2x05 Science/Fiction

We spend entire series watching and waiting for the one episode or moment that just wows us, and it sneaks up behind you without being noticed and suddenly there it is. I was steeling myself for one hell of a deus ex machina, a typical Marvel gotcha, and instead I got to watch Mr. Anderson become Neo. ...and I think it really works and has some amazing potential for the MCU going forward.

The storytelling (the writing, the dialog), the music being creepy and glorious at the same time, this is the finest episode of Loki thus far and it lives up to its namesake by setting a new bar for the genre within Marvel.

It took me a moment to get it, but the reason Sylvie remembered Loki is because she ported out of the control room before the shockwave hit. Watch her panic as the McDonald's branch timeline unraveled in front of her, then suddenly go into cold, in-control mode and just leave it all behind like it was nothing (because now it literally is nothing). I wonder if that exception is going to play into future events, even after Loki "corrects" the way things play out at the TVA.

[7.4/10] Silvie might be my favorite character in Loki, if only because I tend to agree with her. Loki himself is leaping across the multiverse, trying to get the band back together so he can restore the TVA. But it’s not clear to me that's a good thing. It’s not clear that it’s better for Mobius and B-15 and the rest to be pruning the timeline rather than parenting their kids or helping treat injured children. It’s not clear that what the TVA does is good or that having multiple timeline branches is bad. It’s not clear that simply leaving everything alone and letting the multiverse be the multiverse is a bad thing.

That makes it a little hard to root for Loki here. Like so much in season 2 of this show, the logistics of how this all works is nebulous at best, and what the TVA is or does post-He Who Remains is pretty vague too. The dimensional consequences of the organization blowing up, or Loki skipping through time, or the variants being returned to their timeline doesn’t come with weight, since it feels like the show has been screwing around with apocalyptic event after apocalyptic event in every episode.

And yet, Silvie cuts to the quick of it. She asks Loki why he wants to do all this, and the answer is simple -- because he wants friends. Whatever the TVA represents to the universe, or to the “sacred timeline”, or to the ongoing battle between good and evil, to Loki it represents a place of belonging, where friends like Mobius saw something in him no one else did. Whether the TVA itself is good or bad doesn’t really matter, because a simple scene at a dive bar in Oklahoma shows why it matters to Loki. That makes his quest easy to root for.

Admittedly, the “getting the band back together” material is good. O.B. as a begrudging decorated theoretical physicist who does groundbreaking science to pay the bills for his sci-fi writing career is adorable and endearing. Mobius as a water sports vehicle salesman and overwhelmed single dad with a carnival barker’s flair is an amusing persona for Owen Wilson to play. And Casey as one of the famed Alcatraz escapees, who’s inclined to use the temp pads to rob banks, is a hoot.

Again, there’s a lot of nonsense mumbo jumbo to all of this. Why Loki needs to gather this particular group to get their “temporal auras” to go back feels arbitrary, and the whole “going to a place that doesn’t exist outside of time is impossible but you already did something impossible feels like a handwave. Once again, the mechanics of all of this is a big mush.

But the simple task of getting everyone together, putting the pens in the cup, is a good one. Seeing Loki slip through time, figuring it out as he goes along, being drawn to the people he was with when it all went wrong, is a good way to sell the impact of the temporal loom blowing up.

This is also the best visual outing the show’s had to date. I don’t know why, but I just love the imagery of the end of the world manifesting itself through everything turning into silly string. It’s stylistic and striking in the best way. Watching the group disintegrate, Infinity War style, right when Loki gets them all together, has a bitter poetry to it.

But the peak of that visual approach is Silvie listening to her record in Oklahoma before the world falls apart. Something about the coffee spilling onto the counter, the strands of broken time cracking the window, the clerk running out to her with an outstretched hand, the record itself breaking down to nothing in a stringy ballet, leads to some beautiful and moving images. Silvie is stirred from her contentment by the fact that, good or bad, without the TVA, these branches, her branch, is dying.

I don’t know how I feel about Loki’s realization that with the right focus and emotional energy, he can channel himself backwards along the timeline. It works on a metaphorical level. He’s used to being an object in all of this, an antagonist, a secondary character, but now he has the power to write and even rewrite his own story. And to the script’s credit, he achieves that in a moment of emotional distress and eventually clarity. So there’s something earned about it.

But the power itself feels like a bit of a gamebreaker. The whole “that’s not science; that's fiction” routine is a little too cute by half for me, with its extension of the metatextual motifs the show’s been toying with from the start. And I’m a sucker for this stuff, but Loki’s “It’s not the why; it’s the who” is a little too trite, sappy, and meta for my tastes too. We’ll see where they go with it all.

Overall, certainly one of the show’s stronger episodes, one that gives Loki his clearest motivation this season, and which includes the show’s best sequence thus far. Onto the finale!