That is what I call sticking the landing. This is the most amazing episode of Loki I think anyone will have seen in a very, very long time, especially for a Marvel product.

It’s Loki Season 2 Episode 6, “Glorious Purpose.” Yeah, you got the name right. You heard what you thought you heard. It’s literally called the exact same name as episode one.

Bro, look, you and me, okay? I know you want to talk about this. I want to talk about this, and I’m excited, so let’s geek out together.

Centuries Later

The episode starts right where it left off. Loki’s back at the moment when Victor is going to go out to the device, walk the gangplank, the whole bit. And he begins to let that moment repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

His first thought is to ask O.B. What happened? Why did we fail? What has to be fixed? And O.B. goes, got to be faster. What could we have done differently? Good question. We took too long. So that’s the first thing he works on.

Little by little he begins to learn. It’s sort of a weird kind of, it’s not Groundhog Day, but he finally gets to a point where he realizes, okay, maybe I need to understand this technology better, and get this going quicker, so that we have what we need sooner. So he has a conversation with O.B. at one point, and he’s like, how long would it take you to teach me everything I need to know about this? And O.B. goes, centuries. And he’s like, okay.

Then the words come up on the screen: centuries later.

It reminded me of that episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor spends like a billion years in this one place, just dying and dying and dying, learning and getting better and smarter, the whole bit, until he figures out what’s going on. This is exactly that. Loki learns and studies and understands everything, to the point that he’s able to get there much sooner for Victor to have the thing.

And they succeed. Finally, they succeed. They shoot the thing, it goes off, the Loom starts getting bigger. Then all of a sudden the readings indicate it’s growing again.

The issue is, how do you wrap up infinity? The timelines will branch infinitely. You can’t scale the Loom infinitely, right? Or so you think.

Going Back to Sylvie

So Loki comes to this thought process in his own head. I’ve got to go earlier. I’ve got to stop this all from happening at all, because there’s no way.

He goes back to when Sylvie killed He Who Remains, and he’s there long, because he keeps trying to do it the long way around. He keeps trying to reason with her and talk to her. So they fight, and they fight, and all it comes down to is her saying over my dead body, or something to that effect, I’m going to kill him, something along those lines. It gets to the point that Loki even looks bored. He just knows exactly where her moves are going to be.

And then he gets to a place where he has the ability to kill her. He doesn’t.

The Loki Who Remains

This is when we have an interesting conversation. It’s between He Who Remains and, I’m going to call him, the Loki who remains.

At first He Who Remains is talking down to Loki. He’s like, look, I get it, you’re doing this and this, you have the time slipping, the whole thing, blah blah blah. Who do you think set that up? Who do you think did this? Who do you think did the other? Listen, go through this a few thousand times and then we’ll have a conversation.

And that’s when Loki, very Matrix style, shows up and stops time. “What makes you think this is the first time we’ve had this conversation?”

At which point you see He Who Remains go, okay, let’s talk. They have a conversation a little more in depth about what’s required, and it all boils down to this: he has to do the hard thing. And we all believe, watching the show, that the hard thing is killing Sylvie.

He has a moment with Sylvie at the moment of unraveling, and he’s starting to come to terms with some things. Sometimes it’s okay to destroy something if there’s a hope that you can replace that thing with something better.

Walking the Gangplank Himself

Then finally he shows up when they first open the door. He says his somewhat goodbyes, opens up the chamber door, and starts walking the gangplank himself, because he’s ready to unleash holy hellfire.

As he’s going, his clothes are ripping the same way they did with Mobius. But something else is forming. He’s got this cape, cloak, scarf thing. His crown appears, with the horns. He is Loki at his most triumphant, and it’s unbelievable.

That was exciting for me. Not to mention the fact that he’s got the outfit, you know, the one from the comic books, which is a whole other thing. They loosely adapt pieces of that, and I’m totally fine with it.

The whole thing of him bringing the branches back together, and you see all the branches like a web. Oh, this was a symphony. This was a symphony. And when it reached the end, he became Yggdrasil, the tree of life. He became his own Norse thing, with the multiverse in it as its branches.

Very cool. Very cool.

The Name Drop

I also love the fact that they name drop a variant of He Who Remains. I guess one of them caused a little bit of a ruckus on a 616 adjacent realm, but they handled it, so we’re all good for now. That’s all we can ask for.

That’s Ant-Man. That’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. That’s what that is. So that’s finally confirming that the Kang we saw there was strictly a variant of He Who Remains, and I’m like, okay.

Best as I can tell, the TVA’s new task is helping to build a stronger multiverse. Their job is to fight and face off with variants of He Who Remains, Kang the Conqueror, whatever.

The Verdict

Loki Season 2 Episode 6, “Glorious Purpose,” is a 10 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.

Come on, guys, do you have to ask? This was unbelievable. Mrs. Know-It-All, by the way, also gave it a 10.

It was poetry. It was cinema. There were shots that I don’t expect to see in a Marvel series, or in a TV series at all, that were utter, utter cinema, and film, and beautiful. There were these shots where people are talking and they did this framed-up head shot, and they’re just there, talking and emoting, and you’re just like, wow. It’s crazy to me.

I thought the cinematography was brilliant, and I’m super excited for what this could mean. Be looking for my non-spoiler review of The Marvels, as well as my spoiler review of it later in the weekend.

Your turn. Tell me exactly what you think about this episode, because I’m dying to talk about it as much as I know you are. Seriously, tell me how you felt seeing the crown and the horns come back, and tell me what you thought of the cinematography. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.