Loki, Season 2, Episode 4: Heart of the TVA
Yeah, we get the ball rolling a bit more this time around. There has admittedly been a big gap between my watching of the season premiere of Loki to this episode thanks to real-life stuff, and as such this review will be a bit more succinct. But the back-end of Loki's second season definitely delivers more than it misses.
And 'Heart of the TVA', interestingly, revolves around solving the crisis of the exploding Time Loom. And for the most part, 'Heart of the TVA' proceeds as a pretty typical solving-a-problem episode. Loki himself has just been latching on to the TVA and trying to do good. But does he really believe in that greater good? Is he just trying to latch onto some kind of 'glorious purpose', as the series loves to quote from the original Avengers movie, in a last desperate attempt to find meaning in his life? And that seems to be the main purpose of these next couple of episodes. Though in this one, Loki, Mobius and the rest of the cast are in full crisis-solving mode.
Of course, some of the problems of this season really do rear its head. Ravonna Renslayer and Miss Minutes are technically antagonists trying to... well, I'm not sure if they're still trying to work for He Who Remains, or if they've fully gone off the deep end to do their agenda. But they certainly run around and do a lot of glowering and machinations without me really getting what they're trying to do other than some vague desire to bring down the TVA.
Likewise, a lot of the minor characters only introduced in this season -- like Dox and Gamble, of whom I had to keep looking up on Wikis to know which is which -- really don't matter. One of them, Gamble, just kind of gets shuffled off unceremoniously off-screen after a conversation with the (likewise forgettable) Hunter B-15. Meanwhile, Dox is stuck with a bunch of the rogue TVA agents, all of whom are at least very resolute in their cause and refuse to join with Renslayer when they show up. Only Brad is attached enough to his previous life to go with Renslayer. Admittedly, that was a great scene, and a very memorable one, as Dox says one last 'fuck you' to Brad while she and the rest of her loyalists are squished into a compressing cube by Renslayer.
A lot of the dialogue between characters like O.B. and Victor Timely are... they're cute. I wouldn't say that they're unenjoyable, but it's clear that it's mostly just exposition at this point, and while this episode did move very slowly in this exposition bit, it's actually major setup for the next episode so I won't really complain all that much.
There is a very nice conversation between Loki, Sylvie and Mobius -- the three main stars of this show -- as they stand in front of an elevator and Mobius gives a cute little MCU quip about eating lemon cakes and whatnot... which got Sylvie infuriated because all of these timelines being blown up represent billions and trillions of people. It's something that the show keeps bringing up but never really explored beyond the superficial, though... again, Tom Hiddleson and Sophia DiMartino does an amazing job at acting it out. There are a couple of great lines, like Loki bringing up Odin's lesson to Thor, as well as how 'breaking and razing things to the ground is easy, fixing things is hard', and leading to an amazing mike drop as Loki notes to Sylvie that "we are gods". The themes are a bit messy and a bit jumbled, and I do wonder if the season would've worked better with maybe an extra episode or perhaps less distracting secondary characters for Loki, Sylvie and Mobius to explore their own stances about the TVA's morality.
Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, while Loki and Sylvie are having their heart-to-heart, and Renslayer is turning Minutemen into cubes, Victor and O.B. are geeking out over their cross-timeline paradoxical influence. As mentioned above, these are scenes that are really just fluff. The actors are funny enough for the scenes not to be boring, but the scenes themselves are really nothing to write home about.
Victor Timely gets distracted by the TVA's hot-cocoa machine, which leads to the action climax as Loki and his buddies try to rescue Timely. Now I'm still not 100% sure what Renslayer's major plan is -- she gets pissed off when Miss Minutes reveal to her that He Who Remains had erased her memories, but I really can't make heads or tails of her plan other than generic revenge. We also resolve a random plot point from the first episode which I was absolutely confused about (since I took a break between episodes) but basically the 'bad future' that Loki saw in the season premiere is actually this episode, and he ended up pruning the version of himself from that episode to... uh... do something to stabilize the timeline or some shit. It's really something that's a bit inconsequential, and if they had to resolve it, I really wished that they had called more attention to it.
This leaves us with around 5 minutes of screentime as it seems like our heroes have narrowly averted a crisis. All that's there to do is to get Victor Timely out there with the doohickey to plug it into the thingamabob, right? The exposition is said, the music builds up... and Timely gets immediately turned into cosmic spaghetti before the Loom blows up and engulfs the TVA in glorious destruction. It's an ending and a cliffhanger that honestly kind of came out of nowhere and is honestly rather well-executed and hilarious.
Again... I still don't think Loki's second season stands anywhere near the excellence of its first outing. Neither is it anywhere as good as any of Disney+'s better offerings, like Moon Knight or WandaVision or Ms. Marvel or Hawkeye. But it's definitely starting to pick up the gas with episodes 3 and 4, and while the season's complete plot is honestly a bit jarringly different from what I expected, once I sat down and accepted that the story of the season is about Loki and not the Kang variants or the Kang war or Ravonna Renslayer or any of those things, it's definitely a fair bit more palatable.
Random Notes:
- Loki recaps the events of Thor, specifically how Odin banished Thor to Earth to teach him a lesson.
- While likely just a coincidence relating to the 'string theory' stuff, the way Victor was turned into spaghetti is similar to the effects of how the duplicate Ant-Men were destroyed in Quantumania.
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