All six episodes of Loki Season 1 are out now on Disney Plus and I feel there has been enough time between the mind-melting finale to finally write a bit on the promise of what’s to come. “For all time, Always.” a.k.a. Episode 6 might have been the best Marvel TV hour yet. It broke open the ideas of new universes (or multi-verses) of possibles to look forward to. If you have been in this for a minute then you know that is EXACTLY what it is supposed to do.
It really does seem that the longer this Marvel Cinematic Universe thing goes on, the more people are going to organically butt up against the very same problems that caused a lot of superhero comics readers decades ago to give up on the hobby. And I don’t mean collectors bubbles and foil covers and all that. The mainstreaming of super-tight continuity being a feature (if not THE feature) of the larger storytelling endeavor has led to tens of millions of people realizing they’re now part of another time-honored tradition: the satisfaction that these stories used to provide wears off upon realizing the cycle that these stories all have to feed into is intended to never resolve.
The whole point is for each story to lead to the next story, not to end satisfactorily (although if it does that, it’s a bonus). Part of what made Endgame so remarkable as a film is because it seemed to actually END. Kind of. But Marvel can’t end stories like this, because that’s simply now how this genre really operates, not in this form. Everything is effectively a trailer for the next thing, which is also a trailer for whatever that other next thing is. What’s been mainstreamed with the MCU is the notion of storytelling as a perpetual motion machine that converts endings and beginnings, and either you’re cool with getting put in that loop, or you’re not.
This is the machine that’s been built. There is no ending. There never will be. It will only ever be a beginning to the next thing. The only real solution to this feeling of ennui or whatever is to take a long break from this fiction, and maybe come back when your tolerance level for this ISHT is low enough that it can get you buzzed again once you dive in. Or to shift your focus in what you’re looking to get out of these stories from larger thematic/ meaningful points to almost purely character-based, surface-level delights that stand on their own from moment to moment.
I can’t imagine there’s going to be a lot of “closure” or triumphant statements of realized thesis in Marvel’s future. So looking for endings that AREN’T “story-killers” is probably going to be an exercise in futility. This is one of the bigger problems in people willingly acquiescing to the idea that all great story ideas need to be filtered through this blockbuster prism in order to have their itches for quality fiction to be scratched – you’re simply not going to get the nutritional value out of these stories that they’re hinting at, because ultimately the recipe doesn’t allow for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Loki is one the the best things the powers that be at Marvel have done. EVER. Learn to love the reset button, and figure out a way to appreciate the clever manner in which people can keep hitting it. That’s basically the way forward. otherwise, it’s all frustration on the horizon.