bottle gourd
I wasn’t expecting to be so deeply affected. bottle gourd, Even by the time I reached the Season 2 finale, it felt like this was something that would be played for laughs rather than big realizations. Spoilers ahead.
The first part of the finale, glorious purpose, Really funny, putting our titular character in a time-traveling kind of Groundhog Day. In fact, how can you not think of Bill Murray’s Phil when the title card “Centuries Later” appears and now that Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is amazingly versed in physics and quantum mechanics, he’s brought the Ouroboros (Ke Hui Quan) Have studied with and learned everything. He somehow knows how to fix the Loom and prevent the destruction of the TVA.
Of course, all this is in vain. We learn that the Loom is a failsafe device created to protect the sacred timeline. He Who Lives (Jonathan Majors) planned the whole thing, or at least guided the events. Loki’s confrontation with Kang brings him back to the climax of Season 1, but this time he tries countless, countless times to stop Sylvie (Sofia Di Martino) from killing He Who Remains.
He faces a moral conflict over what to do – kill Sylvie and protect the timeline, or kill what remains of her and put an end to everything – even him. He also visits his old friend Mobius (Owen Wilson) to find answers in his dying timeline. But the story Mobius told him was his inability to purify the boy who would ultimately be responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, and his quick actions on behalf of his partner Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), only muddying the waters. Does it.
Time to be brave.
Instead he goes to meet Sylvie, at a time when all timelines are collapsing into nothingness in some of the most dreamy, trippy CGI Marvel has offered to date. She tells him that it is not enough to save the sacred timeline with all its pain, injustice, and suffering. And this leads to a revelation in our God of Mischief.
He goes back to the Loom, but this time instead of sending out the poor stutterer Victor Timely, he goes himself. “I know what kind of god I want to be,” he tells Sylvie and Mobius through the glass. “For you. For all of us.”
Then he goes into a temporary storm. The wind tears away his clothes and in their place Loki’s dark green cloak appears. Horns grow on his brow like a crown. He destroys the loom, and all timelines scatter into space, their lights extinguished. Moving forward, he grabs one and fills it with his magic, then the other. He moves forward, walking up an invisible staircase, collecting ropes of time as he climbs up to a platform on which we see a throne.
He sits on the throne, binds as many timelines as possible and then pours all his strength and power into them. We see them glowing, green, as they build the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, though the green at the top is tinged with purple, perhaps alluding to the multidimensional war between the Kongs.
Later, we find Mobius standing on the road where a variant of his lives. Private yacht dealer and his boys. Sylvie arrives and they talk cordially. She asks him what he’s going to do and he says he thinks he’ll wait here for a while longer. “Pass the time,” he says bitterly.
mobius and sylvie
As he looks longingly at the life he can’t have, we fade out and cut back to Loki sitting on his throne. His face is tense but there is also a look of pride and satisfaction. He has accomplished his glorious purpose. His destiny. He has become Yggdrasil, the protector of life and time on an infinite cosmology. It’s a beautiful, surprisingly moving moment (after Mobius’s own poignant final scene). It’s a tremendous piece of storytelling that sticks with Captain America: The First Avenger And brings Loki’s story full circle in a way that is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive accomplishments the MCU has ever achieved.
For the first time in a long time, I’m actually excited about the Marvel Cinematic Universe again, if only because they’ve proven they haven’t lost that magical touch yet, even if the overall project has faltered and Has faltered more. It has been successful in recent years, especially when it comes to Disney+ shows.
Of course, the trick is to know where to follow bottle gourd is leading the way, and crafting the future of the MCU with the same care and attention to detail. Because the attention to detail here is truly remarkable.
At first, me captain America, The Red Skull finds the Tesseract hidden behind a mural of Yggdrasil. Actually, he finds it by pressing the snake’s eye. Loki should become the Tree of the World, guardian of knowledge and fortune, all of which in later movies and shows is actually quite remarkable (and subtle, most viewers likely won’t remember).
It is probably no coincidence that the Time Stone is green.
Ouroboros
side note:
I only watched two episodes of this bottle gourd When it first aired. I was feeling pretty tired after Marvel The Falcon and the Winter Soldier And never came back to the show. I only watched both seasons over the past week or so, and watched the finale last night.
This means that I wrote my anti-multiverse article East to finish bottle gourd, And it adds a strange twist to my thesis that the multiverse is killing the superhero genre.
for one thing, bottle gourd Handled this multi-timeline stuff very well, Very Well, and that sets the stage for a compelling resolution to the multiverse (hopefully) with the Kang Wars (though another annoyance there is, of course, Jonathan Majors).
Whatever the case, I’m definitely tired of the multiverse in general, even when it’s handled with the same amount of artistry and the same amount of care and craft. bottle gourd Having somehow managed that, I think I’m enjoying it a lot. but real magic Loki’s The end of the game, making the stakes so personal. Loki wanted to save his friends. He worked tirelessly for centuries to save the people he cared about. In the end, he made a sacrifice to save the people he loved and fulfilled his destiny. Sure, it was all about saving everything from complete destruction, but that took a back seat as Loki struggled to save something far more intimate and personal, and He We care about how you create a superhero story.
As another Disney hero once said, this is the way,
This is the way forward for the MCU. What really matters is telling great stories with characters we care deeply about. These could be TVA analysts like Mobius, or evil gods like Loki, or even sympathetic villains like the Rainslayer. Fundamentally, we need to care more about them and their relationships with each other than we do about The Fate of the Universe. That’s why the latest thor The film failed among the audience. It made Thor a punchline in a story where the stakes were big but boring. It limited their story and the story of their loved ones to one-liners, and while it was still enjoyable it felt hollow in the end. At this point, Loki has been given a far richer, far deeper story, and one that will resonate far more deeply with fans.
This is the way. I have spoken.
