SPOILER WARNING: this post gives away the endings of both seasons of Loki (2021 and 2023), the bonus scenes in Avengers Endgame: Encore (September 2026), and what the Avengers: Doomsday trailers show. It was written on 26 October 2026 and last checked on 13 November 2026, about five weeks before the film opens, from public interviews, trade reports and the show itself. I label each claim as confirmed, reported or my own guess.
The Disney+ series Loki is where the MCU stopped copying the myths and started arguing with them. The MCU post covers the films. Here I go through the show in order, set its last image beside the Norse world tree, say who made it, and look at how it may feed into the next Avengers film. That last part is where I have to be most careful.
Image: Tom Hiddleston speaking at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Season 1 (2021): arrested by the TVA
Season 1 ran for six episodes, 9 June to 14 July 2021. Michael Waldron created it and was head writer, and Kate Herron directed all six, according to Wikipedia. In Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers go back to 2012 and that year’s Loki grabs the Tesseract and vanishes. The escape breaks the “Sacred Timeline”, and the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucracy that prunes timelines, arrests him.
This Loki has not lived through The Dark World or Ragnarok, so he is the Loki of The Avengers: proud, brittle and alone. The TVA shows him his own future, including Frigga’s death and his death at Thanos’s hands. Judge Renslayer puts him on trial for crimes against the Sacred Timeline, and Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) offers a deal: help hunt another Loki variant who is killing TVA agents.
That variant is Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), a female Loki who rejects the name. Wikipedia says she was inspired by the comics’ Sylvie Lushton and Lady Loki but has her own backstory. She and Loki bond on the doomed moon Lamentis, which creates a new branch in time and brings the TVA down on them. Sylvie also learns that the TVA’s staff are variants taken from their own lives, and that the Time-Keepers who supposedly created the TVA are androids.
Loki is “pruned” and wakes in the Void, where a storm-like creature called Alioth devours everything. He meets other Lokis there, including an old “Classic Loki” (Richard E. Grant), who sacrifices himself by conjuring an illusion of Asgard to distract Alioth.
The finale takes Loki and Sylvie to He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors), a 31st-century scientist at the Citadel at the End of Time. He says he ended a war among his own variants and built the TVA to keep one timeline. Tired, he offers a choice: kill him and risk another multiversal war, or take his place. Loki begs Sylvie to stop. She kills him anyway, a multiverse opens, and Loki returns to a TVA where nobody knows him and a statue of another variant has replaced the Time-Keepers. A closing card announced season 2.
Season 2 (2023): the Loom and the tree
Season 2 aired from 5 October to 9 November 2023, six episodes again, with Eric Martin as head writer and Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead leading the directors. Loki is now “time slipping”, flung between moments without warning. The cause is the Temporal Loom, a machine that weaves the timeline’s branches and is now overloaded by their growth. Victor Timely, another variant of He Who Remains, also appears.
In the finale, “Glorious Purpose”, Loki learns from a vision of He Who Remains that the Loom was a fail-safe, and that his options are to kill Sylvie or break the Loom. He refuses the first. Instead he steps into the Loom in Victor Timely’s place and uses his new control of time to destroy it. The branches live on, and he arranges them into a vast tree-like structure. Then he sits alone on a throne at the End of Time. ComicBook.com and The Ringer quote his line: “I know what kind of god I need to be… for you. For all of us.”
The epilogue shows the TVA reformed under B-15, Mobius and Sylvie watching ordinary life, and Loki watching from his seat. Mobius reports that a Kang variant has been stopped in a “616-adjacent realm”, a nod to the film Quantumania. So the TVA is still watching for versions of the man Sylvie killed.
Image: “The Ash Yggdrasil” (1886) by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine, from Wägner’s Asgard and the Gods, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The tree in the myths
Wikipedia notes that critics at Collider, The A.V. Club, Space.com and Vulture read the finale’s tree as Yggdrasil, the Norse world tree. I have not found a line in the show that names it, so this is the standard reading, not a statement from the writers. Here is what the old sources say.
An ash I know, Yggdrasil its name,
Völuspá 19, trans. Bellows
With water white is the great tree wet;
Thence come the dews that fall in the dales,
Green by Urth’s well does it ever grow.
In Völuspá the tree is tended by three women, the Norns. Stanza 20 says “Laws they made there, and life allotted / To the sons of men, and set their fates.” (trans. Bellows.) Snorri adds in Gylfaginning that they sprinkle the ash with water and clay from the well of Urðr so that its limbs do not wither or rot, and that the gods hold their daily court at the tree. The world tree must be watered and defended, and those who tend it also settle fate.
My own reading, not the writers’: a bureaucracy that “prunes” branches, and a Loki who ends by tending a living tree, sends me to the Norns. In the sources, though, Yggdrasil links the worlds. It is not a timeline. The tree also shakes at the end: in Völuspá 47, “Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high / The ancient limbs, and the giant is loose.” The Ragnarök post covers that scene.
“God of Stories”: who said it?
In the comics, as the post on Marvel Comics describes, “God of Stories” is the name the younger Loki takes at the end of the Kid Loki arc. Fans applied it to the series ending. What I can verify: The Ringer wrote that Loki “never actually declares” himself the God of Stories on screen. ComicBook.com reports Aaron Moorhead saying the team looked at the Wikipedia page for the Norse Loki early on, that executive Kevin Wright wrote “God of Stories” on a whiteboard, and that they “really, really latched onto that”. Moorhead’s summary: Loki is “the God of Everyone’s Story, and he’s a librarian that protects it and allows it to flourish.”
I did not find that title in the Eddic sources I have. Snorri’s list of Loki’s kennings in Skáldskaparmál includes “Harmer of Sif’s Hair”, “Forger of Evil”, “the Sly God”, “Slanderer and Cheat of the Gods” and “the Bound God” (trans. Brodeur). None is about stories. So I read “God of Stories” as a Marvel idea, not a Norse title.
Who made it
- Tom Hiddleston is an executive producer. Wikipedia reports that he and Marvel’s Kevin Wright wrote a roughly 30-page document setting out the TVA, He Who Remains and Victor Timely before writers and directors were hired.
- Kate Herron was hired in August 2019 after a 60-page pitch, per Wikipedia. She did not return for season 2.
- Owen Wilson played Mobius, which Wikipedia says Herron and Wilson shaped with Good Will Hunting in mind, as mentor and therapist for Loki.
- Michael Waldron pitched a “big, crazy, fun time adventure” (Wikipedia). Eric Martin was head writer for season 2.
- Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead led season 2’s directors. Natalie Holt wrote the music, and Wikipedia says her season 1 score mixes a theremin with Scandinavian folk instruments such as the hardanger fiddle and nyckelharpa.
One name I looked for and did not find is Taika Waititi. I found no verified role for him in the series. His Ragnarok matters only because this Loki has not seen it.
Avengers: Doomsday, part one: what is confirmed
Image: Joe Russo and Anthony Russo at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Official announcements or several major trade outlets support these, as of 13 November 2026.
- Dates: Avengers: Doomsday opens in the US on 18 December 2026 (16 December in the UK, per Wikipedia citing Digital Spy), and Avengers: Secret Wars on 17 December 2027 (Deadline, May 2025).
- Directors: Joe and Anthony Russo direct both (Variety, July 2024). Wikipedia lists Michael Waldron, the creator of Loki, among the writers, with Stephen McFeely and Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers.
- Doom: Robert Downey Jr. plays Doctor Doom, announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2024. The film was first titled The Kang Dynasty, and was retitled after Marvel dismissed Jonathan Majors in December 2023 (Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter). Kang is not in the announced cast.
- Hiddleston: he was in the 26-name cast announcement of March 2025, and the trades say he returns as Loki (Deadline, April 2025; The Hollywood Reporter, July 2026). He told Men’s Journal, as relayed by GamesRadar, that Loki’s story in the film picks up from the end of season 2 and does not undo it. Co-director Anthony Russo told Empire that Doomsday will give fans “a new incarnation of that character,” though Marvel has not said what that means for the story.
- The premise: the Avengers, the Wakandans, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men converge to face Doom as the multiverse collapses (Entertainment Weekly and Marvel, via Wikipedia).
Anyone can watch one more piece of evidence. Avengers Endgame: Encore, the re-release that opened on 25 September 2026, adds new scenes. In one, per Deadline, Variety and EW, Loki visits Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter and offers help with “some timeline things”. In another, TVA staff (Mobius, O.B., Casey and Miss Minutes) see growing incursions between universes, and the multiverse is described as collapsing. Wikipedia quotes Empire as having Anthony Russo say the Loki scene is “where Doomsday was born”. Joe Russo reportedly said the TVA scene matters a great deal to the film. That is the clearest on-the-record statement I found that the series and the film belong to one story.
The July 2026 trailer matters too. GamesRadar and Screen Rant both noticed a hand holding Loki’s TVA card, with what looks like a wedding ring, probably Steve’s. That the card appears is plain from the footage. What it means is a reading, not a fact. Variety reported that Andy Park’s concept art includes “a mysterious image of Loki” at the centre. And in a September 2026 interview quoted by ComicBookMovie, Hiddleston said: “Well, come on. I’m holding the timelines together. We live in a multiverse now, I think. And Loki is the God of Stories. So, there it is.” That is one outlet, so I treat it as a credible quote, not a plot summary.
Part two: what is reported but not confirmed
Do not rely on these. The scooper Daniel Richtman, as passed on by The Direct, says Hiddleston’s part is small. Other scoopers say Loki is a prize the characters race to reach, or that Hiddleston is also in Secret Wars. ComicBookMovie notes a rumour that Loki dies at Doom’s hands, and that when Hiddleston was asked, he answered “I’m going to stop. I have to stop.” Consequence said Loki appears in the D23 trailer in August 2026, and I found no second source. None of this is confirmed by Marvel, Deadline, Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, and some of it will be wrong.
Part three: my guesses (labelled as guesses)
- The tree matters to Doom. In the Encore TVA scene the tree-like timeline threads turn red as the multiverse collapses. If Loki holds the branches together, as Hiddleston’s line suggests, Doom might want his power. In the 2015 comics Secret Wars, as Marvel’s explainer sums it up, Doom takes a godlike power, builds Battleworld from surviving fragments and rules it. That is a fan theory that fits the evidence, nothing more.
- Kang’s story and Doom’s may be one problem. The real-world reason for the swap was Majors’s dismissal, but in the story, He Who Remains built the TVA to stop a war among his variants, and a collapsing multiverse is a similar war between universes. I suspect Doomsday is meant as the answer to Loki, but that is an inference.
- Loki may appear in more than one role. He is a time-slipper, so he could be a helper in one scene and the figure on the throne in another.
What we know versus what we’re guessing
- Known: the dates, the directors, Doom and RDJ, the retitled film, Hiddleston on the cast, the Encore scenes, and the TVA card in the trailer.
- Reported, not confirmed: the size of Loki’s role, a death, a Secret Wars appearance, and the D23 glimpse.
- Guessed, by me: how the tree, Doom and the incursions link up. The film may disagree with all of my guesses.
Please re-check this post before it goes up. Trailers and interviews are arriving all the time, and one interview can change what I wrote. Check the release dates on Marvel.com or Disney’s page, and look at Deadline, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter for any new statement about Loki. If something has been confirmed, move it up to the first list.
Where to go next
- Loki in the MCU, for every film and series appearance.
- Loki in Marvel Comics, for Kid Loki and the “God of Stories”.
- Loki and Ragnarök, for the tree that shakes at the end of the world.
Discover more from Loki Stuff
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.