The following will dig into spoilers for Loki Season 2, so don’t keep reading if you don’t want to be ruined on the events of the season heading into the finale on Friday.
A lot has happened in Loki Season 2, some of which affecting the God of Mischief and his new powers, and some of which likely affecting all upcoming Marvel movies going forward. The TVA has been deemed an incredibly powerful and vital organization to the stability of all the universes in the MCU, and depending on what happens in the Loki season finale, we might see connections that set up Deadpool 3, the announced Avengers: The Kang Dynasty movie, and even the Fantastic Four movie (that’s sounding more and more like it’s going to take place in the past, and possibly in another universe). But a reference in episode five of Loki Season 2 had Marvel fans thinking about Avengers: Infinity War, though Loki head writer Eric Martin swears that wasn’t his intention.
There’s a moment near the end of Loki episode five where the important people in our hero’s life – Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Mobius (Owen Wilson), and O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) included – start to fade away. Their existence is pruned, and Loki watches helplessly as the characters… well, turn into temporal spaghetti, for lack of a better description. It looks like this:
To many Marvel fans, this effect resembled The Snap, which turned people into dust following Thanos’ triumph over the Avengers in Wakanda. Loki himself didn’t experience the Snap. He was dead by that point. And as it turns out, Loki writer Eric Martin wasn’t thinking about the Snap at all when he wrote this moment. In an exclusive interview with CinemaBlend, Martin told us:
I wasn't thinking about Infinity War at all, which maybe I should have. I don't know. I just approached it from a human standpoint, from the character’s standpoint. I wanted to see the emotion of it. Sylvie has finally found just some peace, and she's finding a life for herself. And it just falls apart before her eyes. It was all about that. That was the only thing I cared about in that scene, is just that the emotion of somebody who's been striving for a simple life, they get it, and it just blows away.
The two sequences have their desired effect. We feel the pain of loss, only with Loki, he’s immediately able to restore his friends once he manages to control his time slipping (a complicated process in the TVA), setting up some significant action in the season finale. From what we have been told, this will be the conclusion of this particular story, because Loki Season 3 isn’t in the cards. But the TVA has to be a significant part of the MCU story moving forward (it’s too powerful not to be), and I doubt we won’t see Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief (or God of Stories) in another Marvel movie or television show in the future.
