Review: Loki’s surprising twists paid off with a major cliffhanger finale

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  Tom Hiddleston’s Loki runs afoul of the Time Variance Authority (TVA) for creating a “nexus event.” [credit: Marvel Studios ]

It should be obvious by now that Marvel Studios is leaning hard into the multiverse concept for Phase 4 of the MCU, and the Disney+ series Loki developed that multiverse even further as it concluded its six-episode run this week. Granted, the finale proved to be a bit “talky-talky” and heavy on the exposition. But it ended on one hell of a cliffhanger than sets up any number of tantalizing possibilities for the MCU as a whole—particularly Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, currently scheduled for release next March.

(Major spoilers for the finale are below the second gallery. We’ll give you a heads up when we get there.)

As we’ve reported previously, the launching point for Loki the series is that scene in Avengers: Endgame when a 2012 version of Loki snags the tesseract containing the Space Stone and vanishes through a portal. Our trickster soon encounters a team of armed guards who “arrest” him on behalf of an entity known as the Time Variance Authority (TVA), the “custodians of chronology” in the MCU, monitoring violations to the Sacred Timeline. Catch the TVA’s attention by trying to change history, and you just might meet the wrong end of the Retroactive Cannon (Ret Con) and have your entire history deleted from the historical timeline.