How Many Years Did Loki Really Spend In The Season 2 Finale Time Loop?
The Season 2 finale of "Loki" proved to be epic in scale, as the Asgardian god of mischief finds himself taking control of the multiverse itself. His journey to that epic power is anything but straightforward, as Loki (Tom Hiddleston) spends much of the Season 2 finale using his Time Slipping abilities to try and engineer a scenario where the Time Variance Authority can be saved. By returning countless times to different moments in the series, Loki hopes to engineer a scenario in which he can restore the TVA. In the end, Loki takes on a new role in the MCU and realizes that he must shoulder the ultimate burden if he hopes to save his friends.
By manipulating the timeline with his newfound Time Slipping powers, Loki works with Ouroboros (Ke Huy Quan), Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), and Mobius (Owen Wilson) to try and repeat the failed repair of the Temporal Loom from Season 2, Episode 4. When that doesn't work, he travels back to the Season 1 finale, confronting Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) and He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). This MCU version of "Groundhog Day" plays out at an incomprehensible scale, raising the question of just how much time Loki spent cycling through the same events.
To figure out how much time Loki spent in the Season 2 finale time loop, we can look at a few clues offered by the episode. Combined with some basic math, it's possible to figure out the bare minimum amount of time Loki spent, but not the maximum.
Loki spent a lot of time trying to speed-run a Temporal Loom repair
When Loki first arrives back in the climactic moments of Season 2, Episode 4, he starts by trying to shave time off Victor Timely's attempt to repair the Temporal Loom. Time after time, he fails, and Timely is turned into spaghetti by the temporal radiation outside the TVA as soon as the blast doors are opened. We see three attempts, each of which takes roughly a minute, though the show's editing speeds up the pace. It's possible that the episode doesn't depict every attempt Loki makes here.
Next, Loki Time Slips to an even earlier moment, finding Miss Minutes at the point in Season 2, Episode 4 when she and Ravonna Renslayer were interrogating Timely. He starts from that point six or seven times before going even earlier to the point when Timely was first brought to the TVA. It's unclear how many times he starts from there since we only see it happen once, but he's able to predict a line of dialogue from Casey (Eugene Cordero). Ultimately, we don't know how much time Loki spent in these first couple of time loops, but it was enough to make him move on to more drastic measures.
Loki spent centuries learning science and engineering
In Episode 4, Victor Timely is spaghettified after trying to repair the temporal Loom, and Loki returns to that moment many times in the finale. After repeatedly trying to live through the moments leading up to Timely's spaghettification to find the scenario in which he succeeds at expanding the Temporal Loom, Loki decides to learn all the mechanics, physics, and engineering knowledge Ouroboros has in order to create the most efficient scenario. It ultimately leads to a pyrrhic victory, since the Loom was never designed to contain infinite timelines. Nevertheless, learning from Ouroboros takes Loki hundreds of years. Strangely, the episode doesn't include an explanation of how this took place. Did Loki go back hundreds of years, introduce himself to the TVA's head of repairs, and ask for physics lessons? Did he go unnoticed by other employees during that time? However it happened, it was the single longest endeavor of Loki's time looping.
While mastering quantum physics in real life would take about a decade if you went through the process of earning the necessary degrees, not to mention those for mechanical engineering, Ouroboros knows far more about those subjects than anyone in our real world. As he directly tells Loki, teaching him everything would take centuries. The show confirms this, giving us an onscreen card that cuts to "centuries later." How many centuries, we don't know, but Loki likely spent at least 200 years mastering Ouroboros's knowledge in addition to the potentially thousands of times he repeated the events of Episode 4.
Loki fought Sylvie to save He Who Remains thousands of times
After his plan to fix the Temporal Loom fails, Loki travels further back in time to the Season 1 finale, where he tries convincing Sylvie not to kill He Who Remains. This proves equally impossible; at that moment, Sylvie is utterly convinced the Kang variant needs to be eliminated. Eventually, Loki begins to freeze time so he can speak with He Who Remains. At one point, the villain tells him, "Why don't you just go through this a couple thousand more times," implying that the trickster has already run through the scenario at least that many times.
It's impossible to calculate how long that would have taken him since each attempt was slightly different. In some cases, he tried fighting Sylvie, which took very little time. In others, he tried talking with her, which took a little more. And in many cases, he paused time to talk with He Who Remains for quite a while. For simplicity's sake, let's assume that each attempt took an average of 10 minutes and that he went through this particular time loop 2,000 times. Ten minutes multiplied by 2,000 gives us nearly 14 days, which is the best estimate we can arrive at based on the information provided by the episode.
So, how long did Loki spend in time loops during the Season 2 finale? A couple of weeks dealing with He Who Remains is a negligible amount of time compared to the hundreds of years Loki spent studying under Ouroboros, as are the 10 or so attempts shown at navigating the Loom repair with Timely. The shortest time we can estimate, all in, would be 200 years, two weeks, and about one hour, but it could have been much longer.