On to episode 2 of Loki season 2! Now that Loki’s temporal slipping has been fixed, it’s time to get the plot moving. In what direction is it moving? Well, that remains to be seen, but let’s take a look and see what we’ve got…
1. Defecting Hunters
The episode begins with Mobius and Loki on the hunt for a hunter. X-5 has gone missing after heading out with General Dox, and has made himself comfortable in 1977 as a movie star.
So right off the bat, we can see how the latest changes and revelations in the TVA are causing agents to go rogue. Those who once defended the timeline are now making nice niches for themselves in it, so they can enjoy the lives they never had. And on one hand, we can’t really blame them for wanting to get out after learning the TVA took them from their timelines. But on the other hand, X-5 not only has important information about what Dox is up to, he’s also a real ass.
But of course, we also have to look at the name he took (Brad Wolfe) and the movie he starred in. Brad Wolfe is a canonical character, who both played the character “Zaniac” and took on the name as his alias after he gained powers. However, he also died in 1986 and, to my knowledge, was never resurrected, so this was a bit of relatively obscure Marvel lore.
Will X-5/Brad transform into an energy knife-throwing monster? Probably not, and this is in all likeliness just an Easter egg, but a fun one nonetheless.
2. More TVA Troubles
Mind you, defecting agents isn’t the only issue at the TVA. O.B. is busy trying to fix up the Temporal Loom, but he’s locked out of the systems for having an “invalid temporal aura.” Ravonna Renslayer is still missing, and Miss Minutes is gone too. And then there’s everything going on with General Dox and her crew.
It’s a lot, but it’s nice that we’ve got skilled actors bringing these scenes to us. One of the highlights of this episode included Loki and Mobius chatting over pie (in a room that seems to contain nothing but slices of key lime pie, because the TVA is like that) as Mobius explains that he’s happy with the life he has now in the TVA, and doesn’t want to know about the life he had before his timeline was pruned. We get to know more about him as a character as they delve in further, and he admits that he’s afraid of knowing if he had something good taken from him. (And it probably involves jetskis in some way.)
At the same time, seeing Casey meet O.B. and have a bit of a “big fan” moment meeting the writer of the TVA Guidebook was a fun moment.
Scenes like these help humanize the members of the TVA, even as their internal civil war begins to break out.
(And the scene where Loki interrogated Brad/Hunter X-5 was just good fun as well, even if most viewers could tell right away that Loki seemingly tricking Mobius was all part of their plan.)
3. Reunited
It didn’t take long for Loki to find Sylvie again, but now she’s… working at McDonalds. (Yep, that product placement is going a long way in this series, especially since we’re treated to a scene with Mobius praising the food at McD’s pretty enthusiastically.) But considering how the two fought the last time they saw each other (and I mean literally fought, swords and all), it was certainly something of an awkward reunion.
Yet the Sylvie we see now is done with it all. She beat the TVA, she killed He Who Remains, and she’s done running from disaster to disaster; all she wants now is a quiet life. So, naturally, the laws of storytelling means she won’t be able to get that until she completes at least one last task, if not more.
Of course, she has a “refuse the call” moment as well, even after helping Loki stop Dox and her Minutemen. So we’ll see what it will take to get her back in action for good, and how her dynamics with Loki will evolve as the season goes on.
Continued belowAlso, could she afford her truck on a McDonalds paycheck? I know it’s the 1980’s, but that really just nails in how much prices have outpaced minimum wage.
4. Is Destiny Still Written?
One major point that came up during Loki’s meeting with Sylvie was his insistence that the future is in danger, and he saw her at the TVA when he was pulled forward in time. Sylvie’s response that the future is no longer written brings us back to a major theme from season 1: choice vs predestination.
Loki and Sylvie have been “Team Free Will,” fighting against the idea of a singular timeline that must be, while the TVA has been “Team Predestination,” making sure that every timeline plays out exactly as they’ve determined. But now the line between those positions is starting to blur, with TVA members split between choosing a new path and continuing to follow the “sacred timeline,” while Loki is concerned about what will happen in the future that he saw.
Of course, once time travel gets involved to this extent, I have to start analyzing how the mechanics of time travel work. We’ve seen that time travel in the MCU can create branching timelines when something significant happens (like the removal of an Infinity Stone), but people can travel through time without changing their own history in order to prevent paradoxes (at least in Endgame). But as last episode demonstrated, Loki could take actions in the past that impact the present, which means changing time is possible, at least within the TVA.
And this is the fun of thinking about how time travel works in series like this. Can someone change their own timeline? Are past and future both set in stone? Do we have free will, or are we all following a predetermined path? These are all questions Loki will need to explore as the season goes on.
5. Aggressive Pruning
The episode ends with Loki, Mobius, and Sylvie fighting several of General Dox’s Minutemen as they attempt to aggressively prune every loose branch in the Temporal Loom. While they do successfully stop the Minutemen, multiple alternate timelines are pruned and wiped from existence. (And the fight scene isn’t that exciting, since the Minutemen are more focused on setting off as many charges as possible before Loki’s team stops them.)
So this is treated as a tragic, horrific moment – each timeline contained a universe’s worth of beings, all wiped out in an instant. It’s mass death on a truly incomprehensible scale.
And that’s actually kind of a problem – it’s such a large scale that it’s beyond comprehension, and all we see of it are lines being erased on a screen. As an audience, we know that it represents billions of lives being snuffed out, as multiple alternate universes are wiped off the map. But just knowing that’s what it represents doesn’t make the impact of the destruction really sink in.
Compare it to the incursions in 2015’s “Avengers” comics leading up to “Secret Wars.” Whenever a universe was destroyed, there was a sense of the destruction and loss, usually shown through the Earth(s) being destroyed and their heroes helpless to stop it. Or in Infinity War, where even though Thanos’ snap wipes out half the universe, the real impact to the audience comes from seeing characters we know and love disappear.
In Loki, a Minuteman tosses in a reset charge and an entire timeline is gone, all entirely offscreen. It’s an odd sense of disconnect from the death and destruction it’s meant to convey.
On the other hand, seeing entire universes destroyed might be a bit much, and it would certainly stretch the budget for the season. So for now, we’ll just have to accept that countless lives and worlds across multiple timelines were destroyed in this episode.
All in all, things are moving forward, and the show still gave us time for some good character moments, although it’s not a perfect episode either. We’ll see how things move forward in episode 3, following the destruction that episode 2 ended on.
