If you missed the after credits go back and watch them !
Can't believe a character that I knew only for minutes made me tear up!
GLORIOUS PURPOSE!!!
Ahhhhhh i’m so happy they are not shying away from the tough conversations on what it means to be Captain America in this decade. I love symbolism in storytelling and there’s no stronger symbol than that shield, and the way they have used it as a vehicle and representative of the different American identities (good and (really) bad) has been incredible.
Steve Rogers, John Walker, Sam Wilson and Isaiah Bradley all represent sides of the US that co-exist, and John Walker being the effective Captain America for most of this show isn’t accidental - he’s the side of America that’s most present and salient right now (in the world off the screen), but ending the show with Sam Wilson carrying that shield - and going through all the issues that that might bring up - is as powerful a message as any - one of hope and of what the US should aspire to be. Steve Rogers is no longer enough, Steve Rogers is the American Dream - Isaiah Bradley the American Reality - and Sam Wilson is both. This show, and all of Captain America’s storyline, is about so much more than just men in spandex and they’ve done a fantastic job taking it even further here. Glad Marvel is still delivering after so many years, makes me proud to be a fan!
Welp. That was depressing and dark as fuck.
Talk about getting the Bad End.
But if this is a taste of what Multiverse of Madness is going to be like... Consider me even more hyped.
the ending holy shit, this series is so good
Love how the car chase scene was filmed. Kate is so fun and her banter with Clint is great as ever. The moment with her writing down to let him know what little Nate was saying was incredibly sweet. Maya is a cool character so far too, I'm really enjoying this show more than I thought so far.
Wrapping it up with the title "Captain America and the Winter Soldier" was a nice touch :)
I can see why Marvel wanted to start with this show rather then WandaVision. I liked Wandavision, but this show felt more like the movies and had more of a direct relationship with them. It dealt more with "the blip" and seems like a more natural beginning of phase 4. Episodes of this length and substance are also more rewarding to watch week to week then the short run time of the wandavision episodes, especially given you had no clue what was going on until a few weeks in.
The opening action sequence was great, they made a good choice starting this story with Falcon and moving to Buckie mid way in. It was great learning a little more about Falcon being that they've really shed very little light on his story at all in the movies other than his loyalty to Steve. We know more about Bucky, so the focus here was correct. I like that these shows add more substance to the characters then the movies can fit in, it was sad watching Bucky come to terms with the damage he caused, but something his character needed since he was really only used for action scenes since the winter soldier all those years ago.
Very solid start for this show, I can't wait to see more but also felt satisfied with what I got which is something I struggled to feel with the short and mostly irrelevant WandaVision episodes.
And then the ending comes where everyone let out a collective "oh hell nah."
[7.8/10] “Previously On” is the sort of episode that answers the questions fans have been asking from the beginning. Who caused the hex? (Wanda) What made her do it? (Cumulative trauma) Who’s controlling it? (Sort of Wanda, sort of not.) What’s the deal with Pietro? (Total fake). What about Vision? (Wanda recreated him.) What’s Agnes’s angle here? (A witch trying to attain more power a probably drain Wanda the same way she drained the rest of her coven.)
For a lesser show, these could be mechanical answers to mechanical questions. Instead, this episode answers those technical points while also getting at the why of all this. It confirms, once and for all, that WandaVision is a story about the slow accumulation of trauma, and the ways the shiny sitcom worlds on the television screens are an escape from it.
Agnes (or Agatha, depending on your preference), plays Ghost of Xmas Past with Wanda, forcing Wanda to guide her through major events of her history in an effort to uncover how she became this powerful. Rather than centering on incantations or magical artifacts (give or take an Infinity Stone), it hinges on the moments of both comfort and loss in Wanda’s life.
It’s a strong conceit, giving Elizabeth Olsen plenty of notes to play across the years and showing how Wanda has lost so much of the year. We start with a scene of serene domestic bliss, or what passes for it in a war-torn Eastern Bloc country, with Wanda and Pietro as children with their parents. Suddenly a bomb disrupts the peace of “TV night”, destroying the young kids’ lives amid a moment of happiness and depicting events described in Age of Ultron. \
That sets a pattern for these things, where each moment involves how Wanda copes with such losses. We see her becoming a freedom fighter (or terrorist, depending on your vantage point), out of an attempt to avenge her parents in a way. It leads her to connect with the mind stone (something that, alongside a shadowy figure, will no doubt be explored in more depth later). The experience heightened her powers, but was also a source of further trauma, of being experimented on and treated as disposable.
(Just my crazy theory: [spoiler]I predict that the shadowy figure Wanda saw in the Mind Stone will be Wanda herself, from the future, creating a stable time loop and deciding to set these events into motion, even knowing the hardships of where they lead, because it’s a way to let love persevere.[/spoilers].)
But then we get the best scene in the whole episode, where we jump to Wanda still grieving her brother’s loss, another unfathomable trauma, only to get some unexpected comfort from Vision. The writing and acting here is magnificent. The imagery of Wanda talking about grief as a series of waves, continually hitting her every time she tries to stand, is haunting and effective. But Vision’s retort, of not knowing what loss is given his origins, but appreciating the notion that it is love persevering, is just as beautiful a counterpoint. You can see the way the two of them are connected not just through the mind stone, but through their unique experiences of grappling with the human condition from opposite sides, of learning how to move forward together. The chemistry, easy rapport, and connection between them in those moments is off the charts.
It’s a minor miracle. Having lost everyone close to her, Wanda forges a connection with someone else, someone who helps fill that space. Only then, he’s taken from her too. The final flashback we see is Wanda barging into Sword and seeing Vision being torn apart. We see the man she expected to be waiting for her when she was un-blipped lying in pieces before her. She reaches down and can no longer feel her, the last thread of that connection severed.
It’s enough to send anyone sprialing. We witness the mechanics of what happens next -- a grief-stricken Wanda coming to Westview, uncovering what was meant to be the place where the rest of their lives together began, the ghost of a new chapter of domestic bliss that she was once again robbed of by chaotic forces.
So she snaps. She explodes in her grief, for her parents, for her brother, and for her love, each ripped away from her in the times she most needed comfort, most thought she could be safe and happy like those people on the television screens.
That’s the most piercing thread of “Previously On.” At each stage, Wanda watches these sitcoms as a form of relief, of escape, to have a glimpse of the life denied her by circumstance and tragedy. She’s watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and seeing a happy couple when her parents are killed. She’s watching The Brady Bunch and a couple of friendly but needling siblings when she and her brother are treated like lab rats. She sees the comical violence of Malcolm in the Middle where the father figure can endure large scale mishaps but come out unscathed because “it’s not that kind of show.”
The import is clear. The allure of these stories, this pristine or even hardscrabble sitcom worlds, is that even when the edges are rougher, tragedies rarely happen. Happy families get to persist, to flourish. They get to happen at all. It’s a world where the worst losses of the world are kept outside of the frame, made digestible and easily resolved, one half hour at a time. It is, a world where she can have the life that she dreamed of as a little girl, the life she and Vision imagined for themselves, back.
Who wouldn’t want to bury themselves in that world at a time when the universe has taken pound of flesh after pound of flesh from your body? Look, we’re talking about a famed Scarlet Witch using her “chaos magic” to rewrite reality for a small town in New Jersey. None of this is down-to-earth exactly. And yet there’s something that feels so relatable, even natural, to Wanda choosing (or instinctively reacting) to conjure the sort of place that’s bereft of the traumas she’s suffered again and again and again.
We know the ruddy details now: that Agnes wants power, that Hayward wants a Vision of his own, that Wanda is firmly the source of the Hex. But more importantly, we understand why it came to this. “Previously On” gives us all those stark moments of love and joy and happiness that Wanda was robbed of, and the comforting glow of a place where no such heart-wrenching thefts can occur. Whatever season-ending fireworks happen next week, no one can blame poor Wanda for retreating into her static-filled dream world, when so much of her life has been this crystal clear nightmare.
GLORIOUS!!!!! PURPOSE!!!!! :crocodile: :crown: :crocodile: :crown: :crocodile: :crown: I actually teared up a little over Old Man Loki and it was, in fact, glorious.
Who knew this show would have the most realistic depiction of Hell: being kneed in your genitals over and over while being told you'll be alone forever. But for real: I love the twists in this. They are so good, and I can't wait to see what happens next.
Filler? This episode has more character development than all the previous ones! Man, you people really want action for 50 minutes? Also, I'm not surprise white people don't like when characters talk about race. It makes them uncomfortable. Same reaction to this week's episode of This Is Us. sigh
All I wanted for Christmas was for Hawkeye to make it home.
At this point I guess anything is possible so I'm going to say Dembe is Katarina Rostova!
Holden's face when he saw Clarissa was absolutely priceless.
For me this season was much better than the previous one, and it seems S6 is going to be one the best seasons of television.
FUCK YOU JOHN WALKER STEVE ROGER'S LEGACY IS NOT EVEN REMOTELY GETTING BLOOD ON HIS SHIELD BECAUSE YOU KILLED A MAN WITH IT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
GodDAMN this show is just not pulling its punches.
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Not technically fourth wall-breaking, but The Watcher is so aligned with audience's perspective that Ultron's acknowledgement of him feels like it, and that moment feels so jarringly thrilling. Plus, best use of animation's fluidity so far; series-altering serializing with past episodes; and real, hefty stakes both small (Natasha and Clint) and big (Ultron's unstoppable domination that culminates in a Multiverse-leaping fight). Just good stuff all around. Can't wait to see how this lead into the finale.
[7.7/10] I was so pleasantly surprised by this! I didn’t really know what to expect, with this being Marvel Studios’ first foray into animation and the high concept premise of the show. But I really enjoyed what we got.
For a while, I expected that this was really just going to be the plot of Captain America: The First Avenger except with Peggy slotted in rather than Steve. And that would still have been perfectly fun! Watching this show hit the same beats of that film, except with small but significant difference thanks to Captain Carter being in the role rather than Steve Rogers would have been worthwhile on its own.
For one thing, I like how this episode, as Agent Carter did, focuses on how even with her accomplsuhments, Peggy faces discrimination because of her gender. Of all the people for the MCU to bring back, it’s funny that it’s Bradley Whitford’s returning from the all-but forgotten Agent Carter one-shot. But he makes sense as someone who always thought too little of Peggy, stepping into a leadership role after Col. Phillips is shot, and creating an internal impediment.
To the same end, I like how the episode flips the dynamic with Peggy and Steve, but tshowing how they still understood one another and would bond with one another, even if their situations were changed. The two still falling in love, only to have Peggy making the heroic civilization-saving sacrifice play instead, is still heart-rending, and a nice sign that even as major things change, some things stay the same.
But I also liked the places where this episode goes off the reservation! Howard Stark building a proto-Iron Man suit for Steve Rogers called “The Hydra Stomper”? Yes please! Captain Carter saving Bucky, thereby avoiding the Winter Soldier situation (at least with him)? Hell yes. Her finding the tesseract and bringing it back to the good guys on an early mission? Awesome!
The further along the plot of First Avenger that this episode gets, the more it diverges and makes its own rules and own story, and I really appreciated that. Her team’s attack on Red Skull’s stronghold made for a rolokcing conclusion. I don’t know who Red Skull’s “champion” was. (Hive? A Chithuri?) But watching Peggy fight a giant squid monster while the Howling Commandos rescue Steve made for a killer conclusion.
I was especially impressed by the fight sequences here. I have to admit that I had some reticence about the cell-shaded graphics. In truth, the vocal tracks didn’t always sink perfectly. But the action was surprisingly fluid and well-staged. The show uses the freedom of animation to add greater flow to Captain Carter’s badassery, and some of the combat has a more impressionsitic style that makes it top tier MCU fisticuffs. Even the use of lighting and color in these fights stand out. Going into What If...? my biggest concern was the visuals, but they came through like gangbusters.
Overall, this was an exciting start to this new show and raised my expectations for What If...? to be more than a shiny lark, and instead be a meaningful exploration of what these changes in the path might look like.
Loved this episode! Had the same energy as Thor Ragnarok which is easily the funniest Marvel movie
Where the hell did her parents vanish to during the attack? She was yelling all throughout the house, and her mom just reappears right at the end. Lol.
(I know it doesn't matter, but I thought it was funny.)
That musical was actually kind of great; I wouldn't mind seeing more of it.
Funny how most people think this is boring filler stuff, or even dislike the whole show, while I do like it more and more.
For me it seems this is the first time that Marvel puts substance over effects. There is an actually story involved instead of just knitting together CGI shots. Of course there is an agenda in all of this, there is no denying that. But I don't see this as a bad thing.
And I'm looking very much forward to the final episode now.
[9.0/10] There’s so much to talk about in this one. X-Men’s Quicksilver as Avengers Quicksilver! Bulletproof hotpants! 1980s TV spoofs! Scarlet Witch’s stand-off with Sword!
But here’s the thing that stands out to me, the thing that grabbed me the most while watching this “Very Special Episode” -- Vision confronting the woman he loves over what’s happening. That moment has extra oomph because of the effects. There’s something eerie about the two of them arguing over the end credits until they stop. There’s something scary about the two of them rising into the air at the same time they raise their voices to one another.
What stands out about it, though, is the emotional rawness in the moment. Vision isn’t just upset; he’s worried that he can no longer trust his wife, that she’s done something terrible to him, to everyone, and doing everything in her power to keep it from him. Wanda is trying to hold it together, feeling just as vulnerable and admitting she’s not even sure how this started. They are both just so messed up by what’s happening, so riven by it, but in ways that drive them apart over whether to tear this all down or do everything they can to continue propping it up.
The tenor of the scene is familiar to anyone who’s spoken with a loved one who’s unwell, who is not themselves, whether through grief or mental illness or some other trauma that jeopardizes their ability to process the world as it is. There’s an honesty to that scene, one that is frankly startling, and it’s the kind of place I never really expected an MCU project to go. It’s draped in reality-distorting fiction and the trappings of family sitcoms, but somehow that just makes it all the more disturbing and poignant when the truth of those moments bursts through those bracing layers of abstraction.
That’s bolstered by the second most stunning revelation of “On a Very Special Episode” -- that Wanda stole Vision’s corpse from Sword. More to the point, that he left a living will and wished never to be revived, not wanting to be anyone’s weapon. It’s plain that Wanda, either by herself or with the help of someone else, revivified him, and that he’s starting to reckon with the margins of what happened to him, if not the full picture.
He’s starting to see through the illusions and deceptions that Westview is made of. Again, the show does so well making the moments where it breaks the sitcom rhythms unnerving. Agnes’s “should I take it from the top” bit is eerie, and for once, Vision has a chance to realize it before Wanda resets things. Instead, she tries to play it off, tries to distract him with puppies and doorbells ringing and other head-fakes that Vision’s nevertheless noticing.
It comes through in the odd behavior of his coworkers, who respond to a Sword email by reading and laughing in unison. Vision briefly frees Norm, who is understandably frantic and undone and, most importantly, in pain over what’s being done to him. The secret truth of WandaVision is that it’s not a comedy show or sitcom homage or a superhero series. It’s a horror show, and Vision’s starting to realize that. He’s realizing that everything is wrong here, starting with him, what he can and can’t remember, and the mother of his children.
Meanwhile, there’s some more traditional but still cool developments on the outside. Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo, and Darcy Lewis are trying to save Wanda, trying to show her compassion despite what’s happening, while Sword Director Hayward thinks she’s just a terrorist who needs to be taken out. Meanwhile, our trio of familiar characters are finding solutions to the problem, realizing that 1980s tech can penetrate the Hex without being transformed by Scarlet Witch’s powers.
Of course, it doesn’t go unnoticed by Wanda, and she storms out of the Hex to threaten Heyward and everyone else when, unbeknownst to Monica, he tries to use their drone to eliminate her. It’s a scary moment, one only slightly cut by Elizabeth Olsen reverting to her dodgy Eastern European accent. We see definitively that Wanda has at least some control and awareness of her surroundings and what’s happening, enough to want to protect it from interlopers and those intruding on her surroundings.
It’s become increasingly clear why she’s so protective of her perfect bubble of happiness and what she is running from -- grief. The show channels that idea through 1980s sitcom pastiches in an amusing fashion, with Agnes as the friendly, albeit intrusive neighbor, kids growing up too fast, and dogs dying so that parents can give an important lesson about making peace with certain facts of life.
At the root of it, though, is a deep sense of loss and the artifacts of reckoning with death, something difficult whether you’re a child or an adult. Wanda says to her boys, and to herself, that she cannot reverse death, that they cannot turn away from it, because some things aren’t meant to be elided and some lines shouldn’t be crossed.
We confirm that she has brought the corpse of the man she loves back to life, presumably because she couldn’t deal with his absence and the tragedy of what happened to him. The commercial break this episode name-checks Lagos, the Nigerian city from Civil War where Scarlet Witch accidentally killed dozens of civilians when trying to redirect a blast, more mess than any paper towel could clean up. And she reflects, at her sons’ urging, on the loss of her own twin, Pietro, the only lifeline she had when she lost her parents at the same tender age Billy and Tommy are now.
So she does what she’s already done -- she brings him back, after a fashion. It’s an inspired bit of stunt-casting to bring in Evan Peters to quasi-reprise his role as Quicksilver. But beyond the jolt of the misdirect and reveal is a simple truth, that this whole thing is wrong. It is a coping mechanism, one meant to shield Wanda from yet another horrid demise marring her personal history.
So she, or some other force working with and through her, has constructed this place to evade that destabilizing realization. Vision is breaking out of it, shaking off the cobwebs of his violative rebirth and seeing through the comforting lies that Wanda is straining so hard to hold onto. It is difficult, hollowing, wounding to watch someone you care for undone by grief and trauma, dragging the world down with them. So much of what WandaVision does is clever or exciting or amusing. But what it does here is disquieting beyond words, and deeply, painfully true.
[7.4/10] Blaise Pascal came up with a philosophical concept known as “Pascal’s Wager.” It’s an argument to believe in God. Pascal maintained that if you believe in God, and He turns out not to exist, you’ve lost nothing, or comparatively little. If He turns out to be real, you gain the infinite rewards of Heaven. Whereas if you don’t believe, and God is real, you risk the infinite pain of Hell, the chance of which would outweigh any meager reward disbelief might grant you on this mortal coil.
Now there’s four centuries’ worth of counterarguments to this famous wager, so if you’ll pardon the expression, don’t take it as gospel. But it seems like the same argument He Who Remains makes to Loki and Sylvie: believe me and gain the power and glory you’ve always wanted, or don’t and face a terrible calamity. Our heroes (or anti-heroes) have to weigh that proposition, whether two beings innately prone to betrayal and mistrust should take this odd man’s pronouncements at face value, or instead assume he’s lying and risk multiversal catastrophe to bring free will back to the masses.
I don’t know what I would choose. There’s been enough lies and, frankly, weird shit in the last six episodes that I’d be ready to believe both that this mysterious, calm-but-deranged figure’s tale of inter-dimensional battle quelled into harmony and that he’s yet another huckster trying to preserve the status quo because it suits him and because agitators like our protagonist soon become flies in his ointment.
It’s enough to divide the Lokis. Sylvie is ready to kill him, tired of other people controlling her destiny, willing to believe that her counterpart has succumbed to the lures of glory and a throne. Loki is ready to buy his story, willing to leave a system he’s risked everything to overthrow in place and offer his trust to someone for a simple reason -- because he wants to keep this woman he loves safe. Do you unravel a lie that keeps the world stable and relatively peaceful, or do you slay the liar, discard his stories, and let the chips fall where they may?
The announcement of future films with subtitles like “Multiverse of Madness” and “Quantumania” tips the MCU’s hand here. But the ultimate choice, the debate, and the willingness to sacrifice oneself rather than betray another, have meaning despite that. The finale of Loki’s first season is essentially one big conversation with God, the Devil, or maybe just the showrunner personified in their own work, and it’s a compelling conversation.
It should be said, after fireworks-filled swan songs for the likes of WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s nice to have a season finale to an MCU show that is, outside of little swordplay, all talk. The rollicking action came last week, giving us a climactic and cinematic battle which cleared the decks for the major characters to mainly consider their actions here, and listen to the pitch, rather than blow things up before reflecting on them.
Perhaps that’s more possible since, as our mid-credits surprise indicates, Loki is the first MCU show to announce a second season. This is, then, a major mile marker along the series’s journey, not the end of it. More ground to cover gives the show room to hinge its finale on a choice and a discussion, rather than on fist-fights and explosions.
That discussion is led by Kang (Can we call him Kang? They don’t call him Kang, but it’s definitely Kang), a scientist and conqueror who spins the tale of forging multiversal peace from his own warring variants. I don’t know quite what to make of the character’s debut. Jonathan Majors (of Lovecraft Country fame) makes big choices as an actor, which I’m always inclined to admire, but there’s something off about him here.
Then again, maybe that works. Taken generously, this variant of Kang has “lived a million lifetimes.” He’s tired. He’s at peace with either two gods of mischief running the show or the throes of inter-dimensional combat beginning anew. He should be weird! Too often these godlike beings fall into the same tropes of stentorian-voiced automatons (something the Time Keepers’ presence low-key spoofs).
It’s refreshing, in its way, to have the man behind the curtain turn out to be some unpinnable weirdo, sitting in a big empty castle, shuffling papers and reacting with awkward bemusement to each new development. I’ll confess to having trouble connecting to the performance in the moment -- a little too much “Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor” quirkiness for my tastes -- but the acting choices align with the strangeness of the character, and the more I think about that, the more I can appreciate it.
We also see confrontations and teases from the rest of the cast. Hunter B-15 is spreading the word to her comrades, using proof in front of their faces that Renslayer is a variant, and by extension, so’s everyone at the TVA. It’s a smart, succinct way to show the fire spreading.
Better yet is the confrontation between Mobius and Renslayer. Just as Sylvie and Loki take differing approaches to the choice laid out in front of them, so do their TVA counterparts when deciding what to do with the knowledge that the TIme Keepers were a lie. Mobius announced last week that he was ready to burn it all down. But Renslayer stays firm, reasoning that even if there’s more to the story than they thought, there must be a reason for how things are, a justification to maintain the status quo, even if it’s not the one they thought.
It speaks to the essential question Loki has been asking from the beginning. What do you do when what you thought was your purpose is taken away from you, when the person you thought you were is upended? Renslayer clings to the wreckage, hoping the tides will push her where she needs to be. Mobius aims to bring the truth to the people, to stop what he once supported, as the best way forward. Sylvie breaks in the same direction, championing free will and a life unbound to a dictator, benevolent or not, no matter what transdimensional boogiemen he conjures up in warning.
And Loki too finds his purpose -- to save himself, only for once, that means saving someone else. There’s a meta quality to Loki’s season finale, with plenty of comments on this all being a game, or an effort to rewrite the story. You can even read it as a commentary on Marvel Studios’ quality control, maintaining this cinematic universe with consistency so that dozens of hours of entertainment can feel reasonably cohesive and connected. In a post-Endgame world, with gutsier and more out there concepts at play, this could be the MCU’s declaration that things are about to get wilder and woolier.
But for Loki, who tries to stave off that all-but inevitable unraveling of the multiverse, it’s about holding onto something, a bond to someone outside of himself that’s worth holding the rest of existence in thrall for, if it means keeping her near. Since his abduction and deconstruction by the TVA, Loki has found his new glorious purpose, and it’s Sylvie. Whatever infinite pleasures and punishments this would-be god presents to him, they can’t outweigh the presence of this person who changed his life. He bets on her. Let’s hope he doesn’t lose anyway.
It would be a shame to sleep on this. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier subverts expectations and roles established by the Captain America films, primarily at how we look at American Exceptionalism. Duplicity and duality finally seem to be at the core and it's refreshing and interesting to know that basically the only thing keeping Sam and Bucky positive on governmental oversight was Steve himself.
John Walker's character is fascinating because of how it plays into and against Steve's traits. No longer is Captain America some altruistic force; now he functions even further as an arm of the military. Although Walker would have you believe he's doing everything for the greater good, the greater good is frequently challenged within Steve's arc. By setting up Walker as more of a stereotypical, arrogant military man combined with Sam and Bucky's distrust, the cynicism is not only pushed onto Walker as a Cap replacement but also towards American foreign policy as a whole.
This is something MCU detractors have been citing as fault in the franchise for years, the lack of any critical eye towards the American war machine. I am utterly enraptured.
The scream I gave with Katniss cosplay. Hahahahhahahah LOL. The whole LARP thing was also very funny, especially the guy imitating the sound of swords battling. This episode brought out the good humor that was lacking in the first one.
[7.7/10] Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are fun together. That might be enough to power this show alone. Both are talky, smart aleks as Loki and Mobius respectively, but they have different energies. Loki is theatrical, comical, smirking, and sarcastic. Mobius, by is wry and sardonic with a workaday wisdom vibe to him. The pairing clicks in the contrast. They’re close enough to mesh but different enough to compliment one another, and it’s the best part of the show.
But I like the plotting in this episode! If the first outing for the series set the table, this one finally starts serving up dishes, as Loki and Mobius actually get a break in the case. Loki realizes that his counterpart, the Superior Loki, is hiding out from the TVA in pre-apocalyptic zones, because her mucking about won’t leave any “time variances” since they’ll all be washed away by the impending disaster. Mobius cross-references that with a candy bar found at the scene of the crime in the last episode, and it leads them to actually locating their target.
Look, it’s not much, but it shows how Loki could be useful and clever when pointed in the right. It shows how Mobius is good at his job and right, however fleetingly, that this God of Mischief could be an asset to their investigation if used properly. And it plays by the rules established by the show of how time travel and detection work, while preserving the timeline. In a way, this is all a basic cop show plot, but dressed up in temporal finery and 1960s drudgery, the results are tons of fun.
I’m also a fan of Loki and Mobius’s conversation in the lunchroom about life, the universe, and everything. I’m a sucker for those sorts of navel-gazing conversations on the nature of existence, but I genuinely enjoy the two of them bouncing off one another in these grand matters of creation and philosophy. Mobius is intriguingly zen, chalking up anyone’s existence to a certain weirdness, resolving that existence is chaos, and being grateful this slice of chaos gave him the TVA. Loki, on the other hand, is not content to just ride the wave. He wants to know how things began and how they’ll end and seem to reject the notion of the Time Keepers forging order from chaos and allowing all souls to meet at the end in peace. These cosmological conversations are well-written, both in terms of getting at the big questions of existence in a compelling way and rooting them in differences between characters.
There’s also a lot of pure fun to be had here! The show opens with a good gag when we see a medieval scene and expect the heroes or villains have leapt far into the past, only to reveal that we’re seeing a Renaissance fair in 1980s Wisconsin. The droll librarian retorting to Loki’s every file request with “That’s classified” is a hoot. And Loki himself, making goofy mischief in pre-volcano Pompeii is utter delight.
The one catch is that the show is less interesting every time Loki and Mobius are separated, more or less. I’m not wild about Mobius’s interactions with his boss, Renslayer, which has a very generic, “I get results, chief!” vibe with a 1940s screwball twist. I’m not averse to the vibe, but the execution is generic.
Likewise, the final setpiece in a futuristic ersatz Wal-Mart didn’t do much for me either. Superior Loki using her abilities to hop bodies is a trick, but none of her hosts are as good at spouting smug, knowing dialogue as Tom Hiddleston is. Her motivations are opaque, which is fine at this juncture, but still a hindrance for a series’s villain. And the action is choppy and mild, with none of the flair of the time-dilated dust-ups from the last episode. The one saving grace is that Superior Loki’s immediate ploy to massively disrupt the timeline is a promising hook. Setting up the TVA to work like clockwork, only to have a variant of our favorite Trickster God throw a cosmic monkey wrench into the proceedings promises entertaining disarray to come.
Overall, though, I’m still most compelled by just watching two superb actors and two stellar characters bounce off one another in a high concept scenario. The plot remains a little convoluted if you stop to unravel it, but works well enough on a scene-to-scene basis that it’s easy to get the gist even if the details are fuzzy. I do appreciate the “It’s not about you” kiss-off at the end, which may be a metonym for the series’s main theme, and there’s zing in what the narrative promises will come next, but after two episodes, I’m still mostly here to watch a pair of quality scene partners have fun together.
(Spoilers for Star Wars: The Bad Batch: I find it funny that in two months, Disney+ has released two shows with a setup of “Here’s a scenario featuring lots of different versions of a popular character only -- wait for it -- one of them’s a girl!”)
Very poorly written. Strong messages shouldn't feel like forced propaganda. It's just sad
Marvel Trolls 2 months ago: "Why does it always end in a big dramatic fight? So formulatic unhhhh..."
Marvel Trolls today: "unhhhhhhh so boring so much talking no fight geez this is so boring. Multiple timelines soooo stupid."
But mark my words, you'll see all of them still posting about every show and movie for the next few decades.
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z2021-12-31T23:59:59Z