Does Marvel's Loki Season 2 Finale Leave Room For Season 3?
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 2 finale of "Loki."
Burdened with glorious purpose, indeed. The messy, frantic, but constantly entertaining second season of "Loki" came to a thrilling close last night ... and probably not in a way that anyone could've expected. After spending almost an entire season building up the importance of Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) and emphasizing their mission to fix the finicky temporal loom, the finale all but threw those red herrings out the window in favor of a much more character-focused and deeply satisfying conclusion to Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) emotional quest to find meaning. After realizing that he could opt for another way around He Who Remains' false dichotomy from last season's cliffhanger, which suggested that either the timelines remain under the Time Variance Authority's prune-happy control forever or devolve into complete and utter chaos, Loki made the ultimate sacrifice to essentially become the loom himself. And with one final montage of all our main characters at various stages of peace, the series seemed to bring things to a definitive end.
But wait — can that really be it? For a series that felt like the most natural way to tease their grand multiversal plan, would it make any sense not to forge ahead with a third season? And, more to the point, would another timeline-jumping adventure even be worth it, especially after how smoothly the creative team landed this plane and avoided the typical Disney+ problem of a lackluster ending?
Fans are probably bursting with such questions right now, and so are we. Luckily, various "Loki" writers have already gone on the record about plans for what might come next. But now that we've seen the finale for ourselves, perhaps it's worth exploring whether there's even room for a potential season 3.
'A full and complete story across those two seasons'
Okay, it's one thing for us viewers to idly speculate about the future of "Loki," but what about the actual filmmakers in charge of this season? Thankfully, the writers and other members of the creative team have been surprisingly forthright about their original plans for how this series would unfold. Their comments may, in fact, surprise you.
We previously covered comments by executive producer Kevin Wright, who said, "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." Sounds pretty definitive! Of course, that doesn't necessarily rule out the idea of simply adding more chapters to keep the good times rolling. In an interview with CinemaBlend, head writer Eric Martin added even more fuel to the fire that season 2 of "Loki" might be all that's in the cards. As he explained using the exact same metaphor, "We approached this as like two halves of a book. Season one, first half. Season two, we close the book on Loki and the TVA. Where it goes beyond that, I don't know. I just wanted to tell a full and complete story across those two seasons."
In all honesty, I'd say they succeeded in telling what felt like a mostly self-contained adventure. Impressively, "Loki" kept its own main characters as the primary focus at all times, as opposed to forcing crossover teases and distracting cameos to lay breadcrumbs for future installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — even though Kang is obviously meant to play a bigger role in things to come. So the question naturally becomes: Do we even need a "Loki" season 3?
Ending on a high note
Let's take stock of where "Loki" leaves all these fan-favorite characters.
Loki, of course, has now found the ultimate expression of glorious purpose as a man fully out of time, literally holding together the timelines — even if this heroic act doesn't exactly come with much glory. But our last lingering look at his face suggests that he's now found a semblance of the peace and search for meaning that he so desperately sought throughout the show. Mobius (Owen Wilson), meanwhile, has finally decided to leave the TVA altogether and witness his old life on the timeline. His last wistful statement to simply take a moment and let time pass for a change feels awfully touching for someone who defined his existence by his commitment to the TVA's misguided principles. And as for Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), she's finally free of various authority figures who tried to control every step she made. Now, she's able to do what she most wanted all along and find a comforting life on the timeline.
Taken together, it's an unexpectedly poignant end for all of these heroes, especially for a studio that rarely allows such conclusive statements for its characters. Not since Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) left behind his friends to live out a life with Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) in "Avengers: Endgame" has Marvel delivered such a bittersweet and (relatively) unambiguous ending. Forget about the upcoming movies and the multiverse ramifications and all that other franchise-building noise. For these specific characters, it feels fairly obvious that their roles in the story could easily be considered done. After all they've been through, haven't they earned the ending they chose for themselves?
For Marvel's sake, let's hope they understand the power of ending on a high note.