That reference to a Kang variant being defeated near the end, did that refer to Quantumania?
Yes. Mobius says a variant caused trouble in a 616-adjacent realm, which no doubt means the Quantum Realm. (Because the MCU is officially called Earth-616 within the MCU, despite other sources calling it Earth-199999 or whatever. Despite the pretense of some works that it's all a single unified multiverse, it's still really just a bunch of alternate fictional interpretations of the comics, and with the exception of
Spider-Verse, they all call their own primary universe Earth-616 when the subject comes up.)
So, do we figure that's it for Hiddleston in the MCU now?
I did repeatedly find myself thinking this season that Hiddleston is no longer convincing as an ageless Asgardian. In-story, all of this (until the time-loop business in the finale) is supposed to be just days, at most weeks, after Loki was pulled from the timeline at the end of
Avengers in 2012, but Hiddleston looks significantly different now than he did then. I guess they could digitally de-age him if they wanted to bring him back, though.
Ultimately, it led to this feeling like it could have been a feature-length Loki movie as a coda to Season 1, and worked just as well.
Except that even as a movie, it still would've just felt like an afterthought, a gratuitous complication to the ending of season 1 that still comes out in essentially the same place it started, aside from a few small character-arc advances.
I'm also confused because Marvel made explicit comments about how this episode would tee up Kang as the antagonist for the Multiverse Saga. And then...it doesn't. There were some references to the Kangs being out there, along with a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to Quantumania, but the ending scene at the TVA does not imply they are heavily concerned about him. Makes me wonder if there was a post-credit scene they cut at the last minute.
I guess it implicitly sets up the threat, because He Who Remains stressed that destroying the Loom would unleash the multiversal war that would destroy everything, and then Loki destroyed the Loom. But it does rather rely on the viewer remembering the whole discussion setting up that threat in season 1, so it's not as strong as it could be.
So on the whole, I liked it as an episode. I found it a very brave/creative way to end a MCU series. However, I think it was a mediocre ending to both Season 2, and Loki's character arc.
It was creative in visuals, design, and direction, but there was very little story, just a shaggy-dog tale about dealing with a dragged-out plot problem, with hardly any character exploration. The plot drove nearly everything the characters did, instead of the characters driving the plot. And you're right -- it made the whole season that preceded it feel even more pointless than it was already feeling to me.
You know what I would've liked to see as a post-credit scene? Loki looks down from his Yggdrasil throne, asking someone to help him monitor the multiverse, and the camera turns and we see Jeffrey Wright as Uatu.
