Who pruned Loki at the end of the Loki season 2 episode 1? Warning: spoilers ahead for Loki season 2. Loki has returned to Disney Plus for a new season of his Marvel show, and it’s already causing waves.
Yes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has fully committed to time travel now (Which is going to make watching all the Marvel movies in order a nightmare), and our favorite Marvel character spent the first episode Time Slipping. This painful form of time travel could only be fixed by the God of Mischief pruning himself at the exact right moment.
There was just one problem. Loki got a bit distracted by Sylvie and nearly forgot to murder himself (we don’t blame him for that, to be fair). Thankfully, some mysterious figure knew what needed to be done and pruned Loki before he was lost to time. But who pruned Loki and why? Well, we’ve put together a list of suspects to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Who pruned Loki at the end of the Loki season 2 episode 1?
At the time of writing, we don’t know exactly who pruned Loki when he ran into Sylvie at the end of Loki season 2, episode 1, but we can make some guesses as to who it might have been.
It’s easy to presume that the person who pruned Loki was trying to kill the God of Mischief, but that might not be the case. Loki was supposed to be pruning himself when he was executed as part of Ouroboros’s plan to stop the Time Slipping, but he’d been distracted by the appearance of Sylvie. Maybe then it wasn’t an attempted murder but a successful rescue.
The Loki pruning suspects
With that in mind, we present the suspects who may have been behind the pruning. We’ve scored them all from one to ten, with one meaning ‘almost impossible’ and a ten meaning ‘they definitely did it.’
- Renslayer
- Kang
- Mobius
- Sylvie
- Loki
Renslayer
The most obvious person to prune Loki would be Renslayer. While we don’t know exactly what she’s up to yet, the former leader of the TVA has every reason to want our favorite Asgardian variant dead. The TVA did look a little worse for wear in the future, so maybe Loki appeared during Renslayer’s revenge on her former employers, and she took the opportunity to murder him then and there.
Still, it doesn’t seem like Renslayer’s style not to gloat before murdering her enemies, and she’d have no reason not to rub it in Loki’s face. We’ll give this a 6/10.
Kang
Kang is the new big Marvel villain, and like Renslayer, he’s got a motive to kill Loki, considering it was he and Sylvie who murdered He Who Remains. That said, we just don’t see Kang stabbing someone in the back. From what we saw of him in Quantumania, he may be villainous, but he’s not a coward, and he’s certainly not subtle.
No, like Renslayer, if Kang had attacked Loki, he would have either gloated about it or made a show of it. No, and as far as suspects go, Kang’s probably the least likely. Let’s give him odds of 1/10.
Mobius
Moving on to people who might actually have pruned Loki to help him, we like the odds that it’s a future version of Mobius. Why? Well, Mobius is clearly Loki’s best friend (Aside from Thor), so he’s got a reason to save him, and he was in the Time Loom when it seemed like Loki hadn’t properly pruned himself.
Perhaps in the original timeline, Loki didn’t prune himself, and future Mobius saw a chance to right a historic wrong and save his old friend. There’s just one problem with this particular idea: it seems as though in the MCU, when you’re time-traveling, you become part of past events, meaning that the timeline you experienced was always the version where you time traveled back (It’s called a predestination paradox, and it’s very confusing) and you can’t rewrite events.
In fact, we know this because timelines, where things have been changed, are what create the Nexus points and the variants in the first place. Therefore, if future Mobius was the one who sent Loki back, then it was just sheer coincidence that he pruned Loki at that exact moment, and we don’t necessarily see our favorite member of the TVA essentially killing his best friend without a ‘hello’ first. Let’s score this a 7/10.
Sylvie
Sylvie seems like the most realistic candidate for the person who pruned Loki despite the fact a version of her was in the room at that exact moment.
Why? Well, Sylvie’s never been afraid to exploit time travel for her own ends, and she is rather fond of Loki, so saving him from himself would probably be quite high on her list of priorities. She’s also not the chattiest either, and we can imagine her pruning her ex-boyfriend/temporal counterpart without saying a word. As we say, this seems like the likeliest explanation, 9/10.
Loki
Maybe future Loki pruned himself… sillier things have happened when time travel’s involved and Loki’s got a self-loathing streak. We’re going to give this a 5/10.
While we wait to find out who was being Loki’s unceremonious pruning, why not check out some of our other spoiler guides? We’ve explained the concept of Time Slipping, revealed who we think was calling Loki at the end of episode 1, and broken down where Sylvie is in the post-credit scene.
While you’re here, be sure why not travel forward in time yourself by reading our guide to Marvel’s phase 5 and learning all about the upcoming Marvel movies like The Marvels, Avengers 5, and The Thunderbolts.
Finally be sure to check out our list of the best TV series ever made for more great shows.