Loki - The Variant

 Time travel as a genre is very difficult to write if you want the story to make any sort of sense. But the payoff is that you have some really amazing "chronodynamic" possibilities. It's a sci-fi genre that engages the left-brain quite a bit - the trick, of course, being to ensure that the right brain is also satisfied (I'll admit I'm sure I'm oversimplifying the left/right brain divide, but you get the general idea.)

The second episode of Loki has the title character make a rather brilliant logical leap that made me, as a viewer, go "oh yeah, that's actually really clever!

Let's back up. Ok, spoiler goggles on.

The TVA has a problem - a variant of Loki has been killing its agents and stealing the reset bombs they use to "correct" a branching timeline. These seem to erase any trace of a variance, which does make me wonder why they don't just set these off instantly and go back to their headquarters, but hey: drama.

Our Loki, who, it's worth pointing out, is, in fact, a variant as well (the "real" Loki was the one who died trying to keep Thanos from getting the Tesseract) has teamed up with Mobius to track this one down and, hopefully, earn a pardon for his accidental mucking about with the timeline (to be fair to Loki, he had no way of knowing that his escape was going to change the course of history, which seems likely to be the case for most variants who get zapped away by the TVA.)

Loki being Loki, he is having a hard time earning the TVA's trust - even that of Mobius, who does genuinely seem to like him. But we, the audience, are also a bit unsure of his ultimate motivations. Not only does he have a penchant for deviousness, but the TVA itself has that kind of mindlessly brutal vibe of the society in Brazil - not malicious, just utterly callous - and so it's not even clear that Loki's work with the TVA is even him joining the "good guys." If anything, we're just seeing a - to borrow D&D's alignment system - Chaotic character working for a Lawful organization.

When reading through his own files, Loki comes across the file on Ragnarok - a report on the apocalyptic event that destroys the entire "planet" of Asgard. It seems that despite the heroic efforts in Thor: Ragnarok, nearly 10 thousand Asgardians die (not sure if that's just talking about Helya's massacres or if they left a whole lot of Asgardians there when they woke up Surtur, which would make that end seem a lot more horrific.)

Loki, of course, with no one watching, begins to weep at the knowledge of this coming destruction. As we've always known, despite his villainy, Loki has never been heartless or soulless, and while we spent a good chunk of the first episode explaining that pretty explicitly, this moment reminds us that all he really, truly wanted was to be loved by his family and welcome in his home - and this variant didn't get to that point before the TVA scooped him up.

But, in the midst of that, he has an epiphany - the massive destruction that occurs effectively wipes out any big changes you might make to the timeline. To demonstrate this, Loki has Mobius take him to Pompeii right as the volcano is about to erupt. While Mobius tries to think of minor things they might do that would branch the timeline a little bit but not too much, Loki gets up and starts yelling at everyone in Latin that they're about to die, that he's from the future (though he also questions whether the TVA is,) and that nothing matters.

And, as it turns out, he's right - none of the major violations of time-travel protocol do anything to alter the past here, because any of the changes that might have been inflicted on the sacred timeline are wiped the moment that everyone who heard him gets buried in volcanic ash.

Which is, you know, a bit grim. But clever.

So, Loki figures that the other variant is hiding out in apocalypses - any enormous event where their actions would be made irrelevant by the ensuing destruction, and thus wouldn't alert the TVA.

Mobius then realizes that Loki B left a candy called "Kablooie" with a kid in medieval France, and dates the candy to the mid 21st century. And, in a moment that is a bit dread-inducing, they begin looking through possibilities amidst the many destructive weather events coming in the 21st century because of climate change, eventually finding a massive store that's part of a chain called Roxxcart in Alabama during a massive hurricane (apparently Roxxcart will be some kind of "Walmart but the size of an entire mall.")

Preparing for the mission, we get a couple images of other Loki variants - apparently, there have been a whole lot, or there had been before they got pruned from the timeline. There's a little undercurrent of the sort of cosmic dread that Rick & Morty mines for pathos - our Loki, who isn't even our original Loki, kind of, is in fact, just one among many Lokis. From an outside perspective, that might make you feel less concerned for this one, but if you consider the way he's experiencing it, that's got to be really maddening, especially with someone who has the ego of a god.

Anyway, Loki does demonstrate that he understands the subtleties of his own magic a bit more than even Loki-expert Mobius, which seems to hint that he really is the only one positioned to solve this issue.

Loki, Mobius and their team go to the Roxxcart in question - doomed to soon be destroyed, along with all the people taking shelter within it - to track down Loki B.

Ultimately, it's Loki himself who encounters a series of people who have been enchanted by his doppelganger, and the two have a confrontation. But ultimately, it's just a distraction - Loki B has been stalling to send a barrage of Reset Bombs to other points in time, "bombing the Sacred Timeline." What that actually means is a bit unclear, but we see that back at the TVA, the timeline is twisting and branching off in many places.

We also finally see Loki B herself - yes, this version of Loki is not played by Tom Hiddleston, instead it's Sophia Di Martino - recognizable as Loki thanks to the horned circlet she wears under her hood, but going on a different journey.

After she sets off the bombs, Loki B jumps through a time portal, making it look very much like our Loki was the one who did all this. Likely expecting that things aren't going to go great for him if he just stands still, he jumps in the portal after her, seeming to betray Mobius' trust and also going off somewhere and sometime we and he have no idea about.

Given where things land, I do wonder if next week's episode is going to give us a bit of time to get to know this "Lady Loki," like where she branched off of the timeline. Loki, in myth, is genderfluid, at one point giving birth to some mythical creatures, so the idea that in some other timeline path he'd become female is hardly breaking canon (and I believe it's happened in the comics as well.) It might also make it easier to keep track of which character we're seeing. But I'm really curious to see how this develops.

Our Loki seems to genuinely be enjoying his detective work at the TVA, and while it's motivated by the hope to escape erasure (and possibly usurp the power for himself) he and Mobius have, in two episodes, developed a pretty convincing rapport.

Now, let's get into the time-travel shenanigans.

There is a hand-waving excuse Mobius gives for each timeline branch sort of working in its own "real time," so you can't just go back and prune it before the variant acted. But I do actually wonder: is Lady Loki actually a different person than our Loki?

One of the things with time-travel stories is that time becomes subjective. From our Loki's perspective, this whole endeavor has just begun, and he's basically a rookie (albeit a skilled one) at the TVA, training with a weirdly real-ish Miss Minutes who jumps into his computer when he tries to swat at her.

But wouldn't the perfect person to take down the TVA be one who trained with them? I do really wonder if we might see, in one of the later episodes, a grand reveal that our Loki has progressed to the point where the change happens, and we start to see things from a different perspective.

I mean, consider this: Mobius is obviously named after a Möbius Strip. (I realize he's also a comic character, but stick with me.) If you're unfamiliar with a Möbius Strip, you can make one by cutting a thin strip of paper and getting a bit of tape. Bring the two ends together to form a loop, but before you tape them together, give one end a single twist. With them taped together, you now have what is, if you ignore the very thin edge of the paper, a single-sided shape. You can draw a line along the middle of the strip and you will cover "both" sides before you reach the point you started.

In fact, if you cut along that line, you'll actually just get one big loop instead of two.

The point is - I wonder if the plot of this show might form a kind of Möbius strip - that we might make that flip somewhere in the middle (alongside our Loki) and see the other side of things for the remainder.

Just a nerdy prediction.

Still, the Möbius strip is also a metaphor for some tropes you can pull off in time travel. A single individual can have very different motivations and goals at different points in their life - sometimes that are totally the opposite of what they previously held.

Indeed, looking to the comics, and specifically the announced villain of Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (and strong contender for overarching Thanos-like villain) Kang the Conqueror, we have an example of how time travel can really make for a complicated character.

Kang is a person who lives for an insanely long time and also travels through time, and as a result, during different periods he essentially acts as different people, with different names and identities. And some of those are supervillains. Some of them are superheroes. It's all just one person who goes through a lot of changes over time, but because all those versions are jumping around in time, it's somewhat like having a whole host of characters in one.

Might Loki have a similar fate? In fact, he sort of already has - going from brother to villain to reluctant ally to usurper to self-sacrificial hero over the course of his MCU appearances.