Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Loki season 2 finale, "Glorious Purpose."
Loki ends with its titular god claiming his throne — just not the one he expected.
The Marvel Disney+ show concluded its second season this week, seemingly saying goodbye to Tom Hiddleston's Loki. In an effort to stop the universe from collapsing in on itself, Loki learns to control his "time-slipping," using it to go back further and further in time. With help from Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Mobius (Owen Wilson), and O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), he tries again and again to fix the TVA's temporal loom and prevent a meltdown. But every time he goes back, he fails, and he spends literal centuries reliving the same events over and over.
Eventually, Loki admits defeat and chooses to sacrifice himself to save every universe. Walking toward the temporal loom, he grabs the very fabric of space-time and uses it to build a throne of his own, weaving the threads together to create a tree. (It's a nod to the legendary world tree Yggdrasil from Norse mythology.) With that, Loki essentially crowns himself master of the multiverse, watching over every timeline as a lonely god. It's the ultimate selfless act from one of Marvel's most notorious villains — a villain who once sicced an alien invasion on New York to get his dad's attention.
Here, executive producer Kevin Wright breaks down the series' emotional finale — from the throwback line that Hiddleston improvised to whether this is really the end for Loki.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When did you decide this was how you wanted Loki's story to end?
KEVIN WRIGHT: I think we knew in season 1. Once we were going to do a season 2, we knew that Loki would end up on the throne. That was always the easy thing. The question was: How do you want that to feel for the audience? There's a version that's triumphant and super heroic. There's a version where it's an evil turn. But it was always about the emotional journey we wanted people to go on. It was about building that journey to be as cathartic as possible and to feel like a payoff for six movies and 12 episodes over 12 years with this guy. It was always about building that arc to be as fulfilling as possible.
Most of the episode is dedicated to this sort of time loop, where we see Loki trying over and over again to get things right and fix the loom, almost in a Groundhog Day kind of situation. What was fun about getting to do that endless loop?
Even in season 1, we always wanted to do a Run Lola Run thing, but there was never space for it. So once we started going into loops this season in the writing process, we thought, "Oh, let's finally do it." So much of that is total credit to Paul Zucker, the editor of the episode. That montage wasn't scripted per se. We knew Loki was going to be rerunning things, but it wasn't written exactly the way that it played.
A really fun thing, though, was that our cast — outside of Tom — had no idea what we were doing. They understood that he was rerunning time, but we shot a very different ending to episode 4 that was not the real ending. All the cast thought something very different would happen. We would send them away on lunch breaks, and Tom would take his lunch later, and he would just keep shooting with [directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead] with a skeleton crew. There were very few people that fully understood what we were building in that finale. So, for that core team, I think there was a lot of satisfaction when everybody was able to sit down and see how it came together. It just felt like this little secret.
What do you remember most about watching Tom film those final scenes?
Two moments really jump to mind. The first is a little bit of a longer story. There's the scene with He Who Remains, and that was scripted one way. We had this fear, like, "Is this going to feel like we're retreading the same ground as season 1?" Would it be fulfilling? We started shooting one day, and anybody in any creative field will understand this: There are days where the words are right, they way you're doing it is right, but it's just not adding up. Something was missing. We knew we weren't nailing it, and I had to make the call. That is really scary, when your first AD just wants to keep moving, and I said we were going to stop shooting.
Tom went and sat down with our script supervisor and basically did this insane crash course in 30 minutes of every line that had been said on the whole series. Then, he went for a run around the lot at Pinewood [Studios], and when he came back, he was like, "I know what this needs to be now." Then, he and Jonathan worked out what it was going to be, and they sat down with Justin and Aaron and me and Katie Blair, our production writer. They just quickly rewrote this new scene and shot it. It was just the pinnacle of what Tom does. He has such a finger on the pulse of this entire series and how that scene had to go. In a moment, he was able to reconfigure it with all of our collaborators.
The other thing is that final line before he steps out toward the loom, which is the Thor line, which was not scripted. Right before we were going to shoot that, Tom came and pitched it to me, like, "Should we do this?" We were like, "God, why did we not write that?" It was perfect, and it was 100 percent Tom.
I wanted to ask about that line, where Loki turns to Sylvie and Mobius and says he has to do this "for you, for all of us." It's a direct throwback to one of his lines in the original 2011 Thor. So that was a Tom Hiddleston improvisation?
It was 100 percent Tom. We had already done a few takes of the first part of that line, which was, "I know what kind of god I need to be." And on the final take, Tom said, "Hey, can I try this?" As soon as he said it, all of us were like, "This is going to be the take." It almost gave me Truman Show vibes, that final sign-off, looking straight down the camera. But that story gets to the heart of how Tom is always trying to make things better. We just had to build a series that could give him the framework to have those creative pivots. Everyone would just kind of throw their hands up and say, "Geez, this is why this guy is fantastic."
With Loki in charge of the multiverse, this could affect how (and if) we might see Jonathan Majors' Kang the Conqueror in future Marvel projects. For you, where does this finale leave Kang and his future in the MCU?
I'm going to tread probably infuriatingly lightly, but for me — and I know all the filmmakers agree — we think everything is there on screen. I think all the details are there, and there is a lot that people haven't picked up on, or haven't fully understood what is being said. The key to the future is in that conversation with Sylvie, and this doesn't necessarily undo any of those threats. In my mind, it's what Sylvie said: "At least give us a chance. Let us fight that battle for ourselves and define our own destiny."
I also wanted to ask about that final shot of Mobius in Ohio, where he's standing there silently, watching time pass. Why was that the right ending for Mobius?
In the big picture of the show, we wanted this to feel like a real ending. We wanted to give closure on a number of things, and we didn't want to do anything that felt like it was just teeing up a new story. But you could plant new seeds that could become new stories. My feeling with that scene in Ohio is that it's Mobius overcoming a personal obstacle. He just had to go and look. The show is not telling you whether he's going to stay there, or whether he's going to go back to the TVA. I think both are possibilities. But the important thing was the character growth of him going to do the thing he has been avoiding. I think it took what Loki did to cause Mobius to go, "I have this opportunity. This opportunity was given to me by Loki. The least I can do is go."
So that being said, is this the end for Loki? Is this a season finale, or is it a series finale?
I'm thinking of it kind of like a comic run, and this is the end of that comic run. I know [head writer Eric Martin] has said this a lot: These two seasons were two chapters of the same book, and we wanted to close the book. That was a challenge from Owen in between seasons: He was like, "Nobody has the courage to close the book! Let's close the book!"
Again, I speak for myself and not Marvel, but I am certainly pitching ideas of where I could see certain stories going. I think there are a lot of stories you can tell at the TVA, and we are just scratching the surface on that. I would love to see more stories with Loki, and I think Tom would continue to play this character until he is Richard E. Grant's Classic Loki [laughs]. But I don't think that means you need to have this story every year or every two years. It's about doing it when we have a good story to tell. I would love to keep working with these filmmakers.
We built a really awesome team, and if Loki is Breaking Bad, maybe there's a way for this team to keep telling stories with our version of Better Call Saul — whether that's with Sylvie, with the TVA, or with a new Loki. But we only want to do that if we have the right story and it can be just as fulfilling as this one. After all, you can't be the God of Stories if you're not going to tell more stories.
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The easiest way to save the Time Variance Authority and the timelines from imploding on themselves? Why, Time Slip again and again into the same scenario hundreds, if not thousands, or maybe millions of times until you get it right (this is not actually how to save the TVA, but that’s a story for another time…).
The beginning of Episode 6 of Marvel Studios’ Loki is essentially Loki reliving a no-good, very bad day again, and again, and again in hopes of just once getting the Temporal Loom to stop overloading. Loki literally spends centuries trying to figure this out, which means that on-screen everyone at the TVA is reliving the same scenario again and again…and again. And again.
Behind the scenes, that meant that the cast had to film scenes from Episode 4 again (and again and again) to mesh into Loki’s quest in Episode 6. While Loki might be frustrated with having to replay this multiple times the rest of the cast was left very bewildered — mimicking what we see on screen for the TVA characters.
“I think the funniest part of all of that, though, was as we were shooting it, you are essentially replaying that Episode 4 over and over and over again, as performers, as actors, they just start to lose track of days, and where we are in the story and what's actually happening,” Executive Producer Kevin Wright explains to Marvel.com. But taking everything a step further, star Tom Hiddleston was clued into what was happening in the latter half of the season with this constant reply of Episode 4. The rest of his friends at the TVA? Not so much.
“I would say the way that Episode 4 ended, the way it was shot, our cast, outside of Tom, thought something very different was happening,” Wright adds with a laugh. “We kind of lied to them about what was happening to sell a really insane performance. Up until I think they had all seen the episodes, they had thought something very different was going to happen at the end of 4. I think there was all this extra level of confusion for them, as we're repeating this moment over and over and over again, trying to figure out why that is happening and what is going on.”
And the cast certainly felt this confusion. Season 1 of the series was filmed in order, while Season 2 was filmed out of order, so no one questioned why one scene was being filmed again and again (and again for centuries).
“Sometimes we’re the end before we’ve shot the beginning before we’ve shot the middle before we’ve shot the beginning of the middle and then the end of the middle and then the end of the beginning,” Star Sophia Di Martino jokes. “It’s already a head melt trying to get your head around this series and all the time slipping and to-ing and fro-ing between universes but then shooting out of sequence is like a hat on a hat and the hat is really confusing.”
But Di Martino didn’t care how many times they had to film it because it just meant she got to see her friends every day on set.
“We did a lot of days in [Temporal Core] room, over and over again. There were some really fun times when we were all going a little bit stir crazy, Cabin fever on the edge, but it was really lovely knowing I was going to come to work every and see all those guys every day.”
To the surprise of no one, Tom Hiddleston kept everyone’s spirits up, because as Wunmi Mosaku notes, “He has the whole script in his head at every moment and he can tell you exactly where you were just coming from and where you’re going.”
“He’s always reminding us like, this is the first time even though we’ve shot this a thousand times, this is the first time we’ve done this. The repetition of the scenes was really, really hard to keep the intensity equal as well because it’s a repeated scene. Honestly, some people are just magicians, and I would say Tom Hiddleston is one of those, I don’t know how he keeps happy, and chirpy, he doesn’t dream about [filming] it all night. He keeps the joy in the room.”
Not only was he the cheerleader, but Hiddleston was also working extra hard to keep an air of mystery for the scene, continuing to film while others had left.
“Oftentimes, a lot of that with Tom specifically was shot when the cast would go on their lunch breaks,” Wright adds. “They would all go away, and Tom would stay back with our directors and our camera operator and everybody and kind of just like churn through so many different versions of these. It was weirdly a thing that I think we all had the same idea of what it was going to be, but only Tom kind of had it in his head of how it would end up.”
Don’t worry, Hiddleston always took a lunch, too, as Wright notes, “he just did it later.”
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