Warning: Spoilers for the Loki season 2 finale to be found within.
It’s fair to say, in the battle of the competing Marvel releases, the Loki season 2 finale definitely beat The Marvels in terms of ringing the most tears out of its audience. While the Captain Marvel sequel was mostly a fun and breezy ride, Loki‘s possible final episode ever left us concerned we’ve just seen the last of the Asgardian anti-hero in the MCU.
In case you’ve somehow missed all spoilers for the finale, basically Loki’s now stuck in a tree for the rest of time. Or, to put it another way, Tom Hiddleston’s trickster elected to make what Captain America would call “the sacrifice play” and became the new God of Time, or He Who Remains, to maintain and oversee the multiverse, thereby saving reality but condemning himself to a long, long, life of loneliness.
It’s a tragic ending for a character who has come to find himself a family and a new (glorious) purpose across Loki‘s two seasons, although you have to hand it to the writers as they’ve clearly been planning this out for a while. On top of Loki’s ending serving as a mind-blowing callback to his comic book origins, the season 2 finale brings things full circle in another way too by revealing a memorable cameo from season 1 was a subtle bit of foreshadowing all along.
In season 1’s fourth episode, Jaimie Alexander returned as Lady Sif for a scene in which Loki became trapped in a bad memory — the time that Sif whaled on him after he cut off her hair as a prank. A furious Sif declared, “You deserve to be alone, and you always will be.” In the context of this episode, her words forced Loki to realize that being alone is actually his greatest fear. This is something reiterated in season 2, episode 5 when he admits to Sylvie that the real reason he wants to save the TVA is so he can have his friends back.
In the wake of the season 2 finale, however, Sif’s words seem more like a curse. Thanks to his new occupation, Loki is indeed alone and “always will be.” Although perhaps Loki got his own back with a little prophetic curse of his own. The side of her hair that he cut off? It’s from her left — Sif later lost her left arm in Thor: Love and Thunder. Clearly, Asgardian gods shouldn’t have spats as they could suffer the consequences for all time, always.