The Short Take:
I happily drank in the Victorian mise-en-scene, intoxicated to the point at which I forgot about the issues identified last week. I’m still irritated that I can’t enjoy a pretty fun performance due to external factors.
[SPOILER WARNING: Do not walk through that time door unless you’ve seen the series through the episode titled “1893.”]
Image Credit: Collider
The Long Take:
I’m such a sucker. I know I kicked up a fuss last week, raising concerns about the plot arc of the season and how it, in light of Episode 2, feels both rushed and glacial. I’m not taking any of that back; not yet, anyway. But all it took was some pocket watch chains and puffy-sleeved jackets to reel me right. back. in.
We spend nearly this entire episode in 19th century Chicago; first, Ravonna travels to 1868 Chicago to discover that a part of He Who Remains’ back-up plan was to ask Ravonna to deliver a copy of Chekhov’s TVA Guidebook to a young Victor Timely, a variant of Kang that may not have become a scientific genius without Ravonna’s multidimensional intervention. In trying to track down Ravonna and Miss Minutes, Loki and Mobius end up at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and stumble into a Kang variant named Victor Timely giving an Apple keynote about what looks like a miniature version of the Temporal Loom. They then realize that they can just take Timely back with them to the TVA to help Ouroboros retrofit the Loom, rather than trying to persuade Miss Minutes to override the system. Lots of dapper, Charlie Chaplin-esque chase shenanigans ensue.
Image Credit: IGN India
The late 19th century holds a special place in my heart because I spent years researching and writing my dissertation on the popular fiction of that time period. I was fascinated by the perfect storm of social, cultural, and technological change that all converged to produce works like The Time Machine (1895), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996), The Invisible Man (1897), Dracula (1897), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2). These works reflect anxieties about Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the development of early film technology (the first paying audience for a moving image was in 1895), the invention of the x-ray machine (also in 1895), and theories of a fourth dimension that some scientists used to explain the existence of ghosts.
Meanwhile, Victorian consumers had this fascination with the dead, holding seances and paying for ghost portraits. This is, after all, the period that inspires Disneyland’s famous ride, The Haunted Mansion. In 1862, in fact, a scientist named John Henry Pepper first demonstrated in a theater the specific special effects technique that creates the dancing ghosts on the popular theme park ride today. As new technologies prompted Victorians to question visual evidence as a reflection of reality — with early film, for example, creating realistic images that weren’t actually real — the more interested they became in expanding their notion of the real to include the supernatural, especially within this framework of “the beyond” or another dimension. Sounds a little bit like the multiverse, doesn’t it?
In short, victorian society viewed science, the supernatural, and commercial spectacle as all a part of the same cultural soup. So Victor Timely sharing his “astounding temporal marvels” in the middle of a beer garden at the Chicago World’s Fair, with a large crowd eager to be swindled by him, fits the bill perfectly. Even more fitting is the decision to surround Timely’s scientific demonstration with Loki and Sylvie spewing their green magic everywhere and Miss Minutes pretending to be a ghost. This is even more historically accurate to attitudes at the time than one would think. The only way the local newspaper can explain sightings of Miss Minutes is as an apparition, coding new and strange technology in supernatural terms: “Ghost clock continues to haunt midway.”
Though originating in the Victorian period, this broader idea isn’t new to the MCU. Ever since Thor met physicist Jane Foster, the Thor franchise, as an example, has always had a “magic is just science we haven’t discovered yet” bent. This has been the way — not unlike the Chicago World’s Fair “diorama” — that Marvel can appropriate preexisting mythologies, simplify them, and iron them all into a consistent MCU continuity. Thor and Loki’s god powers are recoded in the MCU as alien technology. I see a similar coopting of history in this episode of Loki’s introduction of Victor Timely. The part about my dissertation that I haven’t yet mentioned is that in looking at this historical period and the popular fiction it produced, I tried to establish the origin story of the mad scientist trope.
We also can’t forget the at times unsavory real-life mad scientists of the period. The War of the Currents famously pitted Edison against Tesla, which spanned the 1880s and 90s. What I’ve read about Edison in particular indicates that these inventor tycoons were so competitive and power hungry that they sniped patents from others. Historians have since debunked this, but for a long time it was rumored that Edison electrocuted Topsy the elephant on Coney Island in an attempt to show how dangerous his competitor’s form of power (AC or alternating current) was relative to his own (DC or direct current).
Thank you for indulging my history lesson. Hopefully I can now make something out of it as it relates to this episode. What exactly is the significance or the utility of invoking the late 19th century in this episode or even this series more generally? What does that ultimately tell us about this show and its narrative agenda?
As I alluded to earlier, it in some ways could merely be a nod to the historical inspiration for Marvel’s wider “Multiversal Saga.” This Chicago World’s Fair episode is titled “1893” so the episode could pay tribute to what this specific moment in time represents for the rich tradition of genre storytelling that would follow. It could set up the more futuristic iteration of pop culture pushing reality’s limits in our contemporary moment, in the MCU in 2023.
I see this return to 1893 as a way to more clearly establish (perhaps deepen, though I’m not quite ready to go that far) Kang as a character. I know we’ve already had the stunning surprise of He Who Remains at the end of Loki Season 1 and, with lesser success, an encounter with another, more conquest positive variant of Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but this is the first time we really see the mad scientist side of Kang in full form. Through Victor Timely, we can see, on the one hand, that a Kang variant can be not only a scientific genius but genuinely obsessed with the pursuit of scientific discovery.
On the other hand, we see the darker side of that mad scientist coin. Earlier in the episode, Victor very ominously tells one of his potential investors that he “doesn’t do partnerships,” and then we see that this also applies to his personal relationships, as he would rather toss Ravonna overboard than invite her to entangle her romantic interest in him with her multiversal ambitions. It is, after all, He Who Remains and not They Who Remain.
Image Credit: Polygon
This sense of isolation and emotional distance, like you are the only one thinking clearly and everyone else is a fool, is a classic feature of the mad scientist. Everyone says you’re crazy but you’re doing your thing anyway. This inevitably leads to personal costs. I’m looking forward to learning more about what wrongs previous Kang variants have done to Ravonna, all in the name of his singular vision and a fear of partnerships. I’m assuming that this is the “secret” Miss Minutes refers to at the end of the episode.
While Victor Timely might seem like the most docile, well-meaning variant we’ve seen so far, I cannot ignore that baked into the 1893 mad scientist is not only madness and loneliness, but a sense of opportunistic, capitalistic deception. The invocation of the Chicago World’s Fair and therefore Edison, as well as the intermingling of science and showmanship that would have been prevalent in 1893, tells me to never trust any Kang, even if they are soft spoken and stuttering. They are all greedy charlatans looking to profit off people’s sense of wonder.
When Victor pleads with Sylvie for his life and says, “Please. I haven’t done anything…That isn’t me. That…you don’t know me. You don’t know the heart I have beating in my chest. I can make my own choices.” This is exactly the right line to persuade Sylvie to spare his life because everything she does is in the name of free will and choice. She wants to believe that she, as a variant of Loki, has the freedom to determine her own identity outside what is expected of a Loki variant. Who’s to say this isn’t all for show? A performance to pull on Sylvie’s heartstrings?
Image Credit: Screen Rant
I’ve been putting off talking about Jonathan Majors, but inevitably that’s where I have to land because his appearance as Victor Timely here marks his first big appearance not only in this season of Loki, but his first appearance in the MCU since the actor’s romantic partner filed charges against him. With each passing day, more and more people say that he’s going to beat these charges, and I suppose a lot hangs in the balance, uncertain. I, of course, want victims of abuse to see justice and do not want to condone any of Majors’ harmful actions. But as we hang in the balance, as Disney and Marvel wait with bated breath, I am incredibly disappointed that I can’t enjoy Majors’ performance without his own alleged villainy haunting my viewing experience. Unlike some critics and podcasters I’ve read and heard, I appreciated his absent-minded professor rendition of Victor Timely, and thought he played the complexity of the mad scientist as not quite hero, not quite villain, and not even anti-hero well.
I guess that means I’m back in, but perhaps for the wrong reasons? How long will the glow of a good old retro veneer last?
Will the disturbing reveal of Miss Minutes’ true desires turn out to be less random and creepy with the passage of time? I wasn’t thrilled that she turned out to be an obsessive stalker groupie of Kang’s, but I was amused by the rivalry that formed between Ravonna and Miss Minutes. And if the last scene is any indication, we might see a new alliance forming between those two against Kang, yet not for Loki and Mobius either. Astounding, to say the least.
I must respectfully disagree with one assertion that you make in this review, which is that the MCU has set a standard that all magic is just sufficiently advanced technology. There is no technology involved when, in Ragnarok (terrible a film as it was), Thor summons lightning without Mjolnir. The office of Sorcerer Supreme leads a groups of sorcerers who protect the Earth from mystical threats (as defined in Dr. Strange). Wanda wields chaos magic and can “re-write reality at will”, which is completely magical in nature (witchcraft and not sorcery, as we learn). I think you’re leaning on Thor’s original explanation from his first film that he comes from a place “where they are one and the same,” and, while we may be able to argue that about Asgard (though I would push back on that argument), it’s been shown to not apply elsewhere in the MCU. To the contrary, I see the juxtaposition of magic and science as a sort of fascinating throughline that is being played out in recent films.