Loki S2E5: Science/Fiction

So that happened.

One problem with introducing world-ending stakes into a story is that it’s less, not more suspenseful. The audience is generally safe in assuming the world won’t end and our heroes won’t all die. Stories are generally more successful when they focus on personal stakes, and Loki has done an admirable job so far about making the personal more important than all the end-of-the-multiverse stuff. Yes, the characters’ actions have insanely high stakes, as entire timelines and the nearly-infinite lives lived within each get snuffed out on a character’s whim. But we’ve known from the start that the MCU doesn’t end with all of spacetime collapsing because someone didn’t fire off a MacGuffin in time on a Disney+ show.

Except last week it did.

The characters didn’t fire off the MacGuffin in time, the temporal loom holding all of spacetime together exploded, and everyone died. The end.

Except we’re only halfway through the season. So not the end. So the impact of seeing every conceivable past, present, and future explode in a blinding flash of light as our heroes are incinerated is a little blunted by that knowledge. But it makes for an all-time-great “how are they gonna get out of this one?”

And the answer, unsurprisingly, is, “it’s not at all clear.”

We open with Loki standing in the same spot he was last week when the multiverse exploded. Except the multiverse is still there, he’s still there… and no one else is. He ambles around an empty TVA, with an announcement blaring through the speakers about “failsafe mode.” And as in the first episode, he’s unexpectedly being yanked backwards and forwards in time. Except even in the past, the only other person he sees is himself, from a different time jump. Before he has time to process this, strange tendrils of who-knows-what start to emerge from every surface, closing in on him until he time-jumps away at the last moment.

This time, his jumps aren’t random. He visits the show’s other characters at different branches of the timeline in their real lives, before they were recruited into the TVA. Casey is a prisoner escaping from Alcatraz. B-15 is a kindly doctor. Mobius is — you guessed it — a jetski salesman. Ouroboros is a struggling sci-fi author, sneaking his books into a bookstore and then buying a copy so he’ll have made at least one sale.  

Conveniently, OB is also a professor of theoretical physics when he’s not writing. So between his knowledge of science and fiction (hey, that’s the name of this episode!), he’s ready to hear Loki’s story and believe him. And he offers advice, which, metaphysical mambo-jumbo aside, boils down to: basically everything that’s happened to Loki so far is impossible, so he should be able to will himself to do one more impossible thing — get back to the TVA before it’s destroyed and save everyone.

The proposed method involves, in scientific terms, “getting the band back together.” We learned in previous episodes that everyone has a specific “temporal aura” no matter which timeline they’re on, so OB theorizes that if the main characters are all in one place, Loki can jump back to a moment in the TVA where those same people were also in one place. It’s hot nonsense, but that’s kind of par for the course on this show.

So Loki tries to explain to a dorky suburban dad that he’s actually named Mobius and works in an office that sits outside of time itself, and Owen Wilson’s quiet, exasperated, “I sell jet skis, man,” is the absolutely perfect rejoinder. But of course, we get Mobius on board. And Renslayer. And Casey. And Sylvie. 

Except unlike the others, Sylvie does remember Loki. Her “real life” was never real — just some stolen time where she could lead a quiet life as a McDonalds cashier after a life on the run from the TVA. So he doesn’t have to explain anything to her. He has to convince her. That taking the others out of their real lives yet again, that going back and saving the TVA that made her life hell, is all worth doing. It’s back to their ongoing argument about free will. It’s back to putting the personal over the world-ending shenanigans.

What makes it personal for Loki is that, while he may have both altruistic and selfish reasons for wanting reality to continue existing, at the end of the day, he just wants his friends back. He hasn’t had very many in his life as a marauding trickster god. An easygoing chat with Mobius over a slice of pie might seem like an incredibly trivial thing to hang the fate of the multiverse on. But at the end of the day, those are the kinds of things that really matter.

And those kinds of things — not big climactic CGI firefights — are what makes a story work. Except Loki gets to have it both ways. We get the emotional character moments, and then we get a horrifying reminder of the big-picture stakes. It’s a devastatingly effective combination. 

Stray thoughts:
• The tendrils snaking through the collapsing timeline look very similar to the strands Victor Timely unraveled into when he died last week. It’s a special effect that manages to be both cartoonishly PG, and deeply unsettling. 

• The escape-from-Alcatraz sequence was probably a lot of fun, but because Loki is as poorly lit as every streaming series, it was impossible to tell what the hell was going on. Although that did at least preserve the reveal that one of the prisoners was Casey.

• Last week, we learned Victor Timely based his work on the TVA manual Ouroboros wrote based on the work of one Victor Timely. This week we close the loop even tighter, as Loki gives the manual directly to Ouroboros. “I do end up writing a bestseller!” We’ve said it before, but Ke Huy Quan’s kid-like enthusiasm is such a terrific addition to the show.

• “I promise you this will make sense.” Loki says that a lot. He’s usually wrong.