What Happened During Season 2, Episode 6 of Loki?
How did season 2 of Loki end and what’s next for our favorite God of Mischief?
The fifth episode of Loki season 2 revealed that Loki survived the temporal loom explosion that wiped out the TVA by time-slipping again. He continues uncontrollably time-slipping and ends up finding all of his friends living alternate lives on different timelines. Eventually he finds OB, who is able to recreate a TemPad with the TVA guidebook that Loki had in his pocket and together they gather all his friends to help. They try to figure out a way to get back to the moment before everything went wrong with the Loom but the timeline they are in dies before they can execute a plan. At the last minute, Loki realizes how to control his time-slipping.
What Happened in Loki Season 2, Episode 6 “Glorious Purpose?”
After learning to control his time-slipping in episode 5 of season 2, Loki travels back to the moment before Victor Timely tries to take the Throughput Multiplier out to fix the temporal loom. After Timely is killed, he asks OB what they could have done differently. OB says they took too long, so Loki makes it his mission to speed up the process, trying over and over again to get Timely out there faster. He even goes so far as to learn everything that OB knows about mechanics, physics, and engineering, which takes centuries.
Finally, with Loki doing everything as fast as he can, Timely makes it out onto the gangway and is able to shoot the Multiplier into the Temporal Loom and make it back. The rings of the Temporal Loom expand and it starts stabilizing for a few moments. However, it then begins overloading again and the group realizes that the Loom will never be able to accommodate all the branches of time that are duplicating and expanding at an infinite rate.
After coming to the realization that the Loom will always fail, Loki goes back to the moment where Sylvie killed He Who Remains to try to convince her to stop. But Sylvie will not give up, and says “If you want me to stop, you’ll have to kill me.” Loki knows that he cannot bring himself to kill her, and asks He Who Remains why he never tries to stop her. He Who Remains pauses time and it is revealed that he knows about Loki’s time-slipping and that he wasn’t just going to let Sylvie kill him. He mentions reincarnation, indicating that he always knew that Loki would come back to this moment.
Then, He Who Remains reveals the Temporal Loom is a failsafe, and that it will always delete branches other than the Sacred Timeline. He mentions that the TVA is just collateral damage and can easily be rebuilt. Loki realizes that his efforts have been a waste of time and decides he will change the equation by breaking the Loom — but He Who Remains reminds Loki that that will cause a multiversal war with all of He Who Remains’ variants and that nothing will survive, even the Sacred Timeline. But, Loki insists that he will find another way.
At this point, Loki travels back to his interrogation with Mobius in the Time Theater where he asks for his help in how to choose who lives and who dies. Mobius gives some advice to Loki about purpose being more burden than glory, and keeping the big picture in mind. After this Loki returns to where the group was when the timelines started dying and talks to Sylvie about the choice he has to make. She tells him that protecting the Sacred Timeline is not enough, since people would not have free will. She tells him that sometimes it’s okay to destroy something and he realizes that this is true if there is hope that you can replace that thing with something better.
Loki returns to the Temporal Loom control room and makes the difficult choice to walk out onto the gangway and destroy the Loom. As he is walking, his clothes disintegrate and he takes on his full form as a god, complete with the cape and crown of horns. He destroys the Loom and the timeline branches begin swirling around him, dying. He grabs them one by one and uses his magic to carry them with him. He gathers the collection of branches and slowly makes his way toward a rift that has opened in space where he pulls all of the branches with him to the end of time. As he gets closer, a throne appears and Loki takes a seat and pushes his magic through the branches to bring them back to life — finally getting the throne OG Loki always wanted, but sacrificing himself in the process.
Back at the TVA, we see a new reality where the monitors show a more tree-like structure of timelines. OB and Casey are working on bringing back Miss Minutes in a way where she won’t try to kill them all. B-15 and Mobius are monitoring the variants of He Who Remains to make sure they don’t know about the new TVA.
Next we get a montage of what everyone is doing with their lives. OB opens a box of new TVA guidebooks, which Victor Timely does not receive as a child. Renslayer wakes up in what seems to be the Void that we saw in the last season. Mobius decides to leave the TVA and check out life on the timeline — so he goes to his variant’s home and sees him playing with his two sons.
The episode ends with a view of Loki still sitting on the throne, surrounded by the thriving, green timelines at the end of time.
Will there be a Season 3 of Loki?
While nothing has been confirmed either way yet, this season finale did feel like a series finale. The last episode of season 1 informed viewers that a season 2 was in the works, but this time we did not see any updates on future seasons of Loki.