Loki: Glorious Purpose

 "The last thing I want is a throne."

SPOILERS, obviously. I mean, this is not only the season finale but surely ends the show for good, two seasons to tell one complete stiry and then stop.

Loki begins and ends with an episode called Glorious Purpose; the snake eats its own tail. But look how far Loki has come, a triumph of character development from the writers and from Tom Hiddleston. In the end, Loki is truly a god from a myth, sacrificing everything so that a whole multiverse of infinite timelines may live and countless people may live. Last episode he confessed to Sylvie that he was motivated not only by altruism but by fear of losing his friends, of loneliness. So we know that his sacrifice, meaning perpetual loneliness, is meaningful and a final redemption.

And this is all beatifully mythical- Loki, for all eternity, alone on his throne, sacrificing everything. There are obvious echoes of Christian mythology, of course, but far more of the old myths. It's a different pantheon, but this evokes such things as Apollo driving the Sun across the sky in his chariot every day. It's appropriate, then, that the new loom should reveal itself as Yggsdrasil, the World Tree. The ultimate Ragnarok has been averted.

So yes, much of the episode is timey-winey fun evoking such things as Back to the Future, and it's brilliant. But there's real depth here, and character. Not only Loki; Mobius accepts he needs to leave the TVA and discover who he really is. We even get to see He Who Remains being sincere with Loki and, while we can't accept what he stands for, we can understand his motives. He's not evil, but genuinely focused on what he sees as the greater good. Jonathan Majors is extraordinary as ever here, with HWR and Victor Timely being crucially different performances.

There's so much subtext here, too. I'm barely scratching the surface. There's a lot about free will vs. determinism which is at once timey-wimey and philosophical. There's lots of great comedy in the timey-wimey scenes ("I'm not questioning your surprisingly advanced engineering skills..."), beautifully performed. There's an ambiguous end for Renslayer. And, in the end, there's what appears to be a stable multiverse. This, I'm sure, is at the heart of this phase of the MCU. More than that, though- episode, season and series- this is utterly magnificent.