Twould be ironic if he lived in the desert and only wanted a jet ski because be lived away from the water
Spoilers Loki season 2-- spoilers and discussion
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
Twould be ironic if he lived in the desert and only wanted a jet ski because be lived away from the water
Pie is good, invalid temporal aura, necessary mischief, receptionist fanboying over the handbook author, existential conversations of ones being, and the looming threat of all existence collapsing.
In other words, another day in the office at the TVA.
I will say I am surprised how quickly the threat of Dox and her drive to prune countless branches was quickly resolved, but I do appreciate the lengths the show made us feel how about the consequences of those prunings. Not through mindless CGI montage or what have you, but seeing how our heroes reacted to that massive destruction of life, seeing how much that hurt felt for them.
I'm glad we got plenty of Sylvie, both her richly-desired domestic life at McDonald's and her distinct fighting prowess for a fleeting moment solely to protect that life. The confrontation between her and Loki wasn't quite as intense as I expected but I'm also glad it wasn't quickly resolved. There's still a lot of conflict between the two of them and I'm curious to see how it'll unfold throughout the season.
Still no Renslayer but now that they have a trace on her and they know about her connection to He Who Remains (who OB desperately needs in order to access the Loom), I imagine we'll be seeing both of them in short order (or rather Victor Timely at least).
In other words, another day in the office at the TVA.
I will say I am surprised how quickly the threat of Dox and her drive to prune countless branches was quickly resolved, but I do appreciate the lengths the show made us feel how about the consequences of those prunings. Not through mindless CGI montage or what have you, but seeing how our heroes reacted to that massive destruction of life, seeing how much that hurt felt for them.
I'm glad we got plenty of Sylvie, both her richly-desired domestic life at McDonald's and her distinct fighting prowess for a fleeting moment solely to protect that life. The confrontation between her and Loki wasn't quite as intense as I expected but I'm also glad it wasn't quickly resolved. There's still a lot of conflict between the two of them and I'm curious to see how it'll unfold throughout the season.
Still no Renslayer but now that they have a trace on her and they know about her connection to He Who Remains (who OB desperately needs in order to access the Loom), I imagine we'll be seeing both of them in short order (or rather Victor Timely at least).
Yup, I loved that unintended connection. This weekly double dosage of Eugene Cordero is such a blessing.
Damn, Hiddleston's Loki was and is the MCU's best villain/antihero by far and it's both Hiddleston's acting as well as the written character himself.
Once again a really great episode, tense and emotional with the best scenes being pure dialogue. That's what the core strength of the MCU, it's awesome characters and something i believe they lost a little bit in their recent projects but it shows that you don't need huge CGI battles.
It was heartbreaking to see them all breaking down when their mission failed and most time branches were destroyed but even more so when Sylvie rejected Loki and went back, the look on his face just broke me. I also loved the pie scene so much, both for the surreal setting of them just eating a very good pie but also the discussion they had. Seems like the variants finding out about their real selves will be a big thing for them this season and possibly earth shattering for Mobius if he ever decides to do it.
Once again a really great episode, tense and emotional with the best scenes being pure dialogue. That's what the core strength of the MCU, it's awesome characters and something i believe they lost a little bit in their recent projects but it shows that you don't need huge CGI battles.
It was heartbreaking to see them all breaking down when their mission failed and most time branches were destroyed but even more so when Sylvie rejected Loki and went back, the look on his face just broke me. I also loved the pie scene so much, both for the surreal setting of them just eating a very good pie but also the discussion they had. Seems like the variants finding out about their real selves will be a big thing for them this season and possibly earth shattering for Mobius if he ever decides to do it.
Not a fan of the forced-confession scene. Even without physical pain, it was a torture scene due to the psychological terror, and I'm so sick of the overuse of torture scenes in modern fiction. It is a damned lie that torture and threats are an effective way to get information out of someone. Real-life interrogation experts will tell you that it's actually counterproductive -- the subject will readily lie to get out of whatever you're threatening or hurting them with, and the stress and fear may impair their memory and make anything they tell you less reliable. Torture isn't interrogation, it's just bullying and abuse, a way to force someone to submit to your power. So fiction writers' addiction to writing scenes where torture and threats are a successful way of getting truthful information out of people is toxic and stupid.
It's also lazy as hell, because it's a deeply overused plot device. That's the other thing I hated about it -- it was just so disappointing. They set it up with this scene of Mobius saying "You're the god of mischief," with an attitude of prompting Loki to come up with some clever, creative scheme to get the information out of Brad, and instead we just got the most cliched, unimaginative interrogation trope ever, dressed up with special effects. I mean, they could've had Loki build a whole illusory reality designed to make Brad think he'd escaped and had a reason to go to Sylvie's branch. Or he could've conjured up an illusory Sylvie and make Brad think she'd already been found so that his information was no longer secret anyway, then have her ask "So how did you find out where I was anyway?"
Speaking of Loki's powers, I didn't get why he bothered to run after Brad through 1970s London, rather than coralling him with illusions like he did in the very next scene.
The destruction of most of the branches was dramatically effective in the moment, but hard to reconcile with the other MCU projects we've seen establishing a richly diverse multiverse -- the many worlds glimpsed in What If...? and Multiverse of Madness, the various Spider-Verses, and particularly the thousands of Kang variants glimpsed at the end of Quantumania, which tied directly into Loki. There's no way the destroyed branches could be more than a tiny fraction of the total. I mean, yes, the loss in lives is still devastating, but the graphic implying that there were hardly any left didn't seem to fit.
It's also lazy as hell, because it's a deeply overused plot device. That's the other thing I hated about it -- it was just so disappointing. They set it up with this scene of Mobius saying "You're the god of mischief," with an attitude of prompting Loki to come up with some clever, creative scheme to get the information out of Brad, and instead we just got the most cliched, unimaginative interrogation trope ever, dressed up with special effects. I mean, they could've had Loki build a whole illusory reality designed to make Brad think he'd escaped and had a reason to go to Sylvie's branch. Or he could've conjured up an illusory Sylvie and make Brad think she'd already been found so that his information was no longer secret anyway, then have her ask "So how did you find out where I was anyway?"
Speaking of Loki's powers, I didn't get why he bothered to run after Brad through 1970s London, rather than coralling him with illusions like he did in the very next scene.
The destruction of most of the branches was dramatically effective in the moment, but hard to reconcile with the other MCU projects we've seen establishing a richly diverse multiverse -- the many worlds glimpsed in What If...? and Multiverse of Madness, the various Spider-Verses, and particularly the thousands of Kang variants glimpsed at the end of Quantumania, which tied directly into Loki. There's no way the destroyed branches could be more than a tiny fraction of the total. I mean, yes, the loss in lives is still devastating, but the graphic implying that there were hardly any left didn't seem to fit.
I didn't even know who this "Dox" person they were discussing was until she finally showed up and I pieced it together from context. They could've made that clearer.
Boy, that was a step down from the first episode.
- First, the positives - every scene with Hiddleston and Wilson shone. The two have such great chemistry that I could watch a whole episode with just the two of them.
- I'm also happy we got more Ouroboros.
- Everything seems really muddled in terms of goals here compared to season 1. Was Brad even a character last season? I have no real memory of him. Is Dox the threat? Renslayer? Sylvie? Miss Minutes? Kang? I am just hopelessly confused now about where things are going, which is not a good place to be by the second episode.
- All those alternate timelines being pruned was supposed to have dramatic impact, but just fell flat. We don't know any of these alternates after all. Not to mention that the whole idea of caring in a multiverse where anything can happen is really hard to make work.
- The episode was built around the torture scene, which I loathed, because it buys into really tired, post 9/11 ideas that torture actually works to extract actionable intelligence. This is both false and morally abhorrent. And look, I get Loki isn't a good guy - it makes sense for him to be okay with torture. Yet, I don't get why Brad held out for so long. It didn't even seem like Sylvie threatened him in order to keep silent. It was just...a plot contrivance.
I mean, really, why was Brad holding out? Who did he hold loyalty to?
I guess the inference is he was working for Dox, and went AWOL rather than continue with the pruning. But he lived in a variant TL presumably, since his own presence would cause a branch to form. Wouldn't he want Dox to be defeated then, so he could go back to his own peaceful life as a film star?
The goals get so tripped up so quickly too. They start out the episode needing to find Sylvie, because reasons. Then all of the sudden in the final third, Dox's attack comes almost out of nowhere (I know it was foreshadowed a tiny bit in the first episode, but still). So the point of getting Sylvie involved was...absolutely nothing!
Well, finding Sylvie is about finding the answers to what happened when Loki visited the future and saw the TVA under attack. That's a season-arc thing that will play out later. The threat posed by Dox was more of a distraction from that, another problem they discovered along the way.
Still, I agree that it doesn't feel like there's a clear story focus yet.
No, he kept very specifically asking to be returned to the prime timeline.
He is Rutherford in the Sacred Timeline.
I know that the way that Loki has done timelines doesn't make a lick of sense, but how can a variant possibly hide in the prime timeline? That would imply that he was always meant to go AWOL, which would run counter to his orders.
Yeah, that's weird; it should have branched just by him being there and changing things. But the whole idea of a "Sacred Timeline" is a myth, after all; it's just He Who Remains's timeline, the one he conditioned the TVA to consider sacred in order to preserve his own existence. So the whole premise of the series is predicated on the TVA characters believing profoundly in a completely false paradigm of how the multiverse operates; thus, I'm not too concerned about TVA members believing or asserting things that don't make sense. Brad believing it's still the Sacred Timeline despite his return to it is just denial, clinging to his comfortable illusions.
