Season 2 of ‘Loki’, featuring our favorite cunning trickster, is inching closer towards its final episode.
The latest episode has finally given us a glimpse of the hows, whens, wheres, and whys of Loki has time-skipping powers.
Tom Hiddleston’s eccentric trickster first began time-slipping in the early moments of Season 2’s Episode 1, and since then it didn’t make any sense how was he able to do it.
The game changed in the final moments of Episode 5 as the show’s second season approached its last episode.
Loki and time-slipping
In the closing moments of Loki Season 2, Episode 5, the destruction of the TVA spreads to the branches, eventually consuming everything and everyone except for Loki himself.
In a moment of anguish and isolation, Loki time-skips back to just before the desolation, which leads him to reveal to OB that the trick to mastering his time-skipping lies in the ‘who’.
While that might seem confusing at first glance, an earlier discussion with Sylvie along with a quick look back at Episode 1 gives some key insights that tie it all together.
Motive
In a bar on Sylvie’s branched timeline, she asks Loki what it is he really wants. While Loki initially offers that he wants to stop He Who Remains and then save the ailing TVA, Sylvie draws out of him his true motivation: he wants to save his friends.
Ultimately, he just doesn’t want to be alone.
Can Loki save TVA?
Well now joining the puzzles together, it can be said that he might as Loki was seen doing his first-ever timeslip back in Episode 1.
When he then goes to pursue Mobius and skips back into the past, he ends up skipping directly into the room with the future Mobius, once more finding the friend he was seeking.
Ultimately, Loki’s ability to jump through time stems from the connection he has to the people around him, which enables him to—as OB mentions—do what should be impossible.
The how and why are both answered in the who: Loki’s friends and his connection to them are what enable him to move through time and space to do whatever it takes to save them.
How Will Loki rewrite the story?
Before he left the versions of his friends that he’d found on the timeline, Loki tells OB he’s going to “change the story.”
What could he be planning? The answer to that likely lies in the moment he skipped back to. Just before the episode abruptly ends, Loki slips back to the final minutes of Episode 4, where he stands at the top of the stairs leading out towards the Temporal Loom.
The finale of Season 2 of Loki premieres at 9 p.m. EST next week on Thursday, November 9.
