Four episodes in and I think I’ve spotted a pattern in the events of Loki’s second season. After a episode of temporal, time warping, craziness that moves the entire MCU forward, the show tends to take a step back with a following installment that resets the stage while easing the strain on the budget. Check it out: episode one saw time slipping, portents of the future and problem solving occurring in two separate time periods simultaneously while episode two focused simply on dissent within the TVA but was soon followed by episode 3, which bounced us back to 1890’s Chicago and saw a frenzied tug of war over confounded He Who Remains variant, Victor Timely, in order to save reality itself. You see where I’m going with this: Crazy time episode – calm TVA episode – crazy time episode – fourth episode.
However, while Heart of the TVA does, in fact, follow this pattern, thankfully returning directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead make sure that this latest TVA locked episode is far more riveting than the last.
After their excursion to the Chicago World Fair, Kang variant Victor Timely finds himself in the TVA which proves to be as educational and as inspiring as you’d expect to a frustrated inventor and his geeky meeting with Ouroboros even results in a paradox as the TVA handbook that O.B. wrote influenced Timely’s works while He Who Remains’ creation of the Time Varience Authority inspired O.B’s. However, while everyone works at figuring out how to fix the rapidly failing Temporal Loom, dark forces are still amassing against them and even though Revonna Renslayer and clock-shaped A.I. Miss Minutes were banished to the Citadel At The End Of Time, they’re still able to slow the efforts of our heroes from afar. In fact, Renslayer in particular has doubled her efforts to thwart any version of He Who Remains after Miss Minutes reveals that she not only ruled the TVA at his side, but was one of his major generals in the multiversal war before everyone had their minds unceremoniously wiped blank.
To block Miss Minutes, Loki and the gang merely reboot her, but Renslayer takes another tactic by visiting the imprisoned TVA general Dox and her men to offer them freedom in payment of joining her, but the only one who volunteers is – surprise, surprise – turncoat TVA Hunter, Brad Wolfe who becomes her agent as he aims to prune anyone standing against her.
However, she needn’t have bothered, because as Timely himself volunteers to done that super bulky protective suit and venture through the maelstrom in order to get to the disintegrating loom and adjust it, the efforts of our heroes may already be far too late to do any good.
For a series that’s supposed to be able to traverse all of time and space, Loki’s second season seems to be spending an awfully lot of time in the same six rooms of the TVA. Ok, I’ll concede that last episode’s chase through period Chicago was an exhilarating change of pace and scenery, but the show’s getting an awful lot of mileage out of the same bunch of sets over and over again. With that being said, Heart Of The TVA sole purpose for being is to not only trim some drifting threads, but to facilitate something of a reality obliterating ending that literally leaves everything up in the air. To go back to my theory at the top of the review, Loki’s done something like this before where the fourth episode of the first season saw the God of Mischief apparently fatally pruned only to open up the entire MCU to a multiverse of variants of all shapes and sizes so when this episode apparently ends with the Temporal Loom finally giving way and reality itself being snuffed out, you have to believe that the next episode must be planning something potentially gargantuan.
However, the potential destruction of all of time and space takes up a mere couple of minutes of the episode and no matter how spectacular and unexpected it may be (notice how Timely literally unravels like the unlucky Ant-Men in Quantumania’s probability storm), we have to also consider the entire episode preceding it, but while it isn’t as intriguing at the first episode or as magnificent as the third, it’s still light years ahead of the second and even clears up a few questions raised by Loki’s time slipping.
Of course, the reason the episode works so well is thanks to the aforementioned efforts of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead who are no stranger to reality fucking concepts thanks to such movies as The Endless, Something In The Dirt and Marvel’s own Moon Knight and while it techincally invokes not much more than a bunch of temporal tech talk and a rerun of scenes from other episodes. We have yet another scene set in the TVA’s cells that involves that weird-ass machine that creates crushing cubes (more on that later) and yet another scene involving someone pulling on that hefty space suit and heading back out to tamper with the temporal loom, but while it may feel like Marvel’s most innovative show seems to have run out of ideas, Benson and Moorehead make sure that all this already covered ground comes with some much needed new wrinkles.
Firstly, we get to spend more time (so to speak) with Timely as it seems that not all Kang/He Who Remains variants are power hungry, murderous, control freaks and the paradoxical fanboying back and forth between him and O.B. is genuinely sweet, elsewhere, both Renslayer and Miss Minutes continue to prove that scorned women – even animated clock ones – shouldn’t be fucked with as they edge into more obvious villainy as the not only attempt to gain vengence on Timely for past sins, but enact one of the MCU’s most hardcore moments to date as they use that funky, cube-making, torture thing to crush Dox and her defiant troops into pulp with all the upsetting, squishy sounds you’d expect.
When it comes to Loki, Mobius and Sylvie, (e.g. the actual stars of the show), they’re still somewhat being swamped by the mechanics of the plot rather than driving it, but even so, Loki still manages to answer a lot of hanging questions from the first episode as time has finally caught up with his time slipping and he even finds out who saved his life by pruning him – hint: it’s him. Elsewhere, Mobius and Sylvie have a moment concerning the former’s avoidance about taking a moment to examine what his former life could have been, but the main headline is that ending.
Going once again back to the subject of patterns, the last time we saw an apparent obliteration of a main character in the fourth episode, it led to the most significant episodes in MCU streaming history – now that the TVA and everyone in it has unravelled, where Loki goes next could be vitally important to whatever comes next.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 