Glorious purpose

Loki Season 2 — 4/5

The current Marvel discourse has been interesting to watch. "A few relative failures and the whole thing's doomed." My friends, it has always had bad parts. There have always been mediocre parts. My preferred Marvel Universe ethos was laid out at the entrance, at the end of the first Iron Man. "Hey, what if we introduce the Avengers?"—ie, let's say something aloud and see if someone can make something out of it later. It was throwing out threads. Here's a character, here's a line, here's a motivation. Let's see what happens. And the beauty of these movies has been when all of those threads seem to so intentionally collide in moments like Captain America finally saying "Avengers Assemble" in Endgame. And bros? My dudes? My ride-or-dies? Number one movie-going experience I've ever been a part of. There's a type of storytelling experience that is only achievable through longform storytelling. It's the feeling of things coming together; threads crossing over and under and through the years to lead to moments that feel like magic. It's the feeling of being rewarded. In exchange—sometimes those moments go nowhere. Sometimes it's just a loose thread, a false story to follow. I think the lie of the Marvel Universe is how much of it is planned versus how much they've just flown by the seat of their pants and hoped someone could make sense of it. And of course the more they get it "wrong," the more pressure there is to step in and make that plan more solid—less random, less chaotic; less open. Fortunately, Loki was finished before that conversation stepped up it's PR campaign because wow, what a fucking ending to a character. Loki gets his throne he no longer wanted; only through understanding the burden of the crown can one wear it. Loki ascends from the God of Lies to the God of Stories, not weaving them like Anansi but holding each creation up as worthy of being told. Each tangent, each breach, each variation leaves room for being worthwhile. He is Atlas of the libary, carrying our stories on his shoulders, cataloguing all of the books on the shelves without passing judgement on their contents. He is the firmament that all can stand on, free to move. From villain to anti-hero to Marvel's greatest hero—the series' final episode is the end result of all these tangents, these random lines and images, coming together to make something that we never saw coming, that all fits with what we've seen; the throne he thought he deserved; the only person he could love enough to become a hero for ended up being himself (in a way). As Marvel is busy learning another lesson about best-laid plans, here is the antithesis to that: as Sylvia and Loki both understand, the more calculated the Sacred Timeline—the more calculated the Marvel Universe becomes—the less we want it. The show had a decent amount of flaws in getting here, particularly in not making things clear when they could have been more easily explained, but the emotional resonance it earns in that final episode, the threads it weaved and tied together—again, there is a type of storytelling experience that is only achievable through longform storytelling, and here it is again. As long as the possibility of that exists, I'll keep signing on for more.