Spoilers!! under the cut.
I’ve been seeing a lot of remarks, especially in post-Ragnarok hug fic, suggesting that Thor thought Loki was dead after Surtur destroyed Asgard. When I watched it the first time, I was confused and seriously bothered about why Thor didn’t wait to see whether Loki had gotten out before he, Valkyrie, and Hulk jumped onto the big ship. Before Hulk shows up again after fighting Fenris, Thor and Valkyrie are talking like they think this was a suicide mission: “At least our people have gotten to safety.” But when Loki takes the little ship to go dunk Surtur’s crown in the Eternal Flame, he doesn’t look or sound like he thinks he’s going on a suicide mission.
Probably more tellingly, the way they play the “I’m here” moment, it definitely seems like Thor is testing whether Loki is an illusion, not a hallucination. I mean, a hallucination might still have seemed to catch the bottle stopper – though maybe Thor would have heard the clunk of it hitting the door? But as a follow-up to earlier moments, it only makes sense if he’s testing to see whether it’s an illusion; and Thor’s reaction of relief is definitely more appropriate to “Loki didn’t fuck off by himself” than “Loki isn’t dead.” So I’m guessing we’re supposed to think that Thor was trusting Loki’s strong self-preservation instincts and assumed that Loki got out in the little ship (the Commodore?) and just went off somewhere to make his fortune on some other planet. He’s pleasantly surprised that Loki came back to help him take responsibility for the homeless Asgardian people, not that he survived.
Unfortunately, that was not made very clear in the movie, and I was hearing other people around me asking “What happened to Loki?” It would have been really disturbing that Thor didn’t seem to be worried unless he was just very confident that Loki would find a way out but wasn’t expecting him to come back for other reasons.
Loki is the Philosopher King 