Loki Season 2 explained episode by episode

Loki Season 2: Explained (Episode-Wise & Ending Explained)

Season 2 of Loki is directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, who’ve brought us fantastic films like Resolution and The Endless. Season 2 picks up from where we left off – with Sylvie killing He Who Remains and Loki landing in TVA with no one recognizing him. If it helps, you can check out Loki Season 1 Explained In Detail or this Quick Recap of Loki Season 1. Here’s the entire Loki Season 2 explained episode by episode.

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Contents

Here are links to the key aspects of the series:

Loki Season 2: Who is “He Who Remains”?

He Who Remains is a version of Kang who we see at the end of Season 1. He claims to be a nice version of Kang who wants to stop the multiversal war. The way he’s chosen to go about it is mass genocide of every timeline/reality that he disagrees with. Does not give vibes of “nice”, does it?

Loki: Season 2 Episode 1 Explained (Ouroboros)

Loki returns to the TVA but to its past and he begins to time slip between the past and present. While the folks in TVA feel the place is devoid of time, their claims make no sense. Think about it this way – if Mobius stands in the TVA and counts from 1 to 100. The moment he says 1 is in the past of the moment he says 100. What they don’t do in the TVA is age.

Everyone in the TVA has been informed that they are variants kidnapped from different branched timelines; their memories were wiped. In the past, Loki hears a recording of Renslayer and He Who Remains and learns they were in cahoots. B-15 convinces the council leader to stop pruning branches as it is genocide. Loki shows up in the present and reveals that the TVA is a front for He Who Remains.

Mobius takes Loki to Ouroboros for help. Loki slips to the past, and he asks the past Ouroboros for help, and he builds him a Temporal Aura Extractor. Loki slips back into the present, and by then, Ouroboros has already created the device. When they try to extract Loki, he time-slips into the future, where he sees Sylvia and is pruned just in time by an undisclosed person, allowing Mobius to save Loki in the present.

Loki: Season 2 Episode 2 Explained (Breaking Brad)

X-5 decides to settle down and become a movie star, Brad Wolfie, in one of the branched timelines in the year 1977. Mobuis and Loki find him and bring him back to TVA, and Loki threatens him till he discloses Sylvie’s whereabouts.

Loki goes to 1982 on a branched timeline to get Sylvie, who enchants X-5, to learn that Dox and her Minute-Men plan to destroy all branched timelines. Before Loki and team can stop her, they prune most of the branches. Distraught, Sylvie returns to her branched timeline with He Who Remains’ TemPad.

What is the Temporal Loom?

The Temporal Loom is the device that keeps the Sacred Timeline contained. Once He Who Remains is killed, the branched timelines overload the Temporal Loom. The blast doors to access the Loom are shut and need He Who Remains’ aura to open.

Loki: Season 2 Episode 3 Explained (1893)

In 1868 of the Sacred Timeline, Renslayer arrives with Miss Minutes to drop the TVA guidebook into the house of an orphaned kid, Victor Timely. This event bootstraps Victor’s path to becoming a scientific genius. It appears that Victor is the one who sets up TVA in the future and becomes He Who Remains as Victor is from the Sacred Timeline (the prime MCU timeline). If Victor is not He Who Remains, then it means Kang from another timeline created the TVA which would be rather surprising.

In 1893, Loki shows up to take Victor back to the TVA, while Sylvie wants to kill him, and Renslayer wants him to take control of the TVA. Victor goes with Renslayer. Miss Minutes gets Victor to ditch Renslayer on the way and then discloses her love for Victor. Renslayer finds Victor, and so do Loki and Sylvie, who can’t get herself to kill Victor as he is presently innocent. Sylvie kicks Renslayer to the end of time and joins Loki to the TVA. What’s silly is that she doesn’t bother confiscating Renslayer’s TemPad and Miss Minutes. Or killing her after narrating how many times she’s killed her in her head.

Loki: Season 2 Episode 4 Explained (Heart of the TVA)

Miss Minutes shows Renslayer a past recording of He Who Remains asking for her memory to be wiped along with everyone at the TVA.

Who wrote the TVA guidebook?

Ouroboros Loki meaning

At the TVA, Victor meets Ouroboros to learn that Ouroboros’ book gave him all the knowledge, and Ouroboros wrote the book based on the works of Victor. The contents of the guidebook are part of a Bootstrap Paradox, a snake biting its own tail, the Ouroboros.

Victor and Ouroboros work together to figure out how to increase the Temporal Loom’s bandwidth to handle more branches. 

Renslayer travels to the TVA to talk to Dox and her minute-men, who refuse to follow Renslayer, and she kills them all. X-5 is spared as he joins Renslayer, and the two take Victor captive. Miss Minutes takes control of the TVA systems.

Why does Loki prune himself?

This is a Predestination Paradox. The undisclosed person in Episode 1 who prunes Loki is his future self. In Episode 4, Loki sees his past self (from Episode 1) in front of a lift that Sylvie uses. Loki realizes that he needs to prune his younger self, as that is what helped Mobius extract him to stop him from time-slipping (in Episode 1).

Ouroboros reboots the system to kick Miss Minutes out, allowing Loki and Sylvie to use magic. Sylvie enchants X-5 and he prunes Renslayer. Victor offers to step out to enhance the Temporal Loom, but the radiation destroys him instantly, and the Loom explodes.

Loki: Season 2 Episode 5 Explained (Science/Fiction)

Everyone in the TVA disappears, and Loki begins time-slipping again. The folks from the TVA get reverted to their original timelines:

1962, Branched Timeline – Casey is a thief escaping Alcatraz.

2012, Branched Timeline – B-15 is a pediatrician.

2022, Branched Timeline – Mobius is a jetski salesman.

1994, Branched Timeline – Ouroboros is a failed scientist and sci-fi writer.

Ouroboros explains that Loki is slipping through time and space to the exact people he needs, so he must be subconsciously controlling it. Loki gives Ouroboros a copy of the TVA guidebook to help him invent the TemPad.

Loki time-slips to Mobius’ timeline and tries convincing him. Ouroboros arrives with the TemPad he invented; Ouroboros took 18 months to do this. After Loki leaves him with the book, he works on the invention for over 1.5 years. So somewhere in 1995-96, he gets done and then uses the TemPad to travel to 2022 of Mobius’ timeline.

Why does Sylvia remember the TVA and the Temporal Loom?

Sylvia is a variant from a timeline that has been destroyed. When the Temporal Loom explodes, she is simply transported to the timeline she was last in. But everyone is rolled back to their original timeline and they never left to become part of the TVA; this is why none of them remember the events of the TVA as it never happened for them.

The destruction of the Temporal Loom causes every branched timeline to get erased. Before Loki can assemble his crew to return to the moment before the Loom blows up, everyone around him gets erased, including Sylvie.

How is Loki able to control his Time-Slipping?

It appears the loss of his friends and Sylvie gives him the focus that he needed to control where and when he needs to be. So he quickly jumps back in time by a few minutes; the main difference is that this time, only his consciousness jumps back. Earlier, we would see multiple Lokis during time-slips, but this time, we have one Loki sitting in Ouroboros’ place but with the memories of what is about to happen. After this, Loki’s consciousness jumps to the TVA moments before Victor exits towards the Temporal Loom.

Loki: Season 2 Ending Explained: Episode 6 (Glorious Purpose)

The ending of Loki Season 2 sees Loki deciding to sacrifice his future and embrace loneliness as he replaces He Who Remains as the caretaker of the multiverse. This also means that every timeline can now survive, leading to a potential multiversal war caused by Kang(s). In the final episode, Loki begins pushing his consciousness back through time to various points to understand how to learn the workings of the Temporal Loom and how to enhance it to support more branches. After travelling back in time and failing for centuries, Loki is able to successfully help Victor widen the Loom. But he soon learns that the Loom overloads anyway, as it has no way to support infinite branches.

Loki travels back to the point just before Sylvie kills He Who Remains, and no matter what he does to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains, Loki fails. Loki learns that the Temporal Loom is a failsafe, and its job is to automatically purge all the branches except for the Sacred Timeline in the event of an overload. He Who Remains also mentions Loki’s time-slipping was engineered by him so Loki can show up and kill Sylvie.

Loki goes back to when he first met Mobius to learn that Mobius couldn’t get himself to kill a variant kid, and Renslayer did the job instead. I’m unsure who this variant kid is; please comment below if anyone knows. Loki also goes back to talk to Sylvie and explain to her the predicament he’s facing. Sylvie says all the timelines need a fighting chance, and their destruction shouldn’t be one person’s decision.

Season 2 Finale: What happens to Loki in the end?

Loki makes one final time jump, steps out, and destroys the Temporal Loom. He then uses his unexplained godly powers to bring life to the dying timelines and heads to the end of time to sit on the throne, becoming the God Of Stories, sustaining every branch depicted visually as a Yggdrasill.

Long story short, Loki, from that 2012 timeline of Endgame, eventually becomes the entity that holds together the fabric of all realities. However, in return, he must face his worst fear – being all alone. The first episode of Season 1 shares the same name as the finale to highlight that Loki did find his glorious purpose.

What happens to Mobius and Sylvie in the end?

Mobius decides to quit the TVA and heads to the Sacred Timeline to see what his life would have been like. Remember, Mobius was a variant kidnapped from a branched timeline, and that’s why we see two of him in that final scene. Sylvie accompanies Mobius, and the two part ways to make their own futures.

That brings us to the end of the Loki Series. What were your thoughts on the plot and ending of Season 2 of Loki? Drop your comments below.