Despite personally enjoying the famously divisive Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (What? They were fun), even I have to agree that the much ballyhooed Multiverse Saga of the MCU hasn’t really taken off with the kind of focus I was hoping for. After teasing us with a huge, overarching story that potentially could take in every Marvel movie ever made in history and offering up Jonathan Majors as “He Who Remains”, a precursor to the time hopping Kang The Conqueror and his many variants, the overarching story hasn’t actually made any real progress for aside from a post credits scene at the butt end of Ant-Man 3.
Well, with its third episode, Loki finally puts some motion in the notion of the whole Kang variant thing and with it, finally manages to regain some of the focus lost from not only the previous episode, but for the Multiverse Saga as a whole.
As the whole TVA (not to mention everything else) is threatened by the overloading of the overworked Temporal Loom, both Loki and Mobius head back in time in order for them to sniff out either one of three different people who can shut the machine down. The first is Ravonna Renslayer, a TVA agent on the run who is hoping to make scene of all the recent upheavals that’s plagued her beloved life’s work and in doing so, she’s aligned herself with Miss Minutes, the artificial intelligence that served as the right hand animated clock to the time manipulating He Who Remains, who could prove vital to shutting down the loom before disaster happens.
When we catch up with this duo, we find them in Chicago, Illinois in 1868, leaving a parcel for a young boy who will grow up to become struggling inventor Victor Timely, another dreaded variant of He Who Remains and who is the final piece of the Loom puzzle.
Enter Loki and Mobius who, after a fruitless trip to 1868, track Revonna to 1893 to head them all off at the pass and find themselves at the Chicago World’s Fair in order to try and pin down at least one of their targets. However, upon arriving and stumbling upon Victor Timely’s presentation of a prototype, Temporal Loom, Loki’s fear of the man soon dissipates after he discovers that the stuttering inventor is nothing more than a con artist, selling unfinished prototypes in order to get money to fund his advanced ideas.
As Loki and Mobius clash with Renslayer and Miss Minutes over Timely, serial wild card Sylvie arrives to make things even more complicated as she has now taken it upon herself to slaughter any variant of He Who Remains who shows up on her radar. As everyone takes turns stabbing each other in the back for various reasons (Renslayer wishes to co-rule the TVA from its inception, Ms. Minutes is in love with her master and desires a tangible body, Loki doesn’t want reality to end), it all comes to a head in Timely’s lab in Wisconsin. But us Sylvie’s warnings about Loki bringing a variant of He Who Remains back into the fold of the TVA well founded?
While the previous installment of Loki felt like it was burning precious episode time simply warming over old threats and sweeping up the problems left over from season 1, 1893 shifts gears and gives us the purpose that we were missing by finally giving us some much needed progression in this whole, overarching, Kang arc. While not all of it can be placed at the feet of the movers and shakers at Marvel (Majors’ well documented issues and Hollywood strikes have battered the studio of late), I actually hadn’t realised how starved I was for multiversal MCU content that didn’t just rely on excessive cameos, but with this episode I finally ate well. Starting off with an old-timey rendition of the Marvel Studios theme, we see Renslayer essentially creating Timely by dropping a copy of the TVA Handbook through his childhood window, we find that He Who Remains’ influence is still strong after his death as Miss Minutes facilitates his strangle hold on molding the timelines. It not only gives Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s character more to do in a single episode than she arguably had throughout the entirety of season 1, but we get to see what makes her tick, too – as do we get with Miss Minutes, who is displaying some Ultron-style breaks in her programming as she makes a play for her beloved creator.
Beyond that, we get yet more of the Loki/Mobius detective show double act that proved to be a rare strong point of episode 2 and we even get a small moment of yearning when the trickster god stumbles across a diorama of Asgardian legend and complains that none other than Balder the Brave is represented and he isn’t. However, the true hook here is the return of Jonathan Majors’ multi-role stint as the time travelling despot of many shapes and sizes and in the form of Timely, we get the most human version yet. Essentially a living, breathing macguffin, Majors portrays the inventor as a jittery, crazy-haired luminary, who is desperate to realise all the outlandish concepts that dances inside his head like errant bolts of lightning and the World’s Fair turns out to be the perfect way to reintroduce him. Giving off serious Stark Expo vibes from Iron Man 2 and the World Exposition of Tomorrow from Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel’s always been at home in the company of eccentric futurists and if Loki: season 2 ends up being a stealth origin story for He Who Remains (albeit a fittingly paradoxical one), then the franchise should be richer for it.
Elsewhere, those disappointed that Loki’s charismatic leading man has grown bizarrely trustworthy in his old age will no doubt be happy to see that this episode has returned to the realms of rampant duplicity with the backstabbing antics of Renslayer and Miss Minutes doing the God of Mischief proud, but from all this comes possibly the most intriguing twist yet. Stranded in the ruined Citadel at the End of Time by Sylvie with the moldering corpse of He Who Remains (she seems to be softening after a stint at working at McDonald’s), the bitter A.I. suggests that Timely’s decision to return to the TVA was foolhardy considering that Miss Minutes knows all of his secrets and let’s slip that Renslayer herself has a surprise history. Is she a Kang variant too? Is this how Marvel finally circumvents Majors’ legal issues or, in true Loki fashion, is it all a big red herring?
Whatever the outcome, Loki’s half way point course correction proves to be as welcome as it is… Timely.
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