[COLUMN] Loki Found Its Glorious Purpose | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Loki is handily the best of the streaming shows to debut as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This is because Loki actually feels like a television show. Most of the company’s streaming output has felt like four-hour movies cut into arbitrary chunks of content that streamed weekly on Disney+. WandaVision began with a structure that celebrated the conventions of the classic sitcom, but it warped towards a standard blockbuster climax. She-Hulk was so heavily restructured in post-production that what was meant to be the show’s penultimate episode became its premiere.

Marvel has largely approached making these television shows the same way that it makes its movies. These shows don’t have showrunners, they have “head writers.” They are also often heavily reworked in post production, to the point that an entire plot thread was dropped from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The assumption appears to have been that Marvel Studios could apply the same model to television production that they had used on their blockbuster movies.

Ignoring the broader question of whether that model still works for their films, it is also hubristic. Despite assuming control of the company’s television division from Ike Perlmutter and Jeff Loeb, producer Kevin Feige was a stranger to television production. Indeed, recent reports from the production of Daredevil: Born Again suggest that Marvel Studios has realized that television has its own language and structure, and the company is increasingly willing to embrace that.

With that, Loki feels more like a television show than many of its contemporaries. Most obviously, it is the first of these shows to get a second season rather than releasing as a self-contained miniseries. It also swapped writers and directors – and added cast members – between seasons, suggesting that these two clusters of episodes are more than just a single twelve-episode episode miniseries split across two release blocks.

Indeed, this second set of episodes is instantly recognizable as the sophomore season of a successful show. It has added a relatively big name to the cast in Ke Huy Quan. It also has some of the familiar structural elements that tend to clutter follow-ups to successful premieres. The first half of the season feels somewhat bloated and disorganized, as if caught between tidying up carried-over plot threads and telling its own story, between serving existing characters and setting up new ones.

Of course, it helps that this messiness is woven into the narrative of the series. The first season of Loki ended with the death of He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) and the fracturing of “the Sacred Timeline.” Time itself was unravelling, coming to a loose end. The show visualizes this by having characters and objects explode into colored string, as if the force holding reality together has come undone. The season’s chaos and lack of structure becomes a thematic device.

However, there is more to it than that. While Loki tells one single story that runs from the premiere to the finale, both titled “Glorious Purpose” to underscore the show’s themes of recurrence and repetition in the same way that Quan’s character is named “Ouroboros,” it has a keen grasp of episodic structure. Each of its instalments are satisfying on their own terms. It is impossible to imagine the series being restructured like She-Hulk or Falcon and the Winter Soldier were.

Every episode of Loki has a clarity of purpose, which is useful for a show about abstract concepts like time travel and paradoxes. For example, the season’s fourth episode, “Heart of the TVA”, ends with the heroes failing spectacularly and destroying all of space-time. This allows the fifth episode, “Science/Fiction” to focus on Loki (Tom Hiddleston) reassembling the team from the fractured branches, only for that to also fail. These both lead to Loki’s journey in the series and season finale.

It's a credit to head writers Michael Waldron and Eric Martin that the show uses its structure in a clever way, using individual episodes to mirror and echo one another. This is most obvious in the decision to give the premiere and the finale the same title, but it is also reflected in how the penultimate episodes of the first and second season use similar narrative and thematic devices to underscore Loki’s core character arc across the two seasons.

At its core, Loki is the story of a character who journeys from selfishness to selflessness, a raging egotist who comes to care about more than just himself. The beauty of the premiere and the finale is that Loki has a very different understanding of the concept of “glorious purpose” at the end of the second season than he did at the start of the first. It is a neat and organic character progression, and one that doesn’t always get to play out across the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In the penultimate episode of the first season, "Journey into Mystery", Loki finds himself exiled to the end of time. Amid the ruins, Loki is surrounded by variants (Richard E. Grant, Jack Veal, Deobia Oparei and so on), copies of himself from various broken timelines. It is a reflection of Loki’s own ego. At the end of time, there is only Loki. In contrast, “Science/Fiction” finds Loki exiled to various branched timelines, reassembling his friends and his team. Loki cannot face the end of time alone.

This is a clever mirroring, the sort of structure that could never really work within a feature film. Loki understands that the structure of television, stories told through multiple episodes and seasons, allows the series to truly engage with its thematic ideas around repetition and cycles. The opening stretch of the finale finds Loki using time travel to revisit the cliffhanger of “Heart of the TVA”, speed running it (“again! faster!”) in the hopes of achieving a more satisfying outcome.

Jacques Rivette argued that “[e]very film is a documentary of its own making.” Perhaps that is true of television as well. Loki’s frantic efforts to reset the fourth episode’s cliffhanger aren’t too different from Marvel Studios’ “fix it in post” attitude, with an emphasis on last-minute reshoots and visual effects crunch. Indeed, Loki sounds increasingly like a weary producer as he coaxes Victor Timely (Majors) down the gangway over the loudspeaker. “You’re doing really well. Fantastic. Keep going.”

Ultimately, it’s an issue of magnitude. There are too many timelines. “It’s a scaling problem,” Timely tells Loki when they fail. “The Loom will never be able to accommodate for an infinitely growing multiverse. You can’t scale for infinite. It’s like trying to divide by zero. It can’t be done.” This feels somewhat pointed, given that one of the narratives around the recent struggles facing Marvel Studios is “scalability”, the fear the company has spread itself too thin across too many projects.

Of course, Loki is a story about an egotist who learns to look outside himself. The finale serves as more than just a metaphor for a troubled production team. Indeed, “Glorious Purpose” often feels like a direct rebuttal to the first season finale, "For All Time. Always.", in which He Who Remains argued for the fascistic Time Variance Authority (the TVA) as a necessary evil. He Who Remains assured Loki that the murder of innocent children was a small price to pay for stability and security.

This is a theme that is both timely and timeless. In “Glorious Purpose”, Loki quotes from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a book of poetry that has been on actor Tom Hiddleston’s mind recently and which reportedly informed his work on the season. Those four poems were inspired by Eliot’s experience of the Second World War, a monumental and horrific tragedy. However, this idea of the suffering of innocents to maintain the established order resonates in several current global political crises.

Over the course of the second season, Loki has largely fought to preserve the status quo, even in the face of apocalypse. In some ways, this has always been the grand tragedy of Loki as a character. In Thor, his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) explained that Loki was a child taken from Jotunheim to secure the peace. This is not too dissimilar from the operatives of the TVA, abducted from branched timelines. He Who Remains argues that such violence is necessary. “I keep us safe,” he insists.

It’s a fundamentally broken system, and Loki’s arc across the series has been towards accepting that. “I grew up in apocalypses, Loki,” explains one of Loki’s variants, Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino). “I’ve lived through enough of them to know that sometimes it’s okay to destroy something.” This prompts Loki to have a realization. “If there’s a hope that you can replace that thing with something better,” he expands. It’s a moment for clarity for the character, a culmination of his journey.

Much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe can feel like a power fantasy, the tale of superheroes who do what they do simply because there’s no one who can tell them not to. In contrast, Loki argues that “most purpose is more burden than glory.” Loki ends the season by stepping outside of time and space. He takes the fragmented branches of reality in hand and – rather than cutting them off or pruning them – he breathes life into them. He frees the multiverse, in all its infinite possibilities.

This is an unusual finale for a Marvel Studios production. More often than not, as in projects like WandaVision or The Marvels, these stories end with characters firing different color energy bolts at one another. Instead, Loki ends with a big set piece of its title character marching slowly towards his throne, dragging the various timelines along with him. It’s an ending that feels like a fitting conclusion to this particular show, rather than a one-size-fits-all narrative template.

One of the big recurring themes of this year’s pop culture has been the idea of an absent god, simmering through everything from Fast X to Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3. The second season of Loki seems engaged with this idea. Loki is a god, after all. He steps into the fractured chaos left in the wake of He Who Remains and fashions an order from it. The branching multiverse resembles nothing so much as Yggdrasill, the world tree from Norse mythology – and the Thor comics.

This is genuinely bold. Loki responds to understandable anxieties about the unravelling of the modern world by proposing something truly radical, arguing that it is possible to create something new from the ruins of the old broken system. By the end of the season, the TVA has been repurposed to track down rogue variants of He Who Remains, the man who once used them to police his world. It feels like a complete journey across two seasons and twelve episodes.

The finale even feels like a television finale, allowing for rumors of the TVA’s appearance in Deadpool 3. The episode contains a coda, “After”, that explores the fates of the show’s ensemble. These sequences are largely wordless, a montage playing over Natalie Holt’s wonderful score. It’s a reminder of how much the audience has come to care for these characters over these twelve episodes, rather than an advertisement for where viewers can see them next.