Forget timelines, jet skis, and key lime pie. The real crux of the Marvel Studios story Loki Season 2 simply comes down to the friends Loki has made along the way and the friends he’s willing to risk everything to try to save.
As season 2 nears the end, Loki realizes that there is no way to save the timelines. The Temporal Loom will overload no matter what because He Who Remains designed it as a failsafe to protect the Sacred Timeline and nothing more. And he, unfortunately, realizes that the only way to stop this is to kill Sylvie before she kills the one she’s left with (and that’s not something Loki wants to do). After one last heart-to-heart talk with her and Mobius at different times, he realizes that there is is a way to save everything: Loki finally knows what kind of God he wants to be. Then, with one last look at his found family, he heads out to the bridge to save the timelines.
It’s a complete 180 for the character viewers first met at Marvel Studios. thor, and one who would then order a group of people to kneel before him. But, at the end of season 1 of Loki, he was a changed man and cared about the people of the Time Variance Authority. He had found a new and glorious purpose to work toward. Season 2 is now about him saving them all.
“The impetus for a lot of his action throughout this season is that he’s trying to save his friends and the people he cares about, he was just going about it the wrong way,” executive producer Kevin Wright tells Marvel.com. .
While much of the first half of Season 2 is Loki trying to fix the timelines’ problems, the second half of the season is Loki accepting that not everything can be fixed so neatly, and that includes himself. . Viewers have seen Loki run through different timelines recently, but that doesn’t negate his past actions, good or bad, and who he is at his core.
“It took him growing to accept aspects of himself again, he’s a God,” Wright adds. “He is destined for greater things. Over the course of two seasons, he’s been a sort of time policeman, and to find the solution to this impossible problem of how to save TVA, how to save these people that he cares about, meant that he had to re-embrace a past, “It’s not that I had forgotten it, but that I had put it aside.”
“I think it’s about following where the character has been and where they are, and letting them tell the story,” explains head writer Eric Martin. “I think we do that with all the characters and that’s where the richness comes from. We know Loki’s rich past. Many of those problems are things that you can never let go of. You just continue to deal with them in different ways.”
In Episode 4, Sylvie even reminds Loki that they are both gods, but Loki still needs another little push to get there. It takes the idea of Loki losing everything he now holds so near and dear to send him down a completely different glorious path.
“I think that’s what allows you to go from lowercase g ‘god’ to uppercase G ‘God,’” Wright continues. “By doing that, it’s like you can do all the things you’ve been trying to do this season. You can save your friends. You can give everyone the best version of their life. “You can give the TVA a chance to restructure and become something better and nobler.”
There’s just one small problem with doing this, however, as Wright adds: “(Loki) can’t be a part of this.” The only way to save everyone is to sacrifice yourself. “That would be the true test of whether this guy will really become a hero. Because a lot of times in real life, people who do something heroic won’t reap the benefits themselves.”
Star Tom Hiddleston himself was a big supporter of this idea of Loki’s complete change of heart, with Wright noting, “He talked very often about how, as you evolve as a person, you can never really progress toward a better version of him.” . Yourself until you accept yourself, your past, your flaws, all of that. And once you accept those things, you can become something bigger.”
It was easy for Martin to write this for the character because Hiddleston was so willing to show everything. “Tom is an actor, that’s why he speaks with emotion. And I’m a writer and that’s what drives me to do. Our conversations were always about that. Where is Loki’s heart, where is that thing that tells him to go, and where are the missteps along the way?
In the end, when faced with the most difficult decision of his life in this timeline, Loki did what he had to do. He is a changed God.
“The most intriguing thing is, when you finally get that opportunity, would you make that huge sacrifice and show that you have truly changed?” Wright asks. “You see what he does. He does. He does.”