Loki Episode 3

Ha ha, it’s Loki 2077.

(Loki proceeds to fuck everything up)

Yep. Definitely Loki 2077.

That’s a nerd joke for you. The rest of you just skip to the next paragraph.

There’s a sequence in this week’s episode that perfectly captures this series’ sense of plot progression:

l  Boy Loki and Girl Loki have snuck aboard a train heading to Location A

l  B & G Loki are discovered

l  There is a Fight

l  B & G are thrown from the train

l  During the scuffle a device is broken which means the Lokis’ plan is in SHAMBLES and they are DOOMED

l  After a brief discussion they decide ... to walk to Location A

So everything that happened was kind of pointless. They didn’t need to sneak onto the train at all, they could have walked. The consequence of the device being broken was that they decided to do the thing they had already decided to do.

All we get out of the entire sequence is a bit of banter between Tom Hiddleston (Loki One) and Sophia Di Martino (Loki Two) and her Mancunian accent. Tom gets to rehash his character backstory about being quite close to his adopted mother while Sophia gets to drop vague hints and tell us precisely nothing. This is also in line with the show’s penchant for repeating plot points we’ve already been over.

Fans will squeal about the character development but no it bloody well isn’t don’t be so daft, it’s a reiteration of things we already knew about Our Loki (mama’s boy) and deliberate obfuscation about Other Loki. Oh, and iTs CaNoN tHaT tHeYrE bIsExUaL jesus this era is going to look pathetically fixated on people’s sexual orientations in 10 years’ time isn’t it.

(I wonder if Sophia’s offhand remark she has a post-apocalyptic relationship with a postman is a reference to the Kevin Costner movie/David Brin novel of the same name? IT’S CANON SHE’S FUCKING KEVIN COSTNER doesn’t get you Twitter retweets though so probably not.)

Otherwise, it’s Tom reenacting his relationship with Owen Wilson, only now it’s with Sophia. Have Tom bicker with someone he’s supposed to be working with, how very original. To be sure there’s sparks there, a bit of fireworks even, and Tom can play charming yet vulnerable like nobody’s business so the interplay is fun to watch, but I can’t help the nagging feeling it’s not actually in the service of anything related to the story. 

And why does Sylvie, who is supposed to know all about the planet in question blowing up, not know where the Ark is? Whatever.

We still don’t know quite what Sylvie/Sophia is aiming to do or why—I THINK that as an unwitting “Variant” much like Tom she has been hunted by the TVA and has decided to strike back and destroy her pursuers rather than quietly submit to erasure, but that’s kind of conjecture on my part. As I keep saying, some clarity with regards to your antagonist (or perhaps deuteragonist at this point in the plot) would really help grease these narrative gears.

The only progression or new information that we get is that the TVA is also staffed by Variants, meaning they’re all kind of witless dupes too, including Owen/Mobius. So the TVA is pretty well solidified as the “real” bad guys of the show and a jet ski future for Mobius is looking more and more likely. Though it does make Sylvie/Sophia murdering all those other TVA guys kind of gross—look, the baddies can either be “mooks” that are just obstacles your hero can vanquish without worrying about morality, OR they can be real, live humans with their own hopes and dreams, but suddenly switching from one to the other is going to make half your story feel very, very odd.

See also: Stormtroopers are just brainwashed kids, now let’s go murder-fuck a couple thousand of them.

At least we got to see where the entire special effects budget went: on a kind of grey-purple planet that could be Vormir but isn’t, with an astonishingly fake-looking planet in the sky, plus a kind of “Snowpiercer” train that also steals the save-the-rich premise from the same movie, and a single cut action sequence lifted from “1917” only the people are patently just running around in a circle while the camera spins on a tripod.

It all ends in a kind of cliffhanger which gives Tom yet another chance to strike almost exactly the same pose he held at the end of episode two.

I think I joked about this time-travel show ending up being kind of a time loop like Tenet or something, but this repetition and recycling of scenes and conversations ain’t funny.