Loki
Loki Laufeyson
Series · Phase 4
Loki
2021 · 47 min
The Loki who escaped with the Tesseract in Endgame's 2012 detour is arrested by the Time Variance Authority within minutes, informed his entire life was written for him, and offered a job. The first…
The Multiverse SagaDisney+87%Released
The story
The Loki who escaped with the Tesseract in Endgame's 2012 detour is arrested by the Time Variance Authority within minutes, informed his entire life was written for him, and offered a job. The first season is a buddy procedural about a narcissist being deprogrammed by a mild-mannered bureaucrat with a Jet Ski catalogue.
Season two abandons the mystery for something stranger and better: a man trying to hold a dying machine together while time itself spaghettifies around him. It ends with Loki choosing to become the load-bearing beam of the multiverse, which is the only satisfying ending any MCU Disney+ series has managed.
Key facts
- Release date
- 9 Jun 2021
- Status
- Released
- Phase
- Phase 4
- Saga
- The Multiverse Saga
- Runtime
- 47 min
- Certificate
- TV-14
- Director
- Kate Herron, Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
- Writers
- Michael Waldron, Eric Martin
- Seasons
- 2
- Episodes
- 12
- Streaming
- Disney+
- Timeline placement
- Outside time, at the TVA — branching from 2012 during Endgame's time heist
Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Tom Hiddleston | Loki |
| Owen Wilson | Mobius M. Mobius |
| Sophia Di Martino | Sylvie |
| Gugu Mbatha-Raw | Ravonna Renslayer |
| Jonathan Majors | He Who Remains / Victor Timely |
| Ke Huy Quan | Ouroboros |
Characters
Sylvie
Sylvie Laufeydottir
Mobius M. Mobius
Mobius M. Mobius; on Earth, Don
Kang the Conqueror
Nathaniel Richards
Easter eggs
- The TVA's design, Miss Minutes and the orientation films are built out of mid-century American corporate animation, with Tara Strong voicing Miss Minutes.
- Throg — Thor as a frog — is visible in a jar in the TVA's archive, from Walt Simonson's Thor run.
- The Void's landscape is littered with a Thanos Copter from a 1979 comic, Yellowjacket's helmet, a Sanctum and a crashed Statue of Liberty.
- Alioth, the storm-creature guarding the Void, is a Kang antagonist from Avengers: The Terminatrix Objective.
- Richard E. Grant's Classic Loki wears the comic-accurate green-and-gold with the tall horned headdress, and his final act quotes Loki's comics death.
- Alligator Loki and Kid Loki are both pulled from Marvel's actual back catalogue, Kid Loki from Journey into Mystery.
- Sylvie's origins as an Enchantress variant tie her to Amora, and the show keeps her Asgardian roots deliberately vague.
- The Citadel at the End of Time and He Who Remains reframe Kang the Conqueror through a variant, seeded here two years before Quantumania.
Trivia
- It was the first Marvel Disney+ series renewed for a second season, announced before the first had finished airing.
- The TVA's retro-institutional look was shot on Kodak film stock with anamorphic lenses to avoid the flat digital look of other MCU shows.
- Tom Hiddleston is credited as an executive producer and was involved in the writers' room.
- Natalie Holt became the first woman to score a Marvel Studios project, building the theme around a theremin.
- Owen Wilson's Mobius was written specifically for him and he was the first choice.
- Season two was directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who went on to direct much of Daredevil: Born Again.
- Ke Huy Quan joined as Ouroboros months after winning his Academy Award for Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Reviews
Critics
87%
Loki's ambitious sci-fi worldbuilding and the easy chemistry between Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson make it one of the MCU's most rewarding television experiments.
The MarvelGossips verdict
Two seasons that improve as they go and land the franchise's best ending — a genuine sacrifice with genuine cost, played without a single quip. Sylvie remains underserved, and season one spends too long withholding information the audience worked out in episode two. Hiddleston has never been better in the role than in the final twenty minutes.
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Loki Season 2 Ending Explained: The God Of Stories, The Broken Loom And What Loki Actually Became
Loki does not fix the Temporal Loom. He destroys it and replaces it with himself. Here is what the God of Stories…
What Is the TVA For Now? The Time Variance Authority's Post-Loki Job Description
The agency lost its purpose, its god and its machine in the space of two seasons — then showed up in a Deadpool…
The TVA Set Design Decoded: Every Hidden Detail In Loki's Retro-Bureaucratic Nightmare
Brutalist concrete, 1970s office furniture and an animated clock with a Southern accent. The TVA is the MCU's…
Frequently asked
Is Loki's ending the best in the MCU's TV output?
It is the most widely praised. Loki takes He Who Remains' place at the loom, becoming the multiverse's living support structure — a resolution with real finality, which almost no other Marvel series has attempted.
Does Loki still matter after Kang was dropped?
Yes, structurally. The series established the multiverse, branch timelines and the TVA, all of which Avengers: Doomsday depends on. Tom Hiddleston is confirmed in the Doomsday cast.
Which Loki is this?
The 2012 variant who grabbed the Tesseract during Endgame's Battle of New York heist. He has not experienced Thor: The Dark World, Ragnarok or Infinity War, and learns his own death from a TVA file.
Will there be a Loki season 3?
Marvel has not announced one, and the writers have described the second-season finale as a conclusion. Hiddleston has said he considers the arc complete while leaving the door open.