When Marvel Studios began its 2021 Disney+ era, it did so relying on its characters carrying television over many episodes. This risk didn't always pay off, with long-form television not so suited to some. Here, it flourished.
Loki, running in 2021 and 2023 for two seasons, took the franchise’s most famous villain and asked a question the films never had the time for. What would happen if the God of Mischief took a look at himself? The show answered it in spades, with bureaucracy, multiverses, romance, and, eventually, one of the most moving endings in Marvel history.
Loki is welcomed to the TVA by Miss Minutes
The series opener has Loki (Tom Hiddleston) fresh from escaping the Avengers in 2012 captured by the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Enter Miss Minutes, a cheerful cartoon clock voiced by Tara Strong. This excellent scene set the tone, with Loki forced to sit through an orientation video that was as parodical as it was narratively important.
Loki was up for being funny, sinister, and genre-bending, all the qualities evident in most peak Marvel. The beige filing cabinets of the retro-futurist office world was easy on the eyes and provided a visual throughline for the series.
Loki’s TVA file confirms he is gender fluid
Before the series even premiered, a teaser showed Loki’s TVA file listing his sex as “Fluid,” and the detail appears in the first episode. It was a small addition, but a critical one. In the comics and Norse myth, Loki has long been a shapeshifter who moves between genders, and Marvel’s interpretation finally pinned it down with an on-screen nod. It was an early indication that the show would treat its lead’s identity with rigorous attention to detail.
Mobius shows Loki his own future
In the TVA’s Time Theater, the agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) shows Loki the life he was always supposed to live—his betrayals, his mother’s death, and, finally, his own demise at the hands of Thanos. Hiddleston plays the scene with a level of vulnerability never before seen in the films. It’s the moment the series starts transforming from a comedy to a character study and the start of the show’s best friendship, as Mobius tells Loki he can choose to be something more.
Sylvie and Loki get real
On the doomed moon of Lamentis, as the world crumbles around them, Loki and his variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) finally talk honestly. Sylvie asks about his past: “You’re a prince. Must’ve been would-be princesses. Or perhaps another prince.” Loki’s answer is simple: “A bit of both. I suspect the same as you.”
It was the first time the MCU confirmed a lead character as bisexual, and the episode leaned in, painting Lamentis in the purple, pink, and blue of the bisexual pride flag. Director Kate Herron, who is bisexual herself, said acknowledging it had been her goal from day one. “It is a part of who he is and who I am too,” she wrote on social media, adding that her “heart is so full” it is now canon. Some fans wanted more than one line, and that was fair, but for a franchise of this size it was a meaningful first step.
Classic Loki’s glorious purpose
In the Void at the End of Time, Loki meets a gang of his own variants, including Kid Loki (Jack Veal), Boastful Loki (DeObia Oparei), an alligator in a crown, and, best of all, Classic Loki (Richard E. Grant) in the original comic book costume. When the nebulous monster Alioth closes in, Classic Loki conjures an illusion of Asgard to give the others a chance to escape. Facing certain death, he grins, says, “Glorious purpose,” and is consumed. This charming but heartbreaking moment foreshadowed the series' final fate for its main character
He Who Remains pulls back the curtain
The first season’s finale takes Loki and Sylvie to the Citadel at the End of Time, where they meet He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), the man behind the TVA. He Who Remains reveals that the Sacred Timeline exists to prevent a multiversal war between his variants, a satisfying twist considering the buildup to this moment. It’s a bold, unconventional finale built almost entirely on dialogue. It ends with Sylvie choosing revenge over peace, and with Loki left to face the consequences.
O.B. and the Temporal Loom
Season 2 brought in Ouroboros, or O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), the TVA’s eccentric repairman, fresh from Quan’s Oscar win for Everything Everywhere All at Once. His scenes with Loki and Mobius are a joy, full of manuals, jargon, and goofy warmth. They also set up the season’s central problem: the Temporal Loom, the machine that weaves the timelines together, can’t hold the multiverse, and the explosion that threatens it will wipe out everyone.
Mobius sees the life he never lived
In the series finale, Mobius finally visits the life his original self lived before the TVA took him: a home, a family, and children. Rather than step into it, he chooses to watch from a distance and leave it be. This sad and gentle scene functioned as a reminder that Loki always cared as much about its supporting cast as about its lead. Wilson has rarely been more magnetic on screen.
Loki learns to control time
In the penultimate episode, Loki discovers he can “time-slip” at will. He uses the ability to go back and find his friends, who have been scattered back into their original lives on Earth after the Loom’s collapse, pulling them back one by one. Watching Loki, who spent most of his life driven by self-interest, risk everything to rescue the people he loves is the culmination of two seasons of change. The God of Mischief has become, against all odds, a friend.
Loki holds the timelines together
Of course, the best moment comes at the very end. After lifetimes of slipping back to the same moment, studying for centuries and failing again and again, Loki realizes the Loom was never the answer. He walks out into the explosion and gathers the dying timelines in his own hands. He pulls them into the shape of a great tree, the Yggdrasil of Norse myth, and takes his place on a throne at the End of Time.
It’s Loki finally finding his glorious purpose. In a tragic twist, it embodies perhaps the truest sacrifice any Marvel hero has ever made. He must remain forever alone, holding the threads that sustain the multiverse, no more rewarded for his actions than he was as a villain. Nobody will thank him, and most will never know.
Hiddleston put it best: “The glorious purpose he always wanted has no glory in it. It has only a burden." Loki ends up “in a position of belonging,” he said, “but he would be alone in his belonging.” After 14 years in the role, it was the most fitting farewell imaginable.
Many Marvel shows have had great moments, but few have had an arc that finishes as completely as this one. Loki took a villain, gave him a reckoning, a romance, friends, and a crown, and asked him to give it all up. That’s why it still stands above the rest.
Both seasons of Loki are streaming now on Disney+.
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