Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as Loki from the film series, starring alongside Sophia Di Martino (Sylvie), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Renslayer), Wunmi Mosaku (Hunter B-15), Eugene Cordero, Tara Strong (Miss Minutes), Neil Ellice, Jonathan Majors, and Owen Wilson (Mobius) reprising their roles from the first season, alongside Rafael Casal, Kate Dickie, Liz Carr, and Ke Huy Quan.
Changing his strategy to wanting to prevent the Sacred Timeline from branching, Loki time slips to the moment before Sylvie kills He Who Remains.
Loki destroys the Loom, magically rejuvenates the dying timelines and rearranges them into a tree-like structure with himself at the center, committing himself to oversee the branches of the multiverse alone at the End of Time.
After Loki's actions, the TVA accepts the infinite timeline branches and now tracks He Who Remains's variants, with Mobius reporting that one of them has been stopped at Earth-616's "adjacent realm".
Development on a second season of Loki had begun by November 2020,[1] which was confirmed through a mid-credits scene in the first-season finale, which was released in July 2021.
Wright also credited the idea of time loops to editor Paul Zucker and stated that the final scene in the episode had deviated from the original script.
The creative team held numerous meetings deciding how sequences of Loki destroying the Loom and ascending to the citadel's throne would be written.
[9] Meanwhile, Wright interpreted Mobius's scene in Ohio as him "overcoming a personal obstacle" and expanded upon Martin's sentiment by saying that Loki had helped provide him with opportunities beyond his TVA life.
As such, Kevin Wright decided to stop filming and reconvene with the production team, during which Hiddleston had discussed possible ideas with the script supervisor and was able to rework the scene with the writers and Jonathan Majors.
[15] Visual effects for the episode were created by Trixter, Framestore, Rising Sun Pictures, Industrial Light & Magic, Cantina Creative, FuseFX and Lola VFX.
[13]: 55:21–55:35 [16] The idea for Loki to weave the multiverse into the shape of Yggdrasil had emerged in January 2023, with the post-production team spending seven months working on the scene.
Hughes praised directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead "having broken Loki free from conventional Marvel storytelling" by getting "abstract, obtuse, glorious" and "genuinely weird", by letting Loki rescue the timelines and "seize a throne for himself—in the most beautiful possible way", as the overseer of the timeline tree, "a truly mythical act, transcending plot in service of raw, emotionally affecting story".
[22] Gizmodo's Sabina Graves wrote that this season finale sees Loki having "his destiny fulfilled" as "everything falls into place".
Loki initially refusing to approach the Loom himself and having Timely repeatedly do it showed his character growth, wrote Graves, as he was "selflessly trying to change everyone's fate without stepping in".
[24] Vulture's Siddhant Adlakha rated the episode 2 stars out of 5, as it has "some grand ideas", but is "burdened by a reliance on symbolism without meaning, and on plot mechanics without a human core."
The underlying problem of Loki season two arises from the Temporal Loom, wrote Adlakha, as it is "a device theoretically representative of the dilemma between one timeline and many — between determinism and free will — but it's only ever treated as a machine"; then when Loki saves the timelines, their portrayal as "enormous strings" fails to properly convey "what they represent in terms of people saved, or life lived".
Club, Space.com and Vulture interpret Loki's shifting of the timelines into a tree-like structure as a reference to Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of life.