Loki recap: Welcome to the Jonathan Majors show
Beautiful visuals and moments battle against character motivations that are getting harder and harder to track
TV Reviews Loki
We probably need to have a talk about Jonathan Majors, yeah?
That’s a trickier concept than it probably should be, thanks to the domestic abuse allegations still hanging over the Lovecraft Country star—allegations that broke just as Marvel was really hyping itself up to make him the new face of the entire franchise, in the wake of an extremely eye-catching (and episode-consuming) performance as the man behind the curtain in Loki’s first-season finale. Majors has been dropped by his manager and his PR firm over the last several months, as well as a number of advertising clients and acting gigs. But Marvel has hung tight, a stance that very much includes this week’s Loki, which brings the actor back to the forefront as yet another incarnation of classic Marvel baddie Kang The Conqueror.
Whether Majors should be in this episode is going to come down to personal dictates: Whether his presence generates outright rejection, dissatisfied tolerance, or executive producer Kevin Wright’s own stated goal to not do anything “hasty” in regards to the star’s public fate being a matter of individual morality. But given that Majors is a huge part of “1893”—especially by verbal volume, thanks to his adoption of yet another distracting verbal tic to distinguish this latest Kang from the pack—we do find ourselves needing to come to terms with the performance itself. After being melodramatically teased in the after-credits stinger for Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (revealed, somewhat amusingly, to literally just be a scene lifted straight out of this episode), Victor Timely is now here in the flesh. And he’s…kind of an irritating dork?
Loki, and Majors, do deserve some credit for subverting expectations, rendering Timely far more of a comedic character than his initial introduction might have suggested, an Oz-esque humbug if ever there was one. (There’s even a bit of the Coen brothers to some of his more energetic scenes, all fast-talk and scampering escapes.) But he’s also just a lot to take, as he dodges creditors, makes impulsive decisions, and speaks…in waysthatseem…to…suggest…thathe’scomeunstuckfrom…time. Every scene with Timely seems, for better and worse, to stretch on far more than it feels like it should.
But despite the slapstick, the bumbling, and the seemingly endless affectations on display with Timely’s initial appearance, we do need to acknowledge the clever thing that both “1893” and Majors are doing here. The actor and the script are careful to thread in all the ways this obvious con-man might one day evolve into He Who Remains: that mixture of vision, buffoonish0ness, and hucksterism—cut with a deep desire for isolation, independence, and, above all else, control—laying down the foundation for what might some day make him “the thief of all free will.” By the time he begs Sylvie to spare his life in the episode’s climax—protesting, honestly, that he hasn’t done anything yet—we’ve seen enough to know why she’s wary of her own compassion.
But, whoops, we’ve jumped all over the timeline ourselves—fitting for what is somehow the very first episode of Loki to really take advantage of its time-travel conceit and do some actual damn time traveling for once. Situated in the fabled “White City” of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, the episode is an undeniable visual win, recreating the spectacle of one of the planet’s most famous exhibitions of architectural and scientific prowess, and then dumping Loki and Mobius into the middle of it. (Mobius can’t stop sight-seeing and gorging on fair food; we can’t really blame him.) There’s a fun time-travel romp running in the background here, getting chances to shine whenever it doesn’t get superseded by the show’s actual plot, which sees the pair casing the fair for Renslayer, who’s been bouncing around both the era and the area in an effort to…well…
Real quick, episode viewers: Anybody know what Renslayer is actually trying to accomplish here, at any given moment?
The return of Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Loki is, on the one hand, very welcome: Mbatha-Raw is a talented performer, and she plays the scenes, and the character beats she’s handed as well as can be expected. But Ravonna Renslayer, the character, is an absolute mess, leaping from motivation to motivation as soon as a new one comes into view. She claims to be the embodiment of “order,” but she can’t even muster up to “chaos,” instead landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “completely inconsistent.” That might very well be intentional: Loki has always had “glorious purpose” hanging as an idea in its horned head, and this second season has seen the entire TVA floundering in its effort to figure out what it’s for in a universe not entirely under its control. But “floundering” is a very small-doses flavor, especially when it’s being applied to the closest thing your show has to a genuine antagonist, and the actual result is to make Renslayer feel like a puppet—not of malevolent cartoon AIs or cosmic masterminds, but of the Loki writers themselves.
(We can also chalk this episode’s new version of Miss Minutes up as one of those things that looks better than it works in practice, although there’s at least some genuine menace to Tara Strong’s performance as she slowly lets Victor in on how deeply troubled his former/future AI assistant is.)
As for Loki himself, he feels largely superfluous to tonight’s events, dragged along in the wake of other characters making big (if not necessarily good) choices. His apparently reflexive desire to save the TVA from the CGI Space Wedgie (which only a Kang can fix, hence why Timely is required) remains weirdly under-examined—he’s become less “The God Of Mischief” at this point than “A Nice Man Who Tries To Do Nice Things,” or, at his worst, “The God Of Not All Time Cops Are Bad”—leaving any actual character considerations to fall to Sylvie instead. Sophia DiMartino is up for it, as usual, but Loki’s second season remains weirdly uninterested in Loki himself. (Meanwhile, Mobius eats some Cracker Jacks and has multiple scenes of recrimination with Renslayer that could have been entirely silent for all they stuck in our memories.)
As we alluded to above, the climax all comes down to DiMartino and Majors, Sylvie and Timely, tormented and possible future tormentor. It’s here that Majors reminds us why his initial performance took the fanbase by storm, despite being shot through with odd little performative tricks that he occasionally leans on as a crutch. He sheds enough of the costume to show us Timely the man, vulnerable and true, calmly asserting the right to existence that his other version so cruelly denied Sylvie. And it’s here that DiMartino reminds us why Sylvie has been the heart of this series’ most emotionally resonant moments, an open wound desperately looking for both a place, and a way, to heal. And that’s “1893” for you: moments of incredible beauty (both practical, and emotional), genuinely fun bits of time-travel adventure and comedy, and all of it held together by a lot of very haphazard strings and a web of character actions that don’t build to any kind of coherent whole.
Stray observations
- Old timey Marvel theme during the sizzle reel: extremely cute!
- As it turns out, Timely’s technical abilities are at least in part the result of a time paradox—Renslayer having anonymously given him a copy of O.B.’s TVA manual as a child for him to spend his life obsessing over.
- As usual, we remain at least mildly baffled by Loki’s time-travel mechanics. Do all the Kangs derive from Victor/1890s Illinois, or are they just seeded throughout all of time and space, waiting for something to trigger them into megalomania? (Also, 1868 is listed as the Sacred Timeline, but 1893, after the handoff of the book, is a Branched Timeline, which is…interesting.)
- Interesting to note that the Loom is only holding steady because of Dox’s temporal genocide last episode; it’s so hard to pin down this show’s actual moral stances, given that she appears to have genuinely saved the TVA, at least for today.
- Not much Ke Huy Quan tonight, but O.B.’s deeply relieved “Really? Oh that is such a relief!” when Mobius questioningly says “We can hack the system…” is very funny.
- “Thor’s not that tall.”
- “I didn’t give the man this book!” (followed by immediately tossing Timely the book).
- The big Miss Minutes feels like one of those things that’s in the show solely so it can go in the trailer. (Her jealous eyerolls are a treat, though.)
- “Why are the two of you not in cahoots with him and his butler?”
- Very creepy effect as Miss Minutes overlays onto the mannequin’s head.
- Sylvie ends the episode with one of the most unconvincing “I’m not going to kill the bad guy even though I could” speeches of all time. Stranding the bad guy at the End Of Time works a lot better when you don’t leave her with a TemPad and the evil time-controlling AI!
135 Comments
Still enjoying this so far. I also enjoyed Majors’ performance, though it’s tough to ignore, you know, everything else that’s going on with him.
Sigh, it’s just sad to think of the wasted Kang potential. How did Quantimania screw up so bad? We should have met several of him by now, different interesting people like this, maybe even leaving it unclear for a while as to whether they’re different variants or in fact the same guy hopscotching through time and space.
To answer the question, it seems like Kangs are seeded through time and space—which to me stretches the concept of ‘variants’ way too far, unless I guess they’re setting up that they don’t all have to be played by Jonathan Majors, ha—and this guys is a lesser one or “not destined to do anything crazy” who was only to be “kickstarted” in case of emergency.
I’m honestly still not 100% sure Timely is in fact a variant. I was pretty confident he was just an ancestor until Miss Minute’s rant near the end, but even that isn’t wholly convincing, since she only knows what he told her, and he might have left out crucial details. The only real way it makes sense is if HWR snatched a baby Kang or three and dropped them inside the sacred timeline at different points as a failsafe. Without future tech, they’d be unable to properly Kangify, and would just fade into history. If he’s really homegrown in the nineteenth century, surely his temporal aura would be off.
Stolen baby Kangs makes sense…I mean, lol, in the context of utter insanity.
The only real way it makes sense is if HWR snatched a baby Kang or
three and dropped them inside the sacred timeline at different points as
a failsafe.This concept feels ripped straight from the comics page and I want it to turn out to be the case so badly now.
Arguably, they have already threaded the needle on “variants don’t have to be a 1:1″ because we have Lokis by all different actors at this point so I think they are building themselves a Jonathan Majors out.In the comics, Kang gets access to time travel at different times. Rama Tut who was already teased is the result of Kang going back in time so I do think there is also the possibility we are setting up “uh oh Kangs are traveling through time and potentially “changing” the past.”There is speculation Rama Tut is being set up for a Moon Knight season 2 and with the Steven Grant easter egg earlier in the season and the return of Moon Knight to the logo, I am wondering if that is something they are actively seeding.
The Lokis not being 1:1 was always weird…I interpreted it as “The Sacred Timeline” not actually being one timeline but a manageably small “multiverse,” but nothing has really confirmed that other than…well all the different Loki, which are otherwise, what…coincidences where similar stories have arised in vastly different time periods or galaxies?
Loki variants have the added strangeness that our Loki is a Frost Giant given Asgardian form by Odin. So were Sylvie, Richard Grant, Alligator etc all likewise converted Frost Giants, or multiple species? Are they all so different because they all got transformed differently? If basically any creature could be adopted and turned into Loki, that explains why only two other variants (Prime and President) are played by Tom Hiddleston.
I thought there was no Moon Knight season 2
Just a rumor. Oscar Isaac has suggested he’d be up for it. The easter eggs in Loki has stirred the rumor mill.
Yes as seen with no way home and the three spideys
Moon Knight vs Rama Tut would definitely be a good direction for them to go in for S2. Assuming there is a second season. Marvel TV really needs to get its act together and start striking when the proverbial iron is still hot.
Yeah, this is all rumor, but there’s been a renewed rumor that Oscar Isaac is in negotiations again for potentially that and Kang Dynasty so it seems possible.
There is speculation Rama Tut is being set up for a Moon Knight season 2
and with the Steven Grant easter egg earlier in the season and the
return of Moon Knight to the logo, I am wondering if that is something
they are actively seeding.
Wait, what was the Steven Grant easter egg? I must have missed that.
Had to look it up. Casey was listening to the same podcast about staying awake in episode 1.
When Casey is wearing headphones in I believe episode 1 (my episode might be off because I’ve been watching in chunks), he takes them off and you hear the podcast that he’s listening to and it’s the “solving puzzles is a great way to stay awake…” podcast that Steven listened to at the beginning of Moon Knight while completing the rubix cube.
Kang absolutely does not need to be played by Majors. Sylvie is Loki, as is Richard Grant and the alligator from season 1. Variants can be wildly different; it’s not an issue to recast him (it wouldn’t be regardless, but they have an in-universe explanation, which is nice).
So now you’ve got me thinking which reptile Kang variant might replace Majors. Frilled lizard maybe?
Well, now, that’s just your two cents.
…so you’re saying there’s a chance we could get Jeffrey Wright all up in this bitch?
David Oyelowo would be my first choice, but Jeffrey Wright would also be awesome.
I think a problem for that is that he’s already “The Watcher”, and his voice is so distinctive it would be hard to see him as a different role.
I mean, is Renslayer a Kang variant? Based on the end of the episode it’s either that or his daughter
She doesn’t quite seem like a Kang, but…maybe the reason for that is what’ll make her really angry?Kang doesn’t seem like the type to have a kid, but I suppose eventually he might get the urge at some point between now and The End Of Time. I would prefer a secret that doesn’t involve retconning what we learned about her past in S1.
In the comics she’s his love interest
It would be kinda great if she was like, an Ant-Man variant. If an alligator can be loki she could really be anyone. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but that’s what’s been established.
Well they established that not all Loki variants are Tom in season 1 or even that same race for that matter, so “kang” could be anything I suppose. Timely was likely pruned in the pursuit of the sacred timeline, so MM/RR kickstarting him, then returning before he would have been pruned to take him to the TVA makes sense.Personally, I wonder if Timely is actually the guy Sylvie killed, with HWR “Bill and Ted’ing” himself back into power, by giving himself knowledge of the TVA before he created it. Like Loki/OB and the device Mobius uses to save Loki.
Okay, you do realize this entire season was filmed before the accusations started, right? Just for the sake of my own sanity, please tell me people get that.Also a bit odd for the review to make such a big deal about him, but not say a word about Tara Strong’s recent trip to Mel Gibson Land.
We get it. Doesn’t really change how we receive the work, though.
It’s not unheard of for Disney to almost completely re-shoot projects that it finds problematic. I don’t think they’ve ever pulled a full “swap out the scandalous actor” a la Army of the Dead or All the Money In the World though.
Reshoots require writing & acting, two things not available for the last few months.
Again, the show was in the can and Majors’ issues were public well before the strikes happened.
Sure, logic doesn’t always effect the way people act. But it should.
I think Tara Strong doesn’t get much backlash because she voices a relatively minor character and it’s a lot easier to tune out a voice than a face and physical performance. She’s also an out anti-vaxxer so fuck her.
oh and she’s in much more trouble https://www.thedailybeast.com/star-animated-voice-actor-tara-strong-fired-after-israel-hamas-posts
Not really. She voiced one episode for a kickstarter show that only did a pilot, and they’re not going to bring her back for the future. I doubt most of us have heard of “Boxtown.” She hasn’t been fired from any of her higher profile gigs. Doesn’t change that what she is saying is… not great. At all. But let’s not act like she’s been cAnCeLleD.
Yet.
Technically correct. Things that haven’t happened haven’t happened
She really went full Princess Clara, huh?
I’m looking around but, how interesting, can’t see a single quote of anything that she posted or evidence of any posts that she ‘liked’. Apparently people screenshot whatever it was. I’m no expert on this conflict but a person should have the ability to sympathize with whatever group they choose. Yes, another McCarthy age is upon us. Apparently pro-Palestinian sympathies are increasing, but when has the US ever been sympathetic to Muslims?
Kosovo? The Uyghur situation in China?
What does this comment have to do with Tara Strong and the Isreali-Palestine conflict?
Does this look familiar? “but when has the US ever been sympathetic to Muslims?”
Those were just convenient situations where Russia and China happened to be brutalizing Muslims.
You can’t find any of the things she’s said? Uhhhhh not sure how that’s possible, but you do you
The Left is pro-Palestinian like the Right is pro-Life
::facepalm!::Oh, dear—what Hamas did to non-combatant Israelis was terrible.So is what Israel is doing right back to non-Hamas Palestinians, with far more resources.I used to think Israel was smart in their handling of terrorism, too—but Netanyahu just seems to want to destroy the Middle East so he can be King of the Ashes.
If you are going to try and cancel every celeb who has virulently grotesque Zionist views and supports genocide, you are going to cancel a good portion of Hollywood.
She isn’t an anti-vaxxer.
…. she’s an anti-vaxxer too?
so fuck herAfter seeing a picture of her, yes, I would like to, thank you very much.
it might also be because people don’t even know she exists.
i did not, before reading this comment (had to google her), while i (and many other people i guess) have been aware and liked jonathan majors since lovecraft county, which made these accusations sting a lot more.
(by the way fuck him)
I think it’s because she’s not as famous.
I mean it was probably the opposite of Gibson land , given that the gist was pretty much “nuke Palestine” .Definitely a dumb thing to post, but I’d say maybe this was a “get angry/upset and post dumb stuff over a situation” given the current situation rather than a measured attempt to be a racist.
We get that you are a woman hating piece of shit who loves watching TV shows that star women abusers.
I think the expectation was to literally reshoot all of his scenes with a different actor.
Are you suggesting that “too much to reshoot” is a better reason to proceed than having a criminal on a mainstream TV show? You need help.
lol yo… I don’t think anyone thinks that and it’s stupid of you to suggest that. Whether or not the show was filmed before the accusations doesn’t change that it’s possibly unjust to the victim(s)? to see his face all over a mainstream TV show. Idiot.
Hasn’t Kang gotten his ass handed to him twice already? Hardly seems like a Thanos level villain to me. My guess is Daredevil going back to the drawing board is only the first step. The MCU is in for a reboot.
Only once (in Quantumania), & that was explicitly & repeatedly established to be a variant without access to any of his time-travel shenanigans.He Who Remains didn’t lose. Just getting Loki & Sylvie to the citadel completed his victory; at that point, he was ready to die happy.And Victor Timely isn’t (yet) a villain.
Why does he talk like he is either brain-damaged, or has learned English solely from reading, and has never heard it spoken before we meet him? Without an explanation as to why he is like that, it is just annoying.
Some people just have tics, and they don’t need some sort of organic plot explanation. It could also just be a con that he hasn’t dropped yet.
In fact ALL of Jonathon Majors characters have ticks! Seriously tho it’s like he just finised theatre school. Woof. Stop pursing your lips dude.
My take is that his mind is always moving too fast for his voice to keep up, perhaps due to the unnatural and paradoxical nature of the information he’s been exposed to.
I have more of an issue with how the episode was edited more than his performance. It wouldn’t have been as bad if they layered in music underneath or cut to more reactions during his monologues. Having to hang on him during every spoken word made every scene felt longer than it actually was.
Between the various Kang’s do you almost get the sense the folks atarvel think majors is just like, the best most amazing actor you guys, wow, look at him *acting*
I spoke not too much unlike this until I was in my early 20s and I got a job talking on the phone for a living that somehow enabled me to mostly get past my speech issues. My stutter was so haltingly bad I wouldn’t even answer the phone growing up. I wouldn’t walk into rooms full of people either because I couldn’t get “hello” out. I think it’s probably a combination of an attempt at a speech impediment and also at how fast his mind works. I do love that he’s something of a con man though, I love con man stories.
Kang the Conqueror was downright measured. Probably a way to differentiate the characters
It was annoying, but I think he has a bad stutter problem so I give some leeway.
A post civil war black child being given a book they can’t understand from the future with instructions that simply say “dedicate your life to this, and only this” will likely have more than a few phonetic impairments.
I’ve known people with stutters before who sounded a lot like this. It might be a little exaggerated for effect, but didn’t seem all that strange.
It’s quite clear what Renslayer’s motives are: to stabilize the TVA with herself back in charge, and presumably with an HWR variant back with her. I think the confusion is largely a result of the show playing coy with what exactly she remembers. She obviously doesn’t remember everything, especially with Miss Minutes teasing what is almost certainly a relation to HWR, but she remembers more than any of the other employees, and the recording in episode 1 shows they worked closely together. But she stated her objective outright during the episode, and never really deviates. It even lines up with her closing remarks to Mobius in Season 1, where she tells him that only one person has free will, the one in charge, and she’s going looking for him.
Also, as much as I do agree that Loki is bouncing around without a real clue, it’s worth remembering that barely any time has elapsed during this series. He let that line go about “remember when I tried to take over New York”, but it’s easy to forget that was like a week ago. A week of having his whole sense of reality upturned at least three times, and having to go through a decade’s worth of character development and then some over that same interval. Whether it’s some small innate good part of him or just plain self interest, he’s trying to keep reality from dissolving, and he hasn’t had a lot of time to catch up and collect himself. His motivation is changing from moment to moment because he’s completely unmoored in a meta-apocalypse. Plus his girlfriend hates him.
In fact, the episode did a magnificent job contrasting Minutes’ obsession with HWR and Renslayer’s obsession with “fixing the TVA,” showing how both were actually dominated by a need for power and totalitarian control. It was really well done and apparently went right over the author’s head.
I mean she DID have a big speech towards the end about order vs chaos while wielding a huge orange gun, seemed to me her primary motivation is pretty clear…
I found this incredibly resonant and also quite helpful. Thank you for your service.
I’m honestly surprised that William doesn’t understand the motivations at play here. Renslayer’s is based in practically no character change on her part, making her easiest to understand. She just wants to restore the pecking order, like you said.Loki’s is somewhat complex, even when it’s not front and center, in that he’s had to reconcile his lack of “narrative autonomy” in the universe while still trying to keep himself in the game. That first episode of Season 1, where he sees the Infinity Stones as paperweights and his own death from Infinity War, just really hammered the existential journey he was about to experience. And now he’s caught in the middle of forces that are so cerebral that they boggle the mind. It makes sense that he would be torn between motivations, just as any TVA employee aware of the situation would be. The fact that he can keep it together at all, focusing on the threats he somewhat understands (Kang, the Loom aka reality falling apart) while emotionally hung up on the one responsible for their plight (Sylvie), makes him feel believable to me.This show isn’t perfect, and some of the plotting choices don’t always work, but the one thing that they’ve managed to do is make the characters feel like they mostly fit this story.
Plus his girlfriend both hates him and is him
I’m going to preface this by stating Jonathan Majors’s seems like an awful person at best and every defense he’s put out there for his behavior has only made him look worse.But…I suspect your criticism of Victor Timely would look very different in a world where he didn’t have allegations against him.
Really? He was already over the top obnoxious back in season 1, and he somehow managed to dial it up to 11 here.
I’m talking specifically about how AV Club had been fawning all over Majors prior to the allegations regardless of the work.
I was getting mighty tired of the “Simpin’* for Kang Hour”. Maybe it makes sense for a rogue AI to go all high-school jealous, but to see Renslayer, who has been known for exerting control and not being controlled, act that way felt a little wrong…and probably creepy, too, since he is sorta her employer.*Forgive me, youngsters, if I am not using that correctly! Get *on* my lawn!
Not sorry I got rid of Disney+.
I think they went over the top with the speech mannerisms. You really don’t need the crutch, just act.
Calling it now: Renslayer is a variant of Kang.Jonathan Majors is a talented actor but every scene he’s in the dialogue just drags. I thought this was a direction thing with the first-season finale, but it happens in this episode too. There’s just a lot of dead air, and a lack of immediacy that takes a lot of the air out of the scenes.
That was my/our first thought as well.Also, I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop with Ouroborous. The fact that he’s been there since the beginning suggests he knows far more than he’s letting on, and it would be great casting against “type” for Ke Huy Quan to actually be playing a bad guy.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if Casey ends up being either an OB variant or taking on his role within whatever version of the TVA lingers on after this season.
Honestly, outside of Kang in Antman, I haven’t enjoyed any other version Major’s has put forth. It seems he wanted one Kang to be nice and subtle, while the rest are “I’m swinging for the fences!”…It’s distracting. You can just tell its ACTING ACTING ACTING
The post-credits bit in QM with the assorted Kangs hooting and hollering was pretty cringe, too.
He reminds me of everyone I went to music theatre school with. That is in no way a compliment. Where you can sort of hear a sing-sony rhythm to their line delivery as tho they’re “ACTING ACTING ACTING”. It’s called being able to “see an actor’s rehearsal”. Jonathon Majors is a ham and a bad choice by Disney.
revealed, somewhat amusingly, to literally just be a scene lifted straight out of this episodeHuh? I don’t understand how you thought it was anything else? Even if they were comfortable assuming everyone watching had seen Quantumania, it’d be weird to just skip it.
I was pleasantly surprised by it considering what they did at the end of Captain Marvel, where her introduction to the Avengers was completely different than the one we got in Endgame.
I think the idea there was that she shows up and asks “where’s fury?” and then after an offscreen conversation Pepper asks her to go look for Tony and the others in space. So in that case they just didn’t include her very first meeting with the heroes in Endgame because the movie was already too long, and worked without that scene.
This also isn’t the first time Marvel have just lifted a scene from a future project to use as a post-credit scene. The one that jumps to mind is Ant-Man’s post-credits using a scene from Captain America: Civil War, but I’m sure there are a couple of other examples.
“We probably need to have a talk about Jonathan Majors, yeah?”No.I think what’s intriguing about this episode is the TVA manual plan. It doesn’t strike me as something He Who Remains would do, firstly because he really wouldn’t need to and secondly he was quite content to die and tired of all the drama. Why would you curse yourself like that?So the other 2 options are another Kang put this in place or, far more likely, this is the plan of Miss Minutes and her own plan to become the master of all time.
I do agree with you a bit — this could end up being a Kang’s plan to get himself inside the agency office and create himself, either by immersion or by something related to the Loop issue. (Also I just realized that this would basically be the MCU’s version of the Colin Robinson plot from What We Do In The Shadows.)
I get that you can’t afford editors anymore on this site, but surely you can afford a word processor that includes spellcheck, or a grammarly subscription… “the thief of all three will”? Seriously? This looks like shit I wrote as a lazy teenager at 3AM when I put off writing an essay to the last possible moment.
“Every scene with Timely seems, for better and worse, to stretch on far more than it feels like it should.”Aye. I simply felt *bored* during this episode, checking the runtime and being surprised by how much was left. It’s four minutes longer than episode 2; i felt like it was a “double-length special.” Largely because so many scenes felt stretched. I didn’t outright hate Timely’s stuttering and vocal ticks but it got old. Wasn’t villainous, wasn’t charming. Miss Minutes was a highlight and went very nicely sinister. They’re kind of hemming between how “powerful” she is and yet doesn’t seem to do much. Sylvie sends Minutes and Renslayer to the end of time, but like, they should be able to just leave the next second. Right? Did… anyone else find it odd that there was almost zero conflict between Renslayer and loki/mobious? All three run to Timely and they’re just trying to get him to take their side with words. Mobius does point to Renslayer that she tried to kill him, but it felt like there should have been far more hostility? I feel like Renslayer laid out her motivation clearly in her end speech: restore the TVA with her at its head in charge and in power. I’m not entirely sure why, though, other than it’s what she knew. Maybe Minutes’ “secret” will go into it. Why was Renslayer so zealous in the first place? IIRC she knew about the ruse of the time gods. I’m bothered that the only Sylvie we’ve seen in the show so far is incredibly angry, violent, nasty Sylvie. Sure —- the mclife she’d found has been tarnished and her hatred of the TVA/Kang is consistent. But it feels like that’s her only note and forgets any development she had made? I dunno. The amount of exposition was irritating. Just in that first scene, characters just repeat what others say. We don’t need that much hand-holding. The actors are able to deliver it well.Hiddleston in that old-timey suit FUCKSAnyway, good stuff in the episode, but it was a chore to get through due to Major’s acting choices and just the odd pacing of everything
Re: the End of Time stuff, I’d guess Miss Minutes has a way to get them back out, but Renslayer’s TemPad would’ve either been taken or destroyed before she was flung off the boat?Speaking of, honestly have more questions about how that played out than almost anything else in the episode.
Totally agree with you. It took me a while to even finish the episode – I got bored half way through and switched it off. I didn’t come back for four days. It’s a big contrast from season 1, where I re-watched them all several times. The pacing is so weird, and the stakes aren’t clear to me at all. What happens if the Loom fails? Why does time need to be fed through the Loom anyway, if the TVA is no longer trying to force time into a single timeline?
The stakes seem to be “we have to save the tva from being destroyed”. I… Guess that if the loom fails all of reality is gone? But that hasn’t actually been specified, really? Would it just destroy the tva? I mean there was a multiverse before Kang started gardening. S1 was about LOKI and his character journey as much as it was the time travel and multiverse conceits. But now Loki is just good and doing good cos he’s good and so you do the good. I liked the first two episodes a lot. I love Mobius/Loki. Sylvie has been done a bit dirty so far imo. The pacing of ep3 and the overall focus on timely, and how annoying he was/how blank renslayer is def aren’t making me feel invested.S2 is all about “plot” and not really character. I don’t really care about the tva…? Like, I enjoy the setting a lot but I’m not invested in the tva on its own. The actors are carrying the HELL out of this thing so far.
Another fun episode and I’m enjoying the road we’re on, wherever its headed. But Majors’ portrayal of Victor Timely was incredibly grating. I’m not talking about any kind of outside influence from his real world allegations (I support ousting him) because I can separate that from the on screen product (no judgement for those that can and can’t). The portrayal of Timely is just bad. Majors as Kang was good. Majors as He Who Remains had its quirks, but it worked. Timely is just scene chewing distracting. Why he and the director chose to go that route is baffling. It’s way too over the top. I don’t mind a character having certain tics, but that needed to be dialed down by half
It completely took over and derailed the episode. It doesn’t need to be a solo actor “showcase.”
I don’t get how you could not understand their motivations, I feel like they’re all saying them pretty clearly & consistently. Even if they weren’t, there is still a thing called “intrigue” and even potentially “suspense” that media is still capable of
Miss Minutes for Speaker of the House
Specifically, the giant version of her.
She would crush it
Now that Marvel’s starting to talk about letting shows exist as more than a crossover-delivery system, I do wonder how much will really be settled for this show this season, what with their only being three episodes left. I also could’ve gone for a Sylvie solo episode showing us — and granted, maybe we get a scene about this sooner anyway — why she’s so attached to her little slice of 80sklahoma.
So, if Sylvie succeeded and killed him, could they just open a time portal to 1892 and grab him? Or, her killing him would be interference that would open a branched timeline where he’s been killed, so could they just go to the one where he hasn’t? I guess they’re tracking each other, so that’s why they’re all fighting over the same one, but once somebody contacts him, has him go somewhere he wouldn’t have otherwise gone, wouldn’t that create a nexus event and split the timeline, so couldn’t they just solve the problem of fighting each other by going to their own Victor Timelys? But then if Sylvie interfering with him creates a branch, then killing him makes a branch timeline where someone came through a portal and killed him, so then she’d have to go back to the main timeline, where he’d still be alive, so would she just spend an infinite amount of time killing the same Kang? You can’t really eliminate someone from the timeline, because the future they lived has already happened, all you can do is a make a branch future where they don’t exist. A branch that grows, from the perspective of the TVA, but why does it grow? When a new timeline is made in 1893, can they travel to 1894 on that timeline, or do they have to wait until 525,600 minutes for it to grow to 1894? And if so, then is the TVA really outside of time? I’m kinda having a hard time with this. The TVA is outside of time, but there’s all this before and after with the timelines, where time is running normally. It keeps sprouting new timelines, but everything in the universe is happening simultaneously from the perspective of the TVA, so why wouldn’t it just instantly break? I mean, all of a sudden, countless trillions of people across galaxies are instantly unleashed, all living every moment of their lives simultaneously, it seems like instead of sprouting new timelines every second, it would just immediately turn from a tree limb growing branches into a giant, infinitely thick wall of fully formed timeline threads.
Gugu is the single quest part of this show. I groan every time she’s on screen. She delivers lines like she’s a high schooler on stage for the Spring play. Every expression, every utterance, every movement she does takes me completely out of it.
Renslayer is a Kang variant. Is that where everyone’s mind went? That’s what I jumped to. Maybe, maybe not. Would fit though. Well, buckle up for a Miss Minutes with a “real” body at some point. You don’t tease it and not follow through. It took me reading about six posts to wonder if people would bitch if it’s not Tara Strong reprising her role in live action … and nope, recast (into live action) = likely. Crazy southern hottie … hmm … Miley Cyrus?
Renslayer is either a variant or his daughter. My mind went to variant first.I had the same thought about Tara Strong in live action. Although we don’t know if Miss Minutes will get a regular looking body or more, robotic
This is an interesting theory, and is held up additionally by Kang putting the moves on Renslayer and her not having any of it. Why wouldn’t she, unless she was a Kang herself, or related to one?
They could swerve too and make her Kang’s Egyptian Queen or someone from his past.
I think I agree with a B- grade. Majors’ stammer could have been turned down from (kindly) 9 to 7. But the tonal shifts needed some smoothing. Last week we had a major (Thanos Level?) mass genocide… right? This week people running from a cartoon clock. Miss Minutes’ threat is kind of lost on me. Feels too “Disney kids’ channel” I guess. Coming after a genocide and all. Loki himself is feeling a little back-burner on his own show. Anyone got a supercut of Hiddleston doing his Loki Hair-Flip?
Does he do that stupid pursed mouth thing he always does?
Just watched the first 3 episodes of season 2, and JM aside, what the hell happened to the show? The first season was engaging, clever, witty. The dialogue is just incredibly stilted and boring. Loki is just an afterthought (the character, Tom Hiddleston is perfect), the third episode was incredibly weak, it was like half a show expanded. The remaining episodes better step up.
Yeah it’s a jarring shift in quality from the first season.
“Interesting to note that the Loom is only holding steady because of Dox’s temporal genocide last episode; it’s so hard to pin down this show’s actual moral stances, given that she appears to have genuinely saved the TVA, at least for today.”What the fuck is this? Are you actually saying the show is pro-genocide just because a catastophe they’re still working to resolve was incidentally delayed due to annihilating timelines?
I think he’s forgetting two things: (1) that the multiverse existed before the TVA existed, & (2) that Loki saw a future of the TVA being evacuated.
The loom exploding won’t actually impact the people on the timelines at all, but it will kill everyone in the TVA when it happens, because that one physical location will be destroyed.
Which makes me wonder why we should care much about the fate of the tva
Loki seems to think it’s the only means by which to stop Kang variants.But on a more fundamental level, we as the audience shouldn’t want all these people to die, so a successful evaluation before the location is destroyed will still provide some form of catharsis regardless of our various opinions about the job they won’t be doing anymore.
This isn’t the first time the MCU has done this either. The end credits of Ultron were just scenes from Civil War too… dude is acting way too surprised.
>Real quick, episode viewers: Anybody know what Renslayer is actually trying to accomplish here, at any given moment?
She’s executing a failsafe plan where she doesn’t necessarily have full need-to-know, and she’s also so profoundly enamored of a daddy figure she’s never met that she’s willing to be really permissive for a while when it’s suggested that Timely is said daddy figure, or at least a proto-clone of the actual one.The episode ends with two spurned/disillusioned children seeming to decide that it’s time to place ideals over personal attachments, setting aside that those ideals may have been violently injected into them by the very entity that they’re pissed off at. In a sense, thanks to timey-wimey and variant-schmariant, they’re now the “parents” in relation to the proto-clone of their daddy.
I write “seeming” because, well… this is Loki. Lying to one’s self is a major theme.
All cops are bad tho.
but didn’t you see the fake fight with the highschool girls. Disney fixed everything!
see the disney geniuses want the audience to take the kang character seriously, and one way to give him gravitas is to establish that hes played by serious, intense, craft-focused actor man jonathan majors. so they let him do stuff like this. it’s bad though! they should dump him now, not because of the accusations, but because it’s not working. the accusations are the perfect excuse!
Man it’s not even that Majors is a bad actor per se, it’s just so much acting, and some of the choices could have been… reconsidered. I don’t what he or the director were thinking. He must be giving a lot on set that just isn’t coming through the camera. He worked best in his scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer in Quantumania. There, his mix of underplaying and short bursts of wildly, wildly overplaying fit that version of the character. Add in the personal life stuff and I’m just not on board with watching this guy do these weird things across the rest of this show and two or three more movies.
“Also, 1868 is listed as the Sacred Timeline, but 1893, after the handoff of the book, is a Branched Timeline, which is…interesting.”This is likely the explanation of how Kang can be defeated. Prune THAT timeline and he’s never created.
No, it’s an explanation of how branching timelines work. The “Sacred” timeline is one where Kang obtains his time travel capabilities another way, leading him on the path to become HWR. The whole point of preserving the sacred timeline is that it is the one which leads to HWR at the end of time.Giving young Kang a copy of the TVA handbook in 1868 did not happen in the “Sacred” timeline, but only as a result of Miss Minutes and HWR’s plan. Giving him the TVA handbook creates a branch which splits off from the Sacred timeline, resulting in a different life path for Victor Timely (our named Kang variant from this branch). Pruning that branch is now immaterial to defeating Kang…because he has already been created, and isn’t in that branching timeline anymore (now that he’s been taken to the TVA).Every deviation from the one timeline which created HWR – every time someone turns left instead of turning right, etc. – results in another Kang. HWR built the TVA to prevent other variants of him.
I think we take the “Sacred Timeline” for granted because it somehow, at the end of time, leads to HWR (and because the show fed us the line that that’s what it is). The Sacred Timeline is only an expression of which Kang is creating a TVA at the moment; and HWR just gave Timely all the basis he needs to create it in this branched timeline.What if, with this Kang rebooted to become HWR, his branch becomes his Sacred Timeline and the crux of the season is that as Timely advances and becomes Kang, he decides to make his timeline (which almost certainly continues to deviate significantly, given his tech advances so early) the Sacred Timeline, and puts the TVA to pruning the MCU as we know it?
I don’t always appreciate AVC “reviews” nowadays, but I appreciate that your coverage does actually review the merits (or not) of an episode instead of just a recap.My main gripe is the ferry “across the lake”… to Wisconsin?? Dude, take the train. And on top of that, when they show them on the ship, looking out at the Expo, they are clearly traveling south… which is not the direction of Wisconsin.
“ when you don’t leave her with a TemPad and the evil time-controlling AI!” – how would she know?