Recap / Loki Episode 12: "Glorious Purpose"

"Most purpose is more burden than glory."

Having mastered his timeslipping, Loki travels back to the moment right before Victor Timely dies and the Loom collapses. Now the God of Mischief must find out how to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.

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Tropes:

• Alertness Blink: After Loki barges into the TVA's War Room to ask for Miss Minutes' help directly, Minutes responds with an audible wide-eyed blink at this seemingly random turn of events.
• All According to Plan: The entire season was He Who Remains' Long Game playing out. He knew Loki would become Unstuck in Time, try to repair the Loom, fail, and eventually come back to the pivotal moment where the timeline branched with his new powers. The only thing He Who Remains didn't see coming was Loki choosing to replace the Loom instead of him.
• All for Nothing: Even though the plan to save the Loom turned out to be successful, the very nature of The Multiverse means that the Loom (at least as built by He Who Remains) can't contain the infinite branches, and will eventually explode no matter what efforts they make to expand its capacity. This also serves to foreshadow the Loom's true nature.
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: Mobius circa Season 1, episode 1 tells Loki a story about a hunter who was unable to prune an 8-year-old boy who would be the cause of the deaths of thousands of people, and as a result caused the deaths of many hunters before another hunter pruned the boy. Loki easily figures out that the reluctant hunter is Mobius, while Mobius explains that the hunter who pruned the boy is Renslayer.
• Barrier Maiden: With his new ability to control time, Loki decides to take over the function of the Loom and maintain the integrity of the infinite branches, becoming the focal point on which the entire multiverse rests.
• Batman Gambit: One engineered by He Who Remains to ensure his own survival — either Loki kills Sylvie, or he dooms the branches and the TVA by letting her kill him so that there's no way to manage the Loom. Loki chooses neither option.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Loki started the series coming off the Battle of New York and desiring a Throne of his own. He finally gets the ultimate throne by series end and more power than anyone could ever imagine. But not only has Loki grown beyond his Avengers-era characterization and wants, but his selfless apotheosis costs him everything.
• Beneath the Mask: He Who Remains, upon realizing Loki has figured out time-skipping, drops the eccentric act he had put on for Loki and Sylvie and becomes more serious in tone while revealing this was his plan all along.
• Big "YES!": Loki exclaims "Yes!" when Victor succeeds in launching the throughput multiplyer and making the rings of the Loom bigger.
• Bittersweet Ending: Loki dissolves the Temporal Loom, saving the branched timelines from the failsafe destruction. But by doing so, he sacrifices his own happiness and is now alone at the end of time, protecting and sustaining the branches. The TVA, however, has changed for the better as they prepare to fight the variants of He Who Remains.
• Bookends:
  • The first and last episode of the series have the same title.
  • Loki first appears in an Asgardian garb and ends the series in a new set of Asgardian robes.
• Brief Accent Imitation: He Who Remains mockingly imitates Timely's particular accent and stuttering when he asks if Loki has met Timely.
• But Now I Must Go: After Loki saves the branches, Mobius leaves the TVA to check out his life on the timeline and then decide from there what to do next.
• Call-Back:
  • Loki finally gets his throne, perhaps the greatest throne of all: he becomes the god of time in function if not in title, and he is doomed to sit on his throne at the end of the multiverse holding the branches of time and sustaining them indefinitely. As Mobius warned him earlier, his chosen purpose is heavy on the burden with little to no real glory save for the gratitude of the TVA.
  • Mobius ultimately ends up doing the thing he feared — visiting his life on the Sacred Timeline, to see what it was like.
• Close on Title: To fit the time shenanigans in this episode, this episode closes with the title card.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Loki continues insisting the model of the featureless suit looks like Mobius.
  • He Who Remains says that Loki is his favourite.
  • Before Loki goes into the Temporal Loom, he tells Sylvie and Mobius "For you. For all of us.", which are the exact same words he said to his father when he was hanging from the Bifrost and explaining his actions in Thor. Additionally, Mobius and Sylvie's responses make up Odin's response from that film as well.
    Mobius: No!
    Sylvie: Loki!
  • This Loki gives a tearful smile before he sacrifices himself, just like Classic Loki did.
  • In "Science/Fiction", Sylvie asks Loki what he really wants. Here, he gives her his final answer: he wants to sustain the timelines to protect his friends and everyone in the multiverse, no matter the cost.
  • Mobius mentions a Variant of He Who Remains who caused some trouble on an adjacent of 616, but has been taken care of.
• Copycat Mockery: When He Who Remains first mentions Victor, he mockingly copies Victor's stutter.
• Crazy Enough to Work: In one loop, Loki gets the idea to barge into the TVA's war room and ask for Miss Minutes' help directly. It's unknown if this actually manages to work.
• Create Your Own Hero: He Who Remains engineered Loki's entire journey and Time Master powers with the expectation that Loki would come to see reality as he does: that the only defense against oblivion is maintaining the Sacred Timeline. Instead, he imbued Loki with the power to save the multiverse.
• Cultured Badass: Loki briefly quotes William Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot in this episode:
  Loki: I've wasted time, and now doth time waste me!
  We die with the dying... We're born with the dead.
• Dénouement: The last ten minutes of the episode are separated by the "After" Title Card and are dedicated to showing what is going on in the TVA some time after Loki's Heroic Sacrifice and to giving closure to the characters.
• Determinator: Loki spends centuries from his perspective trying to save the multiverse.
• Didn't See That Coming: He Who Remains was not expecting Loki to become the new Loom. Although it may be possible He Who Remains simply did not even entertain the thought, because of his certainty allowing the multiverse to exist would result in the very war he'd just ended happening again.
• Didn't Think This Through: In the centuries spent preparing for an iteration of events that would save the Loom, it never occurred to Loki that the Multiverse's nature as infinite realities would mean it would overload the Loom no matter how much it expanded.
• Double Meaning: Loki declares his efforts to save the Loom a "waste of time," referring to both the effort he put in and the multiple branches (timelines) doomed to die thanks to HWR's Batman Gambit.
• Dramatic Sit-Down: Loki sits down on the stairs in the Temporal Core in defeat when the Loom fails even though they succeeded in making the rings bigger.
• Failure Montage: Two of them appear in the episode: one where Loki sees Victor spaghettified, and another of him failing to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains.
• Finishing Each Other's Sentences: Loki, having gone through this before, knows what Mobius is about to say when he takes over from O.B. and Casey, and modifies the upgrade for the system himself.
  Mobius: Better watch out, O.B.! Someone's coming—
  Loki: ...coming for your job!
• Five-Second Foreshadowing:
  • At one point while trying to stop Sylvie from killing He Who Remains, an exasperated Loki asks why the latter doesn't even try to fight back or stop her from doing the deed. Almost as if on cue, He Who Remains freezes Sylvie in her place, utterly stunning him.
    He Who Remains: Soooo... how long have you been going at this?
  • When Loki timeslips for the last time, he arrives just as Victor Timely completes his Temporal Aura scan and an automated voice says "Welcome, He Who Remains," foreshadowing that Loki is about to become the one who guards the timelines.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • During the first Failure Montage mentioned above, there are several shots of Victor without his helmet on, suggesting he was so rushed that he didn't have the time to don it.
  • The new edition of the TVA Handbook is now credited to both Ouroboros and Victor Timely.
  • There is a new jetski magazine on Mobius's desk featuring Brad Wolfe. Word Of God confirmed that he returned to his life on a timeline.
• Gilligan Cut: After being told that it could take decades or even centuries for Loki to learn all the knowledge that Ouroboros and Victor Timely know about physics, the episode cuts to black with a title card that reads "Centuries Later".
• Grand Finale: Confirmed to be such by Eric Martin.
• Groin Attack: Sylvie delivers one to Loki during their multiple sparring sessions in front of He Who Remains.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Loki spends most of the episode looping back in time to fix the Loom/save Victor Timely and stopping Sylvie from killing He Who Remains.
• Headdesk: Loki slams his head on the stairs railway after Victor is spaghettified for the umpteenth time.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Non-lethal variant. Loki condemns himself to an eternity of solitude as the new god of time so he can sustain the numerous branches of time and keep them from dying out.
• Hijacked by Ganon: The Loom turns out to be self-destructing and wiping out every timeline at once all due to the machinations of He Who Remains, who caused Loki's timeslipping to ensure that nothing can exist without He Who Remains himself and Loki would have no choice but to return to him.
• Hope Spot: An extended, particularly brutal one, where Loki and co.'s plan initial plan to save the Loom finally manages to succeed... only to find out it was All for Nothing because the branches just grow beyond the Loom's new capacity, and always will.
• I Have This Friend: Mobius tells the story of how a Hunter hesitated pruning an eight-year-old Variant that would ultimately go on to kill five thousand people and got Hunters killed because that one couldn't see the bigger picture:
  Mobius: Most purpose is more "burden" than "glory". And trust me, you never wanna be the guy who avoids it 'cause you can't live with the burden.
  Loki: How do you live with it?
  Mobius: Scar tissue.
• Irony: In "Heart of the TVA", Mobius attempted to pass off the responsibility of going out to try to fix the Temporal Loom off to Loki by noting that he already did it once, and that now it should be Loki's turn due to how the model figure they're using resembles him. In this episode, Loki ends up being the one to go out into the Temporal Radiation to become the Loom, over Mobius and Sylvie's initial objections.
• Literal Metaphor: The use of terms like "branches" and "pruning" to describe the multiverse becomes this when Loki shapes the multiverse into the form of an actual tree, specifically the World Tree Yggdrasil.
• Logo Joke: The Marvel Studios logo is played backwards.
• The Many Deaths of You: The first Failure Montage repeats Victor's death over, and over, and over, from various different angles.
• Meaningful Echo:
  • The first and last episode of the series are both titled "Glorious Purpose". In the first episode Loki tells anyone who will listen that ruling over others is the glorious purpose he is burdened with. In the finale, Loki chooses to sacrifice his happiness and accepts the burden of a truly glorious purpose — to become the guardian of all time across the multiverse.
  • In Thor, Loki's last line to Odin and Thor is "I could have done it! For you! For all of us!" in regards to his genocidal campaign to destroy Jotunheim. At the end of Loki, his last line to Sylvie and Mobius is "I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us." as he goes to save all worlds, all universes, instead.
  • In "The Nexus Event", the TVA punished Loki by sticking him in a time loop as torture — Lady Sif kneeing his crotch and then telling him that he deserves to be alone. In the finale, Loki is again caught in a time loop, only breaking that cycle by accepting that he must be alone.
• Motor Mouth: After having failed in many, many loops, Loki starts to talk very fast to buy himself and the others as much time as possible to save the Loom.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Loki's self-imposed burden of binding all timelines to himself (refashioning the multiversal timeline as a new Yggdrasil) is a more benign version of his fate in the original Norse Mythology. There, his punishment by the Aesir is to be bound by his son's entrails and is tormented by the dripping poison of a snake.
  • There is also, arguably, an element of Prometheus from Greek Mythology as well (who is bound to a rock and tormented by his liver being eaten — for stealing fire from the gods on behalf of humans). Loki, in essentially "stealing" multiversal potential (on behalf of all the living beings) from the bound Sacred Timeline of He Who Remains, has willingly taken on the burden of isolation for it.
• The Needs of the Many: Both Mobius and Loki were/are confronted with having to choose between one life and many.
  • Back when Mobius was a Hunter, he was unable to prune a child even when knowing that he would be responsible for the death of thousands. Ravonna had to step in to do it for him.
  • He Who Remains tells Loki that the only option going forwards other than letting the fail-safe in the Loom prune all branches is to kill Sylvie to prevent her from killing him. Loki is unable to do it and takes a third option.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The timeslipping ability that He Who Remains gave to Loki so that Loki would return back to him even if Sylvie kills him turns out to be potent enough for Loki to replace the function of the Loom itself, leaving He Who Remains to his fate.
• Noodle Incident: Judging by Loki's advice to Victor in the final loop that works, apparently Victor has failed in previous loops from improperly securing his suit, tripping on the first step outside, putting the Multiplier down where it rolls off, and not properly pressing the green button.
• Not the Intended Use: The true reason that the Loom overloads even after they install the throughput multiplier. Victor Timely calls it a "scaling" problem, which amuses He Who Remains; the Loom's true purpose is to maintain the Sacred Timeline by weaving the branches into a single timeline. If the branches grow too numerous for it to handle, it's designed to explode and wipe out all the branches as a last-resort. He reasoned that he could rebuild the TVA if it came to that, as it was preferable to variants of himself emerging.
• Other Me Annoys Me: While they never actually meet, He Who Remains is well aware of his variant Victor Timely, and he expresses a general contempt for the man and his inadequate solution for expanding the Loom — likely as Timely didn't seem to grasp that the Loom couldn't/wouldn't be able to expand despite having had decades to study the schematics of it.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Downplayed, but He Who Remains mocks Victor Timely's stutter when talking to Loki, essentially making fun of another version of himself.
• Precision F-Strike: The usually mild-mannered Mobius eventually loses his patience when Loki keeps behaving weirdly and orders O.B. and Casey around, suddenly knowing more than them.
  Mobius: What the shit are you doing?!
• Purpose-Driven Immortality: After mastering his timeslipping ability, Loki can do Mental Time Travel, making him effectively immortal. He asks Ouroboros how long it would take to learn everything he knows, who says it would take centuries. A Title In then says "CENTURIES LATER," and in the next scene Loki is shown to have a thorough understanding of the TVA with no signs of aging.
• Quizzical Tilt: In the reboot where Loki attempts to ask Miss Minutes to help fix the loom, Ravonna reacts this way to him making the request.
• The Reveal:
  • The Loom was created as a failsafe to protect the Sacred Timeline. In the event of an overload, the Loom explodes, destroying every branch timeline and taking the TVA with it.
  • He Who Remains is responsible for Loki's timeslipping. It is another fail-safe to show Loki what will happen and give him the chance to undo Sylvie killing He Who Remains.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Loki continually timeslips to find a version of events that will end with Victor alive and the Loom restored. It takes a lot of tries before he discovers that even getting it right will still lead to failure, as the Loom will never be able to handle infinite branching timelines.
• Significant Wardrobe Shift: Loki's TVA uniform transforms into his original Asgardian attire but without the gold trimmings, to symbolize how he is now burdened with the responsibility to keep the timelines together, but acknowledging that it is not a "glorious" purpose.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: The montage of Loki repeating Victor Timely's spaghettification is set to "A Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy.
• Tagline: The new TVA's tagline reads "We grow together".
• The Take: When Loki barges in on Miss Minutes and Ravonna's interrogation of Victor, saying he needs the former's help to finish the Throughput Multiplier faster, the camera cuts to Victor, Ravonna, and Miss Minutes all turning to look at Loki in surprised confusion—Ravonna tilting her head and Miss Minutes blinking with a cartoony sound effect.
• Take a Third Option: When Loki says that he wants to break the Loom, He Who Remains tells him that there are only two options: either he does this, which will lead to a multiversal war that will destroy everything, including the Sacred Timeline. Or Loki kills Sylvie, preventing her from killing He Who Remains and thus maintaining the Sacred Timeline and keeping the Loom from overloading. As Loki cannot accept either, he takes a third option, dissolving the Loom and taking it upon himself to maintain and protect the branches, becoming the Barrier Maiden for the multiverse.
• Tearful Smile: Loki smiles at Sylvie and Mobius with tears in his eyes before he goes into the Loom and sacrifices himself.
• This Is Gonna Suck: When Loki asks how long it would take to learn all the stuff O.B. knows, and is told centuries, he resigns himself to doing exactly that.
• Time Master: After what is implied to be millennia of practice, Loki's timeslipping evolves to the point that he can control time itself through thought alone, ultimately replacing the Temporal Loom and managing the infinite branches himself.
• Time Skip: O.B. informs Loki that it would take centuries for him to learn what he knows. Cut to a title card before the next scene:
  Centuries later
• Time Stands Still: He Who Remains freezes Sylvie when Loki asks why he never bothers defending himself. After a while, Loki becomes capable of doing the same.
• Title In: On a black background, the words "CENTURIES LATER" appear, during which Loki learns more about how he might be able to stop the Temporal Loom from exploding.
• Uncertain Doom: The last we see of Renslayer, she's stranded in the Void at the End of Time, where Alioth lurks in the distance.
• Visual Pun: Loki weaves the timelines into Yggdrasil, making them literal branches.
• Wham Shot: A little while after He Who Remains chastises Loki for not learning how to freeze time yet, he unfreezes Sylvie... only for Loki to raise his index finger and freeze her again.
  Loki: And what makes you think this is the first time we've had this conversation?
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The adult Victor Timely is not seen in the epilogue, though the focus on his past self not receiving the TVA manual implies that he was returned to his timeline. The new edition of the TVA Handbook is credited to both Ouroboros and Victor Timely, so it's possible he's still around somewhere in the TVA.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: After Loki ultimately saves / fully gives birth to The Multiverse...
  • B-15 now runs the TVA, reforming it into something of a democracy.
  • Miss Minutes is rebooted by O.B., although he's still uncertain that she won't try to kill them.
  • O.B. is now working upstairs with everyone and has co-written the second edition of the TVA guidebook together with Victor Timely.
  • Brad Wolfe returned to his timeline, and there is a jet ski magazine featuring him on Mobius's desk.
  • Mobius, after learning about his life on the Sacred Timeline, decides to leave the TVA and observe it for himself. Sylvie briefly joins him before setting off for parts unknown.
• World Tree: The branches that Loki has woven together look like Yggdrasil.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Past Mobius tells the story of how he hesitated to prune a Variant of a child who would grow up to kill 5,000 people, thus causing more Variants to pop up, even after Renslayer pruned him.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Despite Loki's best efforts to stop the Temporal Loom from being destroyed, it always ends with him failing, because there's no way to scale capacity for infinity. He only prevents this from happening when he chooses to sacrifice himself by destroying the Loom before it detonates and managing the branches himself.

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"I might just wait here for a little bit. Let time pass."