has a few surprises left in it.
What seemed like it would just going to be a variant (no pun intended) of an earlier sequence where Mobius goes outside to fix the Loom, we had Victor Timely doing the same thing with a different device once more. No doubt the thing would be fixed, the Loom would start processing all the timelines and Timely would begin his ascent into the man who would build the TVA.
That’s…not what happened. Not at all.
Instead, in one of the most genuinely shocking moments I’ve probably seen in the MCU, Timely exits the vault door and is immediately…spaghetti-fied. There’s really no other way to put it. Not that I was terribly attached to Timely, but it was just so unexpected that I laughed out loud.
But it’s not just Timely that suffers. That was their entire plan, and we then watch the entire Loom, and seemingly all the timelines it was straining to contain, explode, with no further time to stop it. The episode cuts just as an explosion is about to reach those still in the TVA. As in, every character in the show.
This is, of course, episode four of six.
Even in Loki, a series about time travel, multiple timelines and multiple universes, where there could be plenty of paths out of this mess, it is genuinely hard to know what happens from here. I’m still trying to process what exactly happens if A) the TVA is destroyed and B) if the Loom and those timelines are destroyed, or even if they are destroyed or instead just untangling like an unfocused mess of snakes, and what that means for the universe going forward.
Loki, like many Marvel shows, has to seem important and relevant to the MCU without being too important to the MCU so that you must watch it in order to understand the big blockbuster films. For instance, you really did not have to watch Loki to “get” anything that happened in Multiverse of Madness, No Way Home or Quantumania, despite the fact that on Loki’s end, it’s very much tied in.
Here, I doubt that Loki and company just destroyed the entire MCU. So, the main question is how the main cast survives, whether it’s them, past versions of them, alternate versions of them, whatever happens here. As for Victor Timely, who is most definitely dead, I believe this specific incident was foreshadowed by Miss Minutes saying “you’ll never be him,” referring to the Kang he was supposed to become. Well, maybe he wasn’t supposed to become that Kang after all.
Again, it simultaneously feels like that because of the nature of Loki there are a million ways out of this, but also that it is very, very difficult to articulate one specific way that is likely to be proven true. The TVA survives the explosion! Loki time warps to before all this to stop it! An army of Kang variants swoop in to wrangle the timelines! I have no idea.
But yeah, good job Loki, now I can’t wait to see what happens next.
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