LOKI Season 2 Episode 4 Breakdown | Ending Explained, Easter Eggs, Trailer Theories & Review

Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show. I’m your host, Paul, and in this video, we’re breaking down Loki.

LOKI SEASON 2 EPISODE 4 ENDING EXPLAINED

After that jaw-dropping ending, we have a lot to talk about, and in this video, we’re going to be going through it all. It’s packed with Easter eggs, hidden details, and a lot of other things throughout that make this one of the biggest episodes in the show’s history.

Throughout this video, we’re going to go through it all, but make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s video.

Now the first thing we have to talk about is that amazing ending scene that completely pulls the rug out from underfoot. In it, we see Victor Timely heading to the temporal loom to finally fix it and save the TVA. As we learn throughout the episode, the radiation is way worse than it was with Mobius, and this constantly wipes out as soon as the doors open.

This leads to the timeline completely exploding, destroying the TVA, and ending the episode. So what the hell is going on? Well, that takes us into our immediate theory time, theory time, for all time.

There are a number of things going on here that I want to talk about and directions that I think could be heading in the show.

Firstly, we need to talk about what things originally seemed like they were going to be, which involved things centred around the bootstrap paradox. In that, a scientist discovers a book that details how a person can build a time machine. They do this and then travel back and leave themselves the book, and the cycle continues on for eternity. I know I’ve talked about this a lot before in other breakdowns, but we kind of need to outline it to talk about what happens here.

We’ve seen what initially appeared to be the paradox at play with he who remains getting Ravonna to leave himself the book. Over time, it was thought this would eventually create himself, and it’s still possible that this is the case.

Now the first possibility is that this was all a mistake and Victor Timely wasn’t supposed to die here, but they left things too late. This now means that there’ll be no one who remains, and someone still must carry the burden of sitting in his spot. The cycle is now broken, and from here on out, there’s no set rule for how this is going to go.

The council of kangs will continue their work, and one of them will probably come out on top. It’s in Kang’s nature to never have a partner, so they’ll wittle themselves down until there’s just one left.

This could possibly lead us into a story based on Agent of Asgard in which an older version of Loki ruled over everything. After heading into a white void, a young loki encountered him, and it was revealed that he’d ruled over everything.

Now I feel like this could possibly be the case with Loki taking the role from the one who remains. When we look at the show, he also starts to see that he was right and that it’s better to be in control than to let the chaos run wild.

Now the other possibility is that there’s actually two timelines here, which itself would take some inspiration from the dark. I don’t want to get too far into spoilers for that, in case you haven’t seen it, but if you don’t want to know, then skip about a minute ahead.

Go, go, go.

Now Dark operates in a similar manner to how Loki does, with all of the characters basically living in a time loop. In the series, we see the character seemingly breaking things at the end but then discover that this was actually the midpoint of the loop itself. There were other timelines seemingly branching off from it, but they all looped back around and still continued on as normal. The things that went haywire were actually all part of the loop, and this then created the beginning point where things sprung from.

Victor dying could make them end up encountering another Kang, and then that’s the one who ends up becoming He Who Remains. In order for them to meet him, this needs to happen, and this is why Victor from the sacred timeline was given the book. The reason it is sacred is because this Kang varient has to be the one who gets the book, and thus his death will lead to other things happening. In order for He Who Remains to be found, this timeline needs to be kept intact, which, in the end, is why He Who Remains sees it as sacred.

This is why he picked Ravonna especially, and it’s clear he’s been playing her this entire time.

Now, when Loki and Mobius arrived, we saw that they were in a branched timeline, so maybe He Who Remains is still in the sacred one with Victor, then going into an offshoot branched timeline where he dies. I also forgot to mention it last week, but the name Timeline itself is a nod to Timeline Comics, which itself eventually went on to become Marvel.

Now, last theory for this bit, yeah. But last theory time for now, but this might actually be a 4D-level chess move by whoever remains. As we know, he will eventually be born again, and he’ll end the multiversal war by destroying every Kang.

In order to do this, though, he has to wipe out every other kang, which this entire plan might have been about. He Who Remains could have known that Victor would have to die, and thus he set things in place to kill one of his variants. I think that the man is going after the council, and he could even be the version we encountered during quantumania. That guy never saw a body, and potentially, he could have gone deeper into the quantum realm. The council talked about how he was an exile, and potentially this is because he was turning against them. He Who Remains is actually based on Immortus, who in the comics was an older version of Kang. We learned that he actually played along with the council to get them all in one place so that he could wipe them out once and for all. So potentially, this move was a masterful one by him to take out one of his variants and unleash the timelines to kill the rest.

In the end, the loom exploding unleashes it all, and now every timeline across the multiverse will be free.

Anyway, obviously, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so make sure you drop them in the comments below.

Now the episode begins with the Marvel Studios logo shaking as we travel into one of the time strands. This feels akin to the opening of Doctor Who, with the intro being similar to what we get here. If you feel like you recognise this, then it’s probably because it popped up at the start of the season 1 finale. That saw us travel from one universe to the next into a black hole, where the castle at the end of time was located. Black holes are something that have appeared throughout the season, with a book popping up on them during the credits. OB also brought them up during the first episode, and MT did a big breakdown talking about how the TV was located inside of one.

Here we get a similar shot to the beginning of the end of season 1, except this time the rock is now crumbling apart. Timelines are spreading out, and whereas initially there was just one, they’ve spiralled out of control and have started to shoot off. We can also hear voices from radio waves, which also riff on what we heard in that final entry.

–

Inside, we pick up exactly where we left Ravonna and Ms. Minues last week, with the shot and their position being exactly the same.

Minutes plays out a scene from the past, and we hear the conversation from the recording back in episode 1.

–

Now Ravonna is also wearing her minute men’s uniform, which is something she had when she picked Sylvie up. As we know, she’d go on to be a judge, and this obviously happened after her mind was wiped.

Now, an interesting thing about what she says is that the words are ‘for us, for all time, always.’ That ‘for us’ bit really sticks out because the TVA saying is for all time. He remains completely removed from us because he was the only one who was going to rule.

And he used Ravonna as a way to get to the top. He also touches upon how she made a difference in the war, showing that she was one of the keys when it came to winning it. Ravonna Renslayer is the love of Kang’s life, and potentially the other ones didn’t have her.

In the comics, she was killed and then split off into time, where Kang constantly encountered resurrected versions of her. Still, they were doomed to never be together, and thus she was either killed or she tried to kill him.

Now Ms. Minutes pops up and says,

As we learned last week, she was originally an AI designed for this, but he who remains gave her extra programming that allowed her to grow. She has remained his loyal servant, and we see as he commands them to have their memories erased. This is protocol 42, which might be a nod to how 42 is the answer to everything.

He says.

Showing some regret but feeling like he needed to do it, the pair then decided that they were going to do their own thing.

Cut to the title, and if you’ve been enjoying our breakdowns so far, then please check out our merchandise store located below the breakdown. Right now, we’re selling a Loki-inspired t-shirt that you can get now before time runs out. We also have Ahsoka, House of the Dragon, Theory Time, Ant-Man, and a lot more. Supporting the channel like this really means a lot, and a huge thank you to everyone who’s bought one so far.

Now, from here, we go into the TV and watch Victor timely arrive. Last week, Sylvie spared him and allowed him to go through the time door, which is on the other side of this. Now his arrival in front of the other kang heads has obviously been chosen for a specific reason. Due to what happens at the end of the episode, I’m guessing that we will in fact get another Kang variant popping up at some point in the season.

When discussing the series with Screenrant, the show’s director said:

“I don’t know that we’ve seen the definitive Kang yet, in terms of what I would envision the definitive Kang [to be]. I think there’s still someone yet to come out of the shadows.”

So down the line, we may be getting more in the season, which the shot composition here could allude to.

I love how tripped out Victor is in this moment, and it would be kind of wild if people just showed up at your house one day and told you you were the ruler of everything. To then go and see these monuments that have been built for you would be mind-blowing. This is very much a monument for him. However, this version is dedicated to the timekeepers, which we see in the next shot down the hallway.

Here we have the three hourglass symbols that they carried during many of their depictions.

Going down to where the murals are, we see B-15 approaching him, and this is a big reunion for these two actors. If you followed us back when we were doing Lovecraft Country breakdowns, then you’ll remember we talked about them a lot, with both pretty much getting their big break in that show.

Victor is at a point where he doesn’t really know who to trust, and we have both sides kind of pulling him back and forth.

Time is running out, though, and the temporal loom is about to go critical with the TVA shaking and crumbling around them.

–

Cut to Chrono Bay, where we see Judge Gamble arriving, who talks about how to handle the situation. In the past, they would’ve just pruned all these excess timelines, but now they’re trying to go with a more gentle approach. Gamble was a character that appeared in the comics, and she too was a clone of Mobius, with Dox being one as well. Because of this, they all shared this kinship, which we also see coming over to the show.

Gamble wants B-15 to convince Dox that the new TVA is the way to go, but whether that’s true or not remains to be seen. Dox obviously doesn’t think so, and in the end, we get Dox in a box.

Now from here, we cut across to the hot, fresh coffee machine that also pops up in the credits. I dunno about that chocolate soup selection, mate, because that sounds rank, but this becomes an important place later in the episode. I’m sure these are an old, timely thing, but I googled coffee machines from previous decades and just got hit with loads of ads for new ones that I’ll probably be seeing everywhere now until the end of time.

However, as our editor Matt pointed out, they’re similar to the ones in Call of Duty: Zombie, which probably also took inspiration from real-world machines.

Down in the basement, we see Victor meeting OB for the first time, with the pair both being fans of one another. Now I think this shows that we got one of our theories wrong: that OB was going to be one of the big bad shows. We thought he was the brains behind the operation, with Kang taking the credit and then shuffling him away. Here it seems like OB sees himself as learning everything he knows from the one who remains, who in turn learned everything from Orobouros. Both are fans of each other, and it’s a sort of chicken and egg situation where both learn from each other.

This is a little meta-joke because an oroborous is a snake that eats its own tail, which represents a cycle of destruction and rebirth. An orobouros also represents infinity, of which this entire storyline is a part. That’s why I think the ending was meant to happen, and it’s a part of the cycle that keeps it going.

I love how both ask for each other’s autographs, and it kind of shows that maybe the one who remains isn’t solely the conman that I said he was last week.

Bringing them a model of the loom, they start to play out the plan, and it’s kind of like a heist movie building off that first episode. What I love about this entry is that we kind of feel like we’ve seen it all before, which is why the curveball at the end changes so much.

This is given to us by the explanation of the radiation.

–

I love how Mobius also says his lokis turn and that the little model looks more like him. Man clearly doesn’t want to go after almost getting spaghetti-fied, and after what we see happen with Victor, it makes sense.

Everything seems like it’s all going to play out fine, though, with Victor bringing out his life’s work.

The man gets ready to have some key lime pie, but Sylvie isn’t too happy with how relaxed the TV is. When you think about it, it’s pretty messed up how they just murder millions en masse at a time and then sit down like nothing happened.

Key Lime Pie further fits the 50s aesthetic of the TVA, and it was even said to be Florida’s most famous treat during the decade.

Now this back and forth of inaction is going to get them nowhere, whereas Sylvie is used to actually putting things into action.

It’s basically a comment on government bureaucracy and how it’s just endless back-and-forth dithering instead of getting things done.

She says to him that it was just a bad day at the office for him and that the reason he hasn’t looked at his own timeline is because it might upset him that one of the ones he’s pruning could be his.

It makes sense too, and the TVA is all he knows, so much like Dox, he doesn’t want to do anything that could deviate from it. That pairs this moment brilliantly with the next scene, where we see X-5 and the other soldiers sitting in the interrogation cell. X-5 is desperate to get back to his life, which Dox mocks by calling him Brad.

–

He was initially just a number, but because he made something for himself, he was seen as being self-centred and casting out the greater hole. This is something that organisations like this prey on, and they want people to all just follow orders rather than acting on their own.

It’s important to note that the judges themselves are given names, whereas the hunters all get letters and numbers. Dox possibly had to earn this at some point, much in the same way Ravonna will have as well. I actually wonder if He Who Remains calling her that at the start was actually him christening her with one. Probably not, but the fact that Dox earned a name shows why shes so willing to hold on, whereas X-5 now would rather go to where hes known as Brad.

At this point, B-15 visits and begs them to help, but she’s too stubborn to do what’s best for herself and the TVA. Rather than having things change, she chooses self-destruction, which is kind of tragic when you think about her character.

Cut to Sylvie and Loki in the automat, and I love how the signs up here are kind of enforcing rules on even the fun stuff. One says to bring your own cup, and if you forget it, remember to bring it next time. There’s also one saying you can only have one slice a week, and even though it’s infinite, they still ration out this food. The pair talk about how she couldn’t kill Victor without sparing him because he looked scared.

On the other side of this, the one who remains wanted it to happen because he had achieved everything he was after. It was kind of like when Thanos relaxed after carrying out the snap because everything they had built had come to its conclusion.

Loki talks about the events of Thor 1, when he banished his brother to earth. He saw his change of character as a weakness but now sees it as a strength. It’s important to keep in mind that Loki keeps referencing these early Phase 1 movies because, to him, they’re all that happened.

This Loki escaped after the Battle of New York, so he’s still very early in the MCU timeline.

He says that her sparing victory wasn’t a weakness and instead showed that she’d grown.

Sylvie just sees the TVA as being evil, but Loki explains that it can end up being better because of people like Mobius and B-15. They’re currently working away to save as many branches as they can, which Loki is also trying to do. He wants to make the TV something better, but Sylvie says something that foreshadows the ending.

LOKI SEASON 2 EPISODE 4 HIDDEN DETAILS

As we know, she ends up getting her wish, which we’ll give our theories on next time. However, clearly Loki is arguing that they all deserve a second chance, which he is very much a symbol for. Juxtaposing this, Sylvie never really got one, so she’s hesitant to hand them out to others.

I think Loki is clearly still going to try and fix it, which we will talk about in our trailer section of the video. I’ll save that until the end, though, in case you don’t want to know, but it kind of gives us an idea of what’s going on next time.

Now Sylvie says there’s a lot relying on hope and that Victor doesn’t become the one who remains. This could make the TVA something good in which all timelines are open and respected. As we know, the temporal looms have been destroyed, meaning that everything is now out in the open, which will lead to a multiversal war. This is something that this season was initially going to be focused on, with the creative team talking about how that was the initial plan.

However, Marvel told them to scale it back for this more personal story about what we have here.

With Dox and X-5, we see Ravonna returning to offer them a deal.

Ravonna says she wants to restore stability, and in exchange, they’ll get a life on the timeline. I wonder, though, if the loom being destroyed is what ends up getting them one in the end.

X-5 sides with her because men are living like celebrities and getting to hook up with Bridgette Bardot.

He turns against Dox, whereas she sticks to her principles. She even wants him to side with them and calls him Bradley, and in the end, they all die instead of going with Ravonna.

Such a badass final line, and man, look at Ms. Minutes. Absolutely psychopath.

Now elsewhere, we see a Victor device integrated into the loom, with him then going out to the hot cocoa machine. I love how he’s more interested in that than all the other cool stuff, and as we know, he invented that chair with a fridge in it. Man just loves temperature control, which yeah, Ive never really understood how it works either, mate. Also, I think it’s hilarious how Mobius was downloading explicit games at work, which is a bit naughty.

Cut to B-15 having the opposite reaction to Ms. Minutes, which is when we get a great Jurassic Park reference.

–

We then see Victor and D-90 enjoying the hot chocolate, which is when the latter is taken out by Brad. This is sort of a reversal of what D-90 did in episode 4 of season 1, as he was the one who ended up pruning Mobius at the midpoint.

The person who got pruned here may have actually been Mobius because he could have been the one who showed Victor the machine. So we might have even had Mobius getting pruned twice in episode 4, but we have a reversal with it being D-90.

It really lines up nicely to have things in a similar light, and we get OB discovering Ms. Minutes as taken over. Again, we see a sort of Jurassic Park reference with them discovering her blocks on the computer. Now I love how, rather than having a blood stain, they discover spilled hot chocolate, and it lets them know something else is at hand.

Loki figures out that Renslayer actually wants the TVA, and we see Victor getting taken to the war room. I love it.

And you can just tell the guys that a slimey conman is constantly trying to play the odds. He’d be the perfect politician because he’ll just say whatever he can to get on top, which explains how he got to rule over all.

Promised to be tortured with a very small box, he decides to make an alliance, as that’s what suits his interests then.

At this point, the loom starts to overload, and we get closure on what happened in that scene in the first episode. Personally, I was expecting this to come at the end of the season, but their dropping it here leaves some mystery. As we guessed, Loki pruned himself, and this was so his past version could continue the path that would lead to here. This was mainly because Sylvie recognised him so clearly that she had been working on another version. It was great watching it all play out, and we got a theory right, at least so far. All of this wasn’t for nothing.

I think it was pretty clear if you know how time travel works and the general way it is used in shows, but it was still nice to get it confirmed.

The phone ringing was carried out by OB, and we see them in the reactor room, which has skin still written on the side from when Mobius was there.

Cut over to one of the chronobooks where we catch Loki from episode 1. I’m pretty sure that this is the exact same scene, with him even holding the watch and then stopping at the loom overloading on the screen.

Trapped in the elevator for a few minutes, Sylvie ends up twisting the wires to free herself, which also explains why she had to pry the doors open.

Seeing Loki see himself also works really well, and I love how he kind of realises what’s playing out. You could catch a figure moving behind him in the corridor and reveal that this is always so cool in time travel shows.

Cut to the control room, which is starting to go haywire, and OB realises that he could reboot the system. This would mean that magic could be used in the TVA, and thus Loki and Sylvie could properly strike back.

Now, in doing this, it locks Ms. Mintues out, and I think it actually wipes her out.

She says she’s losing her mind, which might be a nod to 2001, in which Hal says the same thing.

Last week, we talked about how Ms. Minutes had to get erased like this in order for He Who Remains to not bump into her when changing the chess AI into her. Lots of time…look, you get it, but there weren’t two minutes at the end of time, and thus the one here had to die so that He Who Remains could discover a younger version.

In the end, she says

You’ll never be him.

which foreshadows what comes at the end. Turning into her crude original clock, this looks like a DOS system. We then close in on the kang, reminding us that there are many out there. As the power cuts out, Brad wanders the corridors, which is when Loki challenges him to a rematch. Being enchanted, he re-enters, and I love how he kind of makes his mannerisms feminine to show his sylvie in control.

• This looks cute. I didn’t think I would see you again so soon.

Now Ravonna getting pruned could be pretty bad, but instead, I think this might just send her into the void. I’m sure right, sure that Alioth was actually Kang’s pet dog at one point, and it was told that it had to protect her. Now I believe that we’ll pick up with her down there, and she’ll have to use help from the others that got pruned to make their way out. I’m guessing that the void looks the same as it did before because it still exists down there as the bin.

Who knows, we might even see the alternate lokis from last time, as most of them are still stuck down there.

Richard E-Grant even survived Thanos, so maybe that biting moment at the end itself was another trick. Either way, though, I think we’ll see Kid Loki and maybe even the alligator one as well. We could see an alligator on OB’s desk in episode 2, and we could even get Thor to show up as well. Originally, he was going to be in a deleted scene in season one, and they might have found a way to work this into the show.

Victor then puts his head in a scanner, which is sort of like an MRI machine.

This lifts the lockdown and opens up the shutters, which makes Victor realise it has to be him.

LOKI SEASON 2 EPISODE 4 EASTER EGGS

This reminded me a lot of the hulk during the endgame, where he said he was the one built to carry out the snap. Now, what I love about the ending is that it was built up for so long by the pace and the emotional speeches that they gave. Victor talks about how it’s time to be brave, and you feel like it’s mounting up to him becoming the hero. In the end, though, he was instantly wiped out, which just completely sucked all the air out of the room. Everyone is just stunned, and they don’t know what to do, which leads to Loom exploding as they all look shocked.

The loom blowing then looks like a giant wave from a nuke, and we see it as the blinding light begins to encompass them before ending the episode. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next. Well, you kind of do if you look at the trailer.

First, I want to talk about my thoughts on the episode and how I feel about the show in general. So I really enjoyed the first episode and episode 4, with the middle two being good as well. I think these ones have just been so well done that it feels like Marvels is just knocking it out of the park. There are so many stakes, twists, and turns, and it’s difficult not to admire how far they’re taking it. For a while now, Ive felt like a lot of the MCU stuff feels very corporate-made, with plot lines and characters being induced just to make plotlines and characters. All of this is to make more content, but Loki feels like a centralised story based on character development and the actual fate of the multiverse.

It’s really excelling at what it’s trying to do, and for me, Loki is continuing to be the best MCU show by a long way.

So yeah, I’m really enjoying it, and in case you don’t know, Disney’s been sending out episodes early for review to chumps like us. However, they’re now no longer sending out things beyond episode 4, so our videos will probably be a lot later next week. This was what happened with Ahsoka, and we got them out by lunchtime UK time, so copyright claims permitting, we should have them out next week by then.

But what is going to happen next time?

Well, if we look at the trailers, there are some shots that haven’t appeared yet, and they spell out where things might go.

If you don’t want to know, then please turn off now, and thanks for sticking with me up until now.

So in the first trailer, we got some shots of Loki time-slipping that haven’t been seen so far. This included him arriving outside of a jet ski shop, which I think will be where he finds Mobius. My guess is that Mobis was a jetski salesman, and this is why he’s been obsessed with them ever since we’ve known him. I think that the multiverse will have been blown open, and we’ll then see Loki going through alternate dimensions looking for his friends. We also had one where it looked like Casey was in a prison uniform, and Britt over at our friends, the streamer had an interesting idea.

She theorised that this could be Alcatraz and that Casey might be one of the three prisoners known to have escaped from there. If they were taken out by the TVA and then assigned into the ranks, that would explain how they managed to get away.

I think next week will basically be loki time slipping into the other characters lives so we can learn about what they did before they were taken by the TVA.

Now as for Ravonna, we have a shot in it where it looks like she’s down in the void, and she has the purple glow of alioth covering her face. Therefore, I think we’ll also see her next time as she tries to survive in the void. This will no doubt bring her face to face with the beast, but again, I feel like it’s going to act more like a pet.

Her being a soldier in the multiversal war would have meant she used alioth at some point, and it may recognise her even if she doesn’t recognise it.

Potentially, she could even order it, and this could be what she uses to come out on top. I kind of feel like that will be what happens, and she’ll be dead set on becoming the one who remains.

Either way, I’d love to hear your thoughts below, so make sure you drop them in the comments section.

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