Claiming the Trickster God
Well, one version of them anyway! Read on to find out why…okay, that’s clickbaity, but I don’t care.
Loki 1.5 “Journey Into Mystery”
Okay, good, they didn’t kill off everyone I liked. Pruned people…and things…and timelines all land on some kind of giant planet at the end of time, which makes no sense and also reminds me of Doctor Who.
It’s an open heath, though, not a quarry.
And things that wind up there are typically eaten by a giant monster. Except Lokis. There’s lots, and lots, of Lokis. Including, somehow, an alligator. (I have to assume this is the result of a shapeshifting accident).
Working this out, Sylvie prunes herself to go…not just rescue Loki, although that’s on her todo list, but find whatever’s really behind the TVA. She speculates that as she hid in apocalypses, they are hiding in an even more undetectable location, the end of time.
Of course, being the smarter Loki, she’s right.
She also rescues Mobius, who’s going to go destroy the TVA headquarters for them. Ah, chaos. Such delightful chaos.
(And a dead Loki yelling Glorious Purpose, because one of them had to die. We have plenty).
Loki 1.6 “For All Time, Always”
Worth watching for the Loki/Sylvie fight/Klingon courtship.
Also for a brilliant performance by Jonathan Majors as He Who Remains. He chews the scenery in a most delightful way…and is very much the hero of his own story, and possibly even right. It’s hard to tell who’s right, and that’s really the issue here. There’s a lot of ambiguity here.
Loki and Sylvie make different decisions, and it’s hard to tell which one is right. Neither decision was really correct, but one had to be made.
The status quo was intolerable. Loki in charge? Meh. But the decision Sylvie made is demonstrably the wrong one.
The season ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I’m going to go right into season two.
Loki 2.1 “Ouroboros”
Turns out Oroborus’ is the TVA’s Q department…brilliantly played by Ke Huy Quan. Loki is time slipping inside TVA HQ, which is supposedly impossible…and nearly impossible to fix.
I love how they used the classic time travel trope of somebody going into the past and telling the person in the past to get the thing they need in the future ready. This episode was a lot of fun with time travel tropes.
Sylvie is also in the TVA…but what is she up to as the timeline branches out of control and the temporal loom at the heart of the TVA threatens to explode?
Owen Wilson was also really solid in this episode and I am loving Wunmi Mosaku more and more each episode. She deserves to be a lead in something…she’s extremely talented (but, alas, likely held back by not being conventionally attractive, which is beyond ridiculous but…this is the world we live in).
Loki 2.2 “Breaking Bad”
Sylvie is using more of her own accent when she is pretending to be mortal. It’s actually weird to hear my accent on screen…it never happens!
Yeah. She’s hiding out in a McDonald’s. A McDonald’s. Product placement, anyone? But it’s the ultimate symbol of trying to lead a boring, ordinary life…which won’t last.
Meanwhile, the TVA loyalists are pruning the new timelines, killing billions. Loki and Sylvie are at odds. Loki wants to work within the system to fix it.
Sylvie thinks it can’t be fixed and is sulking. In a McDonald’s.
The Brad of the title is X-5, who manages to put himself back on the timeline…as a movie star. Lots of movie stars named Brad and it’s a perfect pun option.
My accent on screen, though. I never get that.
Loki 2.3 “1893”
1893 here is the Chicago World’s Fair, and they must have blown a substantial chunk of the show’s business on making it look convincing.
Renslayer is trying to manipulate a carefully chosen He Who Remains variant, who calls himself Victor Timely (clearly not his real name) by handing him a TVA manual when he’s a kid.
Now he’s a con artist selling fake inventions at the Worlds Fair…but he’s actually doing fairly well on the time front.
Sylvie wants him dead. Renslayer, of course, wants to take him back to the TVA. So do Loki and Mobius, because his temporal aura can help them upgrade the loom.
And Miss Minutes wants him to make her a body so they can…you know. Creepy!
The fight on the ancient ferris wheel is the high point of the episode.
Loki 2.4 “The Heart of the TVA”
So, it’s probably a good job it’s now possible to timeslip in the TVA…because otherwise everyone’s dead.
It’s kind of the predictable middle act for this, leaving on a cliffhanger that, of course, we all know is “false.”
Loki pruning himself as a self fulfilling paradox was quite amusing. I should have known that’s what happened.
As a note, I’m on Sylvie’s side. Fixing the police without radical action such as burning them down and starting over is probably hard.
Also I just like Sylvie. If I had the cosplay chops…I mean, I have the accent!
Loki 2.5 “Science/Fiction”
Loki is time slipping to all the members of the team but somehow doesn’t work out that’s the key to controlling it. For a god, Loki, you can be really slow.
OB is a failed science fiction writer with a garage full of hardcovers. Mobius is…a jet ski salesman. Everyone has their lives on the timeline.
The entirely unstable, dying timeline, if the loom isn’t repaired. It’s like a domesticated animal that can’t survive in the wild now.
Sylvie won’t help until she loses her home, but Loki time slips right back to before the explosion. None of this is going to happen, but it’s amusing to realize Loki, of all people, has friends now.