Loki Episode 2 Ending Explained: The Variant Mystery and Marvel Connections

Our story starts at the end: Ragnarok. Marvel Comics Ragnarok, that is.

Thor: Disassembled was the closing arc to the volume of Thor comics that ran from 1996’s Heroes Reborn until approximately 2004. It was written by Michael Avon Oeming and drawn by Andrea di Vito, and it was excellent, a meta take on the role of story in the world and how characters react to fate, destiny, and free will when they are part of a story. 

It’s also a surprisingly huge influence on the philosophical conversations in this week’s episode – in the comics version, Thor became the All Father and saw the cyclical suffering his people were forced to suffer as Ragnaroks recurred, so, with Loki’s severed head dangling from his belt and protesting the whole way through, Thor initiated a “final” Ragnarok and shattered the loom at the base of the World Tree. 

Two years later, Asgard was reborn over Broxton, Oklahoma, during J. Michael Straczynski run as writer on Thor. The reborn Thor was tasked with finding the reborn versions of his fellow Asgardians, and one of those, to Thor’s great surprise, was a new female Loki. She stayed pretty villainous the whole time she was a woman, most notably joining Norman Osborn’s Cabal (the bad guy mirror of Marvel’s Illuminati, a team composed of ostensibly good guys who mostly just hung out together doing a ton of awful shit). 

So how does this tie into this week’s episode and the possible Lady Loki we meet here? Well, for that we need to look at another Loki “variant” from the comics…

Between Mobius discussing the possibility that Loki wants to shake up his behavior and Loki’s claims that literally stabbing people in the back is overdone, things seem a bit reminiscent of Loki’s behavior in the comics circa Siege. In that story, Loki died a heroic, albeit somewhat pointless death against the Void. Soon after, Loki was reborn as a child and gained the trust of the likes of Thor and certain others.