What a great ending for Loki!
This really should be the model for everything moving forward. Get creative, unique people. Let them work. Don’t micro-manage them to death in post. LET. THEM. WORK. I could have continued watching for many more seasons; the great characters and acting, the excellent soundtrack, the truly wonderful retro art direction and design of Miss Minutes and the TVA and so on, but you can’t keep a thing fresh and surprising forever. Sad but true. However, once I saw where they were going with Loki’s final act of heroism, and that the latter half of the second season was going to commit fully to the mythic imagery, it ALL really clicked. It was maybe the first time that the magic side of the MCU absolutely worked for me. Like poetry.
The TS Eliot poem that is quoted is extremely relevant here. The quote is from the Little Gidding section of The Four Quartets, and that section is basically a map of Loki’s emotional journey through this season. There are a lot of lines about time repeating, and about the beginning and the end being the same. The bit Loki was quoting from goes like this:
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments
A perfect choice for the series and for The God of Stories.
Marvel and the MCU don’t explain much about Asgardians and adopted Frost Giants turned into Asgardians, ie. how that all works and why they look and act human. But it is established that some like Hela and Thor become transcendently powerful “gods of” some mighty force like death or thunder. So it was welcome to see Loki throw himself into whatever that process is and let himself be transformed by it.
Thor survives a blast from a neutron star, which isn’t perhaps on the cosmological scale of holding together the fabric of reality for all time, but the godlike powers of all the Asgardians has always been elastic, according to story purposes. They’re always operated in a zone between superpowered characters with enough mortal vulnerability to make them compelling story-wise and mythological figures with unknown levels of cosmic power.
I don’t have a lot of trouble accepting that Loki is finally able to cross the line into an outright mythological figure, even one capable of basically holding the universe together. The reason it doesn’t feel like a cheat to me is because Loki pays for his metamorphosis dearly. He sheds the pseudo-mortal shell and sacrifices his life to level-up into this lonely cosmic figure, after trying every other damned thing he can for centuries. And you know, it’s an incredibly ironic subversion of everything Loki, the villain, ever aspired to since the beginning. They found an ending that feels hinted at since the beginning of the character’s arc.
With what I think of as a true Deus Ex Machina, it typically resolves the unresolvable without any real cost, no real narrative transaction has taken place. This is a kind of tragedy where the resolution is brought about through the sacrifice of the central character.
It’s cool if it’s a (rainbow) bridge too far for some. For me, I feel like it’s an earned evolution for Loki.
Other notes:
– Holt should become Marvel’s main composer. Like, how are they not signing her right now for all major films?
– The new multiverse looks like Yggrasdil the World Tree.
– Best thing Marvel’s done since Endgame, hands down.
– Loki may not be my favorite MCU character, but his character arc, is by far my favorite. By a wide margin too, it’s not even close. From being the first big-Big Bad of the MCU to being arguably it’s most selfless “hero” at the end (for all time. always). Hiddleston nailed it every time. The exhaustion, the realization and the acceptance of his destiny all subtly conveyed in each scene and line delivery the last couple episodes was remarkable.
-Kudos to Benson and Moorehead for taking the MCU into the world of thoughtful sci-fi indies.