The Short Take:
Despite being episode 4 of 6, this felt a lot like a season finale because it loops back and connects some dots blotted in the premiere. In some ways predictable, in others anything but.
[SPOILER WARNING: Do not stop for pie, and do not pass go unless you’ve seen through Episode 4, “Heart of the TVA.”]
Image Credit: Variety
The Long Take:
This show is as interested in hot cocoa as it is in the end of time. And I love that.
When Victor Timely stares intently at Mobius’ small beige paper cup, he does so in spite of all the crisis and confusion around him. Everyone else is engrossed in some combination of panicking and workshopping ideas about how to save the TVA, and yet hot cocoa, something that has no bearing on the fate of the timeline at all, captivates Victor. Even more so once he learns that the cocoa came from a machine. [Insert mind blown sound here.]
The primary purpose of the cocoa may very well have been purely as a set-up, so that we could later get the dramatic splatter of it as X-5 prunes Hunter D-90 and captures Timely for Ravonna and Miss Minutes. I think there’s more to it than that, though, because Sylvie chews out Mobius for suggesting that she go eat pie with him and Loki while they wait for O.B., Victor, and Casey to iron out the technical details of their plan. She’s spot on in calling him out for not even wondering what his life on the timeline was like. On the other hand, Mobius is so good at the kind of quiet living that Sylvie wants to save so badly. It’s why she found working a McDonald’s so alluring. In this respect, she should understand why Mobius would want to take a pie break.
So, I guess what I’m saying is…it’s the little things in life that are worth fighting for? Stop and smell the roses? Gosh, that sounds trite.
Image Credit: Sideshow
And yet, I can’t get away from the hot cocoa. It seems very fitting that Mobius, partaker in key lime pie, seeker of cracker jacks, and frequent consumer of machine-dispensed hot chocolate, is the one to expose Victor to this small, mundane wonder. To teach him what the stakes of what they’re trying to save — the chance for people to try hot cocoa from a machine for the first time. It also builds a sense of childlike innocence into his character, in a way that clearly sets him far apart from Kang and He Who Remains. Sure, he’s from 1893 where they’re still stirring their chocolate-based beverages by hand, but, more importantly, he’s drawn in by a creature comfort usually enjoyed by children. It’s very pointedly not coffee, even though that machine says it also makes coffee.
There’s something pure about hot cocoa. Something pure about the way Victor tries to force D-90 to try it so he too can experience the joy. This episode was the first time I felt as though this season did anything to make me care the way B-15 does about the unnamed and unseen people on the branching timelines. And it wasn’t because Dox and her crew were brutally tortured and murdered in a tiny box (though that was rough and I had no idea this show would go there). It was because of these smaller, more innocuous moments. It was because of pie and hot cocoa.
I do feel a little silly after last week because I spent so much time bracing myself for some kind of betrayal or deception from Timely. It turns out he was really just “the good one” all along. His brave self-sacrifice not only (very practically) spares Loki from sudden and, I assume, painful death. It reflects Timely’s desire to take responsibility for his invention, even if he technically wasn’t the variant that built it. And, most of all, it proves that Sylvie was right to spare him. She really didn’t know the content of his character based on his variant status. She didn’t know, as he said last week, the heart that was beating in his chest.
The single best Victor Timely moment was when he and O.B. meet for the first time. The way that Victor wheeze-squeals when Loki says his full name, Ouroboros, confirming Victor’s suspicions, is a precious detail. The entire exchange is the cutest thing I’ve seen on TV in a long time. (What can I say? I love nerds being nerds.)
The rest of the episode — especially the plot — left me scratching my head, though not necessarily in a bad way.
Image Credit: Space . com
On the one hand, parts of this episode were very predictable. Miss Minutes reveals a recording from the Time War that precedes the series, in which He Who Remains professes his admiration and gratitude, only to order Miss Minutes to wipe Ravonna and the rest of the TVA’s memories. This is the same recording that we heard in Episode 1, when Loki pushes play and listens from a device on a wall in the TVA. He Who Remains says, “Ravonna Renslayer. You are quite a marvel. I would be proud to lead with you. You made a difference in this war. Thank you for being on my team.” This holographic recording played by Miss Minutes harkens back to the partial audio recording heard by Loki. We’re closing the first of a series of loops formed at the start of the season.
In time travel, there’s a specific name for an endless loop: a bootstrap paradox, or a causal loop in which one event causes another through time travel, but… it was actually the second event that caused the first in the first place. Usually a time travel film will have one big bootstrap paradox, one climactic moment in which we see a plot loop close and our heroes win the day because, as a key scene reveals, they’ve always won it. But this episode reveals that this season of Loki indulges in an unprecedented number of such causal loops. I already mentioned one earlier without realizing it: when Victor Timely and Ouroboros meet, they discover that they each think that they were inspired by the other. And that’s because they did.
The most dramatic bootstrap paradox in this episode, though, arrives as we see Loki prune himself, thus solving his time slipping problem from the first episode. Future Loki sees past, time-slipping Loki and assumes that, since he’s holding a time stick, he needs to be the one to prune past Loki and cure his time slipping. And yet, Future Loki (or should I say peacoat Loki) is only able to prune Time-Slipping Loki because Time-Slipping Loki already got pruned. (Do I have that right?)
I feel as though this was more confirmation of what I already suspected more than a huge revelation. My eyes didn’t widen. I didn’t gasp. I more thought, “yep, there it is. Just as I thought.” I don’t mean this as a brag. Not at all. It’s just that the way that they shot the elevator sequence in the first episode made it seem like Loki from another time was the one to prune himself, just in time.
Image Credit: Collider
Here lies the double-edged sword of time travel stories. They’re very fun, in a brain-twisty kind of way. But they’re also self-fulfilling, potentially too neat as a plot structure, and intrinsically repetitive (or maybe I mean they intrinsically rely on repetition or echoing). I’m starting to think that my concerns of the series frequently resetting the plot and the prevalence of time loops are related. These four episodes set up a series of straw-man conflicts: Loki time-slipping, Dox conspiring to blow up the branching timelines, or even the race against Ravonna and Miss Minutes to get Victor Timely. And we conclude all of them here, in Episode 4. By the end, Miss Minutes is offline, a possessed X-5 prunes Ravonna, Dox and her crew have been boxed out of the TVA (sorry/not sorry), and Victor Timely essentially becomes a Flying Spaghetti Monster. The plot is now effectively a zero sum game. I should note that considering all the examples I’ve given so far, Loki has causal loops operating on two levels: for characters within the universe, but also within the narrative of the series itself.
I mentioned moments ago that parts of this episode were predictable. Other parts, I must admit, were utterly, gobsmackingly unpredictable. I didn’t expect Ravonna to murder fellow TVA members in cold blood. Even more so, though, I didn’t think that Victor Timely would die the second he stepped out onto the gangplank to the Temporal Loom.
As all these closing loops begin to add up, I wonder more or and more why this season’s creators have chosen to form these loops between Episode 1 and Episode 4, as opposed to the beginning and the end of the season (Episodes 1 and 6). Why did this feel so much like a season finale? What, in light of the zero sum game, could we have left in two more episodes? The openness of that question is exciting, but also worrisome. What happens when the Temporal Loom explodes??? Does the entire universe reset?
And then I remember a line that He Who Remains says to Ravonna, almost under his breath so she cannot hear, in the recording shown by Miss Minutes. As she walks towards the time door, unknowingly towards her memory wipe, he says, “See you soon, always.” This, of course, echoes his catchphrase, “For all time. Always.” (That’s the title of the Season 1 finale.)
The “always” seems to carry more meaning in the wake of all these causal loops or bootstrap paradoxes, however. Like He Who Remains knows that they are all caught in a Groundhog Day situation in which inevitably the Time War will begin again, inevitably Ravonna will fight by his side to win that war, and, inevitably, he must restore order by wiping the TVA’s memory and starting all over again. So, once again considering that these loops can operate on two levels, could the explosion of the Temporal Loom be the show’s way of going back to the beginning? To what extent was this explosion always part of the plan?
Image Credit: The Ringer
More practically, this means we could we start next week’s episode with all our characters in different places on the Sacred Timeline, or regressed back to a pre-TVA life. My personal preference would be to begin in medias res with Mobius living his life with no knowledge that he worked at the TVA. The season so far has been making a big enough deal about the fact that he’s the only one who refuses to learn what his life pre-TVA was like, but makes perfect sense that the character climax of the season would be to learn what he does not want to know. In episode 1, one of the first things we hear is X-5 randomly hassling Mobius about his jet ski magazines. Could we finally see him ride a jet ski, or at least see one parked in his shed in the background?
Perhaps, then, the fight for the soul of the TVA (or “The Heart of the TVA”) will really be the fight for Mobius’ soul, as he wrestles with a life — possibly more than one life if we do a hard reset of reality — that he never knew he had. Always never knew he had? And to what extent will hot cocoa and the fate of all time remain at odds?