[WARNING – Spoilers for the Loki Season 2 Finale, and of the series, Ahead. Watch the S2 Finale then come back!]

In the grand scheme of the MCU, or just the current phase of the ongoing stories, Loki has been an unexpectedly fun watch, and probably the best of all the Disney+ offerings. Not really knowing what to expect at first, other than getting to watch Tom Hiddleston be his best as the trickster god, what we got was an almost total departure from the black and white nature of the superhero genre for a more nuanced character breakdown. Yes, we’re still in the Marvel universe, and Kang The Conqueror gets set up for Ant-Man and to be the next big-bad, and there are still stakes, but by the end of the finale where I had to reckon with everything I just absorbed, the phrase “Burdened With Glorious Purpose” would end up meaning a whole lot more to me than some catchy throwaway line by the bad guy.

Over the course of 12 episodes, the post-Avengers variant Loki takes his own path toward not necessarily discovering how to be a hero like Thor, but coming to the conclusions of what it takes to be the god he has countlessly professed to be. What is “Glorious Purpose” exactly? Why does Loki always say he is burdened by it? If there is one point that multiple key characters make over the finale, there is nothing glorious about purpose. Those two words have been repeated time and time again, whether mockingly by Owen Wilson’s Mobius in the TVA’s interrogation room, by He Who Remains at the End Of Time, or by our title character, whether we’re hearing them spoken with pride and ego, then with confusion and contemplation.

We get to revisit each of those points through the time-slipping plot device introduced in Season 2, after Loki “prunes” himself from the flow of regular time. While I might have thought that each of the key characters had more to say than what we’d gotten, only after Loki hits them with a sort of “cheat code of knowing” and we get remixed dialogue in return do we really get to see the weight “purpose” gives each that we click into, and sympathize a bit more, right along with our main character as he desperately tries to find a way to subvert the destruction of his new companions.

The TVA is burdened by it in having to keep the sacred timeline pure, killing anything and anyone that doesn’t fit the designs specified from who knows where. He Who Remains is burdened by it by keeping the TVA in operation, knowingly annihilating countless lives so a somehow larger body count doesn’t occur by the hands of Kang’s other variants, and no matter how we perceive him, from how we catch the lone survivor of the previous timeline wars in his quieter moments, it does not sound like it is his first choice. Even Sylvie drops her take, in that even if it is a bigger burden for all should the infinitely spreading multiverses to exist, it should be each variant’s choice to make those individual lives work, even if they face ruin in the end.

In his decisions by the end, I’m reminded of the vain sacrifice made to protect Thor and the surviving Asgardians from Thanos’s onslaught in “Infinity War”. For the sake of who he believed in, though not purely in a heroic sense, it was the burden that he saw needed to be taken, whether or not realizing this. We see that calculated choice made again here in a way that not only allows his friends to freely choose how to live their lives, but reconfigures how the TVA works going forward into the rest of the MCU’s Phase 5, allowing for any number of stories to exist simultaneously with Kang, pending Jonathan Majors’s ongoing legal troubles, in the villain role or any other that might threaten Earth’s mightiest heroes.

By bringing Loki’s famous phrase the centerpiece to dissect in the finale, we get a surprisingly satisfying conclusion to the Norse God’s character arc in the series, and with it commentary on the concept of purpose, glorious or not.

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