In Loki Season 2 Episode 5, Is All This Time Jargon Too Complicated For Its Own Good?
This article contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Loki."
Everyone knows the only rule of the Time Variance Authority is that there are no rules — or, at the very least, those rules tend to be mighty hard to pin down. Magic has no effect in this realm, so far removed from normal space and time, but only as long as those inhibitors are up and running. The TVA might be the most powerful organization in existence (the Infinity Stones are used as paper weights!) but, at any given moment, agents have to worry about renegade generals and their army of loyalists pruning entire branches or the Temporal Loom going haywire and threatening to blow everything up. And most bizarrely of all, Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) time slipping shenanigans are suddenly back in full force ... despite Ouroboros (Ke Hey Quan) previously insisting that this phenomenon is impossible in the TVA.
Confusing? Yeah, just a bit. But that's nothing compared to the lore-heavy rabbit hole we go down throughout this latest episode of "Loki," titled "Science/Fiction."
After last week's cliffhanger left us wondering what could possibly happen next, the answer comes rather quickly. Loki is left all alone in the TVA, once again suffering painful glitches from his recurring time slipping problem and getting thrown into various timelines that have somehow reintegrated his old TVA friends. But why is any of this happening, though? What do these recurring time loops where Loki keeps running into his future self have to do with anything? And how does Ouroboros' loopy explanation about how doing the "impossible" somehow makes things possible make any sense? Episode 5 leaves us with more questions than answers, which probably isn't a great sign for the penultimate hour of the season. Let's dig into it.
Time slip slidin' away
The most pressing issue established in episode 5 has to do with Loki's time slipping, an obstacle that kind of came out of nowhere early in the season 2 premiere with no real explanation and was resolved just as abruptly by the end of the episode. So how is it suddenly back in full force? The heavy implication is that the destruction of the Temporal Loom (which may or may not have erased the TVA from existence) has unleashed all sorts of complications for our God of Mischief, erasing the memories of most of his TVA pals and tossing them back into the Sacred Timeline — presumably restored to their original lives before He Who Remains plucked them out of reality to serve as his TVA minions. Luckily, a run-in with the always-equanimous Ouroboros clues him in to a possible solution: simply try controlling his time slipping and he'll be able to travel wherever (and whenever) he wants, like before their ill-advised attempt to send Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) out into the teeth of a radiation storm to his doom.
Simple enough, right? Well, not so much.
While the broad strokes of the narrative are easy enough to track (Loki just wants to reunite with his friends!), the episode weighs all this down with incomprehensible logic and time-travel terminology that only makes things unnecessarily convoluted. When we should be focusing on the emotions of Loki working through his identity and sense of belonging without the comforting presence of the TVA to give him glorious purpose, we're instead expected to parse the meaning of "temporal auras" that somehow act as coordinates in space/time. As fun as much of the episode is, one can practically sense the writers begging viewers to just "go with it" at certain points.
Untangling the timeline
All that said, there is something to the idea that a multiverse-centric show like "Loki" ought to be one of the absolute nerdiest and silliest Marvel productions of them all. As someone who's largely fallen out of love with the Marvel Cinematic Universe in recent years, I have to admit that "Loki" season 2 has brought a charming amount of livewire energy and genuinely creative concepts that have felt lacking in other movies and shows. It's just that, with this latest episode, the balance between emotional insights and meaningless plot logistics seem slightly too weighted in one direction over the other.
That is, with the exception of one scene towards the end of the episode. When Loki uses Ouroboros' makeshift TemPad to travel to Sylvie's place in the timeline, he fully expects to have to convince her of basically everything they've experienced together since the first season. To his surprise (and ours), she remembers everything and apparently just ... reappeared in her comforting life working at McDonald's? Putting aside yet another example of distracting plot mechanics, the real kicker comes when they go out for drinks and Sylvie finally pries out of Loki why he's so dead-set on saving the TVA. It's not the TVA he needs so badly, but a sense of direction and belonging in his own life now that he no longer has a place in the timeline. It's a remarkably earnest and character-focused moment in Loki's arc, which makes it stand out all the more in an episode all about the labyrinthine "rules" of time-travel.
With one last episode to go, we'll have to wait and see whether it can bring this overall entertaining season to a satisfying landing. The "Loki" season 2 finale premieres on Disney+ on November 9, 2023, at 9 pm EST.