Loki ends this season sitting at the end of time with the threads of every universe held in his hands, keeping all of them alive by will alone. That’s the best ending Marvel has written for anybody, and it’s the reason I’d put this character at the top of the entire franchise right now.
He’s the most powerful person in the MCU and nobody says it
Think about where this leaves him. The Infinity Stones don’t work at the TVA. Six objects the films built an entire saga around, sitting in a drawer as paperweights. Whatever operates at that level is already above the scale everything before it was measured on, and by the end of this season Loki is personally holding the structure of every timeline in existence.
That puts him past the Stones comfortably. I’d genuinely like to know how he now compares to the other cosmic-tier beings this universe keeps gesturing at. I’m honestly not sure whether the Celestials transcend individual universes or are contained inside them. If they’re contained, I don’t see how they beat what he’s become.
Nobody in the franchise seems to have registered this. He’s arguably the strongest thing in it.
The ending redeems the whole character
What makes it land isn’t the power. It’s that this is the correct destination for this specific person.
Loki’s entire personality has been built on believing he’s owed a greater role than the one he got. Season one told him his life was written to make other people’s stories work. The answer this season arrives at is that he does get the greater role, and it costs him everything he actually wanted: he gets a throne, at the end of time, alone, forever, holding the thing up.
That’s a real conclusion. It defines him and redeems him at the same time, and it’s earned by a decade of screen time. Hiddleston has been playing this part since 2011 and this is the payoff.
Kang still isn’t the villain this needs
Here’s my problem with the season, and it isn’t a small one. I was not a fan of Victor Timely. The premise gives us a variant who is nervous, stammering and out of his depth, and it’s a legitimate acting choice that also makes the supposed Big Bad of the franchise look small. After Thanos, after a plan that wiped out half of all life, this doesn’t measure up.
None of the iterations feel strong enough. He Who Remains at least had the scene, and killing him made sense as a way to keep the story moving. But that whole strand has always been the weakest part of Loki for me, and the weakest part of where Marvel appears to be taking all of this. I didn’t love that element at all.
I’ll go further than I usually would: I’m not sure Jonathan Majors is the right actor for this. He’s not amazing in it. There’s a lot of technique on display and not much menace, and menace is the entire job. The one place it works is the Council, where all the variants are visibly insane and playing off each other. That’s quite cool. As a single villain, though, he’s poor.
The TVA plot is a bit of a mess
The pruning question tangles itself up.
The organisation is trying to prune timelines, then trying not to, then trying to save all of them, and the rules keep shifting depending on what the episode needs. The Loom material is technobabble that exists to give people something to run towards, and by the back half I’d stopped tracking what the actual constraint was.
Some of that is the cost of a season built around fixing a machine. There’s a version of this that’s tighter and spends less time on corridors and consoles.
The good and the boring
Some genuinely good elements. Ke Huy Quan is a welcome presence, the time-slipping conceit produces a couple of excellent sequences, and the design work remains the best-looking thing Marvel does.
Some boring ones too. Stretches of the middle are people explaining machinery to each other, and the season is noticeably more interested in its plot than season one was in its characters.
Overall, not bad. I’ve watched it week by week and enjoyed doing that, which is worth something in an era where most of this arrives all at once and gets consumed in an afternoon.
Where it lands
I’d give the series a three. The ending is a five and quite a lot of what precedes it isn’t.
That’s a frustrating shape for a season to have. Everything I disliked is in the machinery and the villain, and everything I loved is in the last twenty minutes, where the show remembers it’s about a person rather than a timeline.
Whether the franchise does anything with where this leaves him is another matter. He’s now the load-bearing element of reality itself, which either means everything that happens from here quietly depends on him, or it means we won’t see him again and nobody will mention it. Given how much this universe is currently juggling after the multiverse got properly opened, I could believe either.
Best thing Marvel television has produced. It just took two seasons and a lot of exposition to get to twenty perfect minutes.