The Philosophical Endpoint of Loki.

Spoiler warning: spoilers ahead for Marvel’s Loki, the Marvel Universe, The Good Place, and maybe a few other shows about time. 

Trigger warning: self-harm and existential crisis.

Marvel’s Loki is a beautiful piece of irony. We follow Loki (or rather, a Loki Variant) on a journey through time as he teams up (or dupes) the Time Variant Authority (TVA). Yet even as Loki makes a point in Season 1: Episode 2 about how only he and Mobius (played by Owen Wilson) have free will, viewers are watching this show play out exactly as it was planned by the writers.

By the way, if you’ve come here for a low-key piece about the new Loki show, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Shows about time tend to fall into one of two camps: everything is fixed and you can’t change time, or nothing is truly fixed, which means that everything is open, chaotic, and essentially meaningless.

In The Good Place, the writers spend four seasons exploring the idea that time isn’t fixed (or is imperfectly fixed by an unenthusiastic and humorous Judge), and that in the end, we should enjoy our trip around the sun and our experiences in our life for as long as we want, and then choose our time to wink out of existence. Viewed darkly, The Good Place is a consistent endpoint for postmodern thought: if we’re making meaning out of a chaotic, unfeeling universe, then nothing ultimately matters. And The Good Place, though beautiful with funny moments and relatable characters, somewhat accidentally becomes a kind of dark analogy for the legitimacy and logic of suicide: why endure the pain of life when you can choose to wink out of consciousness and existence at your leisure?

The writers of Loki seem to be riffing on the theme of mischief, as Loki, the god of mischief, plays out the concept in so many variants (so far, there are two we’ve seen on screen, but the credits and the dialogue hint at many, many more). In a way, we have a classic battle (in philosophy and pop culture…and even theology) between the two sides: determinism and free will. The show becomes an exploration of this, and they seem to be headed in a different direction than the now de-canonized Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which more or less suggested that time is fixed (and that the heroes win in the end). In fact, it was in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that one of the characters explains a perfect explanation for the fixed view of time as a diagonal line drawn on a book (showing four dimensions played out in a three-dimensional space). Clip here if you’re interested.

Back to the point: if the writers of Loki are exploring free will (albeit in a sort of Wizard of Oz context), it seems they will land on the side that free will is indeed free. Of course, how can you have heroism without free will? Who are greater heroes than The Avengers and the like…even the Sacred Timeline Loki is a hero in the end. If you have no free will, then there is no bravery, no courage, no exceptionalism. It was all the scripted puppeteering of a higher power. And while the Marvel Universe is built on a sort of Judeo-Christian God (who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent), I suspect that the writers of Loki are going to land in the postmodern context that plays to the audience in heroic and epic terms. Think: the scrappy Rebellion vs. the evil Galactic Empire of Star Wars, or the real-life war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which Star Wars feels closely based on. Popular media is full of these kinds of examples—the war between the Templars (order, control, evil) vs. the Assassins (choice, freedom, good) of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, for example. In other words, Loki has to come down on the side of “freedom and goodness,” not “order and control.”

There are a number of movies and media that explore the concepts of time, and how we relate to them. Prince of Persia, Groundhog Day, The Day After Tomorrow, the Back to the Future trilogy—the list goes on and on. Again and again, these films (thanks perhaps to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens) try to straddle the determinism/free will question—usually using time travel as a plot device for character development so that the usually jerk-of-a-person can go on his journey and become a hero in the end. So far, there’s no real reason why Loki would deviate from this, though perhaps the writers will take the show in a different direction than simply: the Loki variant we like is ultimately good (even while still mischievous) and the other Loki variants are bad (so we root for their destruction because we’ve seen them do genuinely shocking things like murder people we like). Someone will correct me, saying that this is not at all a show about time alteration, because the whole point of the show is keeping the continuity of the Sacred Timeline. But that’s not the direction I want to go with this article. The direction I think it would be interesting to watch (but I’m not convinced the writers can pull this off) is to create a lot more gray area for the Loki variants and the rest of the characters (many of the Minutemen, by the way, we don’t care about at all because they’re just given letters and numbers as names). Except for Pillboi, who we do care about because we grew attached to him in The Good Place, and yes, again, there are a lot of parallels between the two shows. It would be really interesting to see these variants of Loki end up in a massive battle against each other, where “our” variant outsmarts the rest. Or that the actual controlling hand behind the TVA is not the three timekeepers, but more Loki variants (though a lot of Marvel lore suggests this will not be the case).

My point is this. It doesn’t matter what surprising twist or upset the writers can conceive of. And God forbid they pull a J.J. Abrams. It doesn’t matter because the premise they’re working off of can only end one way: into the same dark sinkhole that all postmodern thought ends. And that’s where I wanted to go with this—into a very real, very significant exploration of not Loki’s reality “on screen,” but what postmodern thought means for our reality.

I’ve written about the question of “is reality heading to a conclusion?” before, and my answer is “yes.” But I’m working from different presuppositions. In a postmodern context, where the universe (or multiverse, or omniverse) is just meaningless chaos, where a cosmic big bang event (by the way, the question of where matter came from is one for philosophy or theology, not science) leads to a heat death of the universe, or big rip, with no real consequences for our good or evil actions (even there, “good” and “evil” can’t be objective terms, only how we subjectively feel about those actions). In the end, postmodernism validates the option to remove ourselves from existence, especially if we’re consistent with its logic that allows for anyone’s truth to be valid for them. Suicide is not only a real option in the postmodern context, but in many ways, the most reasonable outcome. We mourn when celebrities we liked take their lives—and we should—but according to a postmodern worldview, it makes more sense to celebrate their decision to live their truth, or really, to even just to shrug and say “different strokes for different folks.” See, the whole edifice of postmodern thought stands on a reality-breaking lie—one that invalidates the entirety of its system of thought. Postmodern thought demands that we take all truths subjectively—except the very claim and truth that all truths are subjective. We must—I repeat—must have an objective reference point to make sense of any system of thought, and postmodernism builds its reference point in the most ironic place—on the grounds of objective truth. If “all truths are subjective” were true, postmodernism would contradict its whole premise, because to insist that “all truths are subjective” requires an objective truth. And when you build an entire worldview on a contradiction, it leads (logically) to the outcome that suicide (even of healthy, bright, wonderful people) is a fine choice. But to really twist the knife, so is murder. Within this contradiction, murder is a wonderful expression of one’s self-invented, subjective truth, because it works for them. The most that people can say to rebut this (within a postmodern context) is that they don’t like it. They feel disgusted, or upset, or horrified about such a choice. Ironically, it is when cases like this show up (when someone we care about is murdered) that people bait and switch, and start appealing to external, objective standards like morality, or “goodness,” or other “Principles” or outside reference points that enforce a “reality as it should be” kind of perspective. The truly consistent postmodernists might admit that murder is a valid life choice and we have collectively decided to put in place laws as a society because we’ve evolved to not want murder because it threatens ourselves and our race. But even there, why would that matter when suicide seems to be the wise choice to end this dream of reality that is simply such a pain?

Besides postmodern thought being built on a logical contradiction, I don’t like (and I suspect you don’t either) where postmodern thought leads us. It leads (ultimately) to a place that says: all that heroism and courage and goodness meant nothing because nothing matters, and no one will be around to appreciate it anyway. But there is something in my bones (and I suspect yours as well) that says: “no, heroism, courage, goodness—these do matter.” Now someone could fault me for choosing to paint reality as I want it to be, instead of taking a hard look at the coldness of reality. “Faith is for the weak,” some will say. And they believe it. I would like to offer a counter-perspective, and one not too dissimilar to the case C.S. Lewis makes (possibly in several places, but likely in his book Mere Christianity). If we have a desire for something (goodness, beauty, truth), then it makes sense to believe that the thing for which we long is real. We have a desire for justice—there must be such a thing as real justice. We have a desire for love—there must be a true thing as love. This argument for the true, the good, and the beautiful is one I find convincing—more convincing than the illogicality of making our own meaning in a sea of chaos, more convincing than a world where it somehow makes sense to argue that nothing matters. See the irony? If nothing matters—how about the claim that nothing matters? Essentially, you’re making sense out of nonsense, thus proving that sense must exist to argue for nonsense. Yet again, postmodernists sneak objective truth claims into their statements—the only thing is that they’re channeling Loki in that they’re being deceptive about it. The alternatives are to willfully deceive people…or perhaps to be so ignorant as to not realize the blatant contradiction. Or, what I suspect most people who are intelligent must do to fall into the camp of postmodern thought: is a kind of double-think. Don’t think about the logically contradiction. Pass it off as a mystery, which must be accepted as the price of admission. Of course, this kind of faith statement (“you must believe in a contradiction”) isn’t one shared by earnest truth-seekers, or people who care about the reality they inhabit. And yes, you do inhabit a reality, because you are thinking, reading, seeing—and these all validate that something exists and that you exist. No, the bigger conundrum is how to make sense of reality when you stop accepting lame excuses and settling for impossible contradictions.

Perhaps reality is determined. Let’s get curious. By whom? Perhaps we have free will. What is freedom? How can it be free—and isn’t that freedom and openness terrifying?

Where Loki may go—and arguably has to go—is that we have free will. After all, that is our zeitgeist, no matter what century Loki is visiting.

What we need is to get away from the contradictions and find the paradox. How can it be true at the same time that reality is determined and that our choices are free?

The analogy I tend to use to explain this is this. Suppose I ask my wife to dance with me. Her favorite song is on, and she loves dancing. She does not have a disability and there is no reason why she would not say “yes.” So, she dances with me. I did not force her to dance with me. It was her choice. She was not predetermined, and yet I could have told you with 100% accuracy that she would dance with me—suggesting in a way that she actually was predetermined to dance with me. At this point, we could get obtusely philosophical and start to deconstruct the nature of choice—enough to veil the reality that we are genuinely free to do what we do. Even if you blame it on programming, you would still sue someone for damages if they attacked you, unprovoked, proving that you believed there was genuine agency. We act as if people are truly free—and that is how we act when the rubber meets the road. The only time we conveniently slip into determinism is when we’re the one wronging someone else (“it wasn’t my fault!”).

Reality is complicated, but in the end, is it? A reality that was set in motion by a chaotic bang must have something external to that to put it in motion. The “matter is eternal” argument doesn’t work in every other context. The officer will call B.S. if you claim spontaneous generation on the drugs in your car. Your mom would have called B.S. if you had claimed you didn’t know how that porn site (or magazine) showed up in your possession. You can’t just “wish” an iPhone into existence, especially as you’re walking away from an Apple store without a receipt. And yet we accept the unexplained existence of an entire universe? It simply fails the B.S. test. If we cannot accept the eternal or spontaneous existence of matter—what then?

The only explanation for reality that makes sense to me is one in which we have (like in the Marvel Universe) an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present Being that sovereignly sees all that takes place while putting us in a context where our choices truly matter. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all fall into this camp—the problem with the first and third is that they don’t account for the perfections of God. God, by God’s nature, to be fully loving and fully good, must not be narcissistic, like Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. God must be self-giving, in a loving relationship and communion—forever. Yet that communion can’t happen with the God’s creation, or that God would be dependent on His creation—invalidating His perfections. No, what we see spelled out in the Bible—first in the Old Testament, and more clearly in the New Testament—is that God is three in Personhood, and one in Being. A paradox, not a contradiction. Thus God, for all time, has existed in a self-giving, other-loving orientation—and out of the overflow of that eternal relationship of beauty and goodness and love, created the universe…and you in it. For a full picture of the implications of this conclusion—you have to understand what “the Gospel” is. A starting place to understand this could be another article I wrote about Jesus Christ. Or even this article here. Because the end of the story—the story of reality (not a fictional universe like the one Loki inhabits)—is that we can have an eternal, joyful, reciprocal relationship with the God who created and pursued us to enjoy Himself, in that beautiful combination of His sovereignty and our free choice. We respond to His loving call to be in relationship with Himself—as our Creator, our Savior, our Lord, and our friend. If you’ve found a more compelling story—a more convincing reality—I would be surprised. And I would be happy to hear more from you about this if you have questions about this.

As concerns Loki, the endpoint of the series is just like postmodernism: don’t look too closely, lest you see the futility of it all. A show in which anything can happen means that nothing matters. The writers have to deftly hide the inherent contradiction in it all, probably in some cliché and sappy ending like with The Good Place. Perhaps they’ll do so in a more mischievous way—though it seems inevitable that Loki (at least one of them) will break the Sacred Timeline, because the Marvel Multiverse is real (and even the title of the next chapter in Doctor Strange). Just remember—that for Loki’s choices to matter, they have to matter. And in a context where anything can happen—and it all leads to nothing of lasting consequence, what really matters anyway? The endpoint will be this: enjoy the show, just don’t think about it too hard, or you might experience existential crisis.