In the age of streaming where buzz is arguably more important than ever in the social media era, it’s a testament to how deep Loki sunk its hooks into audiences everywhere that fans are still analyzing and dissecting every frame of the show, almost two weeks after the Season 1 finale.
For the most part, the biggest shows on TV tend to fade from the public consciousness almost as soon as the last episodes of a particular season are over, but this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re talking about, so the time traveling adventures of Tom Hiddleston’s beloved God of Mischief were always going to linger on a little longer.
One of the major surprises in an episode full of them came right at the very end, when Sophia Di Martino’s Sylvie hastily ejected Loki from the Citadel at the End of Time before following through with her revenge plot and murdering He Who Remains. Whether by accident or design, she sent him into a completely different reality, one where a statue of Kang the Conqueror took pride of place in TVA headquarters, and not the Time Keepers.
In a new interview, director Kate Herron explained the significance of the moment, as well as her interpretation of what it could mean now that she’s just a fan like the rest of us after confirming a couple of weeks back that Season 2 would have somebody else behind the camera.
“So the way I see it in my head is that the TVA exists outside of space and time, but reality and everything as we understood it has completely changed in the last few minutes. With the multiverse branching, how do we know the TVA still exists in that way? We don’t know, and I suppose that’s a big question that will be answered as the show goes on. But in my head, the intention is that Sylvie thinks she’s sending him back to the TVA, but because of the way time and branches are crossing each other outside the window, Loki has unfortunately been sent back somewhere very different. So reality has shifted just by the nature of what He Who Remains said, and the idea is that he’s in this alternate TVA now.”
It’s interesting to think that Sylvie may have believed the TVA was immune to the multiversal madness, so she just thought Loki would end up back where he started, in the loving bromantic arms of jet ski enthusiast Mobius, but it wasn’t to be.
