In my 2021 review I said the man at the end of the season didn’t feel strong enough or violent enough to be the successor to Thanos, and that they could have picked a better villain for the next arc. It’s the one call from this whole rewatch project that the franchise itself ended up agreeing with, and I want to be careful about how much credit I take for it, because being right for the wrong reasons is still mostly luck.
I doubted He Who Remains on dramatic grounds. He talks too much, he’s physically unimposing, and the entire scene is a man explaining his reasoning at length rather than demonstrating any power at all. Against Thanos, who you believed could end you mid-sentence without changing expression, it felt like a straightforward downgrade. That instinct held up: the Kang plan was abandoned, the arc was rebuilt around Doom, and the character now exists as a fork in the road nobody took. Where I’d correct myself is that I framed it as a casting-and-writing problem and it turned out to be neither. The plan changed for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with whether the character worked on screen. My reasoning was about drama and the outcome was about circumstance, and those happening to point the same direction doesn’t make the reasoning any better than it was. What I’d say now is narrower and I think more defensible: the version of this villain the show gave us, cerebral and weary and forever explaining himself, was never going to carry an Avengers film on its own. It needed the Council to supply the actual threat, which means the concept was always going to be spread thin across variants rather than concentrated in one presence, and that weakness was visible in 2021 to anybody paying attention.
The rulebook is what actually mattered
I called the TVA the most useful thing the show does and that’s only become truer with time. Everything Doomsday is about to do with alternate universes works because this season established the mechanics: variants, nexus events, branching, pruning, the Void. When a Fox X-Men actor walks into an MCU film in December, no explanation will be required, because these six episodes did the explaining five years early and did it through character rather than through a lecture.
That’s a remarkable amount of weight for a show which mostly consists of two men talking in beige rooms, and it’s why Loki has aged better than most of what surrounds it. The plot points got superseded and the grammar didn’t. The joke about the Infinity Stones sitting in a drawer as paperweights is still my favourite thing in it and it’s doing exactly that job: one shot, and the entire preceding saga gets resized without a word of dialogue about it. The show was well received at the time and I think its reputation has, unusually, gone up rather than down.
Which brings me to where the rewatch really earns its keep, which is Sylvie. In 2021 her killing He Who Remains plays as a character beat: she’s spent her entire life hunted by an institution, she wants it destroyed rather than reformed, and the show frames it as understandable rage with consequences nobody can quite see yet. The multiverse reopens, the timeline branches, roll credits. Watching it now, knowing the branching led to incursions and worlds colliding and whatever December turns out to be, it plays as the single most consequential decision anybody in this franchise has ever made. More than the snap. More than the blip. She was offered a choice between one tyrant and infinite war, and she picked infinite war for entirely personal reasons, and the show is smart enough not to tell you she was wrong. It’s also, in hindsight, smart enough not to tell you she was right.
The complaints, revisited
I had two problems with Sylvie in 2021: that every other variant we see is male with no explanation offered, and that the romance felt forced. The first still bothers me and the show never addressed it. If your premise is infinite variants across infinite timelines, presenting exactly one woman as a singular anomaly is a worldbuilding choice that needed one line of dialogue and never got it. The second I’d soften. The romance still doesn’t land emotionally, but I understand much better now why it’s necessary: the finale requires Loki to be genuinely torn between somebody he cares about and the fate of everything, and there’s no other relationship in the season strong enough to carry that. It’s a plot requirement dressed as feeling, which is what I said at the time. I just think the plot needed it rather more than I gave it credit for.
My 2021 ranking put WandaVision ahead and I’d keep that order, though the gap has narrowed and the reasons have changed. WandaVision is the better show: bigger formal risks, more to say, and its best scene beats anything here. Loki is the more important one, because almost nothing in WandaVision is required reading for what’s coming and almost everything in Loki is. If you’re only rewatching one before December, watch this. If you’re rewatching one for pleasure, watch the other. And I’ll repeat the thing I said then, because five years hasn’t changed it: the Netflix run remains the high-water mark, and Daredevil and The Punisher had a weight and a willingness to be genuinely unpleasant that the Disney+ shows still circle without ever landing on.
The TVA’s mid-century office look was a good joke in 2021. In 2026, having watched the franchise spend five years pruning its own timelines, cancelling its own plans and quietly disposing of storylines that no longer fit, it looks unintentionally autobiographical. That’s not a criticism and I don’t think it’s deliberate, but there’s something genuinely funny about a show whose central image is an institution deciding which stories get to exist, arriving at the front of an era defined by exactly that. The Kang plan was pruned. Whole branches of setup were pruned. The Void is full of them, and watching a bureaucracy insist its arbitrary decisions are the Sacred Timeline hits differently once you’ve seen an actual sacred timeline get rewritten by a casting announcement.
Speaking of which, the Void turned out to be worth far more than this season found in it. In 2021 it’s a set, a dumping ground at the end of time useful mainly as somewhere to strand the protagonists for an episode. Three years later Deadpool & Wolverine built most of its emotional architecture on it, and the idea that there’s a place where discarded stories accumulate, discarded by a bureaucracy rather than by any natural process, turned out to be genuinely rich. Loki invents it and does comparatively little with it, and that’s worth noting without treating it as a failure, because establishing a concept cleanly enough that somebody else can build on it three years later without a line of explanation is real work.
Mobius is the show’s quiet achievement and I’d give Owen Wilson more credit now than I did. Across everything I’ve rewatched for this project he’s the character I’d most want to see again and the one with the least obvious reason to return: not powerful, no stake in any cosmic conflict, function is essentially to be a decent man inside an indecent institution. That’s exactly why he works, because in a franchise where almost everybody is defined by their capabilities, somebody defined by his patience is a real novelty. Good show. Better rulebook. And a rare case where the thing everybody remembered it for turned out to be the thing that didn’t matter.
