Don't Worry, Loki Season 2 Won't End On Another Cliffhanger
Cliffhanger endings in TV shows have always been stress-inducing, but they're especially so now that it's common to wait two years or more for the next season. Such was the case for "Loki," the third Marvel Studios series to launch exclusively on Disney+, which aired its season 1 finale back in July 2021 and finally returned for season 2 this month. That's a long time for Loki to wait in limbo, having broken the Sacred Timeline, set a Multiversal War in motion, and found himself in a version of the TVA where statues of He Who Remains are everywhere and no one remembers who Loki is.
"Loki" season 1 director Kate Herron told Variety that the cliffhanger ending wasn't originally part of the plan, saying the show had originally been approached as a miniseries. "As we got deeper into production, everyone was very happy, and obviously there's so much to explore with Loki," she explained. "It felt like we should continue the story. So I think the cliffhanger ending came in later in the process."
Whether or not there'll be a third season of "Loki" is less certain, and likely to be determined by how viewership shakes out over the rest of the current season. But in a recent interview with Deadline, executive producer Kevin Wright contradicted Herron's account somewhat, saying, "We always conceived of seasons 1 and 2 as a whole. That these are two chapters of the same book, and that season 2 is finishing that book." And because it's the final chapter of the book, the ending of "Loki" season 2 is designed to wrap the story up in a satisfying way: "I will say that it's not a cliffhanger."
The show that remains
"Loki" occupies a somewhat strange place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe canon. Though there was initially a lot of excitement among fans for the Disney+ expansion, after nine shows already released and half a dozen more in various stages of development, the MCU is starting to feel spread a little thin. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger has said that the TV shows "diluted focus and attention" and contributed to recent Marvel movies disappointing commercially.
One of those movies was "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," which brought back "Loki" actor Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror, a variant of He Who Remains. Kang was being set up as the next big bad, set to go up against the MCU's biggest heroes in "Avengers: The Kang Dynasty." However, the future now seems uncertain in the wake of "Quantumania" failing to break even at the box office, and Majors facing an ongoing court case on charges of harassment and assault.
After the first two episodes, it's hard to tell whether the book of "Loki" has potentially far-reaching consequences for the MCU, or whether it's a self-contained story. The threat of timelines being erased and billions of lives snuffed out has been raised, but it doesn't quite feel tangible. And if the Multiversal War does begin here, will "Loki" be treated as required homework for "The Kang Dynasty"?
"Nothing that I could say in the near future," was Wright's response when asked about how "Loki" might impact upcoming Marvel movies, though he did say that "the implications will ripple into other projects." As for the ending of season 2, he teases that "it'll be exciting and unexpected and everything people like about this show."
Hopefully that means the final shot will be Mobius riding into the sunset on a jetski.