‘Loki’ Season 2 Just Changed the Multiverse Forever

Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Loki Season 2.

The Big Picture

• The multiverse now operates like a tree, with countless timelines coexisting and Loki holding them together using his magic.
• The TVA’s new role is to prevent the branches of the multiverse from colliding and to watch out for new variants of He Who Remains.
• Despite breaking the time loop, there is still a risk of Kang variants interfering with the new multiverse, posing a threat to its stability.

The Season 2 finale of Loki turned the multiverse upside down. In “Glorious Purpose,” Loki (Tom Hiddleston) learns from He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors) that the Temporal Loom is actually a failsafe that prunes every branched timeline in case of overload, leaving only the Sacred Timeline intact. This means the end of the multiverse is something devised by He Who Remains as a way to prevent his variants from starting another Multiversal War. While no one wants another major conflict, doing this is still killing countless innocent lives spread across infinite timelines.

So Loki goes above and beyond and understands that he’s the only one who can save the multiverse, holding every branch himself after destroying the Temporal Loom. As he takes the throne of He Who Remains, we see that the multiverse now looks like a tree, not like lines branching from a single time loop. This is all very beautiful, but what does it mean in terms of how the multiverse works now?

How Does ‘Loki’ Change the Marvel Multiverse?

When He Who Remains created the rules of the old multiverse, he had just come out as the victor in a multiverse-scaled conflict against his variants. They all fought among themselves and there were countless Kang variants coming from countless timelines, as He Who Remains explains at the end of Loki Season 1. The solution he found to prevent this conflict was two-fold: first, allow only one major timeline to survive, the Sacred Timeline, and second, create an institution that allows him to oversee the temporal developments in this timeline and avoid it branching off into another multiverse, the Time Variance Authority (TVA).

Loki‘s Multiversal Tree seems to work in a completely different way, though, and even the TVA is repurposed after he takes over from He Who Remains. It’s now structured like a tree, with roots, a trunk, and branches that stem from it, allowing for countless timelines to coexist. At the base, there are dark roots made of old and seemingly dead timelines that were left from the destruction of the Temporal Loom. All of those meet in the trunk, where they are all held together by Loki himself, who uses his magic to revive them and allow them to flourish. Revitalized, they all grow like branches from a tree, each timeline allowing its inhabitants to have complete free will. This also means countless variants of every living being, as every possible decision is now possible.

Intentionally or not, he created the structure of a tree, so he could himself ensure the survival of his friends and the countless branched timelines. While that may seem like a remaining narcissistic trait of the old god of mischief, it actually speaks of his growth as a person (or deity?), willing to make this sort of decision knowing full well that it means sacrificing the life he built as a TVA agent and even as a god before that — all for the sake of his loved ones and the other trillions of beings he now protects.

As a Norse god, the idea of a tree that holds and gives life to all realms of existence is a familiar one to Loki — Yggdrasil, the World’s Tree comprises the Nine Realms of reality, as Thor (Chris Hemsworth) explains to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) in the first Thor movie. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is said to also be an “ash tree,” which is translated visually in Loki, with the new tree’s roots being the ashes of the previous multiverse. A tree symbolizes renewal and the cycles of nature, something that Loki starts to understand when he quotes T.S. Eliot‘s poem “Little Gidding” to He Who Remains back at the Citadel at the End of Time.

The TVA Takes on a New Role as Keepers of the Multiversal Tree

At the end of the finale, we see Loki’s team — former Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mossaku), O.B. (Ke Huy Quan), Casey (Eugene Cordero), and Mobius (Owen Wilson) — back at the TVA, and the place seems to have been through a major overhaul. Everything has been adapted to the new structure of the multiverse, with signs in the hallways now depicting it as a tree, and even the monitor in the main office room now updates the status of the tree as it did with the Sacred Timeline in the past. It’s not clear if they can keep tabs on Loki and how he’s doing inside the trunk, but at least the branches are well-guarded.

Now, the TVA has a whole new mission and purpose. With so many branches, the risk of some of them growing towards each other and hitting is real — explained in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as incursions, it can end with all involved branches being destroyed. So the TVA has to keep these branches from hitting, which is in itself a huge task as there are countless of them already, with more coming into existence with every second. Of course, if the people from each timeline manage to work these issues out before the TVA has to intervene, that’s even better — we even see something like that taking place in The Marvels.

The other mission the TVA carries out is perhaps even more important, though. They now watch over all these branched timelines to make sure no new variants of He Who Remains start tinkering with the multiverse. We even see that, now, Victor Timely (Majors) never gets a TVA Handbook delivered to his house in the early 19th century, as happens earlier in Episode 3, “1893.” Before she goes to the TVA war room, B-15 stops by Mobius’ desk to chat with him, and they talk about a variant of He Who Remains that caused some trouble on a “616-adjacent realm,” for example, showing how thoroughly they keep up with them. Of course, they are talking about the events of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the realm in question is the Quantum Realm, with 616 being the number assigned to the main MCU timeline. But that’s not the only variant they should worry about.

Kang the Conqueror Variants May Show Up Soon

In principle, the inevitable time loop He Who Remains describes in the finale is over. Loki has managed to break it and now the multiverse can flourish without the risk of anything destroying branched timelines. At the end of Season 1, He Who Remains even mentions how he wanted Loki and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) to take over his position running the TVA and protecting the Sacred Timeline. Either that, or the time loop would reset, there would be another Multiversal War, and he would end up back on his chair some eons later anyway.

This doesn’t mean there’s no risk, though. In one of the post-credits scenes of Quantumania, we see the Council of Kangs gathering for what seems to be the first time in millennia, and it’s implied it’s located somewhere outside the regular flow of time. It’s also revealed that they keep up with the events in the multiverse just like the TVA does, and if Mobius has just been made aware of the events of the movie, it’s safe to say that the Season 2 finale of Loki takes place around the same time as this Quantumania post-credits scene.

There’s still a lot to happen until Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, but Loki’s new multiverse is nowhere near as safe as it should be from the Kang variants. There are still countless ways for them to interfere with the new multiversal tree, as well as the possibility of Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) seeking them out if it turns out she wasn’t eaten by Alioth at the end of Loki. Additionally, the possibility remains that the original Kang variant, Nathaniel Richards, will come into himself in the 31st century and tinker with time, setting off the whole multiversal cataclysm as he does in the comics.

Loki is available to stream in on Disney+ in the U.S.

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