In my 2023 review I said the ending was worth a five and quite a lot of what preceded it wasn’t, and I wondered whether the franchise would ever do anything with where it left him. Three years later the answer is: not really, and also everything. He hasn’t appeared since. He’s also the reason any of what’s about to happen in December is possible at all.
That’s what the rewatch makes unmistakable. The multiverse is intact because Loki is personally holding it together. Every timeline that survives, survives because a man sat down at the end of time and took the threads in his hands and decided to keep doing that forever. When three universes collide in December and the story treats that as a crisis rather than a flat impossibility, the reason there are multiple universes still standing to collide is these last twenty minutes. That is an enormous amount of weight resting on a Disney+ finale nobody talks about much any more, and whatever else this season fumbled along the way, it built the door that everything since has walked through.
Which is also the sadder reading, and the one I keep circling. Marvel wrote the best ending it has ever written for its best character and then declined to follow up on it in any meaningful way. Three years of films and series, several of them explicitly about the multiverse, and the person keeping the multiverse alive simply doesn’t come up. I understand the argument for that — the ending is perfect and closed, and going back risks cheapening it, which is genuinely true and I’d rather have this than a lazy return. But there’s a real difference between not undoing something and behaving as though it never happened. A sacrifice only means anything if the story acknowledges the cost, and so far it mostly hasn’t bothered.
Was I right about Kang? Yes, and it counts for very little
I was blunt in 2023. I said none of the iterations were strong enough, that after Thanos this didn’t measure up, that Victor Timely made the supposed saga villain look small, and that I wasn’t sure the actor was right for the part. The plan was abandoned, Doom took the throne, so the call held.
I’ve said this elsewhere in this project and I’ll repeat it here because it matters: being right for the wrong reasons is still mostly luck. My objection was about drama, the outcome was about circumstance, and those pointing the same direction doesn’t make my reasoning better than it was. What I’d defend is the narrower version, which is that a villain built out of infinite interchangeable variants dilutes itself by design, and that was visible on screen well before anything else happened. The Council remains the exception, all of them visibly insane and playing off each other, genuinely unsettling in a way no single version managed. That was the good version and it’s the one that never got made.
My 2023 verdict was that the ending is a five and the machinery around it isn’t, and that’s held with the gap widening rather than closing. The Loom material has aged badly. It’s technobabble propping up a countdown, and knowing now that the whole Kang framework it was propping up got discarded, those episodes play as elaborate scaffolding around a building that was demolished before anyone moved in. The TVA’s pruning logic still tangles itself up, still shifts to suit whatever the episode needs, and still never resolves into a rule you could state out loud. The last twenty minutes have gone the other way entirely. Loki walking the stairs, understanding what the job actually is, choosing it anyway. Hiddleston has never been better and the show finally stops explaining things and starts meaning something.
Season one or season two?
Season one, and I’ve changed my mind about this. At the time I’d have said season two on the strength of that ending alone. On a rewatch, season one is the better run of television: it’s about a person discovering his life was written for him, it has the Mobius interrogations, and it does its worldbuilding through character rather than through consoles and countdown clocks. Season two has the better ending and the worse everything else. If you’re only watching one before December, the mechanics you actually need are mostly in the first.
Do I want him in Doomsday? Honestly, no, and I’ve gone back and forth on it more than once. The ending is complete. He got the throne, the purpose, and the loneliness that comes with both, and the story closed with real dignity. Pulling him back into an ensemble film to throw daggers at Doom would be a downgrade regardless of how well it’s staged. What I’d want instead is acknowledgement: somebody in that film knowing why the multiverse is still standing, and saying so out loud. A scene, a line, a single shot of the man at the end of time doing the job. Honour it without undoing it. If December does bring him back properly, it needs to be for something only he can do, and it needs to cost him, because anything less turns the best ending Marvel has written into a pause.
A three for the series, unchanged. Some good elements, some boring ones, and a conclusion better than the show around it deserved. The reviews were kinder than mine and I stand by the gap. What’s changed is my sense of its importance: in 2023 this was a well-liked show with a great finale, and in 2026 it’s the wall holding up the entire current era. The fact that it carries that weight so quietly is either admirable restraint or a badly missed opportunity, and I still can’t decide which. I still think he’s the most powerful thing in this franchise, and I still don’t think anybody in it has noticed.
Next in the rewatch, and the last of the 2023 run: The Marvels.
