Loki, season 2: the end of episode 4 explained

“Everything went wrong and now we have two episodes to make things right.”

Huge surprise and biblical cliffhanger! In the middle of season 2, Loki delivered a Dantesque twist that deserves some explanation. Spoiler alert!

At the end of episode 4, Loki and his gang failed to prevent the end of times and an apocalyptic explosion. They were blown away, despite the help of Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), not yet He Who Remains, not yet Kang. But even the founder of the TVA couldn’t stop the explosion from wiping out time and space. Disintegrated by abnormally high levels of temporal radiation. The temporal loom was unable to keep up with the rush of time and exploded before Loki’s horrified eyes, blown away in the process.

“It’s a game we’ve loved playing since season 1,” explains executive producer Kevin Wright in TVLine. “If you have a really cool story element that you want to tell, but it happens in the third act… Can’t we cut out the stuff in the middle to move it forward?”

He nevertheless specifies: “We wouldn’t have done that at the end of the series… But it seemed natural to us that it would happen at some point. So we decided to do it earlier. Firstly, because it’s a twist really shocking, which is always fun. And then it gives time in the last two episodes to explore the consequences and push the characters.”

Kevin Wright strongly suggests that Loki, Sylvie and the others will emerge alive from the catastrophic conclusion of episode 4. But how? In what forms? What versions of themselves?

“Everything went wrong and now we have two episodes to set things right and push these characters to their absolute limits. How are they going to overcome this? It allows us to go to some really deep and beautiful places.” In the process, the producer confirms that episodes 5 and 6 of Loki will include “a true exploration of what holds reality together” and will offer an answer to this central question of the MCU: “Loki can he become the best version of himself? What does that look like?”

The end will be November 9 on Disney Plus.