Episode 1: Live, Laugh, Loki

Loki season 2 is shaping up to be all about intrigue, questions, answers, & theories, as well as a healthy dose of shenanigans and interesting relationships. This article is hoping to update every Friday after a new episode drops so be sure to come back and check it out!

Episode 1 starts us off with Loki, back in the TVA, directly after his altercation with Sylvie in the finale. But as Loki tries to explain his situation to Hunter B-15 and Mobius he suddenly realizes that they don’t recognize him. After some resulting shenanigans ensue, Loki is suddenly and painfully ripped through time to what he soon realizes is the present-day TVA (although, is there ever really a true “present” when it comes to time travel?). As he becomes aware that what he is experiencing is called “time slipping”, as the result of a helpful encounter with the quirky and fun, if not a bit melancholy, Ouroboros (OB, for short), he realizes that he’s being pulled between the past and present of the TVA, but oddly enough, a past that no one seems to remember. We also get a deeper look into the internal politics of the TVA as Mobius and Hunter B-15 are summoned to the War Room after dropping the huge lore bomb that everyone in the TVA is a Variant, kidnapped off somewhere in the timeline. Some wish to hunt down Sylvie and find out what she did at the end of time, while others just want to know how to break the news to the rest of the TVA.

This first episode does a lot to set up the status quo, but even more to leave the audience with questions. Why does no one remember the past of the TVA, why does General Dox feel so strongly about capturing Sylvie? Where is Sylvie‽ And, finally, what happens next? A few of these questions can be answered, at least partially, by theories and the after credits scene. The reason why no one remembers the past of the TVA is likely because He Who Remains, the real founder of the TVA, erased everyone’s memories. Some sort of event must have happened that caused him to factory reset everyone at the TVA and distance himself from the association by creating and ruling through the Time Keepers. Although funnily enough, somehow OB seemed to be unaffected. Maybe He Who Remains forgot him too! And as for what Sylvie is up to, she seems to be getting McDonalds. As Sylvie looks around the restaurant, she sees every normal part of life that she missed while living on the run from the TVA. She “[wants] to try everything,” and I don’t think she’s just talking about the Dollar Menu.

I enjoyed the episode, trying to untangle every plot thread that seemed to be snared on another, and trying to predict what could possibly come next.

Episode 2: Hunter becomes hunted

After the events of the Last episode, Loki is desperate to find Sylvie with a mildly manic kind of focus.
Loki & Mobius get a lead on Sylvie in the form of the rogue, Hunter X-5, or rather his new name, Brad (out of all the names he could’ve chosen, he picked Brad). After Brad’s capture and subsequent torture (he was totally overreacting about the torture btw) he reveals that before he defected from General Dox’s group (to live a life on the timeline as superstar Brad Wolfe) he had been assigned to find Sylvie. And he did. After he gives up Sylvie’s location, Loki & Mobius find her working at the very McDonald’s that she had left off in, in 1982 Broxton, Oklahoma. She had built a life there, a normal one, without the pressure of the TVA. And she was not about to let anyone ruin it.

Ms. Minutes seems to be vital to much of the goings on of the TVA, from the mundane to the catastrophic. From locating Renslayer on the timeline, to opening the mysteriously locked blast doors to the Temporal loom, it seems that nothing much gets done without her support to the overall system of the TVA

As the discussion with Sylvie dragged on, Brad, who’d been forced to tag along, became increasingly nervous, before dropping the bombshell that General Dox was about to drop a bombshell on every branch of the timeline, including the one they were in. A mass pruning event that would kill countless people and destroy every branch that had grown after the death of He Who Remains. Loki and gang rush to locate General Dox and stop her, but by the time they do, she’s already pruned countless timelines. Not to mention that many of her Loyalists escape through modified TemPads. Armed. Sylvie, disgusted with the TVA and its failures, returns McHome After the mass pruning of the timeline, they get a hit on Renslayer’s TemPad.

Now that we have a lead on Renslayer’s location on the timeline we must ask, what exactly is she up to? And why did she leave, what exactly does she hope to find on the timeline? And while the Loyalists have been scattered without a leader, we can’t forget them. It’s that General Dox left behind some plans for them, or perhaps a new leader will emerge.

The episode closes off by showing us that Sylvie still has the primordial TemPad, stolen from He Who Remains, the very thing that may have sent Loki spinning through time.
This episode was a lot of chasing at leads and grabbing at straws for the TVA, and they’re on the back foot now, reeling after General Dox’s attack. It kind of dives into the existentialism of the fact that everyone at the TVA had whole other lives stolen from them. And where do they go from there?

Episode 3: Miss Minutes Gets weird

takes a closer look at a great deal of character relationships, and quite complex ones at that. But at  the same time, it also serves very well to drive forward the plot lines laid in previous episodes. This skillful intertwining of these two things is only part of what makes Loki so great.

At the beginning of the episode we finally see what Renslayer is up to and we find out that He Who Remains had a plan, even for his death. While Miss Minutes seems to know the whole plan, she only gives Renslayer each step as it plays out. Although Renslayer seems to be driven by her need for order and thirst for power, Miss Minutes seems to be motivated by something else entirely.

Mobius and Loki who are following the lead found in the previous episode, find Ravonna at the Chicago World’s Fair, along with the all too familiar face of Victor Timely, or as he was once (or will be?) known, He Who Remains.

Throughout the episode, many characters find themselves in one on one situations, often in direct conflict, and the conversations they have reveal much about their relationships as well as tying into some of the central themes of the series like chaos vs order and whether or not you can condemn someone for something they haven’t done yet, especially when you consider time travel.

But on the bright side, Sylvie finally got her much deserved revenge on Renslayer, or at least some version of it. But afterwards, Miss Minutes reveals that she’s privy to a secret about Ravonna, a secret that Ravonna may not know herself. A secret that just might change the course of the series.

Episode 4: We Love Brad!

I know I’ve had some spoilers before but these ones are gonna be huge okay? Like mega super-duper huge. Ok?

Got it?

Still reading?

Ok, fine, you asked for it…

Everyone dies. Haha jkjk… Unless…

Ok ok, I’m getting ahead of myself, The episode starts off with Ms. Minutes revealing the big secret teased last episode. That Ravonna and He Who Remains worked side by side, that she was a general and the Multiversal War that they won, and that he erased everyone’s memories of everything that happened. Renslayer is just as mad as Ms. Minutes thought she’d be. Just as mad as Ms. Minutes wants her to be?

Judge Gamble implores B-15 to ask Dox (who was imprisoned with her fellow Minutemen after her crimes against the Timeline) for help, because they need it, and no one is as driven to protect the TVA more than Dox. After B-15 takes Gamble’s advice Dox is left with much to consider–That is, until Renslayer shows up and makes an irresistible offer to Dox and her crew. Join her and protect the Timeline, restore the TVA to what it was, and, if you’d like, get a nice cushy life on the timeline once it’s all over. Or die a really grisly death to the Time Cube. Your pick! And idk if I mentioned before but Brad sucks. Screw Brad.

Hey, remember the Temporal Loom? The Temporal Loom that was struggling to handle all these new branches? The Temporal Loom that is emitting lethal amounts of temporal radiation? Yeah, that Temporal Loom. It blew up. Just went kablooey. Everybody, everywhere dies. I think, at least.

Every single episode of season 2 has been chock full of tension, movement, and danger, as our team of not-quite-yet heroes juggle 17 different problems at once. And yet episode 4 somehow managed to contain even more, so much more that if I were to try to write it all down, I’d end up writing more than the damn script! But Loki (the show) manages to balance all this chaos very well, and form a more than coherent story out of all this is very fitting for a show centered around the god of mischief, mayhem, and general japery.

Episode 5: Jet skis and Cliffhangers

Ok, so the world didn’t end (shocking, i know) and now Loki is time-slipping again. Luckily, it keeps bringing him to exactly who he’s looking for, which is everyone near him at the time of explosion. But these aren’t the friends he once knew: they’ve all reverted back to their pre-TVA timelines and lives. We learn some interesting things about each character and we discover the root of Mobius’ deep love for jet skis. And all the while the branches are decaying, becoming temporal spaghetti.

During all this chaos, Loki and Sylvie manage to have a chat and she asks him why he’s really doing all this. Is it to save the world? The TVA? Himself? Loki manages to reach deep down inside himself but the answer disheartens him.

So much happened that it’s impossible to understand all of it, and even theorizing becomes difficult. Some things sort of feel almost contrived, in regards to the developments with his time-slipping. I just hope these loose ends and speculations can all be tied up neatly by the finale.

The whole episode was jam packed with exposition, plot, and character advancements that by the time it was over I couldn’t believe there wasn’t more. Speaking of the ending, what kind of SICK FREAK leaves their poor viewers on that kind of cliffhanger?!

Episode 6: Loki learns all of astrophysics

Loki gets a hold of his time slipping. Over the course of the episode he masters it and all its benefits in order to figure out the perfect solution to his problem (y’know, the timeline blowing up.). All of a sudden the show starts feeling like a video game, with characters repeating the same voice lines. Loki felt like he was coming up against the same part of a quest that he just couldn’t get past as he reloaded into earlier and earlier save files in order to fix what was wrong with the playthrough from the beginning. Almost Groundhog Day-esque

Loki gets asked and keeps asking the hard questions; questions about choices, about how to live with the burden of the outcome, and how not making a choice has its own consequences.

This was a really good episode, but to be honest, it felt a little anticlimactic. We are given little to no context for what Loki is doing at the end aside from him destroying the Loom (he destroys the Loom btw) but all of a sudden everything is fixed and also the timelines have been weaved into Yggdrasil. The discussions during the episode were really enjoyable but some things must have gone over my head.

There was a whole lot of pressure and build-up leading to The Big Moment but so much is kept secret between the silent looks of Loki and He Who Remains that you could get lost in what actually happened.