At the end of last week’s episode we found out that the Loki Variant the TVA were after was not a ‘he’ but a ‘she’, and that her plan was to use the stolen reset charges to bomb the sacred timeline—sending the TVA into a frenzy—before leaving through a time door, our Loki in hot pursuit.
SPOILERS AHEAD
After a quick recap, we go straight into the Marvel Logo, bopping to the beat of Hayley Kiyoko’s ‘Demons’ before segueing to a bar where C20 and the Variant (who, as she herself asks later in the episode, we’ll from now on refer to as Sylvie) appear to be enjoying some drinks. It quickly becomes clear however, that this is all going on inside C20’s head, Sylvie interrogating her to find out how to reach the Time Keepers. The lyrics from the song—“I’ve got demons in my head”—complement this nicely, especially as Loki and Sylvie themselves are referred to as “devils” later on; “There’s something in the water” gives us a hint that there’s something up with the TVA too.
After the opening titles, we see Sylvie arrive at the TVA. Like Loki, she quickly finds that her powers don’t work there, but she’s more than happy to use hand to hand combat and the TVA’s own weapons to fight her way through. Loki catches up and they fight in front of the elevator doors (this also quickly establishes the relationship between them that will play out for the rest of the episode and, oh my god, the sass is strong with these two—they spend most of the time bickering like siblings stuck on a road trip neither wants to be on but that they have no choice but to get through, and it’s glorious) only to be interrupted by Renslayer. Sylvie threatens to kill Loki but Renslayer’s not bothered. Before she can erase them however, Loki activates Sylvie’s TemPad. Unfortunately, they escape from the frying pan right into the fire, for Loki has inadvertently brought them to Lamentis-1, a doomed mining colony on a moon that, in about 12 hours’ time, will be totally annihilated by an approaching planetoid. As Sylvie says, of all the apocalypses saved on the TemPad, it’s the worst. And the TemPad is out of juice.
After Loki manages to steal and hide the TemPad from Sylvie, and Sylvie finds she can’t enchant Loki (his mind’s too strong apparently), they realise they’ll have to work together if they want to survive and so they form an uneasy truce. Sylvie tells Loki to refer to her as Sylvie because ‘Loki’ isn’t who she is anymore (further reinforcing that she could be neither Lady Loki nor Enchantress but a character inspired by both of them). They set out to find a power source to recharge TemPad only to find that most of the people have already fled, but an encounter with a woman who had chosen to stay behind (in which Loki tells Sylvie that “brute force is no substitute for diplomacy and guile”, only to find that sometimes they don’t work either) they learn that there’s a train to take people to the evacuation ark. They arrive to find the wealthy being escorted on board and the poor being kept back, (hello Snowpiercer, fancy meeting you here), but between Loki’s shapeshifting and Sylvie’s enchanting, they manage to blag their way on board.
The show then proves once again that, while it has great action scenes, its best ones are often just two people talking, as Loki and Sylvie get to know each other a bit more. She tells him that she won’t try and steal the TemPad from him because someone taught him some “pretty decent magic”, whereas hers is purely self-taught. This leads to some reminiscing about Frigga—“She was a queen of Asgard. She was good, purely decent.”— showing that while his relationship with his adoptive brother and father may be rocky, he does love his mother, holding her in high regard, making it all the more poignant as he’ll likely never see her again. We also begin to see the differences in their upbringings: while Loki may’ve struggled to fit in on Asgard, he still lived the life of a prince, with at least one person who believed in him, whereas Sylvie can barely remember her mother and seems to have spent most of her life on the run from the TVA, and of course this colours their worldviews.
Then the conversation moves onto their love lives. Sylvie claims that, despite everything, she’s managed to maintain a long distance relationship with a “postman”, and—an important moment for Loki fans—when she asks Loki if there have been any princesses, or even another prince, Loki replies “a bit of both. I suspect you’re the same.” We’ve already seen his gender listed as “fluid” on his TVA rap-sheet, but now we have Loki’s bisexuality confirmed! (But, as they both lament, nothing “real”, which is doubly sad—they’re both lonely and don’t want to admit it.) Sylvie suggests they rest before they arrive and Loki replies “you relax your way and I’ll relax mine.” Her way turns out to be having a nap. His way turns out to be getting absolutely hammered and leading the train in a sing-along (add ‘learning to sing in Norwegian’ as another string to Hiddleston’s bow). He also seems to turn into his brother when drunk, as we get a neat call-back to the first Thor film. (“Another!”) We also get another addition to “Loki’s-rubbish-metaphors” to go along with last week’s “apocalypse salad”: “love is an imaginary dagger”.
Unfortunately, the fun comes to an end when someone works out that Loki and Sylvie aren’t meant to be there and gets security. This leads to—yes, you guessed it—another fight, which ends with Loki being thrown from the train, Sylvie following close behind. To her fury and frustration, the TemPad is smashed as a result of the fall, meaning they’re both stuck. Loki asks about the evacuation ark and Sylvie replies that it never leaves. Loki points out that it never had them on it before, so if they can hijack it, not only will they be able to escape, but doing so will also create a nexus event that the TVA will have no choice but to respond to. As they make their way to the town, Sylvie finally agrees to tell Loki how her enchantment works: she has to make physical contact with someone and then grab hold of their mind. The weaker ones she take hold of with little problem but with the stronger ones it gets tricky, she’s there but so are they, so she has to create an illusion from their memories in order to preserve the connection. She remarks how “messed up” C20’s mind was and that she “had to pull a memory from hundreds of years prior, before she even thought for them.” Yes, Sylvie confirms what some have already suspected: the TVA is made up of Variants, repurposed and mind-wiped (this puts a tragic and slightly disturbing angle on Mobius’s obsession with jet-skis and C20’s shaken “it was real” mantra.)
They arrive at the town to find it in chaos, from both the worsening meteor storm and the people rioting in the streets, and even Loki’s appalled that all these people are essentially being left to die. Then we have an awesome long take (which they’ve done a good job of making it look like one shot) of Loki and Sylvie running and fighting their way through town toward the ark, (in which we see Loki’s telekinesis isn’t limited to Roombas), but it’s all for naught, as the ark is destroyed by a meteor before they can reach it, and, as everyone looks on in horror, the sombre crooning of Bonnie Guitar’s ‘Dark Moon’ takes us into the end credits.
How will our two disaster siblings get out of this? How will Mobius, B15 and the rest react to the knowledge that they’re Variants and have essentially had their lives stolen from them? Will they even find out? Just how ‘in the know’ is Renslayer? Who’s really at the top of the TVA: the Time Keepers or someone else? And how is this show already halfway over? Hiddleston himself has said that episodes 4 & 5 are where the series “really takes off”, expanding into new territory. Don’t know about you but I’m excited!
