The following article will dig into spoilers for the first four episodes of Loki Season 2, so stop reading now if you do not want to have the details ruined.
I’d personally rank Marvel’s Loki as one of the Best Disney+ TV shows. The plotlines, involving time travel and the multiverse, dig deep into heady science-fiction, and the performances by the entire ensemble are terrific. The ending of Loki Season 1 suggested major ramifications for the MCU as a whole, and several of them have played out so far in the first four episodes of Loki Season 2. With a new trailer for the remaining two episodes just dropping, we’re left to ponder how Loki (Tom Hiddleston) will pick up the pieces following the devastating conclusion of episode four. And we had a chance to ask one of the creatives on the show what that ending really means.
Loki Season 2, episode four ended on one hell of a cliffhanger. Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) volunteered to step out into the temporal aura and fire off a device that would increase the fortitude of the TVA’s Time Loom. Only, the second Timely stepped onto the platform, the temporal aura proved to be too powerful, and turned him into spaghetti. Literal spaghetti strands. As the episode concluded, Loki stared into what appeared to be the decimation of the Time Loom, and the end of… well, everything. We interviewed Loki cinematographer Isaac Bauman about his work on the series, and I started by asking him about the very last shot in the latest episode. He told me:
That was a very special moment. We knew that going into episode four, that ending was going to occur, and we wanted to end it on the most dramatically impactful and definitive way possible. Which, you know, the show’s called Loki, right? It’s like seeing Loki get obliterated (and) incinerated, close on Tom’s face. And that character, knowing that the end is coming… it just felt like being as close as we could on his eyes as the universe was being destroyed – and he’s the one that blew it, basically – was the way to go.
Mind you, we have seen Loki die on screen in a Marvel project once or twice before. And like a cunning cockroach, he figures out how to turn back up. Only, this time, it feels more fatal. The TVA, as an organization, takes all of the potential time branches and keeps them pruned so that the Sacred Timeline of the MCU can stay organized and fluid. Without the TVA, countless alternate timelines can occur, creating multiversal chaos. I break all of that down in my analysis of Loki Season 2, episode four:
There are a few things I guessed in my video that have been confirmed by the new trailer – namely, that Loki somehow will survive (likely because of his ability to time slip), and then will have to get “the band” back together to repair and restore the TVA. And in that process, we will see Mobius (Owen Wilson), B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and other members of the TVA living their normal lives on the timeline. So Mobius will work with Jet Skis! That warms my heart.
As does this. Do you know how they filmed the groundbreaking scene? They had Tom Hiddleston stare at a lightbulb. Well, basically. As Bauman told us:
He’s staring at, actually, an array of about 24 LED panels that we had hung outside the window of the temporal core control room.
There are two episodes of Loki left. And then, the next upcoming Marvel movie will be The Marvels, starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers. But we’ll probably have to wait until Deadpool 3 to see how the multiversal madness affects the MCU, as a whole.