Loki S02E03 Review: How Timely

Loki, Season 2, Episode 3: 1893

Again, just like episode 2, I felt like "1893" was a far more impactful episode than the season premiere and its rather bland opening with the giant CGI space loom and the still-underwhelming introduction of kooky side character Ouroboros. "1893" brings us the actual post-credits scene hyping up Victor Timely, the 'origin story' of Kang, as the three different parties -- Loki/Mobius, Ravonna Renslayer, as well as Sylvie -- all want to do take their own spin on Kang. Sylvie is still pissed off about the whole fate thing and wants to just kill off any variant of Kang. Renslayer and the gloriously creepy Miss Minutes want to mentor Victor Timely in some way or other. Meanwhile, Loki and Mobius have the additional information that a Kang is needed to stabilize the mechanisms behind the Time Loom, so they want to rescue Victor Timely. Not to mention the typical "is it ethical to time-travel to the past and kill a super-evil dictator before they can do all of the EVILS" question. 

And the episode itself, despite taking a fair amount of screentime, is... pretty solid. Unlike most of the timelines/locations we've visited in Loki, I do actually feel like we spent a decent amount of screentime in the titular 1893, allowing us to absorb the vibe of the Chicago World Fair, and how Victor Timely is this character that is decades, even centuries ahead of his time with the technology he's showing off in the fair. 

And Victor Timely himself is... at least he feels different? One thing that annoyed me a bit about Jonathan Majors's different Kangs is that "He Who Remains" and "Kang the Exile" both felt like the same character, just with slightly different motivations. And they are both Kang, but I still question if what they did in one episode and one movie respectively really left as much of an impact as ol' Thanos did. It's this unfortunate comparison with the MCU's previous big bad, really. But I do like that Victor Timely is an interestingly weird spin on the character and the actor, even if I do find him and his constant nervous-wreck tendencies to be a bit irritating. I do like that around halfway through the episode, it's clear that Timely has a bit of a mean streak to him with how he betrays Renslayer and leaves her on a boat. There's a fair amount of the ego and his desire of control and independence that'll eventually blossom into blown-out villainy when he does become Kang the Conqueror, which I appreciate. 

The episode does feel like it runs along for a bit too long. As always, Loki, Mobius and Sylvie are very fun to see, and Renslayer's return is pretty all right. I'm not the biggest fan of Miss Minutes, but she did give us a few yandere psychotic sequences in the second half of the episode that I really like. But I do really think that Timely being chased around by the Robber Baron and his goons end up just being padding (and not particularly interesting ones at that) and I really wished that the debt collectors are just written out after Loki magicked them the first time around. 

Sylvie's part of the story is still probably the easiest to understand, though since her goal is just "I need to kill this omniversal lunatic" and the only moral quandry is how Timely hasn't done anything yet isn't the hardest or most oblique thing to 'get'. I do like, again, that Sylvie pops into the episode relatively late, enough for the audience to get that Victor Timely, while not deserving of death at this point in time, isn't entirely harmless. But that's not really what drives the knife home into Sylvie's heart. The episode doesn't explicitly say it outright, but after some arguments with Loki, the argument from Victor Timely that he hasn't done anything, and says some words in the effect about how he's an individual and not 'just a variant' gives Sylvie pause. That's a great moment for both characters involved. 

Ravonna Renslayer, meanwhile... she's working with Miss Minutes (who backstabs her for like 15 minutes but they're back together at the end of the episode) seemingly to create a stable time loop so Victor Timely does become Kang? Or something? It's still not entirely sure what she's doing. She tosses in the TVA handbook (a nice nod to the otherwise bland season premiere) to a young Victor to get him to create basically a small, primitive version of the Time Loom. She and Miss Minutes then go and 'rescue' Victor away from the other parties there, presenting themselves as the only ones that are acting on behalf of Victor Timely's future self. 

Miss Minutes shows that she's more than just a one-note weird creepy character trope and convinces Timely to backstab Renslayer... but then creeps out Timely when she starts talking about how under-appreciated she is as an android, as an A.I.... and then interposes her face on a mannequin and talks about how it would be oh-so-gosh-darn swell for Victor to give Miss Minutes a body of her own. Timely shuts Minutes off in a surprisingly devious manner, and by the end of the episode she and Renslayer seem to shrug it off as 'well, it happened'. 

Renslayer herself gets into an argument with Loki, Mobius and Sylvie on different parts of the episode, and she seems to be convinced that she's embodying order. This isn't really the best argument since she's basically doing the orders of a dead future man and hanging out with a creepy peppy sentient clock A.I., and flirting with little ol' Victor Timely. I'm still not entirely convinced about Renslayer as a well-meaning antagonist at this point, though I do like the performance of the actor. She's at least an actual character, unlike General Whatshername that got beaten last episode. I do wonder just how much is 'create a temporal paradox' fits with Renslayer's definition of order. At the end of the episode Sylvie teleports Renslayer to Kang's Citadel at the end of time, where He Who Remains's corpse is still hanging out. 

This brings Loki and Mobius as the last characters for me to talk about, and... I like their dynamic. They clearly are having fun, but they're mostly just reactive to the conflict going on, which is more carried by Timely, Renslayer and Miss Minutes. Loki and Mobius gives a nice alternative for Timely to do, and I guess the little plot wrinkle that they need a living Kang to stop the Time Loom is neat enough... but it does kind of make Sylvie feel like a bit of a dumbass for refusing to listen that they need to keep Victor Timely alive long enough for them to untangle the mess that the TVA has made. 

The show's still a bit messier than I would've liked, and this is honestly where I think a better season premiere would've benefited the show a lot more, but this is a nice watch. 

Random Notes:

• Part of this episode was shown as the post-credits scene of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. 
• Loki's line, "I've never met this man before in my life", is taken entirely from his line in Thor: Ragnarok when he was denying knowing about Thor to the Grandmaster. 
• Thor and Mobius come across three status of Odin, Thor and Balder. Odin and Thor are obviously major characters in the MCU, but Loki snarks that "no one's ever heard of [Balder]", a gag about how Balder the Brave is adapted out of the MCU despite his major role in both the original Nordic mythology as well as the source comics. 
  
• In the comics, Victor Timely was also a character that made incredible inventions ahead of his time... though his comic-book counterpart was far more successful, being able to found a small town.
• Said town is located in Wisconsin, where his MCU counterpart's laboratory is located in.
• Robber Baron is a minor gang villain that fought against the original (pre-Fantastic-Four) Human Torch. 
• The corpse of He Who Remains still in the chair is a reference to a comic book panel of Kang finding Immortus's corpse in his citadel in Avengers #269.
• Ravonna is the love interest of Kang in the comics, which explains the two's brief moment of flirting.