The Short Take:
Episode 5 goes back to the beating heart of the series. It may be the best episode of the season thus far.
[SPOILER ALERT: The likelihood of spoilerrification increases 7000% if you continue without having seen this week’s episode.]
Image Credit: The Mary Sue
The Long Take:
This series is called Loki for a reason.
And, no, I don’t mean the Tom Hiddleston of it all (though he is magnificent). I don’t even mean that Marvel smartly built a series around one of the most popular characters from the Infinity Saga. I mean that the genius of this series, if we think back to Season 1, is that it has always orbited around one question: what makes a Loki a Loki? Is he a villain? An anti-hero? A hero? And can he learn and grow beyond what everyone thinks a Loki is?
The show has always leaned towards yes, but with the caveat that such an undertaking should be difficult. This is why the psychology of Loki continues to be so compelling. All throughout the Infinity Saga, Loki’s morality has always been a moving target. He hasn’t had a clean, linear progression from bad to good. He has always had his moments, progressing and regressing every which way. His betrayals have been as surprising as they have been predictable. This murkiness is ultimately why his transition from a super villain who tried to take over Earth in Avengers to a full blown hero rescuing all of time and space from the brink of destruction in this series has been so satisfying.
Season 2 of Loki has had some oblique references to Loki’s development. Mostly I think back to the interrogation scene with X-5/Brad, in which he tries to get in Loki’s head by saying that Lokis always ruin everything and that he’s destined to be a loser. While that didn’t cover any new ground, it did remind us of how far Loki has come and how well Season 1 captured Loki’s history as well as the psyche that resulted from that history, in such a short amount of time.
That interrogation scene pales in comparison to this episode, which felt like the first emotional return to form for the series since Season 1.
Image Credit: Polygon
By the end of “Science/Fiction,” Loki finally admits that what he has been saying has been his motivation isn’t his true motivation. As he hops from Mobius’ sporting goods shop to B-15’s pediatric office to the beaches Alcatraz and O.B.’s theoretical physics lab, he reasonably panics about the explosion of the Temporal Loom and the return of his time slipping. But underneath that, he mourns the loss of his friends, who don’t even know who he is. Later on, when he sits at a bar in 1980s Oklahoma with Sylvie, she prods him into confessing his selfish motives: saving the universe is grand and all, but, really, he wants to save the TVA because he wants his friends back. He has never felt a sense of belonging in his own Asgardian family, and now, in the absence of the TVA, he once again feels adrift.
What do you want, Loki?
I want to stop He Who Remains.
No. Wrong. Try again. What is it that you really want? C’mon.
I want to save this. I want to save everything. All of it.
Is it really that hard? C’mon. Keep trying.
I want to save the TVA.
Why?
I want the TVA back.
And?
I want my friends back. I want my friends back. I don’t want to be alone.
The exchange has just the right amount of denial written into it. And, even more impactfully, the vulnerability with which both Hiddleston and Di Martino play this scene cuts through all the timey wimey exposition (which I relish, for the record), bringing the entire season to a standstill. Until this moment reminded me, I hadn’t realized how much I had missed this series as first and foremost a character study of Loki.
The series itself, through this episode, demonstrates an awareness of the tension, the push and pull between cosmic plotting and emotionally grounded character arcs. As a slash construction, the title of the episode, “Science/Fiction” emphasizes the duality of oppositions, rather than one whole harmoniously blended genre, Science Fiction. Loki has to both proliferate wacky, slippery time travel concepts and convoluted gadgets AND provide sincere, accessible, and crystal clear human emotions. While I’ve had my doubts about other episodes this season, this one navigates that tension perfectly.
This is not to say that science and fiction never blend together in this episode. O.B.’s Sacred Timeline self, a theoretical physicist who aspires to become a bestselling science fiction author, intentionally blurs the two components, as he is always talking about “real” scientific concepts and Loki’s seemingly impossible temporal problems in one breath. Not to get back on my Oppenheimer beat, but part of this is just part and parcel of theoretical physics, that often contemplates the nature of reality and, in doing so, can sound a lot more like science fiction than science fact.
Ultimately, the disentanglement of science FROM fiction serves a higher purpose in the episode: to push Loki along on his arc. O.B. says that science is about the what and the how, but fiction is about the why. Hence, the revelation that his motivation is in fact to get his friends back and restore his new home, the TVA, is the driving force of the narrative more than the through-put multiplier, the Temporal Loom, or Victor Timely’s prototype. Loki takes this logic that one step further, concluding that for him it’s actually the who — his friends — that allow him to control his time slipping and burst into a timeline of his choice, at will. Thinking of them and his attachment to them helps him focus and direct his time slipping. Decoding TV this week pointed out that if we go back to the time slipping in episode 1, every time Loki time slips, it’s to and from the core characters in his friend group: Casey, Mobius, B-15, and Sylvie. I haven’t gone back to corroborate this, but I love the idea.
Image Credit: Looper
This tension between the what or the how and the why or the who builds to a climactic and, to me, very classic MCU moment of a hero tapping into their fledgling super power. When the science fiction physics professor version of O.B. first suggest that Loki try to deliberately time slip, he hilariously writhes and strains to no avail. But then, in the heat of the disastrous moment, in the face of danger and when the situation requires it, he is able to tap into his full powers and, finally, control them. The key component of this breakthrough, however, is his clarity of motivation. The why, which is really about the who. It’s only after Sylvie forces him to admit to her and himself that he’s selfishly trying to regain a sense of belonging and friendship that he can tap into his time slipping — well, now we probably have to call it time jumping abilities.
My lingering question after seeing this is about the origins of these abilities. Was this a latent power Loki has always had? Or was he able to develop these powers because he successfully pruned himself from the timeline? He’s the only one that remains in the TVA after the Temporal Loom explodes. Is that because he was not tied to the timeline in the same way after? (In theory pruning himself cured his time slipping, so that may not hold up in a court of common sense.) Or did his time slipping level up because the Temporal Loom explosion essentially blasted him with time radiation, forcing the time slipping to mutate into a stronger and more advance power?
OR. Or. Or perhaps the previously on montage purposefully included He Who Remains’ line about how everything he and Sylvie did they did because He Who Remains “paved the road” means that this is all a part of larger plan, the full extent we still do not comprehend. He Who Remains could have set Loki up to do all this from the start. How much were the events of this episode a part of the Ouroboros/Groundhog Day scenario I considered last week? (Send help…I think I’m getting too carried away.)
This idea of He Who Remains paving every road and anticipating every move, however, would go against what this episode seems to triumphantly declare: that Loki and friends get to write his own story. In the bar, Sylvie says to him that they’re all writing their own stories now, and that he should go write his. Again, this goes back to the core question of what makes a Loki a Loki. The answer this episode gives seems to be whatever Loki decide makes a Loki, makes a Loki. This pivotal conversation between Sylvie and Loki creates a dialectic about free will and self-determination. They get to decide who they are, and no one else.
Image Credit: The Ringer
I took this to be a meta commentary as well — that the creators of Loki, no matter how many time circles they write around themselves, can rewrite the story. We may think it’s going one way, but they reserve the right to pull the rug out from under us and defy our expectations for a series like this. Can I even speculate about what we might expect to see in the finale, then? Jonathan Majors anxiety aside, I do think the season needs to confront He Who Remains and/or Kang the Conquerer in some way. He’s been looming too large over this season, his name on the lips of nearly every character. It would be unsatisfying to end this season with only a hologram of He Who Remains and Ravonna. Loki and Sylvie need to face him or another, more menacing variant of him, to come full circle, returning to the confrontation to the end of Season 1. Would Sylvie make a different choice were they to return to that moment, that consequential choice to listen to He Who Remains or kill him?
And how will all our TVA characters reconcile their two lives lived now? Will they regain consciousness and then have to choose one over the other? As I predicted last week, we finally got to see Mobius on a jet ski. It was sad and empty, though, because rather than joyriding on the jet ski, he’s riding one that’s not moving and set in front of a fake backdrop so he can sell one to an unsuspecting customer at a sporting goods store. We learn that his and hers jet skis have been sitting in his garage, wasting away since his wife died or left. The jet ski is a source of pain rather than simple pleasure for this version of Mobius.
Image Credit: Escapist Magazine
I do think that the series needs to follow through on the promise of pie: that Mobius has to confront his own past this season, in a manner similar to Loki Season 1. We haven’t had a chance to do that yet, so maybe that needs to be at least a part of the finale. Will his temporal ostrich-ing be justified? Or will he learn that reconciling his two lives will bring peace? Will he get to write his own story too?
Image Credit: Screen Rant
Or maybe we’ll all be spaghetti in the end. It certainly looks cool enough.