2x04 Heart of the TVA

[5.8/10] I don’t know, folks. I think I’m burning out on this season a bit, which isn’t a good sign for a 6-episode run. There’s just too many characters and too many storylines and too little focus to the whole thing. Season 1 wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty clearly centered on a limited set of characters and relationships and problems which gave it a certain throughline through the insanity of the premise. Season 2 is all over the place and it makes the whole thing pretty tedious to get through.
We have a couple of bootstrap paradoxes. Victory TImely got the TVA handbook from O.B., but O.B. got the handbook from Victory Timely. And then the person who prunes Loki during his visit to the future is....Loki in the future. Okay...sure. Pretty standard time travel stuff. A little cheap, but fine.

But then we have everyone scrambling to do lots of crazy stuff. Victory, O.B., and Casey are trying to rekefargle the horolographer or whatever to fix the time loom through a bunch of technobabble. Renslayer and Miss Minutes are starting a coup. B-15 is trying to rally the troops to preserve the TVA. Loki and Sylvie are having ponderous conversations about who is or isn’t playing god and whether the TVA is worth saving. Brad is turning on General Dox and company. Mobius is...uh...getting pie? Getting yelled at for Sylvie for being myopic or blase? Oh yeah, and the universe is going to explode.

None of it fits together especially well. You never really get a sense of timing or progression ro connection between the various stories. Once again, Loki just kind of jumps from scene to scene without any sense of pacing or structure, and we’re left to wait for the inevitable big bang.

There’s a few smaller moments I liked. Miss Minutes’ degrading is a cool effect. Victor’s fascination and eventual delight with the hot cocoa machine was downright adorable and well-constructed. The scene with Loki, Sylvie, and the ringing phone was shot like a horror movie and drives tension. And something about Victor Timey getting shredded to ribbons from the temporal forces was unexpected and cool visually.

But man, I don’t care about any of the characters or what’s happening at this point. Loki is all over the place. There’s a ton of things going on, but none of them seem to matter because all of them are life or death. There’s little sense of clarity or motivation in most of the actions, just a bunch of thinly-drawn characters doing things for thinly-drawn reasons.

To the point, it’s at least intriguing that Renslayer was once the partner of He Who Remains, until he wiped her memory and everyone else's. The closest thing to potent commentary on this show in a while is the idea that he kept his paradise on the backs of their hard work. The imagery of two women (well, one woman and one clock) saying “We don’t need him. Maybe we never did.” and taking over is something, at least. But after that, it’s not entirely clear what they want. To take over the TVA? Okay, why? What are they going to do with it? How will taking it over TVA bring them what they desire?

At least with Brad, we know that he wants to go back to his branch and live the life of a movie star. His is weirdly the most compelling part of this, because he makes a queasy moral compromise, throwing all of his friends under the bus in the process, to selfishly feather his own nest. It’s not much, but he’s the person here whose choices and motivations are the clearest, and on top of that, his performance is good, so it weirdly makes Brad one of the most compelling characters in this whole confused milieu.

I won’t deny that the hook of the timeline exploding is a good one. It’s not every show that blows up the universe with two episodes to go. But true to the image of the glut of timelines clogging the loom; this episode, and this season, feels like someone threw a plate of spaghetti against the wall and put a frame around it. You can sort of trace things and find batters or throughlines here and there, but overall, it’s just a mess.

Everytime I think I'm gonna unambiguously like an episode of loki his season they just have to pull some fuck shit in the end that peeves me. Honestly Heart of the TVA is a pretty strong episode despite my quibbles. For the absolute first time this season I felt like I fully understood the positions, perspectives and goals of all of our characters. We had a lot of sitting in rooms talking scenes this ep which might sound boring but was sorely needed to actually establish why everyone was doing the things they did this season. I especially appreciated getting some real clarity on the different factions in the TVA from Dox to X-5 to Mobius. It a shame they kinda squandered it by Killing off all of Dox's faction but hey we can't have everything.

Loki and Sylvie also had a really good scene/battle of wits. It's a little bit of a reread of their philosophical debates from the season 1 finale and episode 3 but all in all still really well executed. Honestly this scene is the first time I've really felt these two's chemistry all season. Tom Hiddleston and Sophia Di Martino probably did their best work together here. If I were to criticize anything about Sylvie this episode (and lets be real I love to winge) I think this episode kinda highlights the contrivance of the writing for Sylvie this season. She's always just where she needs to be for the plot to move (weather or not this makes sense for her character). She follows Loki to the TVA but the plot never works hard enough to fully justify that choice imo, even with the solid character exploration peppered through this ep.

Renslayer was a bit of a mixed bag. Again I do not like the romance overtones between her and Kang. But I like that this epiode established her and Miss Minutes wanting to take the TVA on their own without him. Miss Minutes even gets a standout moment in the end when she . These two have honestly been really great antagonistic forces Both Mbatha-Raw and Tara Strong give compelling performances. Which makes Rennslayers unceremonious pruning such a disappointment.

I will say the ending of this episode was exciting. Obviously loki and the gang aren't actually dead but so much of these episodes have been coasting on sci-fi gobbledygook and convenient last minute saves. it is interesting to see all the planning of the episode actually collapse.