Did Loki Become the New He Who Remains at the End of Season 2?

The ending of season 2 of ‘Loki’ allowed us to see the fact that Loki was able to find a way out of what seemed to be an endless loop that was designed to make him lose and allow He Who Remains to eventually remain in power. He made the difficult decision as he had to sacrifice the one thing he wanted to save trillions of lives and allow his friends to stay safe. Loki could be seen sitting on his throne at the end of time as he now has a new burden. So, does that mean that Loki became the new He Who Remains?

Loki’s choice

When Loki learned how to control his time slipping, one of the things that fans thought was that he was going to easily save the day for the TVA in the season 2 finale. But things weren’t so simple because he used his powers to return to the past time and time again to find a way to fix the Temporal Loom. He even spent centuries studying the nature of the Temporal Loom and Throughput Multiplier so that he could speed up the process of fixing the Temporal Loom.

However, he and his friends found out that expanding the Temporal Loom’s capacity was useless because it was never meant to handle infinite timelines. Loki had to confront He Who Remains at the end of time as he used his powers to return to the past. 

Of course, He Who Remains (HWR) was already aware of what Loki had been doing because he seemingly hinted that he was the reason why Loki could time slip. HWR also told Loki that the Temporal Loom was supposed to be a failsafe that was designed to destroy every timeline but the Sacred Timeline, thus guaranteeing a reset that would allow HWR to return.

HWR told Loki that there were only two options for him. The first option was to allow Sylvie to kill HWR and eventually leave the Temporal Loom to destroy everything except the Sacred Timeline. Meanwhile, the second option was to kill Sylvie and allow HWR to remain in power while watching over one single Sacred Timeline.

Loki, who understood the nature of burden after a conversation with Mobius, flirted with the idea of killing Sylvie. But Sylvie told Loki that sometimes it was better to destroy something to make way for something better. And this gave Loki an idea.

He returned to the moment in time before Victor Timely made his way to the gangway leading to the Temporal Loom. Instead of allowing Timely to try to fix the Temporal Loom, Loki went through the gangway to destroy the Loom, thus making it impossible for it to use raw time to create more timelines.

As such, Loki defied HWR by finding option C despite the fact that the Kang variant thought that Loki only had two options. Loki’s choice allowed him to find a way to make sure that his friends and the timelines were safe and that HWR was never going to return.

Loki’s new purpose

While it may be true that Loki was able to find a third option out of the mess that he and his friends were in, what was also true was that the destruction of the Temporal Loom left a gaping hole as there was no longer anything creating timelines using raw time. That was when Loki stepped in as the one who now regulating the entire multiverse.

Loki used his newfound powers to regulate all of the timelines as he opened a portal that led to the end of time. He sat on the seat that HWR once sat on as Loki now has his throne. Loki was now the new He Who Remains because he had taken the place of the man who watched over the TVA and made sure that there was only one timeline.

But while Loki may have turned into the new He Who Remains, he was different. Instead of destroying all of the other timelines to make way for only one timeline, Loki used his power to regulate all of the timelines using his power. As such, the different branches of the Sacred Timeline formed a tree that symbolizes how all of the different timelines in the multiverse are branches of the same tree that gave them life.

In short, Loki was now a different version of HWR because he didn’t prune all of the other branches of the tree to leave room for only one branch. Instead, he made sure that all of the branches coexisted with one another while he served as the one who was taking care of this metaphorical tree. 

So, while He Who Remains acted as a god or a king who thought that he had total control over time itself, Loki is more of the caretaker of the tree that houses all of the branches of the Sacred Timeline.

They may have similar roles, but they do things in different ways because Loki not only oversees the timelines but is also the one regulating their flow, similar to what the temporal Loom did. Only now, Loki is able to make sure that all of the timelines exist instead of allowing them to destroy one another.

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