Marvel’s bad week began with the scattershot theatrical sequel The Marvels and doesn’t significantly rebound with the season-two finale of Loki—two misfires that have been designed to establish a tantalizing franchise future but instead come up with haphazard wheel-spinning and nostalgia (the former) and brain-teaser convolutions (the latter).
In what appears to be its concluding chapter, the Disney+ series aims to demonstrate that it has, per its title, “Glorious Purpose.” Instead, it primarily suggests that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) no longer has a clear guiding point, and that includes with regards to multiversal baddie He Who Remains (aka, Kang the Conqueror)—who, as played by Jonathan Majors, remains the biggest of the studio’s many headaches.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Majors’ villain factors prominently into this closing episode of Loki, which opens with Loki (Tom Hiddleston), now in control of his time-slipping condition, leaping back to the moment right before the Time Variance Authority’s (TVA) Temporal Loom melts down from timeline-strand overload and destroys everything and everyone in every existing reality—including Loki’s TVA buddies Mobius (Owen Wilson), Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and Casey (Eugene Cordero). Also gone: his female-Loki love interest Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and old-timey He Who Remains variant Victor Timely (Majors).
If that synopsis makes any sense to you, kudos. Nonetheless, its complexity speaks to the show’s primary second-season problem: a plot that’s so tangled that comprehending it requires plentiful rewinds and Wikipedia and recap rereads. It’s messiness masquerading as intricacy, and, too often, keeping up with it feels like homework—the death knell for a superhero series about a cheekily arrogant time-traversing god.
Loki spends the majority of this hour reliving past events in a valiant effort to repair the Temporal Loom and, once that proves futile, to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains (as she did in the first season’s finale). As it turns out, He Who Remains knew that Loki and Sylvie would be back to replay this supposedly fatal encounter, just as he caused Loki’s time-slipping, and there’s something amusingly apt about the fact that—via this do-over confrontation—Loki basically negates its entire second season, rendering it a long-form torturous prank orchestrated by Majors’ villain.
Still, the proceedings are such a frantic paradoxical jumble that easily grasping them is semi-hopeless; one basically has to go with the action’s screwy flow. “This all feels a bit rushed,” quips He Who Remains, and what’s funny about the line is that it now pertains to everything in the MCU, be it Loki’s heroic mission, The Marvels, or franchise mastermind Kevin Feige’s attempts to combine TV and film narratives into a cohesive whole.
Loki frequently plays as a self-referential series about the MCU, with its focus on the difficulty of weaving together and streamlining disparate (multiverse) storylines while simultaneously protecting the “sacred timeline” upon which everything rests. Loki ultimately manages to do just that, thwarting his adversary’s mysterious designs by destroying the Temporal Loom and selflessly assuming the new mantle of He Who Remains in order to keep the multiverse together and, in doing so, to save his loved ones (this is, you see, his real “glorious purpose”).
As far as fitting fates go, it’s not a bad one for the God of Mischief, considering that it completes the character arc which began at show’s outset—the rare recent instance in which the MCU exhibits actual structure. Moreover, it re-emphasizes Loki as this saga’s literal and emotional center, around which all of its relatively peripheral figures revolve.
Of those individuals, the only one that truly matters in the Big MCU Picture is Majors’ multiverse-controlling He Who Remains, and yet Loki leaves him in limbo. With Loki having assumed the villain’s spot as the man pulling the (literal and figurative) strings at the end of time, He Who Remains and his myriad variants are ostensibly free to wreak havoc, presumably in the multiverse-annihilating war that he promised would materialize should Loki demolish the Temporal Loom.
A late shot of Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) stranded in the post-pruning wasteland that Loki visited in Season 1, and being visited by a glowing purple light (heralding He Who Remains’ arrival?), implies that Majors’ rogue is out and about, preparing to initiate the conflict that’ll dominate the upcoming Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. Like so much of the studio’s post-Avengers: Endgame fare, however, clarity is sorely lacking. Ending things with He Who Remains’ status up in the air is more than a bit strange—stranger, even, than the fact that the MCU’s current and upcoming phases will require knowledge of this scrambled Disney+ venture.
With no lynchpin icons or lucid direction, the franchise is quickly becoming adrift, and that’s not fixed by Loki’s concluding note of unification. Still, its main challenge is figuring out what to do with Majors, who’s dealing with a domestic-assault case as well as additional accusations of harassment and abuse. Having rested their forthcoming fortunes on his shoulders, Feige and company are in a knotty predicament from which there is no simple disentanglement, and this finale barely even tries to do so—unless Loki’s assumption of He Who Remains’ position means that he can become, for all intents and purposes, the new Kang, and thus serve as the catalyst for any ensuing skirmish with the Avengers.
Casting Majors’ He Who Remains to the side as a forgotten troublemaker, and restoring Loki to the role of prime franchise antagonist (as he was in the original Avengers), would be a short-term PR win for Marvel, and probably worth the inevitable downsides—namely, sabotaging Loki’s transformation into a selfless hero, and pivoting everything to come around a been-here, done-that baddie.
The likelihood of such a resetting switcharoo, alas, are likely slim; the MCU has made its untidy bed and now must lie in it. Yet with so many outstanding questions about Majors, how it plans to intertwine its multiple big- and small-screen threads, and which second- and third-tier do-gooders will lead its next phases, it remains to be seen if fans’ patience and interest are infinite, or if Loki is merely another step on Marvel’s path to irrelevance.
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