Plot Summary: Despite having mastered the ability to travel back in time and correct his errors, Loki quickly slowly learns saving the multiverse is no simple thing.

With Marvel dipping their toes into the world of television, Matt Waters brings recaps and reviews of each new episode (you guessed it) every Monday. Check out the full column.

Notes

Episode Title: ‘Glorious Purpose’

Debut Date: November 9^th, 2023

Directed: Justin Benson & Aaaron Moorhead (6)

Written: Eric Martin (8)

Yes, they used this same title for the very first episode. It is a time travel story, I guess!

Loki’s arrangement of the timeline branches is of course intended to evoke Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse mythology said to run through all nine realms.

Mobius’ comment about a particular Variant being stopped in an “Earth-616 adjacent realm” is a summary of the events of Ant Man & The Wasp: Quantumania, where Scott was able to defeat Kang the Conqueror.

The ID number on Mobius’ file at the end is M-FF353. The character debuted in Fantastic Four #353.

Recap

Time Slipping to before the Temporal Loom exploded, Loki tries and fails again and again for centuries to prevent disaster, with even a ‘perfect run’ resulting in disaster.

He instead tries to prevent Sylvie from killing He Who Remains, but can’t accomplish that without killing her, so engages the villain in a dialogue instead.

He Who Remains informs him despite his new mastery of time, it’s still either a single Sacred Timeline or Multiversal destruction and war with an army of his Variants, the exact choice he had to make before.

Gathering final words of wisdom from his friends, Loki defiantly gathers the various branches of the timeline and with immense magical effort, weaves them together into a colossal tree-like structure.

The TVA assumes responsibility for tracking down the Variants of He Who Remains, though they do it without Mobius who retires and quietly observes his original timeline.

Loki smiles as he watches over his friend, committed to overseeing and protecting the Multiverse alone at the heart of the World Tree.

Review

As always, finales are a little tricky without cannibalising content from my Season Review (coming next week!), but I’ll do my best to treat it as an episode in a bubble.

Visually, this is some of the best stuff in the history of the MCU. I’ve commented several times how good the VFX and production design are on this show, and they brought back the impressive spaghettification effects from the last couple of episodes, as well as tossing in all manner of new Space Time Magic…. Stuff. I don’t know if the release date got delayed due to the strikes and that bought them extra time to tighten up the CGI, or if they just gave the various companies sufficient time for once, but the end results should absolutely be in the Marvel highlight reel.

Loki creating Yggdrasil was an emotionally affecting flex, not just because of the tendrils of glowing green fuckery (which briefly resemble the Temporal Loom), but the synthesis of those visuals with other strong elements. Chiefly, Natalie Holt’s score, which has always been one of the best they’ve ever had, but really hit a higher level here, with more of the Lokesenna-infused building melodrama helping guide viewers through Loki’s triumphant sacrifice even when unsure what exactly was going on. She also deployed an inverted Marvel fanfare at the start, peppered in lots of choir, knew when to keep things quiet, and I don’t know if it was her choice or not, but using the Walter Murphy/Beethoven number during the infinite loop scene ruled.

Perhaps the smallest part of The Big Scene, but I found myself saying out loud early in the episode that I wish Loki had worn Asgardian attire more in the show, instead of strictly the shirt, tie and TVA jacket. They not only granted my wish, but dressed him in one of his best looks ever, forgoing the golden grandeur for a more understated earthy vibe. The horns looked less silly. His (unwanted) throne is stubby and ugly, a far cry from Odin’s shining palace. He even looked to have a Viking haircut due to how his hair was pushed back. Loved it, no notes.

All of that being said, I found Benson & Moorehead’s preference for shot/reverse-shot frustrating in the key conversation scenes with He Who Remains and Mobius. It robbed the sequences of their energy in my opinion. Perhaps the show’s greatest strength has been a small but mighty cast of actors with incredible chemistry. Relegating them to talking direct to camera (or I suppose more accurately looking just past camera) undercuts that. I have no doubt they were actually sitting opposite each other and playing off real reactions, but without being able to see both parties it just doesn’t feel right.

Likewise, the differences in lighting and general visual palette made the identical Citadel set from the end of last season hit the eye wrong. I was willing to go with them because returning to such a memorable scene to mine it for more material is a satisfying direction to go in, but failing to replicate it 1:1 had a distracting effect for me. The writing on the Loki/He Who Remains debate was also worse than its equivalent last season, which is strange given Eric Martin wrote both. Trying to one-up something successful is always a dangerous game, and for me they failed here, but it didn’t hurt the episode too much, given the heightened ‘What will happen???’ vibe that comes with the end of a show.

But overall, this is much more of what I wanted to see from this show throughout its second season, with them seemingly remembering late on that it’s an actor-driven show, entrusting its talented performers to do their jobs and bring it home when it really matters.

Best Performance

Tom Hiddlestone really put this show on his back late and put in some of his finest work. He’s absolutely tremendous at the exhausted instructional stuff in the first act, patiently but firmly telling everybody what they need to do next and especially what to avoid. There was something so quintessentially British about it, like a weary health & safety officer. Likewise, you could feel his frustration trying to stop Sylvie, and his anger with He Who Remains putting him in a position where he may be forced to concede defeat, which in turn gave way to Loki feeling almost broken as he resigned himself to his final conversations with Sylvie and Mobius. Telling them that he wanted to do it for them feels authentic to juxtapose with his hollow “I could have done it father, for you!” in Thor. His little sad smile when he says goodbye was also very British. I can’t explain why, it just was, and it was great.

His final moments were entirely mute, and while the VFX and soundtrack did a lot of heavy lifting, Hiddlestone absolutely had to nail the physical performance and boy did he ever. He really sold the effort required to pull off bending time and space, as well as the happy melancholy of his sacrifice. Those last lingering looks were haunting, and you’ll likely see them plastered all over the internet when this show’s ending and what it means for the future of the MCU is litigated.

Owen Wilson got one last chance to be charmingly sad and nailed the brief big time, both in his conversation with Loki recontextualising glorious purpose, and standing alone and watching his perfect life with no clear idea of what on earth he’d do next. It’s made more powerful by how quiet it is.

Begrudgingly, I must once again shine a light on Jonathan Majors as well. At first it seemed his impish theatricality was a pale imitation of what he did this time last season… but then you realise the entire thing is an act, when he drops it and starts talking like a normal person when he’s satisfied Loki has a sufficient grasp on the situation. His delivery is slightly different on identical lines, he goes from avoiding Sylive’s attack in the elevator to drawing attention to Loki blocking it for him, and he even mocks his own overacting as Victor Timely. I truly loathe that he’s so good.

Villain Watch

We went from ‘Oops, All Villains!’, to the antagonist seemingly being the laws of physics, and then settled on He Who Remains… again. All he really did was make the same case as last time – arguably even stronger than before – but he acted as the face of inevitable defeat, and that aspect worked extremely well. In fact, if you consider his journey from S1E6 to S2E6… I’m afraid he’s an all-time MCU character. The idea that his contingency plan to ensure his own reincarnation was to simply let Loki go through what he did – trying and failing over and over for hundreds, possibly thousands of years – only to return to the moment before he died… is kind of brilliant. He survives death by forcing his killers to never have killed him in the first place, and THEN, he kinda/sorta tricks Loki into imprisoning himself. But for a few minutes it seemed plausible he’d worn Loki down through sheer unflappable logic and created an acolyte. Mirroring his dialogue from his previous appearance and having him extremely casually reveal he could have intervened in the Loki/Sylvie fight at any time smacked of ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’/‘You never asked,’ which is to say annoying in a good way. Honestly, I’m super mad Majors is a dickbag, because I want to write paragraphs and paragraphs celebrating this character.

I was pleasantly surprised they resisted the urge to use Sylvie’s stubbornness to try and justify killing her. The last minute heel turn to take the sting out of ‘doing what must be done’.

Renslayer being left in The Void with Alioth as her one and only scene is a bit of a slap in the face given the character’s arc this season (more on that in the Season Review next week).

It was a fun touch to have Miss Minutes return at the end, too.

Plugs

For more Marvel content from me, check out Ben & Matt’s Marvellous Journey, an MCU Podcast, which will be back in a few weeks for perhaps its final episode.

Before then, Ben and I are talking BoJack Horseman with our podcast Untitled BoJack Horseman Project, which has only just started.