Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Loki Disney+ series. 

The season two finale, and seemingly series finale, of the Disney+ series Loki, aired earlier this month. In the sixth and final episode of the season, named “Glorious Purpose,” the audience is taken on a ride that concludes the story of Loki in a dramatic ending unlike anything seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) before. However, the ending can be overwhelming and confusing for viewers, so here is a breakdown of the episode. Disclaimer: I recommend watching both seasons of the series before reading this article to understand it, but if you had difficulty understanding the show’s conclusion or simply want to know what happened to the famous Marvel character Loki, keep reading. 

In the fifth episode before the finale, Loki finds his friends from the TVA living in their alternate realities. By visiting their different timelines, he learns that real people and their realities are being destroyed. He also realizes that he can control his time-slipping, which has affected him since the beginning of the season.

These events set up episode six, where the first scene shows him time traveling into his body right before his friends from the TVA send Victor Timely, a variant of He Who Remains, to fix the Temporal Loom that contains all the timelines so that every universe can be saved. However, this fails, and Victor dies, so Loki must travel back to pivotal moments again and again. He does this in the hopes that he will produce a successful solution to fix the Temporal Loom and save everything in existence. Loki even sacrifices centuries to acquire the necessary knowledge to build the machine that would hopefully fix the loom. 

Finally, he realizes the only way to stop the chaos of the TVA and the timelines is to stop Sylvie, his variant but also a dear friend, before she kills He Who Remains (HWR/ Kang). When he goes back to that moment in time, however, he cannot stop her without actually killing her. The audience sees Loki in a loop, trying countless times to stop her without success. HWR tells Loki that his only option is to kill Sylvie. However, Loki is unable to do this to his friend, because, throughout the series, he has gone from a villain to a hero with a heart. Instead, after going to different periods to have conversations with Mobius, Sylvie, and Kan, he eventually decides that he will “change the equation.”

Loki goes back to the TVA and destroys the loom himself. He then grabs every timeline, preserving them with his powers while he ascends to a throne. The show ends with Loki holding all the timelines together and single-handedly ensuring that all the realities are alive. The TVA now has the duty of nurturing all the timelines. It seems like a happy ending for everyone, except Loki’s is more bittersweet. Faith Saba (10) comments, “The happy ending was at the cost of Loki’s happiness.” While he saved the lives of everyone he loves and all the timelines, he now has to live selflessly in solitude for seemingly the rest of time. It turns out he got the throne he wanted all along, but not in the way he expected, and his glorious purpose was the most important burden in the universe.