This article contains major spoilers for the ending of Ragnarok Season 3 Episode 6.
Netflix’s Norwegian YA drama Ragnarok certainly has its fans, and one must apologize to all of them for the scandalously terrible climax delivered here in Ragnarok Season 3.
It’s not my fault, obviously, but even as I sit here unpacking it, I feel bad for how deeply disappointing this ending is. I can imagine droves of fans drifting here in complete confusion, asking the obvious question in the hopes of receiving a better answer than the one they got.
Is that really it?
And yes, that was really it.
Ragnarok Season 3 Ending Explained
The whole thing begins with an ending of a sort. Peace has descended over Edda. The fighting has ended. Thor has laid the hammer down and is settling into the mundane routine and responsibilities of teenage life. Saxa is working with activists and investors to curb the pollution of Jutul Industries, paying off the show’s underlying climate-crisis message.
Warning bells start ringing when Magne, having passed his exams and graduated, discovers some Thor comics and a plastic Mjolnir. Uh-oh.
Does Ragnarok occur?
Ragnarok, the Norse end of days which entails the deaths of various Gods and the burning and subsequent submerging of the entire world, has obviously been teased since the very beginning of a show named after the event. But does Ragnarok occur here in the Season 3 finale? No, it does not.
One of the precipitating events of Ragnarok is the death of Baldur, the Norse God of Light and the son of Odin and Freya. This is what Magne believes he sees at the high school graduation ceremony: Jens, aka Baldur, being shot with an arrow by Hod. However, nobody else seems especially concerned.
It becomes obvious, eventually, that Magne is imagining these scenarios. His mighty battles give way to him standing alone in the school auditorium, and Signy, who has been giving him the cold shoulder, rather mundanely offering to be his girlfriend if he can just promise to do his best to be there for her.
The show is deliberate in displaying how these events still roughly line up with the prophecy of Ragnarok, of Thor’s death and rebirth in the new world, but… it was all a dream?
Was everything really just a dream?
Oh, boy, Ragnarok is going to get some stick for this. But, yes, the implication is that all three seasons of Ragnarok have just been a fantasy imagined by Magne, who is a paranoid schizophrenic.
Magne found solace in his Thor comic books, his grand imaginings being a coping mechanism for losing Isolde. As someone prone to flights of fantasy and recontextualizing reality, the idea is that Magne has reinvented his life as a cosmic conflict.
At least, though, there’s something resembling a happy ending. While the actual mythological events might not have been real, Magne’s growth as an individual seems to have stuck. Heavy-handed details like him throwing away his comics, and seeing the spectre of Isolde gradually fade away, imply that Magne has gone some way towards healing himself, coming to terms with his actual reality rather than the magical one he invented in his own mind.
This personal payoff notwithstanding, though, this is a deeply terrible climax to a series, almost daringly bad in its embrace of the ridiculous “it was all a dream” cliché.
You can stream Ragnarok Season 3 Episode 6 exclusively on Netflix. What did you think of the ending of Ragnarok Season 3? Let us know in the comments.
I liked the show, but the ending was terrible, both in terms of the mentioned “it was all a hallucination” but more fundamentally it emasculates Magne, undoes the dramatic tension of past episodes and also means there isn’t any scene in the show that can now be seen as true – for all we know he hallucinated Isolde as well – because all we are meant to know for sure post- 9 steps is that he has a father and a mother.
Very bad idea badly executed. But I totally understand the politics behind it. Leaving the story as real would give far too many people the right idea.
Raging! Absolutely terrible ending. Yet another show that ran out of ideas and ended as a dream. Or not real! Raging that I wasted all this time supporting the show by watching it to be let down in the last episode. The whole thing was a waste of time now!
A letdown waiting so long for season three very big let for all three episodes were horrible I was waiting for the show to explode
But it was a disappointment was of time waiting for it should of ended it with season 2
Worst ending to a show I have ever seen. There is too much that just couldn’t have been in Magne’s head. They probably just wanted to end the show without spending too much money.
If they really wanted this to end like this from the start, they should atleast have given us the whole thing re-capped as it really happend.
I’d like to say it was just a terrible ending, but it really makes no sense as the “all a fantasy” ending. Far to many scenes are told by other
characters without Thor around. So the “it’s all a dream” ending doesn’t work. The VO telling the story doesn’t work either if it’s all a dream. I choose to believe that a parallel dimension, a memory of battles past, or a view of what may still be at some point in the future are intruding on reality. It makes it a slightly less horrible ending for me because otherwise all the other characters are living in their own fantasy world as well. Or maybe it was a town of schizophrenics? Worst case scenario he was seeing what could have been and having a hard time separating it from the real world but only in the final scene. Or maybe the hammer was trying to take over again. Oh well, it’s over!
What a letdown. I loved the show except for the finale. Dallas erased a whole season as Bobby’s dream. I feel like I was cheated and I won’t watch anything else from the creators of Ragnarok. They disrespected their audience by not emphasizing more clues.
I think it ended like this bc Netflix canceled it and would t have more seasons. It does this with every interesting show so they had to find a way to wrap it up in like one episode. Lame, typical Netflix BS
It took me a minute to digest the ending of Netflix’s Ragnarok…
Surprised by the brevity of the season and layered progression of the finale, I immediately looked to internet forums hoping for a definitive synopsis explaining how the writers intended for us to perceive it. After reviewing many (likely former) fans’ reactions and thoughts, I have a deviated view of what actually occurred. Though entirely possible, I like to think that the entirety of mythic events were not just a psychological response to trauma from a mind predisposed to mental illness, but something much less abhorrent, yet still a bit trope-ey. I lean towards the premise of “Comic books are based on myths that just so happen to be real”, like in M. Night Shymalan’s ”Unbreakable”, and that Magne was strongly drawn to the story of Thor, because it was his history of sorts. During the graduation ceremony, I feel he is not imagining any of it, but instead, having a visceral vision of the past battle the comic books are based off of. He envisions the mythological entities with the appearances of those of his present, as that is how his mind is able to process these past-life memories. As the battle they avoided plays out in his mind, he finds peace that history had not repeated, but instead, the gods and giants came to an agreement using their gained wisdom through evolved experience. Thus, the ancient, perpetual discord comes to an end, eliminating the trauma loop forever. Magne discards the comic books and toys because he no longer needs them to know who he is and will never need them again. History will not repeat. And just like taking a risk with love, he, his friends and frenemies move forward into an unknown future, finally free to make their own stories.
I think events were true. I mean to much happened away from Magne, also, I’m not a optometrist, but you don’t just go from wearing glasses to not wearing them, without the requisite testing and advice from your optometrist. So, I think Thor reincarnates every few thousand years or so and Ragnarok is a real possibility and the choice is Ragnarok or peace. With peace the world gets a few more thousand years to spin on and with Ragnarok it’s a cleansing and restarting. So, in this version the world gets to spin on and all that Magne saw at the end was what would’ve happened if a peace wasn’t brokered. In the final scene the falling on the knees is a representation of losing his powers and being reborn as just Magne, since in peace time there’s no need for Thor. In the next few thousand years or so Thor will reincarnate as someone else, who’ll have the same choice. Peace or Ragnarok.
SO disappointing! Spending years waiting for the third season, hyping friends up for it too, just for it all to just be a figment of Magne’s imagination?! Genuinely upset that this is the route they decided to take with the show. Like someone else mentioned above, maybe it was because they knew Netflix would cancel it and they would have no time to give the show the justice it deserves. But wow. This ending created so many plot holes. This hurts just like Game of Thrones season 8.
I am surprised to see so many people being disappointed. I really liked the ending because it came as a real surprise! And why must there always be death and destruction to create a new world?
I even wonder whether war and destruction going on in the real world might have swung the producers towards a peaceful finale.
What was the alternative? Blood, gore and total destruction, everyone dies. Then reset and no one remembers anything – or everything? Seen that. Boring.
Also, it is not clear whether it was all only hallucinations or might have been real. And these are the best story endings when they leave some things open to the viewers imagination!
And the final cover song gave me goosebumps…
I have a different take on it, and I would love to find out what the writers’ true intentions were. The fact that Magne started to develop strength before Isolde died, and that he suddenly didn’t need his glasses to me was a hint that it was all true. Through the ages schizophrenics have been credited with mystic powers and I am wondering if our seeing that he had it was deliberate – he needed this perspective to pierce the veil and see the past. Either that or the fact that he was having these visions would look to medical science as if he had was schizophrenic. The overarching message from the three seasons that came through several times was that we can rewrite our future. Magne used his visions of the past to rewrite the relationship with the giants and prevent a dire future. By harmonising with the giants he enabled the present that we saw. In the end the final battle he saw looked to me like the contrast for the past to rewriting the future. He was then able to put aside the past as seen by his throwing out the comics and move into the future. The other theme of climate change, pollution and damage to the earth, shared by giants, gods and humans alike ran in tandem – it was a bigger problem that we all have to solve or there will be no world for any of us. To do that we needed harmony, and to rewrite the future. I think that it is far more fascinating and complex than it looks, and it’s ambiguity in the end was to leave us all thinking about the true key message, that we need to save the earth.
Wow, what a kick in the ass by the writers of this series. I could have stopped at episode 5 and been happy. It would be a good idea to burn episode six and leave it at that.
All the events happened were true, from season 1 to 3. By the new reincarnation of Thor, aka Magne, choosing not to fight has created an alternate ending/history of Ragnarok. In essence, each war has a different story in it because of the variable repetition of reincarnation. This one of course happens in the current or modern timeline. The ending episode at the graduation is an alternate scene if Magne has chosen to fight.