This week on Loki, something really important happened. We’re not sure what it was, exactly, but the cliffhanger that we got at the end of Season 2, Episode 4 is the kind of thing that could shake up the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. It could also mean nothing, like most everything else in the post-Endgame MCU. In the meantime, though, we have many questions that need to be addressed.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 4.
There are two core plot threads in this episode, which takes us back to the Time Variance Authority HQ after we spent last week in 19th-century Chicago. The primary thread involves Loki and Mobius bringing Victor Timely to the TVA–a risky move considering that a different version of Victor used to run the place, but the hope is that he will be able to help deal with the Temporal Loom, which is still unstable.
Meanwhile, Miss Minutes and Renslayer end up at the end of time with the corpse of He Who Remains, and Renslayer learns some pretty important lore: that she fought alongside He Who Remains in the multiversal war, and then he erased Renslayer’s memory afterward. He refers to the memory erasure as Protocol 42, indicating it’s something that happens regularly for everyone who works at the TVA.
This revelation, along with some nudging from Miss Minutes, gives Renslayer a new idea: Forget He Who Remains, Victor, Kang, and all the rest of them, and just take control of things herself. So she tries to recruit General Dox and her hunters to her cause (they’re imprisoned for destroying timelines in Episode 2), promising new lives on the timeline if they do what Renslayer says. But General Dox and her troops aren’t into it–except for Hunter X-05. Renslayer kills the rest using that shrinking box thing from last week, and X-05 goes full baddie. Or did he? We’ll come back to that.
Loki and Mobius return to Ouroboros to see how things are going with the Temporal Loom (still bad), and they introduce him to Victor. And it’s here where we learn something surprising: that OB had originally derived all the TVA’s tech from Victor’s writings. Which is the darndest thing, really, because Victor’s writings are based on the TVA field manual that OB wrote.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much time to ponder this paradox, because the Temporal Loom is about to break down, and they need somebody to go back out into the time stream and fix it. Victor volunteers to be the one, and he puts on one of those big bomb suits that Mobius wore in the season premiere–but the temporal radiation destroys him as soon as he steps outside.
There’s nothing more they can do after that, so Loki, Mobius, and OB just stand there and watch the Temporal Loom explode, after which the episode cuts to black.
That’s a pretty big cliffhanger right there, and we’ve got about a million questions we’re dying to ask about it. Fortunately, we should get some answers in just a week, but in the meantime let’s ponder the mysteries. Here’s our biggest questions after the massive Loki cliffhanger.