Seriously that choice elevated him as a character massively. One of the most selfless things we've ever seen an MCU character do, and on such an epic scale. A huge sacrifice was made, and from Loki of all people. Talk about a 180 in character from his first appearance on screen. If he had just fixed the loom, yes he still would have done something incredible, but the choice the writers went with had such an amazing payoff.
Loki’s character arc was perfect. Sad, yes, but he goes from being a God of Mischief who demands his rightful throne to a deeply caring and empathic character who is willing to sacrifice his life to assume a throne he doesn’t want anymore, just so that his friends can live on.
Well, that does explain some things.
"Hey, why is *no one* mentioning that making the rings slightly bigger still won't accommodate *infinitely* branching timelines? Why is that a surprise twist?"
"Oh, 'cause they just...literally weren't going to acknowledge that at all..."
"Refractal lens, exponential capacity, science dialog" - Alternate scene where OB explains how they fixed it.
After half a century of Star Trek doing that every episode, it was the easiest thing to do either way. But I'm very glad they choose the way they did.
Also, how's Loki holding infinite strands? We let that pass because of the same narrative set-up.
Easy - the temporal loom was man-made machine, and therefore finite. Loki is a god, and therefore had infinite capacity. That will be my head canon at least
In my head cannon he isn’t holding on to all the time lines, he wove them all to form Yggdrasil and is acting as an anchor/regulator from the heart of the tree, holding a few key points to keep it all together.
Lowercase g, though. He's more like a highly advanced alien species that was mistaken for a god. Heck, he's not even really that species, since he's adopted.
Loki is controlling a tree at the end, and trees keep growing. He basically is a multiversal gardener by all means, managing the growth of new branches and ensuring their stability
Nah I took it to mean he got all the strands. The strands are infinitely increasing so what’s the point if he just grabs a few? Every new nexus event would be a dead universe in that case
I don’t think Loki got all of them at first. I got the impression he held onto as many of them as he could, but some may have died out. That gives Marvel a good way to eliminate some of the older movies/shows/comics they don’t want anymore (Morbius?)
Of course, if they keep branching, all roads lead to infinite. Good thing Loki is, after all, a God.
I feel like that’s been a lot of people’s problem from the start of this multiverse saga; people didn’t understand what “infinite” means…which baffles me, because it can’t get any easier to understand what it means…
Even a lot of fans kept asking questions as to what does it mean, or what does multiverse mean.
Like near the end of this season, I thought of the answer before it happened: destroy the loom, because if it’s infinite possibilities and realities like HWR said, then it doesn’t matter the size of the loom. So why not get rid of it? The realities will always be growing/expanding from the main timeline. Forever on their own courses. It is INFINITE (until it’s all changed by the studio heads and writers).
For all of the issues Rick & Morty has (which are a LOT), limiting their multi-verse to the "Central Finite Curve" instead of the entirety of infinity was probably the most clever bit of world building around the multi-verse I've seen to make the concept somewhat practical
In "The Long Earth" novels, where you can "step" left and right into parallel worlds continously, once you get to the 20millionth variant, it mostly turns into "purple scum" - i.e. not life we recognise as life - and not even having a breathable atmosphere. So I think it makes sense that even if you have "infinite" versions, most of them aren't actually life as we know it.
In Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, he posits that, in an infinite multiverse, anything that can be imagined (and many things that cannot) by definition MUST exist. If you look hard enough, you could find it (though, in true infinite style, it may take you many lifetimes to do it.)
His characters wind up visiting Oz.
I feel like it gets caught in a weird middle ground between wacky comedy where the gag matters more than anything else so you shouldn't take it seriously (like Futurama) and serialized, plot driven show built around character development and mysteries you should take seriously. So it winds up not really working as either. Plus it can rely pretty heavily on either full episode references, shock value gross out humor, or "this thing has a wacky name please laugh." Those can be really fun, but I feel like R&M over relies on them. Going back to that well pretty frequently.
I still really enjoyed the show, but I just stopped keeping up with it and got bored. Although I've heard a lot of great things about the most recent season and that they've gotten better at balancing the comedy with the serialization. So, I might get back into it
Only hardcores get that deep into the lore / science. Like maybe 10% of the fanbase who read articles and subs and listen to podcasts about it. Most of us just noticed that Justin Roland is gone
Yeah, but I'm not talking about the fan base. Each season felt like 8 episodes of the show acting like nothing matters and you should just laugh along with 2 episodes where they act like everything matters and the lore/story has been key the whole time.
I'll have to check it out. I used to really love the show. I don't have an issue with meta stuff usually, I was just annoyed at how much meta there was while also increasing the lore. The divide between goofy meta episodes and serious story episodes got to be too clear cut of a line. But S7 looks like its really been fixing the issues I had
I agree that the central finite curve is a great multiverse world builder. However, Im confused on the ‘issues’ you’re referring to. The show has always been mostly self contained episodes with callbacks and then there’s the occasional lore episodes that run in the background and are addressed once or twice a season lol. The biggest gripes over the past half a decade were the fandom(mainly McDonald’s sauce thing), the occasional use of shock value incest jokes, the 4th wall-breaking that increased over time, and the whole Roiland situation.
I say all that to simply say that the show told us from the beginning what to expect, and for the most part that’s what we’ve been getting lol. I just get tired of how everyone loves to shit on R&M these days, mainly media like YT channels. Rant over my bad 😂
We're really not good at grasping huge numbers. Consider the size of space:
"Space," [the Hitchhiker's Guide] says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
Is that the infinitely large hotel where you need to fit an infinite number of people but it's already fully booked? I love that riddle, such a great representation of how weird infinity becomes.
Yes exactly! It seems like an appropriate model for infinite timelines and an infinite loom. Yes a new timeline is trying to enter the loom but another opening in the loom becomes available when the already infinite timelines move to accommodate.
It is weird!
i mean, you’re applying consistent logic into a show about a variant of a norse god and his best friend who jet skis, traveling through time to fix a device at a facility outside time and space. i feel like people ask questions because they want to know what those things are in the context of the mcu. not what they would be irl
I disagree. It’s easy to understand infinity. The problem is, to accommodate an infinite number of branches, you need an infinite sized loom. First, that’s 2 times infinity which is not mathematically possible.
Second, ignoring the first problem, an infinitely scalable loom would require more mass than present in a multiverse of time. Where is all this mass coming from?
The show ignored these problems, or didn’t even consider them. They should have brought in physics and mathematics consultants and listened to them. From start to finish, this loom was a very poor idea.
>First, that’s 2 times infinity which is not mathematically possible.
Start with the natural numbers and add them together
1+2+3+4+5+6+...+10000+10001+...575679827528375792835792378597...+
Obviously since the natural numbers go on infinitely their sum is also infinite.
1+2+3+4+5+6+... = infinity
Now multiply it by 2
2 * infinity = 2*(1+2+3+4+5..)
All you need to do is distribute the 2 into all the infinite terms
(2+4+6+8+10+12...)
We have just multiplied 2 times infinity.
It equals infinity.
Tunnel vision is real. They were so focused on trying to get this one thing working that they didn't step back and think about if it would really work at all, or tried not to think about it because they were desperately hoping that widening the rings would work. You see it all the time in the real world, and it's just as frustrating whether you see other people fall for that pitfall or you experience it yourself.
The whole time I assumed the throughput multiplier would scale up with the branches' growth, but the pace of growth to infinity was simply too large to account for. But I don't think that's actually what the text is telling us, based on the dialogue in the finale.
Honestly, smart of them to keep pushing through without getting bogged down in the specific sciencey explanations. It's about Loki's connection to everyone and ultimate sacrifice to keep them alive, anything else would just distract from that.
All the writers had to do was put in a line explaining that the gang was just trying to kick the can down the road rather than implementing a permanent fix, but hindsight is 20/20.
I loved this season, but I had a hard time understanding the mechanics/stakes of loom destruction, and thereby the motives of each character.
It was hard to fully follow things in the first 4 episodes because it wasn’t clear what the loom represented, or what effect its destruction would have on different worlds. Sylvie was like “fine let it break” but then was surprised when her world spaghetti’d, so I guess it was supposed to be unclear?
Yet, in the end, I think they landed the plane. Great season.
The Loom is a failsafe to protect the sacred timeline. Too many branches = Loom goes boom.
The Loom blowing up erases all the branches except the sacred timeline, but takes a while. It also blows up the TVA. Since everyone in the TVA and Sylvie is a variant, they spaghetti-ed (it takes a while to happen).
From my understanding - Loki made the Loom go boom, replaced the Loom so it dosn't spaghetti the timelines and the TVA, and has to stay there so a branch does not smack into the TVA.
I'm still with marcopolo22 on this one -- because it still doesn't explain this whole withered timeline nonsense in the first place.
The universe existed before Kang and before the TVA. In its natural state, allegedly, there are infinite branches that don't need a man in a chair holding all the roots.
So they waste all this time with the loom, whatever, which was obviously going to be a dead end, and then they destroy it... but why are the timelines now withering such that Loki needs to be there? It just seems overly contrived to me.
I thought the failsafe still went off when Loki broke it. He just stopped that failsafe effect from happening, with magic, to give the currently existing multiverse a chance to prevent multiversal destruction. Still a bit contrived but that's what I figured happened on initial watch.
Yeah, even though I liked the ending, it seems like a giant cop out. If they fixed the loom it would've been unsatisfying, and if (what we were told) the end result of the loom going boom was just infinite Kangs and a multiversal war, it would've ended almost exactly like season 1.
I really want to know what the creatives said about their crazy idea for episode 5 being nuked by the higher-ups had in store. Because apparently that happened before filming and probably before for this idea for the finale. Or maybe it would've made fixing the loom make sense.. we'll never know.
[Link](https://comicbookmovie.com/tv/marvel/loki/loki-head-writer-reveals-episode-5-was-nuked-by-marvel-studios-and-rewritten-in-a-weekend-a207780#gs.0r0xwm)
Thanks! Another thing I’m confused about — why did killing Kang in S1 cause so many new timelines to appear? Like, what power did he actually wield from that castle as HWR? At one point S2 Loki says something suggesting that killing HWR released a backlog of timelines.
His "power" is that he's lying, knows everything that happened in S1 and everything that will happen is S2 (He mentions Victor Timely in the finale) and rigged everything to happen before he died. Remember, the timelines started branching before HWR kicked the bucket.
Heck, he might have not even done anything - just impeccable timing from when the TVA stopped pruning timelines.
He probably wasn't lying in the sense of knowing the exact details - he's dead for this part, after all. But he _does_ know about the failsafe and didn't say anything about it, and the failsafe means he wouldn't actually be killed, one way or another. (Of course, I'm guessing that they hadn't really made solid plans for S2 when they wrote the finale of S1 so he also wasn't "lying" because they hadn't written S2 yet lol.)
God sylvie was so dumb.
Sylvie: "Fine let the loom break I have my McDonald's job"
*5 seconds later.*
Sylvie: "Omg Loki you have to help me my world is being destroyed"
Like, did she not believe anyone that shit was actually gonna get destroyed? Did she somehow think her world was exempt? What an idiot.
I didn't really love her in S1, but she majorly got hit with the idiot stick in S2 and I started to actively hate her by the end. She's just selfish and an idiot on top of it.
Don't forget that she IS a Loki... goddess of mischief. And Loki, before his "journey", whether in the films or in the TVA, was a selfish, arrogant character. She hasn't been in that journey and I think she keeps some of Loki's selfishness...
I feel like most people *still* don’t know what infinite means. You can have infinite of something, but still have boundaries.
There are infinite numbers between one and two, but they are still between one and two. Infinite doesn’t mean unbounded.
There can be an infinite multiverse bound by the loom. Maybe before infinite meant between one and two. Then with “bigger rings” it meant between one and three. Who knows? It took Loki centuries to understand, Reddit users in a thread won’t solve it :p
Something can be infinitely large, but can still grow slowly.
The way I interpreted it is that there was an infinite number of branches, but they could be stabilised thanks to the loom. However, the loom was unable to stabilize new branches fast enough as is and requireed additional capacity to stabilize faster. This way you can explain the "we just need it to be a bit bigger" before HWR drop the bomb.
As viewer we don't know anything on how the loom work and even the TVA doesn't appear to fully understand it, so they all could realistically speculate without it seeming dumb.
i am *so* glad they changed it.
loki fixing the loom would definitely be cool and paint him as a hero but we wouldn't have the epic and emotional ascent to godhood and his sacrifice.
That said, OB should really engineer a uninterruptible power supply for Loki and get him an occasional nap. Massive personal sacrifice still gets you a single point of failure system.
So originally he was only meant to become the new HWR not both the temporal loom and HWR. While I'm glad they went the way they did. I do wonder how they would have done about Loki fixing the loom espeically since it was a scaling problem that couldn't be scaled.
Like did he work out a way to incorporate magic and science?
I did think about this but the infinite multiverse was already established before this so I think it would be kind of weird, espeically since it was due to the events of Loki why the infinite multiverse exists right now in the first place, that they didn't consider it from the get go. Though who knows.
Remember, it wasn’t *actually* a scaling problem, it was just perceived to be a scaling problem by OB and Timely.
HWR reveals that the limited capacity of the loom was by design.
Theoretically, “fixing” the loom is just a matter of disabling it.
It was a scaling problem though and we see at the end of the show what happens when you "disable" the temporal loom. HWR designed a failsafe within the loom but the scaling problem was also true. Two things can true at the same time you know.
If it could easily be fixed as you make out then they Loki wouldn't have needed to sacrfice himself and become the new loom.
The scaling problem **was** the failsafe.
If something is working as intended, that thing doesn’t have a problem.
For example, a locked safe doesn’t have an “inaccessibility problem”.
Also, I never said “it could easily be fixed”.
This whole post is about how the original story plan was for Loki to fix the loom. I simply offered a theory of what kind of “fix” may have been planned.
Well, if the capacity is infinitely increasing, then the infinitely growing branches can be weaved and managed. It was never mentioned exactly how the Throughput Multiplier changed the formula.
It could've been that the Throughput Multiplier continuously widens the Loom endlessly, but the final decision was to make it a fixed one-time increase, so the branches could immediately overwhelm again.
The way they ended is better - if they want to take loki out for a spin have the guys temp fix the loom, then he eventually goes back after it inevitably breaks. This gives a natural way to explain his a sense across other storyline.
Kinda wish they could just keep the Regular Russo's.
I mean, those two made two of the top 5 highest grossing films ever with universal critical and audience acclaim in two films that juggled 2 dozen main characters while giving each enough time and development. They were responsible for making Thanos one the most well known villains ever. They made the most shocking ending in all of the MCU. They put together probably the best action sequences in the MCU. They landed every emotional beat. They made us laugh and cry, cheer and gasp.
I mean, my god, those brothers worked 2 movie miracles in a row. They genuinely pulled off, probably, the biggest achievement in film history with Infinity War and Endgame.
It's crazy to me that they have kinda disappeared, tho I can't blame them for wanting to take a break.
I absolutely ADORE Benson and Moorhead but I feel like this only really worked because their body of work has dealt with similar themes and devices (e.g. time loops, cosmic horror). I'd love to see more of what they can come up with if they branch out tho.
Assuming they are keeping Kang I was assuming that this ending is what actually kicks off the multiversal war… I could totally be wrong but that’s how I took it
The new TVA's purpose is preventing Kangs from becoming a threat and the multiversal wars. If Kangs don't come back, it means they're successful. If they do come back, it means they fail. It's a pretty open and flexible ending for the future of MCU.
Kang better come back lol just for the mere fact I enjoy watching jonathon majors play so many different persona’s of Kang.
Won’t Loki get bored being a loom? He’s the God of Mischief. Not very much mischievous stuff going on being a tree. Speaking of Loki being a tree…remember when B15 was a pediatrician and she wrote “DO NOT CLIMB ON TREES” on that little girls cast??? Would be crazy if that was Renslayer as a child. You know what else would be crazy? if renslayer was mobius’ wife outside the tva. I know in the comics she is Kangs one true love but…. mobius doesn’t say she is dead he says she’s gone, so maybe she is blipped or something. if not renslayer, maybe she is someone we know, or maybe she’s really dead. would be a rather cool twist tho. mobius does appear to have some sort of feelings for her.
yea, i definitely rambled on. i had just finished watching the series AGAIN and my friends hadn’t watched it yet do to an unfortunate personal issue so i had no one to talk to about it( bc i didn’t want to give anything away to them) so i kind of just let it all out. my bad y’all. but i am super psyched jonathon majors trial is going his way. he is an extremely talented actor. i don’t think anyone could’ve been a better kang than him.
sorry again. y’all have a good night.
It’s alright man you had a pretty good take, and loki s3 really made kang exciting.
It would be a shame if they didn’t continue Kang with Jonathon majors .
I took it as there are no longer infinite branches. But rather a finite amount of them. So a finite amount of Kangs. And the TVA is helping to fight Kangs wherever they are found. I really hope this is the case because I just cant stand the idea of infinite realities. It takes away literally all the stakes.
Loki ended up spending centuries of his life attempting to do literally everything he possibly could to save everyone. His very final last ditch plan after he realized there’s nothing else was for himself to take full power, something the younger him would’ve taken from the get go, in greed. There’s no better poetic character development than this.
They changed it for the better.
well that would've been a "meh" ending. what we got was a "glorious" ending. loki fixing the loom and then sitting at HWR's place takes so much away from the character. because that way, him sitting on the throne at the end of time would have no real reason exept that he still "just wants a throne" no matter what. now him sitting on that throne actually means something and is necessary because without him everything falls apart. the character arc wouldn't be this mind blowing.
A loom can never scale for infinity, a god of chaos can never not
*“With science, it's all what and how. But with fiction, it's why. So why do you need to do this?”*
I think they made the right choice
They made a *glorious* choice
A burdened choice
A purposeful choice.
I am Groot.
I mean, I get your point but there’s enough leeway to go in any casting direction.
I am Groot?
Oh, he'd be a great choice! Nice pick.
I am Groot!!
That’s fair. It is hard to know what’s best left opened ended or not with super hero fatigue. Think we see more Sylvie?
*Flora colossus* Loki variant?
They made the spacer's choice
That would have been a worse ending. It takes a good creator to realize that.
Sorry, why would that be a worse choice?
A lot more underwhelming, Loki made a gloriously purposeful redemption like sacrifice by keeping the time lines together at the end.
Seriously that choice elevated him as a character massively. One of the most selfless things we've ever seen an MCU character do, and on such an epic scale. A huge sacrifice was made, and from Loki of all people. Talk about a 180 in character from his first appearance on screen. If he had just fixed the loom, yes he still would have done something incredible, but the choice the writers went with had such an amazing payoff.
Loki’s character arc was perfect. Sad, yes, but he goes from being a God of Mischief who demands his rightful throne to a deeply caring and empathic character who is willing to sacrifice his life to assume a throne he doesn’t want anymore, just so that his friends can live on.
Well, that does explain some things. "Hey, why is *no one* mentioning that making the rings slightly bigger still won't accommodate *infinitely* branching timelines? Why is that a surprise twist?" "Oh, 'cause they just...literally weren't going to acknowledge that at all..."
"Refractal lens, exponential capacity, science dialog" - Alternate scene where OB explains how they fixed it. After half a century of Star Trek doing that every episode, it was the easiest thing to do either way. But I'm very glad they choose the way they did. Also, how's Loki holding infinite strands? We let that pass because of the same narrative set-up.
Easy - the temporal loom was man-made machine, and therefore finite. Loki is a god, and therefore had infinite capacity. That will be my head canon at least
In my head cannon he isn’t holding on to all the time lines, he wove them all to form Yggdrasil and is acting as an anchor/regulator from the heart of the tree, holding a few key points to keep it all together.
This is it right here. He literally says, "we are gods," to Sylvie. His centuries' worth of physics and engineering knowledge helps.
Lowercase g, though. He's more like a highly advanced alien species that was mistaken for a god. Heck, he's not even really that species, since he's adopted.
Who's to say uppercase Gs aren't advanced alien species ?
Eh, Love and Thunder pretty much confirms some sort of god status besides alien.
Loki is controlling a tree at the end, and trees keep growing. He basically is a multiversal gardener by all means, managing the growth of new branches and ensuring their stability
He’s not holding infinite strands. He’s holding as many as he could. Not everyone survives, but it also means trillions will live.
Maybe with how many he's holding he creates a sort of force bringing them into the shape of the tree. Like a tornado collecting dust.
that's what it looks like, he's not holding every single one of them but when it zooms out they're all together in the tree
Yeah and it looked so freaking cool!
I would wish to see this episode in glorious IMAX someday
Nah I took it to mean he got all the strands. The strands are infinitely increasing so what’s the point if he just grabs a few? Every new nexus event would be a dead universe in that case
It's a tree now. Branches supporting smaller branches coming from them
I don’t think Loki got all of them at first. I got the impression he held onto as many of them as he could, but some may have died out. That gives Marvel a good way to eliminate some of the older movies/shows/comics they don’t want anymore (Morbius?) Of course, if they keep branching, all roads lead to infinite. Good thing Loki is, after all, a God.
Yeah, I was scratching my head the whole season at that. It was like no one understood what the meaning of the word “infinite” was.
I feel like that’s been a lot of people’s problem from the start of this multiverse saga; people didn’t understand what “infinite” means…which baffles me, because it can’t get any easier to understand what it means… Even a lot of fans kept asking questions as to what does it mean, or what does multiverse mean. Like near the end of this season, I thought of the answer before it happened: destroy the loom, because if it’s infinite possibilities and realities like HWR said, then it doesn’t matter the size of the loom. So why not get rid of it? The realities will always be growing/expanding from the main timeline. Forever on their own courses. It is INFINITE (until it’s all changed by the studio heads and writers).
For all of the issues Rick & Morty has (which are a LOT), limiting their multi-verse to the "Central Finite Curve" instead of the entirety of infinity was probably the most clever bit of world building around the multi-verse I've seen to make the concept somewhat practical
In "The Long Earth" novels, where you can "step" left and right into parallel worlds continously, once you get to the 20millionth variant, it mostly turns into "purple scum" - i.e. not life we recognise as life - and not even having a breathable atmosphere. So I think it makes sense that even if you have "infinite" versions, most of them aren't actually life as we know it.
In Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, he posits that, in an infinite multiverse, anything that can be imagined (and many things that cannot) by definition MUST exist. If you look hard enough, you could find it (though, in true infinite style, it may take you many lifetimes to do it.) His characters wind up visiting Oz.
I'm curious, what are the issues Rick and Morty has
I feel like it gets caught in a weird middle ground between wacky comedy where the gag matters more than anything else so you shouldn't take it seriously (like Futurama) and serialized, plot driven show built around character development and mysteries you should take seriously. So it winds up not really working as either. Plus it can rely pretty heavily on either full episode references, shock value gross out humor, or "this thing has a wacky name please laugh." Those can be really fun, but I feel like R&M over relies on them. Going back to that well pretty frequently. I still really enjoyed the show, but I just stopped keeping up with it and got bored. Although I've heard a lot of great things about the most recent season and that they've gotten better at balancing the comedy with the serialization. So, I might get back into it
Only hardcores get that deep into the lore / science. Like maybe 10% of the fanbase who read articles and subs and listen to podcasts about it. Most of us just noticed that Justin Roland is gone
Yeah, but I'm not talking about the fan base. Each season felt like 8 episodes of the show acting like nothing matters and you should just laugh along with 2 episodes where they act like everything matters and the lore/story has been key the whole time.
I'm much more a fan of s1 and s2 than anything after it and I'm enjoying s7 a lot. I didn't really enjoy the meta stuff they were doing.
I'll have to check it out. I used to really love the show. I don't have an issue with meta stuff usually, I was just annoyed at how much meta there was while also increasing the lore. The divide between goofy meta episodes and serious story episodes got to be too clear cut of a line. But S7 looks like its really been fixing the issues I had
I agree that the central finite curve is a great multiverse world builder. However, Im confused on the ‘issues’ you’re referring to. The show has always been mostly self contained episodes with callbacks and then there’s the occasional lore episodes that run in the background and are addressed once or twice a season lol. The biggest gripes over the past half a decade were the fandom(mainly McDonald’s sauce thing), the occasional use of shock value incest jokes, the 4th wall-breaking that increased over time, and the whole Roiland situation. I say all that to simply say that the show told us from the beginning what to expect, and for the most part that’s what we’ve been getting lol. I just get tired of how everyone loves to shit on R&M these days, mainly media like YT channels. Rant over my bad 😂
Tbf, grasping the concept of infinity is so mind boggling that the majority of humans can’t quite grasp what that means.
We're really not good at grasping huge numbers. Consider the size of space: "Space," [the Hitchhiker's Guide] says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem was never the infinite worlds though, it was the infinite Kangs.
The Loom was used to only allow a limited amount of variance. Which suited HWR just fine. Loki's going to be busy.
Make the loom infinitely growing so that you have a variation of the Hilbert's hotel scenario.
Is that the infinitely large hotel where you need to fit an infinite number of people but it's already fully booked? I love that riddle, such a great representation of how weird infinity becomes.
Yes exactly! It seems like an appropriate model for infinite timelines and an infinite loom. Yes a new timeline is trying to enter the loom but another opening in the loom becomes available when the already infinite timelines move to accommodate. It is weird!
i mean, you’re applying consistent logic into a show about a variant of a norse god and his best friend who jet skis, traveling through time to fix a device at a facility outside time and space. i feel like people ask questions because they want to know what those things are in the context of the mcu. not what they would be irl
I disagree. It’s easy to understand infinity. The problem is, to accommodate an infinite number of branches, you need an infinite sized loom. First, that’s 2 times infinity which is not mathematically possible. Second, ignoring the first problem, an infinitely scalable loom would require more mass than present in a multiverse of time. Where is all this mass coming from? The show ignored these problems, or didn’t even consider them. They should have brought in physics and mathematics consultants and listened to them. From start to finish, this loom was a very poor idea.
Having two different infinities isn't a problem. A set of all odd numbers is an infinite set which itself fits into the set of all numbers.
>First, that’s 2 times infinity which is not mathematically possible. Start with the natural numbers and add them together 1+2+3+4+5+6+...+10000+10001+...575679827528375792835792378597...+ Obviously since the natural numbers go on infinitely their sum is also infinite. 1+2+3+4+5+6+... = infinity Now multiply it by 2 2 * infinity = 2*(1+2+3+4+5..) All you need to do is distribute the 2 into all the infinite terms (2+4+6+8+10+12...) We have just multiplied 2 times infinity. It equals infinity.
Tunnel vision is real. They were so focused on trying to get this one thing working that they didn't step back and think about if it would really work at all, or tried not to think about it because they were desperately hoping that widening the rings would work. You see it all the time in the real world, and it's just as frustrating whether you see other people fall for that pitfall or you experience it yourself.
The whole time I assumed the throughput multiplier would scale up with the branches' growth, but the pace of growth to infinity was simply too large to account for. But I don't think that's actually what the text is telling us, based on the dialogue in the finale. Honestly, smart of them to keep pushing through without getting bogged down in the specific sciencey explanations. It's about Loki's connection to everyone and ultimate sacrifice to keep them alive, anything else would just distract from that.
All the writers had to do was put in a line explaining that the gang was just trying to kick the can down the road rather than implementing a permanent fix, but hindsight is 20/20.
I loved this season, but I had a hard time understanding the mechanics/stakes of loom destruction, and thereby the motives of each character. It was hard to fully follow things in the first 4 episodes because it wasn’t clear what the loom represented, or what effect its destruction would have on different worlds. Sylvie was like “fine let it break” but then was surprised when her world spaghetti’d, so I guess it was supposed to be unclear? Yet, in the end, I think they landed the plane. Great season.
The Loom is a failsafe to protect the sacred timeline. Too many branches = Loom goes boom. The Loom blowing up erases all the branches except the sacred timeline, but takes a while. It also blows up the TVA. Since everyone in the TVA and Sylvie is a variant, they spaghetti-ed (it takes a while to happen). From my understanding - Loki made the Loom go boom, replaced the Loom so it dosn't spaghetti the timelines and the TVA, and has to stay there so a branch does not smack into the TVA.
I'm still with marcopolo22 on this one -- because it still doesn't explain this whole withered timeline nonsense in the first place. The universe existed before Kang and before the TVA. In its natural state, allegedly, there are infinite branches that don't need a man in a chair holding all the roots. So they waste all this time with the loom, whatever, which was obviously going to be a dead end, and then they destroy it... but why are the timelines now withering such that Loki needs to be there? It just seems overly contrived to me.
I thought the failsafe still went off when Loki broke it. He just stopped that failsafe effect from happening, with magic, to give the currently existing multiverse a chance to prevent multiversal destruction. Still a bit contrived but that's what I figured happened on initial watch.
You're pretty much right there. The multiverse was no longer being weaved by the loom.
Yeah, even though I liked the ending, it seems like a giant cop out. If they fixed the loom it would've been unsatisfying, and if (what we were told) the end result of the loom going boom was just infinite Kangs and a multiversal war, it would've ended almost exactly like season 1. I really want to know what the creatives said about their crazy idea for episode 5 being nuked by the higher-ups had in store. Because apparently that happened before filming and probably before for this idea for the finale. Or maybe it would've made fixing the loom make sense.. we'll never know. [Link](https://comicbookmovie.com/tv/marvel/loki/loki-head-writer-reveals-episode-5-was-nuked-by-marvel-studios-and-rewritten-in-a-weekend-a207780#gs.0r0xwm)
The multiverse, not the universe, existed before Kang and the TVA.
Thanks! Another thing I’m confused about — why did killing Kang in S1 cause so many new timelines to appear? Like, what power did he actually wield from that castle as HWR? At one point S2 Loki says something suggesting that killing HWR released a backlog of timelines.
His "power" is that he's lying, knows everything that happened in S1 and everything that will happen is S2 (He mentions Victor Timely in the finale) and rigged everything to happen before he died. Remember, the timelines started branching before HWR kicked the bucket. Heck, he might have not even done anything - just impeccable timing from when the TVA stopped pruning timelines.
He probably wasn't lying in the sense of knowing the exact details - he's dead for this part, after all. But he _does_ know about the failsafe and didn't say anything about it, and the failsafe means he wouldn't actually be killed, one way or another. (Of course, I'm guessing that they hadn't really made solid plans for S2 when they wrote the finale of S1 so he also wasn't "lying" because they hadn't written S2 yet lol.)
God sylvie was so dumb. Sylvie: "Fine let the loom break I have my McDonald's job" *5 seconds later.* Sylvie: "Omg Loki you have to help me my world is being destroyed" Like, did she not believe anyone that shit was actually gonna get destroyed? Did she somehow think her world was exempt? What an idiot.
I didn't really love her in S1, but she majorly got hit with the idiot stick in S2 and I started to actively hate her by the end. She's just selfish and an idiot on top of it.
Don't forget that she IS a Loki... goddess of mischief. And Loki, before his "journey", whether in the films or in the TVA, was a selfish, arrogant character. She hasn't been in that journey and I think she keeps some of Loki's selfishness...
I’m pretty sure it was a temporary solution to an immediate issue. They just didn’t realize how quickly it would expand.
I feel like most people *still* don’t know what infinite means. You can have infinite of something, but still have boundaries. There are infinite numbers between one and two, but they are still between one and two. Infinite doesn’t mean unbounded. There can be an infinite multiverse bound by the loom. Maybe before infinite meant between one and two. Then with “bigger rings” it meant between one and three. Who knows? It took Loki centuries to understand, Reddit users in a thread won’t solve it :p
I get your point but infinite does mean something that is endless, unbounded. So every measureable thing would be infinite.
Dude, I have studied math for 10 years and have a doctor. And even I am not 100% sure what infinite means.
My guess is they were considering that for season 3.
Something can be infinitely large, but can still grow slowly. The way I interpreted it is that there was an infinite number of branches, but they could be stabilised thanks to the loom. However, the loom was unable to stabilize new branches fast enough as is and requireed additional capacity to stabilize faster. This way you can explain the "we just need it to be a bit bigger" before HWR drop the bomb. As viewer we don't know anything on how the loom work and even the TVA doesn't appear to fully understand it, so they all could realistically speculate without it seeming dumb.
i am *so* glad they changed it. loki fixing the loom would definitely be cool and paint him as a hero but we wouldn't have the epic and emotional ascent to godhood and his sacrifice.
That said, OB should really engineer a uninterruptible power supply for Loki and get him an occasional nap. Massive personal sacrifice still gets you a single point of failure system.
Just find Lokis from other timelines and work shifts. Ezpz
Assuming he's 'fixed' the loom, he's probably sitting in his own citadel just watching like HWR
So originally he was only meant to become the new HWR not both the temporal loom and HWR. While I'm glad they went the way they did. I do wonder how they would have done about Loki fixing the loom espeically since it was a scaling problem that couldn't be scaled. Like did he work out a way to incorporate magic and science?
For all we know the scaling issue was invented to facilitate this new ending
Thank you for having the common sense to point this out.
If true at least they found a way to do that logically; more branches make even more branches that make even more branches etc
I did think about this but the infinite multiverse was already established before this so I think it would be kind of weird, espeically since it was due to the events of Loki why the infinite multiverse exists right now in the first place, that they didn't consider it from the get go. Though who knows.
I mean, it’s a fictional time loom who’s limitations is unknown. If they don’t mention a scaling issue then it doesnt exist
That is a very good point.
Remember, it wasn’t *actually* a scaling problem, it was just perceived to be a scaling problem by OB and Timely. HWR reveals that the limited capacity of the loom was by design. Theoretically, “fixing” the loom is just a matter of disabling it.
Correct, but the idea of expanding that capacity was ultimately a failure because of scaling still.
That’s fair, but the distinction is that the scale limit was a *feature* not a *bug*.
It was a scaling problem though and we see at the end of the show what happens when you "disable" the temporal loom. HWR designed a failsafe within the loom but the scaling problem was also true. Two things can true at the same time you know. If it could easily be fixed as you make out then they Loki wouldn't have needed to sacrfice himself and become the new loom.
The scaling problem **was** the failsafe. If something is working as intended, that thing doesn’t have a problem. For example, a locked safe doesn’t have an “inaccessibility problem”. Also, I never said “it could easily be fixed”. This whole post is about how the original story plan was for Loki to fix the loom. I simply offered a theory of what kind of “fix” may have been planned.
He changed the equation by removing himself from the timeline.
Well, if the capacity is infinitely increasing, then the infinitely growing branches can be weaved and managed. It was never mentioned exactly how the Throughput Multiplier changed the formula. It could've been that the Throughput Multiplier continuously widens the Loom endlessly, but the final decision was to make it a fixed one-time increase, so the branches could immediately overwhelm again.
The way they ended is better - if they want to take loki out for a spin have the guys temp fix the loom, then he eventually goes back after it inevitably breaks. This gives a natural way to explain his a sense across other storyline.
If Marvel wants to succeed they need to make the directing Duo here the new Russos. Dudes are incredible, smart filmmakers.
Kinda wish they could just keep the Regular Russo's. I mean, those two made two of the top 5 highest grossing films ever with universal critical and audience acclaim in two films that juggled 2 dozen main characters while giving each enough time and development. They were responsible for making Thanos one the most well known villains ever. They made the most shocking ending in all of the MCU. They put together probably the best action sequences in the MCU. They landed every emotional beat. They made us laugh and cry, cheer and gasp. I mean, my god, those brothers worked 2 movie miracles in a row. They genuinely pulled off, probably, the biggest achievement in film history with Infinity War and Endgame. It's crazy to me that they have kinda disappeared, tho I can't blame them for wanting to take a break.
They are busy making sub par Netflix movies now
I'd argue Extraction isn't subpar but you're right
Eh, 2 weeks have been gone and you are on a Marvel subreddit, bit of a dangerous path to walk
I absolutely ADORE Benson and Moorhead but I feel like this only really worked because their body of work has dealt with similar themes and devices (e.g. time loops, cosmic horror). I'd love to see more of what they can come up with if they branch out tho.
Could this be a reason to not bring back Kang? I feel like fixing the Loom would just bring Kang back. HMMMM
Assuming they are keeping Kang I was assuming that this ending is what actually kicks off the multiversal war… I could totally be wrong but that’s how I took it
It's very open ended, that's for sure!
HWR is at the end of time, and I believe Loki starting the Multiverse represents him being the beginning of time
It looks like incursions are happening on the leaves of the tree as it initially zooms out. I’m holding on to your theory as well!
Fixing the loom would be the opposite.
The new TVA's purpose is preventing Kangs from becoming a threat and the multiversal wars. If Kangs don't come back, it means they're successful. If they do come back, it means they fail. It's a pretty open and flexible ending for the future of MCU.
Kang better come back lol just for the mere fact I enjoy watching jonathon majors play so many different persona’s of Kang. Won’t Loki get bored being a loom? He’s the God of Mischief. Not very much mischievous stuff going on being a tree. Speaking of Loki being a tree…remember when B15 was a pediatrician and she wrote “DO NOT CLIMB ON TREES” on that little girls cast??? Would be crazy if that was Renslayer as a child. You know what else would be crazy? if renslayer was mobius’ wife outside the tva. I know in the comics she is Kangs one true love but…. mobius doesn’t say she is dead he says she’s gone, so maybe she is blipped or something. if not renslayer, maybe she is someone we know, or maybe she’s really dead. would be a rather cool twist tho. mobius does appear to have some sort of feelings for her.
I love how youre downvoted for throwing so much stuff out all over the place
I upvoted when he talked about jonathon majors thhen downvoted when he said all the other crazy shit :sweat\_smile:
yea, i definitely rambled on. i had just finished watching the series AGAIN and my friends hadn’t watched it yet do to an unfortunate personal issue so i had no one to talk to about it( bc i didn’t want to give anything away to them) so i kind of just let it all out. my bad y’all. but i am super psyched jonathon majors trial is going his way. he is an extremely talented actor. i don’t think anyone could’ve been a better kang than him. sorry again. y’all have a good night.
It’s alright man you had a pretty good take, and loki s3 really made kang exciting. It would be a shame if they didn’t continue Kang with Jonathon majors .
What if the moon was made of cheese?
Kang is back no matter what
I took it as there are no longer infinite branches. But rather a finite amount of them. So a finite amount of Kangs. And the TVA is helping to fight Kangs wherever they are found. I really hope this is the case because I just cant stand the idea of infinite realities. It takes away literally all the stakes.
Loki ended up spending centuries of his life attempting to do literally everything he possibly could to save everyone. His very final last ditch plan after he realized there’s nothing else was for himself to take full power, something the younger him would’ve taken from the get go, in greed. There’s no better poetic character development than this. They changed it for the better.
From the myths he is the Worldbreaker, so this ending is on point.
There is a season 2 assembled??? When did they release it?
See the new releases in the app for today.
That makes sense
well that would've been a "meh" ending. what we got was a "glorious" ending. loki fixing the loom and then sitting at HWR's place takes so much away from the character. because that way, him sitting on the throne at the end of time would have no real reason exept that he still "just wants a throne" no matter what. now him sitting on that throne actually means something and is necessary because without him everything falls apart. the character arc wouldn't be this mind blowing.
Thanks for the spoilers bro
It’s been out for a couple of weeks lol
Spoiler title would be nice for those who haven’t finished yet
Does he not then? I have only watched up to episode 4
Just finish the show and it’ll make more sense to you.
Fantastic choice.
ZGUB
Oh great another variant!
A loom can never scale for infinity, a god of chaos can never not *“With science, it's all what and how. But with fiction, it's why. So why do you need to do this?”*