There has been an outcry from fans over the ending of Loki season 2, because he didn’t get to live happily ever after with Sylvie, but I think it was perfection. And now I’m going to tell you why.

AHOY, THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!

I fell in love with the character way back with the first THOR film. Partly because he’s a tremendously complicated character and also because of Tom Hiddleston’s portrayal. He is probably one of the finest actors of his generation (and many other generations), the man can do more with a look than many actors can do with a soliloquy. And for me to muse on how perfect the ending of Loki season 2 actually is, I have to go back to the beginning.

So, let’s take a look at THOR and how the events in that film impacted the character of Loki. He was the second son, slender, elegant, a magic user, not a bruiser like his older brother. He preferred his books to feasting and horseplay with the warriors. Thor had friends who I’m pretty sure gave Loki wedgies when he was a kid. They also saw him as a mama’s boy, and dishonorable because he used magic, cunning and guile in battle rather than whacking things with a mucking big sword.

You also had a truly toxic family dynamic, a father who told his sons “Only one of you can ascend to the throne, but both of you were born to be kings.” Way to set up a grotesque sibling rivalry, Odin. It was also a nice bit of foreshadowing because in truth there were two thrones, when Loki thought there was only one because he didn’t know he wasn’t Odin and Hera’s child.

At the end of the film, Loki wasn’t trying to destroy Asgard, he was trying to destroy Jotunheim as a way to prove to this distant father that he was worthy and deserving of love. To achieve this Loki lures his actual father into a trap and kills him in an effort to earn Odin’s love and respect. None of which works and Loki chooses what might be death rather than return to the family where he doesn’t feel welcome and believes he was nothing more than a trophy of war.

Angry and bitter he seeks vengeance by attacking Earth and thinks he will earn a throne there and prove he is a god and worthy to rule. There are more twists and turns in The Dark World where Loki’s anger leads directly to his mother’s death and in Ragnarok he returns home when he realizes Asgard and its people are in danger. Then trying once more to be the trickster god he stupidly tries to hang onto an Infinity Stone. The most significant moment is when he declares he is Loki Odin’s son as he attempts to kill Thanos in order to protect Thor and Heimdall, but as usual Loki loses.

Now we get into the Marvel timelines in Endgame. Loki, defeated and captured at the end of The Avengers manages to escape and now we have a variant Loki who has been pulled out of time and is once again a prisoner. Through out most of the first season of the television show Loki is his usual arrogant, angry, narcissistic self, but despite himself he forms a bond with Mobius and then he meets an equally angry, bitter version of himself in the form of Sylvie. She is one mirror in which he sees himself reflected, but he’s also fascinated by her and begins to care for her.

Mobius is another mirror offering friendship and camaraderie. Loki had flashes of that with Thor, but it was always poisoned by the rivalry.

All of these examples, good and bad are brought into stark focus at the end of time when Loki meets more variants of himself. All of them battling and betraying each other in an endless struggle for primacy and for what? To rule in Hell? The futility of it begins to register for variant Loki.

In the finale of season 1 Loki and Sylvie reach the fortress at the end of time and are confronted by He Who Remains and the foreshadowing for what will come in season 2 is all there. At one point Sylvie demands “What was the point?” when He Who Remains says he paved the way for them to be there, and he says this:

“You know you can’t get to the end until you’ve been changed by the journey.”

And then he lays out the devastation that will ensue if he is killed and Loki and Sylvie don’t agree to take his place. Loki believes him, Sylvie doesn’t and Loki sums up their dilemma in one devastating line to Sylvie:

“You can’t trust. And I can’t be trusted.”

Sylvie accuses Loki of wanting a throne and he unequivocally states that he doesn’t want a throne. This was Loki being changed by the journey because everything he did in the main timeline was try to seek a throne. Tony Stark even says to him at the end of Avengers “There is no throne.” Finally, Loki has come to accept that.

When Sylvie asks Loki what he wants he responds that he just wants her to be okay. It touches her enough that she kisses him before she sends Loki back to the TVA. She she kills He Who Remains because she hasn’t changed. She is still locked in that angry, bitter, frightened, distrustful place.

Then in season two is a frenzied attempt to save the Loom which weaves together and controls time lines. In terms of Loki’s character  growth there is the sad admission by Loki that he doesn’t want to be alone and that’s he never had friends before and he rather likes having friends. He has begun to care for people beyond himself. Probably because of that mirror provided by Mobius who has given him unconditional friendship.

Once Loki learns how to control time, he lives through hundreds of years learning the physics necessary to save the loom and the timelines, but it’s all for naught. He then returns over and over to the citadel and tries to prevent Sylvie from killing He Who Remains and fails over and over again — because Sylvie hasn’t changed, and can’t be reasoned with. The only way to save the destruction of everything is to kill Sylvie and that Loki cannot do. Because he does love her and it’s no longer a narcissistic love of self, he  wants her to have a peaceful, happy life, to be okay after all that she suffered.

When Loki tracked down Sylvie in season 2, he found her living a deeply ordinary life — working at a McDonalds, being a regular at a bar where they know her preferred drink, friends with her co-workers. It’s a life that he would have abhorred, but after all Sylvie endured he can see that for the first time in her life she is happy and at peace.

Loki got to have a childhood, grow up in Asgard, have a brother, parents. Sylvie was ripped away from her home as a child and the only way she could continue to evade the TVA after her escape was to live in the midst of apocalypses. What a terrible fate for a child, to grow up in the midst of suffering and death.

While Sylvie might be the most important person to Loki he also has come to care about Mobius and Hunter b-15, and Ouroboros, and Casey. He has friends, not merely people he manipulates. And if he doesn’t act they will all die too.

And so Loki finally finds his glorious purpose — he sacrifices himself to save the universe, but more importantly to save the people he has come to care about. The obsessive narcissism is finally tamed, ambition set aside, anger replaced with love. The heartbreak is that in order to save them he must accept a throne he no longer desires, and that he must be alone. That’s what makes it a sacrifice.

That is what makes the ending so, bittersweet, but also powerful. Add to that the fact that Loki twines the timelines into Yggdrasill, the giant ash tree that connects all the worlds was just the perfect grace note to this story.