Did literally everyone just die in ‘Loki’?

This article contains spoilers for Loki season 2, episode 4

Huh. Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen. For the last few weeks of Loki, not all has been well over at the TVA, what with an explosion of timelines overheating the Temporal Loom. Fortunately, there was a solid plan in place: use Victor Timely’s aura to unlock the doors and then quickly expand its capabilities, averting disaster.

This week all the pieces of the plan fell into place, with Timely himself volunteering to brave the temporal radiation and repair the loom. The heroic music rises, the blast doors open and… well, let’s just say he’s now He Who LoMeins (thank you twennyjaun).

The temporal loom went boom, the characters stared into the oncoming time explosion in despair, the screen went white and… roll credits?

What just happened?

As explained by O.B., the loom refines raw time into timelines, which includes the Sacred Timeline that TVA has worked so hard to protect. The reason it’s overloading is because the branching timelines that resulted from the death of He Who Remains created multiple timelines, producing more raw time than the loom could handle. Kaboom.

Without the loom there is nothing refining raw time, likely meaning the number of alternative realities is going to increase chaotically with absolutely nothing to stop it. Nobody knows what this could mean on a wider scale, though the multiverse spiraling out of control for good certainly opens the door for some fun stories.

An explanation is all well and good, but what about the characters caught in the blastwave?

Is everyone dead?

Maybe? Let’s face it though, this is episode 4 of 6, so unless the rest of this season is going to be a white screen and silence, something is going to happen next week. The show gave us no mid or post-credit teases, but our theory is that blast will scatter the cast throughout time, perhaps even returning them to where they were before they were involved with the TVA.

For Loki this would mean he’s suddenly back in the Gobi desert just after the events of the Battle of New York, Sylvie could be back in her version of Asgard as a child, and the various TVA agents would be resuming their old lives before their memory was wiped (maybe Mobius will finally get to ride that jet ski?).

Given that the story must continue, they will probably still have their memories of all that happened, even if they’ll have no easy way of contacting one another without the TVA’s timeline-hopping tech.

This is just a theory, though, and Loki is clearly willing to surprise and shock viewers. For the real answers, we’ll just have to wait until episode 5 next week.