Loki, part 4

"Loki: Season 2", Episodes 4, 5 & 6

Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia DiMartino, Ke Huy Quan, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero, Jonathan Majors, the voice of Tara Strong,

One of the problems with taking a break in the middle of recapping is, obviously, the potential for things to change or whatever new installment to add information we didn't have before. In this case, we are going into the second half after Jonathan Majors was officially let go, having been found guilty of domestic assault. But there is not yet any official word (rumors don't count) on how the franchise will handle that. Recast? Pivot to a different villain who everyone is convinced should be Doctor Doom? Scrap the whole thing because the people who aren't shrieking about Marvel being "woke" and "terrible" now are just bored of superhero movies in general?

Chrissy: Yeah, it takes a LONG time for a ship that big to sink.
Diandra: Yeah. Anyone who thought they would stop with a movie that was briefly crowned highest grossing box office ever clearly doesn't know how the industry works.

Anyway. I'm sure repeated speculation about the future of the whole Kang storyline is going to come up repeatedly now. So let's just dive back in.

Episode 4: Heart of the TVA (or: Project OmegaversedamnitChrissyNOgivemebackthekeyboard!)

Previously on this season. New guy determined they could only fix the temporal loom maintaining the timestreams with the temporal aura of Kang Who Remains, so Loki and Mobius fished a variant from the 1800s. Loki tried to fix the timeslipping and ended up in the future where Sylvie was in the TVA and he was pruned by nobody-knows-who-yet so he could be sucked back out of the timestream. And Renslayer and Miss Minutes are in the citadel at the end of time with He Who Remains' corpse and Miss Minutes promised to reveal something important.

And we begin with what looks like the opening credits of Doctor Who sans theme music.

Chrissy: Is that what Emilio is humming?
Emilio: Sorry.

Emilio: No, I'm not. Oeeeeeooooooooo.

We stop flying through space and zoom in on a broken chunk of rock which is apparently where the Citadel is. Miss Minutes is continuing her introduction of the thing Renslayer needs to see even though it will make her mad. Some sort of 3D video with a backdrop of the window behind HWR's body appears on a nearby surface. Renslayer watches her younger self join HWR for the conversation Loki heard a recording of earlier. He says "it" is almost ready. It apparently being this place at the end of time "for us. For all time." The recording continues past the point we heard earlier as Kang Who Remains talks about how glad he is to have the woman who made a real difference in the Time War on his team. She opens a time door and invites him to follow her to the TVA, which awaits them. He says he'll catch up later. Once she's gone, he activates Miss Minutes and orders her to retrieve "protocol 42".

Emilio: The answer to life the universe and everything?
Diandra: Ahem. Yes.

Even though Miss Minutes must know what that means, we need to spell it out for the audience: they're going to erase Renslayer's memories. And everyone else's too. Miss Minutes goes to do that...somehow...and Kang whispers "I'm sorry" to nobody. The recording dissolves and Miss Minutes confirms that Renslayer commanded the army that won the Time War. Renslayer realizes why Miss Minutes knew this information would make her angry: it means once she won the war for him, he built this little throne room and left her to cluelessly do all the work ensuring his place there. Miss Minutes is like 'yeah, basically.' But now? "We don't need him. Maybe we never did."

Chrissy: Feel free to come back to this line as needed.

And we're back in that version of the war room that has the Kang mural on the wall. Victor Timely comes through a time door and stares at it like 'why does this look familiar?' He wanders out into the hall and ends up at the mural of the time war while the PA issues warnings about chronocenters. B-15 finds him before Loki and Mobius catch up. He makes like he's going to fight them and demands to know what they want with him. Loki offers to show him. "That didn't sound as reassuring as you hoped it would," he says.

Chrissy: Yeah, nobody ever trusts me. It's the burden of a trickster god.

Mobius acknowledges that Renslayer and Miss Minutes have probably told him all sorts of horror stories about them, but they are liars. "Unless they said something good."

Chrissy: Maybe you should let me do the talking from now on.

Anyway, he says they don't have time for this, so he's just going to have to trust them. Victor reminds them that he's from Chicago, so...he doesn't trust anybody. Also, Sylvie is approaching from behind Mobius and Loki, so. Everyone is after him including "Ms. Ravonna" and "the effervescent clock-lady-monster thing" and "I should have some say."

Chrissy: Oh, the man who destroys whole timelines because people can't be trusted with free will wants to have a choice, does he? How very Republican.
Diandra: Don't you usually complain when I bring politics into this?
Chrissy: Yes, well. It applies.
Diandra: I never said it didn't. Although Victor is only a Kang variant, probably not He Who Remains, so.

The lights flicker, there's a loud groan and the PA lady announces that chronocenters 32, 81 and 7 are offline. Victor realizes that whatever just happened has to do with the loom he designed. Loki says yes, and that's why he's the only one who can fix it. The music has an interesting ticking march beat to it by the way. Don't know if that was happening before this episode, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be recurring now.

Elsewhere, B-15 is trailing after Judge Gamble as she rolls into the main room of the TVA. Gamble notes that Dox is still alive. B-15 says she's in holding with the "others", but they can't keep them all there indefinitely, but she needs Gamble to tell her what to do here. Gamble sighs that in the past she would have just pruned them all because that method is "simple, clean and efficient".

Chrissy: Not to mention you could convince yourself it was quick and painless.

Gamble reminds her that SOMEONE said the TVA needed to change now. B-15 asks if they just "forgive and forget" then. Gamble does a little judge dance around the answer, reminding B-15 that Dox is a general whose mission is to protect the TVA at any cost. So she could be convinced that a new version of it is worth protecting. B-15 doesn't think that will work and she's probably right since we're currently talking about the TVA being destroyed by the fact that the loom was never designed to handle too many branching timelines. But Gamble thinks that because B-15's arguments moved her, it could have an effect on anyone.

We start the next scene by focusing on a machine that claims to be able to produce "fresh, hot" coffee, chocolate or soup, which has to be at least two degrees of false advertising.

Chrissy: Have you listened to any of the Cabin Pressure radio plays?
Diandra: Not even sure this is coffee.
Chrissy: I'll take that as a yes. [clears throat, cheerfully] Cup!
Emilio: What's this now?
Diandra: I'll explain later.

Loki leads Victor past it while he has a time traveler's dilemma. "So I built all of this? Or I did? Or I will AND I did?"

Emilio: Had will have built? Had have had built?
Diandra: And thank you, Sheldon. You know...sometimes I worry we're getting too eclectic in our pop culture references.

Loki coaxes him to keep walking as he says it wasn't TECHNICALLY him. Victor tries to wander away to look at something else and Sylvie pulls him back on track, saying it "isn't that great" and also, FOCUS. Mobius promises he can wander wherever he wants once he fixes the loom.

In OB's office, Casey runs a test and grumbles that the loom will still overload despite the possible fix. OB exposits that they've adjusted EVERYTHING it's possible TO adjust. Team Loki enters with Victor and Victor goes total fanboy when he's introduced to Ouroboros because this is the guy that wrote the TVA handbook, right? OB blushingly admits that while he did write it, it was just based on what he learned from a brilliant 19th century inventor Victor Timely who tragically didn't have the resources to realize all of his ideas or he would be "bigger than Einstein". He hesitates a second while his brain catches up to his mouth and asks "what...did you say your name was?" And then it's his turn to fanboy. Loki and Mobius point out the entire paradox here of them both basing their work on the other's, which OB says is "like a snake eating it's own tail" which, FUNNY YOU SHOULD MENTION THAT, GUY WHO IS NAMED AFTER THAT VERY SYMBOL. They ask each other to sign their copies of the handbook. Sylvie is like 'can we get back to fixing the time sensitive broken thing and we can do this whole bromance lovefest later?'

OB says yeah, um..."we have a good plan. It's a pretty good plan. We have a plan."

Chrissy: CUP!

Diandra: Okay, yes, that totally works. Good job.

He prompts Casey to help him with the model they've mocked up. He apologizes for not having the model to scale and not having time to make little figures of all of them and he's embarrassed to show it to Victor, but... He puts a little figure in the space suit on the walkway outside the mini control room and says one of them will have to take the "throughput multiplier", load it into the launcher and shoot it into the loom so it can "scale the loom's capacity and manage the backlog of branches."

Chrissy: [muttering] Dilate the sphincter and apply more lube.
Diandra: Please don't do this again.

He pointedly describes the problem they are fixing as being caused by SOMEBODY killing He Who Remains, creating this mess and "ruining my life." Sylvie just smiles like 'yo.' Apparently not thinking this is clear enough, Loki asks what the connection is between the multiplier and the loom. Casey makes a ring with his hands and says the rings aren't wide enough.

Diandra: SAY IT AND I WILL PUNCH YOU OUT.
Chrissy: [closes mouth] [mutters unintelligibly]
Emilio: Has anyone tried flattery? Maybe some dirty talk?
Chrissy: [ducks]
Diandra: [glares]
Emilio: Please don't hurt me.
Diandra: It was so nice being friends again. There I was, giving you a second chance. But you stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand. This is why we can't have nice things.
Chrissy: I would be impressed that you used the lag between recaps to bone up on Taylor Swift lyrics, but I can see your screen and you apparently copied and pasted a bunch of them to have for reference.
Emilio: That's still pretty impressive. And very librarian.
Diandra: I will take that as a win.

OB points to the rings in the middle of the hourglass shaped loom and says they need to make those bigger to handle all the new branches. But now they have a new problem of that temporal radiation that threatened to tear Mobius' skin off having increased exponentially since that time. There's a pause and Mobius says Loki will just have to work really fast then. Loki's head snaps in his direction like WHAT? Mobius just calmly says it's his turn. Casey looks down awkwardly like a kid watching daddy and other daddy fight and OB finally gets them to stop long enough to say that it doesn't matter WHO it is, so long as that person is FAST. We focus on Victor walking a circle around the loom while OB talks about the problem of the plan still being in the theoretical stage because they can't get the throughput multiplier to work. Loki asks why not and Victor pipes up that it's because "the loom's temporal decay outpaces your throughput multiplier's capabilities." Casey says yes, every time, but how does Victor know that? Victor laughs that he had the same problem when he tried to make a loom and pulls a small metal device he made as a solution out of his bag. He pops open the ball on the end of it and a bunch of wheels inside spin. Loki asks if OB can make that work. OB says it will take time even if it is possible. Victor thinks they can do it together. They shake hands and Mobius and the Lokis leave the room to let them work on it.

Outside, Mobius excitedly suggests getting some pie while they wait. "What is the matter with you," Sylvie snaps. She starts ranting about how they dragged her back to this place begging for her help because everything is falling apart and now he wants to just pass the baton to tweedle dee and tweedle dum and stuff his face with pie while branches of timeline die off? Loki tries halfheartedly to rein her in, but she's on a roll. "Clocks don't tick at the TVA, do they? You found out you're a variant and you haven't even looked, have you? It's just another bad day at the office for you. Timelines are just lines on a monitor. Doesn't matter if a few disappear. Because you've never bothered to look if one of them was yours." She storms off after telling him to enjoy his pie then and Loki belatedly follows her, leaving Mobius to just stand there like 'well, I can't go to the automat NOW.'

Meanwhile, in the holding cell, Brad is taking it upon himself to play leader. Despite being unarmed and probably outnumbered, he thinks they can figure out a way to escape and get back to their "lives", which...do they all even know about the kidnapped variants thing? He keeps rambling until Dox yells at him to knock it off. He snaps that he doesn't want to die here. She snots that he should maybe have thought of that before he sold them all out. This takes the wind out of his sails since he didn't realize they all knew he was the one who told.

B-15 enters and Dox rises to meet her. She says she didn't want any of this and doesn't want to be here now, but...she tries to appeal to her desire to protect the TVA as Gamble suggested, the one thing the both of them have in common. Because if they are going to have to fight off Renslayer or whoever, they're going to need her and her loyal minutemen. Then she apparently leaves to give Dox time to think it over.

Sylvie ends up in the automat by accident because all these stupid hallways look the same. Loki finds her and the lights flicker and everything wobbles again before he can explain that Mobius is "just trying to see in the dark like the rest of us." He reminds her that HE asked her to help and she told him where he could stick it. She's only here NOW because she couldn't kill the HWR variant after all. She acknowledges why: because Victor looked scared in a way HWR never did. Loki thinks for a minute and decides to recall the plot of the first Thor movie, where Thor was banished to Earth and came back "different". He says he mistook it for weakness and mocked Thor for turning "soft". Are you...conveniently forgetting the part where you tried to kill him?

Chrissy: Oh, who hasn't tried to murder their siblings at some point?

Sylvie thinks he was right because being "soft" gets you killed. He thinks the TVA only has a chance right now because she didn't kill Victor, so that moment of being "soft" spared a lot of people on many timelines. She snorts that he's putting a lot of faith in those three to fix things.

Everything wobbles again while they continue this existential conversation. She reminds him that Dox is part of the TVA, so it is also responsible for all those branches she destroyed. Loki says yeah, but B-15, Mobius, Casey and OB are responsible for the ones still alive. "What if you are wrong to believe that this place can be any better," she posits. "What if I was wrong to spare him?"

Emilio: Let's just save the what if questions for another series.

She thinks it would be easier to just burn the place to the ground and start over. He agrees that the destruction part IS easy, but the rebuilding and fixing? That's harder. "Hope is hard." She thinks, then runs a thought exercise wherein Victor succeeds in saving the TVA and it somehow turns into something good with Victor not turning into He Who Remains or an even worse variant. Seems like hope is not just "hard" but hinges on a whole lot of shaky possibilities. He shrugs that it's the only option they have left. She asks what the plan is then; show him what's behind the curtain and just send him home? He thinks they can watch and protect him. "Interfere for good. Heard that one before," she sneers. He snaps that she can't just give everyone free will and walk away. She freed all the timelines and now they have to protect them. They have to do a better job than He Who Remains. She says they're just playing god then. He reminds her that they ARE, in fact, gods and walks away. The ticking march starts up again.

In the holding cell, Brad is telling everyone that they're just going to be pruned the minute the TVA doesn't need them anymore, because it's their MO. So they need some sort of plan. Dox shrugs that despite her differences of opinion with B-15, the woman has "integrity". Brad isn't so trusting. Before they can debate any more, a time door opens and Renslayer and Miss Minutes step out. Dox asks HER where B-15 is like she would know. Renslayer bullshits that she's busy with her plans to take over the TVA and they need to stop her. Dox recognizes that Renslayer is less trustworthy than B-15 and notes that she only wants to protect HERSELF and doesn't care about the TVA. She turns to the clock and sneers that she's REALLY disappointed in all of this. Miss Minutes snots that she knows and she's working on herself. Renslayer snots that she's only been gone for a few days and the loom is just about ready to implode and turn the place into a crater. "Driven into the ground by two variants. Is that what you want?" Brad asks what HER plan to fix it is. She's very vague about that, but she promises that anyone who offers to help her "restore stability to the TVA" right now will be granted their life in the timeline. This obviously has an effect on Brad, but not really anyone else. Certainly not Dox.

Miss Minutes briefly disappears into the machine in the corner, reappearing at Renslayer's side with an evil look on her face as the machine roars to life. Brad begs them to stop. Dox asks if his life on the timeline was really THAT good that he's willing to turncoat now. A box forms around everyone but Brad and starts shrinking slowly. Dox stares Renslayer down as everyone starts backing to the center of the shrinking cube, asking how it feels knowing they would rather die than throw in with her. We focus on a stoic Renslayer and an entirely too excited Miss Minutes as everybody screams and then suddenly goes quiet. Renslayer beckons a shaking Brad to come with her then.

Seriously. What a psycho.

OBs office. Victor sets his little dial device inside the device OB has been building. Mobius enters the room to ask after their progress, casually sipping from a disposable cup. Victor frowns at it and asks what it is. Mobius says it's from the hot chocolate machine.

Diandra: It only vaguely tastes like coffee and/or soup today, so I'm calling it a win.
Chrissy: Have you always been this food motivated?

In the background, Casey and OB are futzing with the machine and ask Mobius for his temp pad. Victor is fixated on the hot chocolate and the fact that this future world has a MACHINE for that.

Emilio: Next you'll tell me you can cool a whole room instead of just a chair.

He asks if he can see it. Mobius asks if he can wait while they figure out why the thing OB is building isn't connecting to temp pads because that seems more important. In the doorway, D-90 offers to take him to the machine. Mobius jumps at this gratefully and pushes Victor in his direction.

Holding cell. B-15 enters and gasps in horror at the carnage we are still spared from seeing. She pulls up her temp pad, which just shows Miss Minutes and an "access denied" message.

Cut to Victor pulling his cup of chocolate from the machine. He starts to bring it to his mouth, notices D-90 looking around nervously and offers it to him instead. D-90 starts to refuse, then just takes it. Victor watches him take a sip and snaps delightedly, turning back to the machine just before somebody prunes D-90 from behind. It's Brad. The chocolate splatters to the ground. Brad whispers "I'm sorry" and turns to the terrified looking Victor to ask where the device is.

OBs office. OB is reading files on an ancient looking computer and announcing that all of Mobius' temp pad files are being corrupted in real time. "Did you download unauthorized games again?" Mobius says he wouldn't make THAT mistake again.

Chrissy: So it was porn.
Emilio: Yeah, that would have been the first guess. Although knowing his obsession with food it would probably just be "9 1/2 Weeks".
Diandra: I'm right here, thanks.
Chrissy: We all know what you were thinking about when you were eating that VERY GREEN pie, Mobius.

Miss Minutes' voice drifts up from the screen and OB realizes the problem is that she has infiltrated the whole system and disabled the temp pads. Mobius tells them to grab the device and get Timely. They all run from the room.

They and the Lokis converge on the spot where Victor used to be but find only the spilled cup of chocolate and a prune stick. Mobius fills Loki in on the problem: Miss Minutes is back and they've lost Timely. The elevator dings behind them and B-15 emerges to add that Dox and her men are all dead. Sylvie concludes that this MUST be Renslayer's doing. B-15 asks if the multiplier device thing is working yet. OB says in theory, sure, but, again, it doesn't matter if they don't have an HWR variant. Mobius says okay, they need to find him and they can try checking the timeline. Loki picks up the prune stick and says no, Renslayer is trying to take over the TVA, so she wouldn't just leave. She's here somewhere.

And yes, the next thing we see is Brad manhandling Victor into a chair in the war room. Renslayer and Miss Minutes are both there, staring him down. He visibly scrambles for a second before expressing relief that they are both okay. Ravonna is like 'yeah, cut the bullshit and just tell us where the device is.' He pulls his copy of the TVA manual out of his belt and puts it on the table before asking what happens if she doesn't like his answer. She says X-5/Brad will find a "very thorough and incredibly painful" way to kill him.

Emilio: We can do that now that we've fully absorbed all the Fox and Netflix content.
Diandra: Yeah, I think this show might still be within the boundaries of family friendly, but all signs point to "Deadpool 3" interacting with the TVA somehow, probably the same way the second movie did with Xavier's school.
Emilio: And we know THAT is going to be very much not family friendly.

Sylvie is joining Loki on this new once per episode run through the halls this time. They arrive at an elevator that is apparently half broken and Loki gets distracted looking at the camera in the corner while Sylvie is inside and the doors slam. Loki calls that Miss Minutes is trying to slow them down. Sylvie tells him to take the stairs and the PA lady announces that total loom failure is imminent.

The rest of the team gets the device to the control room, where the lights are blinking and there's a noise that Mobius notes sounds like something "you want to hear from farther away."

Obviously the whole elevator thing indicates that we are caught up to Loki's earlier forward leap when they last used the extractor. Which is why we get a repeat now of him running around with a timer looking for a prune stick. The elevator Sylvie is in gets stuck and Miss Minutes cheerfully announces that access is denied. She rips at the panel and messes with the wires until the elevator starts moving again. It gets to whatever floor she's trying to get to, but the doors don't open.

Pre extraction Loki gets the green light and the phone starts ringing at the end of the hall. Meanwhile, Present Loki gets to one of the intersecting hallways, prune stick in hand and stops to listen to the phone ringing like 'wow, déjà vu.' He watches his past self approach the phone while Sylvie pries open the doors. Realizing what must have happened now, he fires up the prune stick and stabs his past self in the back, giving Sylvie the weirdest little mind fuck.

Chrissy: Really taking "go prune yourself" to a whole new level, huh?

She cocks her head like a confused puppy and the writers say through him "I promise you, this will make sense."

Emilio: When does time travel EVER really make sense?
Diandra: [incoherent mumbling]wibbly wobbly[more incoherent mumbling]

The phone is still ringing, so he powers down the prune stick and very hesitantly picks it up. On the other end, OB is like WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG TO ANSWER, JESUS! There's a loud rumbling and everything shakes. Mobius whispers at him to hurry up. Loki's voice drifts from the phone to report that they are being slowed down by Miss Minutes, who is trying to sabotage them in any way she can. OB says he could probably take her offline by rebooting the system. Mobius is like 'THEN DO THAT!' OB points out that that would also kill the safety protocols. Mobius asks what that would do. OB says for one it would remove the dampeners preventing the use of magic within the TVA. The two magic users who are on their side look at each other for a beat and shout "TURN IT OFF." OB yanks the phone from his ear like 'sheesh...you don't have to blow out my eardrum.'

War room. Victor is pointing to a page of his book and explaining how the multiplier is going to work. Brad and Ravonna are getting impatient with his obvious stall tactics. The lights flicker dramatically and Miss Minutes says she needs to investigate because that was NOT a power surge. Her clock face spins and she glitches. She says someone is rebooting the system and locking her out. Victor grumbles about her mocking him because her glitching is making her words come out in a stutter. She starts slurring as she says she's losing her cognitive functions and she only has a few moments, so she really needs to tell Victor something importan... She seems to go "dead" briefly, turning into an outline with x's over her eyes, then growls "you'll never be him" like an absolute psychopath before disappearing entirely. A cursor blinks in mid air and a version 1.0 Miss Minutes appears, all DOS lines and only able to recite the time. Then that glitches and disappears too. The lights go out entirely and Ravonna orders Brad to go.

He goes out into the hall and turns on his prune stick, creeping up on a noise at the end of the hall that turns out to be Loki hovering in the dark. Loki asks if he wants a rematch. Probably not realizing the magic abilities are back, he brandishes the stick like 'fuck yeah, I'm'a mess up your pretty face!' Sylvie leaps behind him, grabs him by the head and enchants him.

Chrissy: Notice I'm still just the distraction while she does the actual attacking.
Chrissy: Well, you ARE very distracting, darling. Especially in that suit.
Diandra: Right, that was the other reason we made Emilio Sylvie before. So you weren't doing a one woman tragedy of Narcissus over there.
Chrissy: No, the problem is that I can't properly drool over Tom while also roleplaying his character, but we decided I was Loki long ago, so that can't be helped. Maybe if you recapped something else he was in? Say..."Night Manager"?
Diandra: [sigh] We're back to banging that drum, are we?
Emilio: That would be kind of fun to recap, actually. Loki vs Doctor House with an assist from Princess Diana and the Queen.
Diandra: You just want to watch me deal with an increasingly incoherent and drooling Chrissy.
Chrissy: Hey!
Emilio: Probably. But I can also drool over Elizabeth. I can multitask.

In the War Room, the lights come back on and Brad comes back in, swaggering a little, noting in a somewhat lispy voice that this is "cozy". Because of course Sylvie is doing the thing she did last season again, controlling him like a meat puppet. He pulls Ravonna further away from Victor and gushes that he didn't think he'd see her again so soon. Loki runs in to grab Victor, Sylvie behind him and in the confusion, Brad uses the prune stick on Ravonna.

In the hall, Victor babbles that Loki just saved his life and also addresses him as "wizard".

Chrissy: That's MR. Wizard to...no, I just heard that out loud and never mind.
Diandra: What, no inappropriate jokes about that being a nickname for Doctor Strange or at least a certain part of his anatomy?
Chrissy: ...........well, if you're going to bring it up...
Diandra: No. We're good.
Chrissy: How's that story you're supposedly writing going, by the way?
Diandra: [groan] Always make me regret talking about my works in progress.
Chrissy: Someone has to hold you accountable so it doesn't end up like that Wizard John story.
Diandra: [muttering] Empath.
Chrissy: Whatever.

Sylvie's mind control leaves Brad and he looks around the empty war room in confusion.

The Lokis get Victor to the control room and OB guides Victor over to a machine while Casey exposits that the device is already in the airlock and they just need to scan his aura so they can open the blast doors. OB directs him to put his head in the scanner that looks sort of like a miniature MRI. Victor asks if it's safe. "Theoretically," OB says.

Emilio: Oh, THAT'S reassuring. Thanks.
Chrissy: Just put your head in the weird futuristic device that we're pretty sure won't cook your brain!

Loki taps in and assures Victor it will be fine in a voice he probably hopes is more reassuring than last time. Mobius takes his glasses. Victor takes a deep breath and sticks his head in the machine, which beeps and flashes lights. A different AI voice identifies him as He Who Remains and opens the blast doors.

OB looks at the bright tangle of chaotic light outside and mutters that it's worse than he thought and they need to move fast. Somewhere between this episode and the next I apparently forgot that Loki was first to offer to go out there. It is Victor who stops him as he starts for the stairs to the airlock, saying it "should be me". Loki argues that he doesn't have to do it. Victor thinks he does because HE knows how the device works if something goes wrong. There's a bright flash of light outside and OB yelps and pulls Victor over to the stairs to give some final instructions. Basically the same instructions he gave Mobius before. Get the suit on and get down the walkway as fast as possible when the doors open. Load the device, hit the launch button and get back as fast as possible. Loki pats him on the shoulder and Victor says it's "time to be brave." He goes down the stairs. Sylvie asks how much time he has. Loki non answers that he'll make it.

Chrissy: That little, huh?

Once he's in the suit, device in hand, he announces he's ready and gets in running position. The doors open, he runs out and the second he crosses the threshold he explodes into spaghetti. Everyone in the control room stares in silent horror. Mobius asks what just happened. Sylvie says he's gone and it's over. OB agrees that the radiation is just too high. A bomb seems to go off in the overloading end of the loom and everyone watches tearfully as it radiates toward them until the screen abruptly goes black. After several seconds of silence, the end credits kick in.

Let's just go right to the next episode, shall we?

Episode 5: Science/Fiction (or: Stop Asking Questions and Just Go With It)

I'm just ignoring the previouslies now because at this point you would probably be better off just going back through everything as a refresher because it's ALL going to be relevant for the next two episodes. Again, that's what I write these things for.

The opening logo is accompanied by some very ominous music and explodes into white light. And we're back to the moment the last episode ended and the white light explosion fades, leaving Loki still standing in the control room. Everyone else is gone though. He wanders through the empty halls until a PA address says that failsafe mode has been initiated. Then he timeslips, loudly complaining that this is happening AGAIN. He briefly ends up in whatever past or future iteration of the TVA room with the monitor and sees himself flipping through the handbook. Then timeslips back to where he was before that version of him can see himself. Which turns out to be a very short loop because he walks right into that room, picks up a guidebook from the desk and hears himself timeslipping. One of the desks starts turning to spaghetti, followed quickly by the whole room. He pockets the guide and timeslips before it reaches him.

Chrissy: Nooooooooooooooon, je ne regret rieeeeeeeeeeeen.
Diandra: I'm not sure that applies here, but since "Inception" is one of my favorite movies, I'll allow it.
Chrissy: Of course it is. It's trippy and messes with time.

We come back from the opening logo in a prison. A warden passes a cell, shining a flashlight on what looks like either a frozen person or a very alarmingly lifelike dummy. [Apparently it's paper mache. More on the accuracy of this later.] Once he passes, Casey climbs out from under the bunk, removes the part of the wall covering a tunnel and joins two other guys already down there. There are loud ferry horns outside and as we pan away from the tunnel they crawl out of it is obvious this is Alcatraz, but just in case...the chyron identifies it as San Francisco in 1962 of a branched timeline.

Loki appears as they reach the water line, dragging what looks like a body but is probably some sort of raft. Hello darkness, again. Loki yelps "Casey's" name and asks if everyone else is here, but "Casey" doesn't recognize him. One of the other prisoners asks if this is the "boat guy" and "Casey" hisses that he's not supposed to be here. Loki says he doesn't know anything about a boat. "Casey" asks how the hell he got on Alcatraz then. Loki starts getting hysterical as he realizes he doesn't know where the hell he is, exactly, or how or WHY THIS IS HAPPENING AGAIN. One of the other guys asks Frank why this guy keeps calling him Casey. Because remember how it turned out last season that DB Cooper was really Loki? It turns out "Casey's" real world variant is career criminal and apparent genius Frank Morris. One of the few people to successfully escape Alcatraz. I've been able to backfill a lot of the details of the past couple paragraphs courtesy of an article written after this episode dropped, which notes that while he escaped, neither he nor those other two guys were ever officially seen again and the raft was found in tatters. So he was presumed dead. The author of the article went on to assume that the Loki writers were suggesting he was ACTUALLY abducted by the TVA, which...shows a complete misunderstanding of how timelines and pruning work, I think.

Chrissy: Although the author can probably be forgiven since not all the writers are on the same page and, as you pointed out, it shouldn't have been possible for Steve to return the stones they took from a timeline that was pruned because Loki stole the Tesseract.
Emilio: Ah, but if he returned them within moments of them stealing the stones and the TVA didn't show up until AFTER Loki escaped to the other side of the world then he would have been able to put them back just before the timeline was pruned - and the stones with it.
Diandra: ..........look at the two of you, overthinking this shit. I am so proud.
Emilio: Also, the branches aren't being pruned anymore, so maybe this universe only exists now because of that.
Diandra: I'm not sure that explains how his disappearance could be attributed to the TVA kidnapping him, but let's move on before we all get headaches.

Anyway, dogs start barking in the distance and Frank shushes Loki and hisses that he doesn't know him and he's going to have to find his own way off Alcatraz. This, of course, isn't a problem and he timeslips a second later. The criminals pause for a moment like 'did that weird guy just disappear into thin air?' and return to dragging the raft to the water.

Chrissy: Here's a thought...is the reason this variant had to be pruned that he DIDN'T escape - as was supposed to happen - because they were distracted by Loki and didn't make it away in time?
Diandra: That's...yeah, assuming the same thought process you two were for returning the Infinity Stones, that makes sense. But it could also just be something stupid like he got caught soon after he got back to land or something.
Emilio: And are we assuming these are the exact same variants of these characters?
Diandra: As long as it says branched timeline, yes. I assume these were the exact formerly pruned branches they were taken from.

Loki appears briefly in front of that 80s McDonald's where Sylvie was working, then slips again until he's in the parking lot of a jet ski (or whatever generic version of same) dealership. Which we know HAS to be where Mobius is. Except he barely stops slipping to note the blow up tube thing on the lawn before slipping again, back to the TVA in the time theater he was first brought to. Because we're really just establishing all the locations he will be pinballing between for the remainder of this series. He slips again.

And we're with B-15 this time, in what the chyron identifies as a branched timeline of New York, 2012. She is a pediatrician, talking to a patient with a healing broken arm. She writes "don't climb trees" on the girl's cast to remind her of "how much it hurt" when she first came in in case she gets any more ideas, but admits that this isn't going to stop her because she's a kid. She steps out into the hall just as Loki slips into the hallway. He frowns at her, then disappears again immediately while she makes a face like 'is there a chemical spill somewhere giving me a contact high?'

Emilio: Is this the branch that was pruned when this Loki stole the Tesseract?
Diandra: Um...I assume the variants are the source of the Nexus points that need to be scrubbed, but that's an interesting theory.

And then Mobius is "riding" a jet ski in front of what is obviously a fake background, waxing poetic about wind in his hair and ocean spray. He is interrupted by the guy behind the counter at the shop announcing that his son is calling. And also identifying him as "Don". Now. I know we joked about him being a Thor variant a couple times last season and this made a few more people get on board with that theory because in the comics, when Thor is banished to Earth he lives as Donald Blake for a while and doesn't even remember who he really is. As far as I can tell, the first comic has this seemingly random guy finding Mjolnir, picking it up and becoming Thor because "he who is worthy" etc. Apparently he found out in a much later comic about the whole banishment and that he was always Thor. I'm not sure if this actually works or is just an Easter egg though. Don says he'll call the kid back and turns back to the guy he's apparently trying to sell the jet ski to while the chyron identifies this as 2022 on a branched timeline in Cleveland, Ohio. The guy says he's more interested in a dirt bike. Don tries to sell the jet ski as the "thinking man's dirt bike".

Chrissy: Um, no. It's an ATV for idiots who would rather drown or be eaten by sharks than slam headfirst into a tree.

Loki timeslips into the parking lot outside again, but this time he spots Mobius inside through the glass. He stays in place long enough to go inside and talk to him. "The TVA is gone," he blurts. Don is like 'uh...you mean the ATV? We have two upstairs.' Loki is like 'what the fuck is an ATV?' "You don't remember me either," he realizes.

Emilio: Aren't you supposed to be the smart one?
Chrissy: Hey, you try jumping around in time like this and see if it doesn't turn your brain to swiss cheese!
Diandra: [applauds] "Quantum Leap" reference for the win. Thank you.

Don tries to bullshit that he remembers him coming in the other day. The guy behind the counter says his son is on the phone again and he excuses himself, noting he's a single dad, and tells the guy he SAID he would call back. The guy is like 'yeah, but it's the other son now.' He says he'll call BOTH of them back, but by the time he turns back to Loki, he has time slipped away again.

Pasadena, California, branched timeline (let's assume they all are), 1994. OB plops an obscure book on the counter at a shop. The bored lady at the register says she's never even heard of The Zartan Contingent. OB says he loves the author and reads everything he's written. She tries to scan the UPC and the system doesn't recognize it. He offers to pay cash, but she's already flipping open the back cover and realizing the guy in the author picture looks familiar. (And you have to zoom in to see it, really, but it identifies him as A.D. Doug) Another lady comes out to the front and snarls that she TOLD him to stop putting his own sci-fi crap on her shelves. He simpers that it's a perfectly respectable genre. She plops a whole pile of copies on the counter and says they don't sell in this shop. He takes the pile and slinks out the door.

He retreats to what looks like a post apocalyptic bunker that actually kind of resembles his office at the TVA, boots up his 90s computer and then falls flat on his ass shrieking in alarm when Loki pops into existence in front of him. Having now figured out the pattern, Loki tries a different approach of addressing him as a stranger. "What I'm about to tell you is going to be hard to believe."

Then we just skip to sometime later where AD is babbling that of COURSE he believes that insane story because he's WRITTEN it and it's like one of his characters just came to life and does that mean Benjamin Russel's stories are going to come true too?!

Chrissy: [heavy sigh] [turns to Emilio] Which Star Trek is this?
Emilio: "Deep Space Nine", but I think they referenced it in "Discovery".
Diandra: No, "Strange New Worlds". Which kind of breaks the spacetime continuum actually, but whatever. Russel is from one of the episodes on the greatest hits list I gave you. It would have been an amazing series finale if it wasn't in the middle of an ongoing franchise involving several other shows. Certainly better than the actual series finale that involved Sisko falling off a cliff and becoming a space god or something.
Chrissy: [confused blinking and spluttering]
Emilio: Don't worry about it.

AD says this whole scenario actually reminds him of what happened in his most popular book, which there is a whole pile of sitting right next to Loki. Loki picks one up and realizes OB is a writer in this timeline. "I'm doomed." He drops the book dramatically.

Emilio: Funny, you're not the first person to have that reaction.
Chrissy: Next you'll tell me you're a fanfiction writer who writes stories about me having sex with my brother.
Diandra: [clears throat] Uh, no. Technically he's not YOUR brother since he's a variant with a different Loki. You might recognize him as Mobius.
Chrissy: ....................
Diandra: But I would much rather ship you with a sorcerer you never met because you fucked off the Sacred Timeline too quickly.
Chrissy: .......so I can or I can't talk about whatever shit you're writing now? MAKE UP YOUR MIND WOMAN.
Emilio: I think Firecup should play this variant of OB.
Diandra: We're still using that nickname, huh? Yeah, I didn't mean to step on your toes there.
Chrissy: But at least for now, you are definitely more in line with this character, yes.

AD adds that of course he has to get a PhD so he can keep his day job teaching theoretical physics at CalTech and support his real passion of writing pulp science fiction. Loki perks up like 'oh, you ARE an actual scientist. Thank god.' He redirects AD back to the urgent matter at hand. He needs to get back to the TVA at a specific time. Before the loom exploded. AD says that's not possible, but "don't let that stop you." Loki is like '[sigh] WHAT'. AD says he told him he was time traveling in a place where time doesn't exist. So he wants to go to a place that doesn't exist anymore, where time also doesn't exist. "It's equally impossible and therefore it's something you might be able to do." Loki grumbles that that makes ALL SORTS of sense and doesn't sound very scientific. AD agrees, but says it sounds like fiction, so it's still in his wheelhouse. "You need to learn how to control your timeslipping."

We skip right to them sitting on a bench and Loki is insisting he CAN'T control it and it just happens randomly. AD argues that it can't be random really because he keeps ending up with whoever he is looking for. You might recognize this as being similar to the argument Doctor Strange used about America and her powers, so yeah. That tracks. Also, he seems to be moving through time AND space now making him something like his own temp pad.

Chrissy: Or Tesseract. Could his fixation and repeated proximity/use of a stone have some transference?
Diandra: That would only explain the space part. The time stone was a completely different thing.
Chrissy: Right, and that-
Diandra: Was the one Doctor Strange had, yes. I realized I was walking myself into another of your fic prompts as I was saying it and it was too late to take it back.
Emilio: That would be a way to explain it in a fic that would make sense. Would that work in the one you're writing now?
Diandra: [long suffering groan]

Loki doesn't think this is as good a thing as AD makes it sound. "With science, it's all what and how," AD says. "But with fiction, it's why. So, why do you need to do this?"

Chrissy: Because the writers say so.
Diandra: Oh, shut up and do what you're told.

Loki says if he can't save the TVA, "there will be nothing to protect against what's coming." AD is like 'okay, well. Now that you know why you need to do it, you should be able to control it because that's how this sort of thing works in fiction.' Loki hesitantly tries to do a controlled slip, which looks a lot like his efforts to use magic at the TVA in the beginning. Grunting, flailing like an idiot and looking embarrassed when nothing happens. AD suggests he try harder.

Chrissy: If I try any harder I will probably shit myself in several realities.

Actually, this probably doubles as a sort of behind the scenes look at the whole time slipping thing where Tom is just flailing and yelling for several minutes in multiple takes and nobody is stitching it together this time. AD says he must be doing something wrong because "it really feels like the time slipping is the answer."

Chrissy: Oh, well, let's see YOU do it, if it's so EASY.
Diandra: It's not my job to do it. It's my job to make YOU do it under threat of writing you out of the story if you don't.
Emilio: Yep. Good choice making her the writer.

Loki thinks they should try focusing on the science part and turns to a blackboard with an equation on it. AD picks up a taser or a cattle prod or whatever that is and pokes him in the back with it. Loki yelps and asks what the fuck THAT was. AD shrugs that it was "science", puts it down and sticks his nose in a book, muttering that they know the slips can't be triggered by electrical impulse now. Loki picks up the prod, visibly restrains himself from getting revenge and puts it back down.

Chrissy: If I didn't need you right now...
Diandra: Trust me, you're getting off easy. I could have figured out that this fiction genre specifically is "comic book" and tried the method of activating your ability through trauma. If you stick around long enough, maybe you can meet the guy who used that as a hail Mary treatment for cancer.
Chrissy: Wasn't I playing Deadpool too? Because I have some thoughts on your choice of words there. I'm pretty sure Deadpool gets off easy enough.

AD tries to startle Loki by jumping in his face and screaming, which kind of looks like a chihuahua trying to intimidate a poodle.

Chrissy: Wait, why am I a POODLE?
Diandra: We all know why, drama queen.
Emilio: More importantly, why are we using the usual methods to try to stop hiccups?
Diandra: Because I don't exactly have a handbook of methods to try to prompt someone to time travel, so I have to improvise. Have you tried drinking water upside down?
Chrissy: Well, as long as we're already here, have you heard of the method that involves massaging the-
Diandra: WE'RE NOT DOING THAT CHRISSY.

I hope you all appreciate what I just did to my Google history to get this picture...

Loki tells AD to just forget the time slipping for now and focus on how science can help get them somewhere that doesn't exist. AD says it might exist still. Loki says he saw it disappear. AD reminds him he also said when he was slipping through time most recently he visited a part of the TVA. So it must exist somewhere. "You just don't know where to look for it."

He does a very bad demonstration of handing Loki his pencil cup, holding up all the pencils and saying they need to "get the band back together" and puts the pencils back in the cup. Loki stares at it for a beat and says that doesn't seem scientific either. Apparently the writers assume a lot of ground was covered between scenes here because AD explains that the whole temporal aura thing would apply to a whole group. They have a "collective aura unique to that moment in time." So if they can gather them all they can "read" that aura...Loki catches on and finishes that they can use the aura as coordinates to get back to that particular moment. "No," AD cheerfully says.

Chrissy: Okay, now you're just being difficult.

AD says they don't have a temp pad. Loki says they can build one. AD thinks that would be difficult to impossible based solely on Loki's description and no real idea of how they work. Loki realizes suddenly he still has the TVA handbook in his jacket pocket and asks if it would help if he had the knowledge of everything his other self wrote. AD is thrilled to find out that the version of him Loki knew wrote a "best seller". Loki is like 'uh...sure, buddy. Let's go with that.' He says they should get started on that, then time slips violently, throwing the cup and all the pencils. "Oh, that's a problem," AD says mildly.

Loki ends up in a suburban neighborhood just as "Don" is dragging trash cans toward one of the houses. He yells to the kids that he's throwing away any toy found outside their rooms from now on so he doesn't have to keep coming home to "some lunatic garage sale". Loki takes a moment to fix his hair and clothing, which...is interesting. We push in as Don is asking how an action figure on the ground got burned and a kid a couple yards away lights a match. Which is not at all alarming. Don identifies him as Kevin and asks who the hell gave him matches. Kevin says nobody, he stole them.

Chrissy: I see their mother in this universe is a variant of me and he is a chip off the old block.
Diandra: I'm afraid to ask if you're assuming mpreg or something else.
Chrissy: There's got to be more than the one female variant. Or maybe this is the universe where Loki lived a whole human life and gave birth to human children as well as the horse.

Kevin just runs away as the other kid approaches. Don identifies him as "Sean" and sends him to catch Kevin. "If you keep him from burning down the house I'll get you a puppy."

Chrissy: Oh, yeah, that seems like a great idea.
Diandra: I'm trying here. Nobody said I was succeeding.

Luckily, Sean would rather have a snake, so. Loki appears as he runs after his brother and Don recognizes that he was at the shop "earlier", which puts this as the same day. He asks if this guy followed him home.

Chrissy: [nervous laughter] No, why would I do that? Hahahaha...your left tail light's busted, by the way.

Loki tries to babble past a lie that he was on his way to...uh...whatever is over that way...and happened to see him, so he thought he'd just apologize for his rudeness earlier.

Don asks if he's still in the market for ATVs and opens the garage to reveal two jet skis. One of them used to belong to his wife, but she's gone and the kids are probably going to need expensive braces or some shit, so. Loki says um...no and repeats the "tell you something that's hard to understand" line, but this time he uses Mobius' name. Don thinks that name is ridiculous and Loki clearly has the wrong guy. Loki says no, his real name is Mobius and he works at the TVA, which...is not accurate, but okay. Don is like 'sure buddy, I'm just gonna go check on the kids and maybe call the nearest mental facility and ask if they've done a bed check lately.' Loki tries his hand at the reassuring thing again and swears he's a friend. Don is like 'hahahaha, yep. So am I. We're all friends here. Please don't hurt me.' He holds up a tire iron like he's going to brain Loki with it if he tries to come any closer. Luckily, he is interrupted by AD coming through a time door suddenly, holding a laptop. Loki asks how the hell he got a working temp pad that fast. AD is like 'fast? It took nearly two years.' He says it would have been faster, but he lost his job and his wife left him, so..."what now?" "I promise you this will make sense," Loki tells a spluttering Don.

Chrissy: I really need to stop repeating myself.

They all go through a time door that seems to only go back to the spot further away from the house where Loki arrived. Loki starts again with the 'everything is a lie and you work for space lizards that maintain a certain timeline.' He says they first met at the Time Variance Authority when Mobius saved his life because he "saw something in me that I hadn't seen in myself." Don asks if he and the little weirdo over there moving the glowing door around with a laptop are really his friends. Loki says yes, eventually. Don asks why he doesn't remember that.

Emilio: Because it has had hasn't happened yet.
Diandra: You're going to make me link to that again? Ugh. Fine.

But he says Mobius once told him the TVA was the only life he knew and they have to try to save it now. Don asks what happens to the kids. Loki says they'll be fine which is a lie and he has to know that. But he points to the house where the scene from a couple minutes ago is playing out again and says Don can come back here anytime and it will be like he never left and no one will know he was ever gone. Don tries to whine that he doesn't CARE about saving all of existence or whatever Loki is saying, but Loki reminds him those kids are PART of that existence, so he should. If he helps Loki, then they will be safe. Don sighs and thinks and mutters that Mobius sounds like a pretty cool name actually...

Quick cuts of Loki going through the janky time door to gather B-15 and Frank, who did make it to land with the raft so maybe that was why the TVA grabbed him. They all gather in AD's office where Frank is busy stealing something when Don introduces himself and says his "space name" is Mobius, apparently. He questions if this place is safe from whatever quantum wormhole bullshit they're dealing with. AD says yes, there is no one around this place for miles. So as I said...post apocalyptic bunker. He asks Loki if they have everyone then. Loki mutters no, but he is clearly not looking forward to trying to convince the last one to join them.

Whatever branched timeline Sylvie was on. She is leaving the McDonald's for the night when her dinner disappears like the weirdest version of Thanos just snapped in this universe or something. Loki appears through a door and starts his speech again, but doesn't finish the first sentence before she interrupts that of COURSE she knows who he is, idiot. He is confused as to why she remembers everything if everyone else was reset like nothing ever happened.

Chrissy: Uh, because this is not my original life, dumbass. Remember Asgard?

He flails a little because he didn't think this was how this conversation would go and he's off script now. He timeslips violently despite not actually going anywhere else and Sylvie just stares wide-eyed like 'ooooookay.' She offers to buy him a drink.

Chrissy: Although I'm not sure any amount of alcohol is going to help me unsee THAT.

After he finishes telling her about finding everyone on spots on the timeline not remembering anything, she says it's good that they returned to their lives before the TVA meddled. Loki asks how many of them would have CHOSEN to do that, reminding her of the only life Mobius ever knew thing. Sylvie says that wasn't his CHOICE though. He Who Remains decided that was going to be his life. Loki still thinks he should have had a choice NOW. They can return if they want. Sylvie says he's talking about ripping them out of their lives "showing them something they cannot unsee" and THEN giving them the red pill, blue pill choice.

Chrissy: Too late. Also, "The Matrix"? Really? This wasn't complicated enough?

He says he can't do this without her, but apparently she doesn't care since she has what she wanted now and doesn't care what happens to everyone else. She asks what's wrong with wanting a life and asks what HE wants. He says he wants to stop He Who Remains. She says no, that's not it. Try again. "I want to save...this." She keeps prompting him while he says he wants to save the TVA. Or he wants it back anyway. Because he wants his friends back. She stops prompting, orders drinks from the bartender and his eyes get watery as he says he just doesn't want to be alone. She sadly notes that they're both being selfish then, aren't they? The bartender brings the drinks and she acknowledges that it's hard for him to accept that his friends are where they "belong". He asks where HE belongs without them. She shrugs that they all have to write their own stories now and downs her drink.

Back in AD's lab, Frank is asking how long this is going to take because he needs to get back to something. AD assures him they can put him right back when and where they took him, which is probably not entirely reassuring. Frank asks if that thing can take them anywhere, like, say...the Grand Canyon or...a bank vault. AD just blinks at him and he slinks away. Meanwhile, Don is trying to sell B-15 a jet ski, which...I don't know how selling any sort of vehicle to someone from a decade ago would work, really. Frank starts for the temp pad, making noise about "borrowing" it as long as they're waiting. Luckily, before he gets there, Loki comes back through a time door. Alone and looking defeated. He says they might as well all go home.

Before anyone can argue with that, we go to a record store in Sylvie's timeline. She enters and the clerk asks how his "only regular" is doing. They make a little chit chat and, upon noting she's had a rough day, "Lyle" recommends a record that will "either cure what's ailing you or make it a whole lot worse." "We really need to work on your sales technique," she jokes. But she takes it over to a player set up by a couch to listen. Velvet Underground plays and the next person coming through the door of the shop disappears before anyone can see him. Lyle is distracted looking at the bell above the door and looks back to see the cup he was pouring his coffee into has disappeared. Coffee pours off the counter and spaghettifies midair. Everything else outside starts turning to spaghetti, which he watches with alarm. It starts spreading to the inside and he yells Sylvie's name and starts to run toward her while the whole shop spaghettis around him. She turns just as he reaches her and turns to spaghetti himself.

Emilio: Anyone else hungry for pasta all of the sudden?

Sylvie moves to the end of the room and watches everything disappear, opening a time door at the last second and walking through.

Back at AD's lab, Don is ranting at Loki that he pulled them from their lives with the insistence that they needed to save all of reality and now he's telling them to just forget it? Loki apologizes that he was wrong and mistook something HE wanted as being all important, apparently. Don can go back to his kids. Don reminds him that he said those kids were in danger. Loki repeats that he was wrong and they should go back to their lives where they belong. Frank asks WHERE in his life he needs to go back to, exactly. AD asks what about the TVA that he spent the past two years learning about. Loki says they're fine without it. This is when Sylvie steps through the time door from her spaghetting reality and says they aren't. Loki was right and she was wrong. The branches are dying and they need to do something, but she doesn't know what. Loki says they need to go back and try to stop the Loom from melting down. He turns to AD and rambles about pens and coordinates while everyone else probably wonders if he's having a psychotic break.

Chrissy: I'm FINE. Fine. Just fine. Fine fine fine fine FINE.

AD catches on and turns to pick up the temp pad so they can read the collective aura of the group. Except it's already disappeared. Frank is like 'why are you all looking at me? I don't have it.' He is saying as much as he turns to spaghetti and blows away. AD follows close behind, declaring that "it was a fiction problem" as he goes. Don runs for the door in an attempt to get back to his boys and explodes into spaghetti before he reaches it. "Is this it," B-15 asks in alarm before she goes too. Sylvie says "there's nowhere left to go" and spaghettis too, leaving Loki alone in the disappearing room, clawing frantically at the strings in the air. He screams and the room resets abruptly to a few seconds ago when it was just him and Sylvie left. She repeats that there's nowhere left to go and he looks around in creeping realization and waves his arms, timeslipping to even further back when she first entered the room. She repeats her lines while Loki registers what happened. "I did it," he announces. He turns to AD and says he figured out how to control the slips. "It's not about where, when or why. It's about who. I can rewrite the story."

And apparently he decides to start by snapping back to the moment when Victor was headed down the stairs in the control room. We only get a moment to register this before going to credits.

Chrissy: I think I've seen this film before. I didn't like the ending.
Diandra: [sigh] We ALMOST got through a whole episode without doing that.
Chrissy: Yeah, I noticed.

Chrissy: No comment from the writer about characters taking control of their own story?
Diandra: Any writer, even a fanfiction writer, knows they always do. I once tried to write a smutty one shot and the characters were like "nah, we're gonna turn this into a fight" and I had to stop before one of them stormed out of the room.
Chrissy: Was this Jack and Sawyer by any chance?
Diandra: Yeah, good guess. Anyway, I've learned that it is best to not try to control things TOO much. The story works best when you focus on the plot and surroundings and know the characters well enough to see how they will interact within the environment. A better example, I guess, considering what franchise we're working with here is my MCU story "Destiny". I needed Tony and Loki to interact (not sexually, shut up), but I couldn't figure out how to get Tony to just shut up and listen and NOT try to blow Loki's head off. The answer turned out to be changing the other people in the room. Not only did I get through that scene, I was able to have multiple great interactions between the two after that. And I've forgotten where I was going with this.
Emilio: Meh. Who cares?
Chrissy: So you're letting Doctor Strange and Loki dictate how that story you're working on right now is going?
Diandra: Please stop doing that.

Episode 6: Glorious Purpose (or: I Got You Babe)

The previouslies start with the line the episode title comes from. Specifically, the introduction from "The Avengers". There's also stuff from last season of the conversation about Loki's destiny and He Who Remains saying if one of the Lokis doesn't take over for him there WILL be another multiversal war between variants of him and they'll all end up back at the citadel at the end of time thanks to a sort of reincarnation. Then they flash quickly through one of the moments Loki tried to stop Sylvie from killing HWR and her saying "you want the throne". Then we do a runthrough of the plan that they were trying that failed and spaghettified one of HWR's variants and Loki discovering he can travel through time and switching tactics, time slipping to just before it all went wrong.

Some techno music accompanies the Marvel title card, playing backwards. Cute. And then we pan through the technicolor chaos outside the loom control room and the music sort of blends into the siren going off. We go through the window as we catch the end of OBs instructions to Victor, which we are now seeing from a different angle. Victor goes down the stairs chanting "time to be brave" and Loki jolts as he timeslips back into himself. "I'm back," he mutters. Mobius concernedly asks if he's okay over there.

Chrissy: Oh, just having an out of body experience.

The scene repeats exactly as before, although Loki no longer assures everyone that Victor is gonna make it. The blast doors open, Victor runs out and seems to get further this time before shrieking. We don't see him spaghetti, but we do hear what the closed captioning describes as "squelching" before threads start blowing back inside.

Inside, everyone is stunned and babbling about the radiation level being too high. Loki marches over to OB and asks what they could have done differently. "We took too long," OB thinks. Loki says "again, faster" and a disco version of Beethoven's Fifth starts playing as we snap back to the moment Victor got to the top of the stairs. Loki snaps back into himself again and takes over before OB can finish instructions because I guess he thinks THIS is the part they need to do faster. He jogs down the stairs with Victor, saying they need to do it faster "this time". Mobius asks out loud what he means by "this time", but Loki is already out of the room.

Victor spaghettis and Loki snaps back to the top of the stairs and they do it again with him trying to talk twice as fast before OB even opens his mouth. For supposedly being smart, it takes Loki this many tries to figure out that faster isn't the answer. He needs to slip to an EARLIER time.

Chrissy: Although I should really be careful here, because if I do this TOO much I risk turning Batman into George Clooney and NO ONE WANTS A REPEAT OF THE NIPPLE SUIT.
Diandra: ........I wish I didn't get that reference.

He goes back to the conference room Ravonna was holding Victor in and asks Miss Minutes for help in finishing the throughput multiplier faster. There's a beat of everybody blinking at him like '....the what now?' Smash to him and Casey dragging Victor into the control room, then a quick cut of him standing by the computer with "skin?" written on it while everything goes sideways anyway. Back to dragging Victor to the control room (with Sylvie this time) while Loki mutters "I wasted time and now the time wastes me." Because of course now that they are actually giving Tom more input, Loki is gonna quote Shakespeare. Then he's yelling through the door for Victor to not set the Multiplier down and the Loom is exploding. "Again," he sighs. There's a bunch of quick cuts of him saying "again" in various locations and yelling frustrations at the door and Victor turning to spaghetti over and over.

Chrissy: Really missed an opportunity to use "I Got You Babe" on the soundtrack.
Diandra: Yeah, we're not going for parody here. If there were clocks I would expect the same in joke that was used in "Doctor Strange", but...
Chrissy: Just keep making a case that those two characters should meet again, don't you?
Emilio: They do have a lot in common. But it might be easier to get Doctor Strange and Everett Ross to meet, which is what *I* want to see happen now. Are we recapping "Secret Invasion", by the way?
Diandra: We'll...talk about that later.

The music and quick cuts stop and we're back in OBs lab when Loki first brought Victor in. He introduces them to each other in a way that suggests he has done this several times already. "Ouroboros, this is Victor Timely. Victor Timely, this is Ouroboros. Guess what? The TVA Handbook? You both wrote it. Isn't that amazing?" He marches toward the model hidden under a cloth while Sylvie asks why he's being so weird all of a sudden.

Chrissy: I don't know what you're talking about, I'm perfectly sane.
Chrissy: I said weird, not crazy.
Chrissy: Oh. Are you sure? I swear I heard someone say the other thing.

Loki unveils the model and says they need to hurry up and get Victor suited up so he can fix the loom. Victor splutters and asks why HE has to do it. Loki says because he volunteered. Or he will. Has did will volunteer. Because he knows how the multiplier works and don't worry about it, it will make sense when we get there. Loki walks through the plan with the model. OB objects that the multiplier isn't ready yet. Loki fishes Victor's device out of the bag he's wearing and says it will "widen the temporal input and invert the temporal decay".

OB says it will take time to adapt that thing. Loki asks how long it will take. OB doesn't know since he's never seen that thing before. Loki recognizes the unavoidable hiccup in speeding up the plan here and asks how long it would take HIM to know everything OB knows about mechanics, physics and engineering so he could do it himself. In the background, Victor is staring at him wide-eyed and chuckles. OB asks how much he knows already. Loki says probably not much, but "I'm a fast learner and I'm a god." OB says decades. Victor corrects that it would take centuries. Loki stares at them, the screen goes black and the chyron says "centuries later". In all fairness, he DID add the part about being a god, so. Yeah.

Everyone follows Loki into the control room, Casey babbling about him having weirdly advanced understanding of engineering all of a sudden and suggesting he let OB test the device in his hands first. Loki just says it's fine and drags Victor over to the temporal scanner and sticks his own head in first to prove it's safe. It bleats loudly and a voice declares "access denied". He takes Victor's glasses and walks him through the process. OB notes that it's worse outside than he thought and asks who's going to do this. Loki says Victor volunteers and walks him through the instructions again without even waiting for OB to try to do it. He adds a couple details that probably hint at problems they've had in previous iterations: "tape your right thumb, left knee and faceplate or the temporal radiation will peel your skin off. Watch the first step. Trip hazard...whatever you do, do NOT set the multiplier down, or it will roll off the gangway."

Chrissy: At what point do you realize it would be easier if you did it?
Diandra: A couple more times. For dramatic reasons. And also because this would be a really short episode if he figured that out now.

Loki joins OB and Casey at the computer panel to vomit up some technobabble and prove that he really has spent centuries becoming an expert in this shit with Tom talking so fast that the closed captioner just starts dropping words. "No, it's not going to overheat because we're going to allow it to interface with Timely's adaptive exponential computing system. With all those upgrades, it will allow the loom to scale the capacity to manage the branches."

Chrissy: I love how Eugene is just staring at him like 'do NOT say anything and risk ruining the take'.

And then because we haven't done this enough already, he does the dumbed down explanation of expanding rings, gesturing with his hands...

Chrissy: And now *you're* giving me a look like 'say one word and it will be the last thing you ever say.'
Diandra: Oh, good, you are learning.

Mobius starts to say OB better watch out because "someone's coming for your job," Loki finishes. He hands the multiplier to Casey, who runs off to give it to Victor. Mobius just grabs Loki by the lapels and asks "what the shit are you doing?"

Chrissy: I know you don't remember all those nights (and some days) we've had over the centuries so you don't know how this bossy side of you turns me on, but we do NOT have the time right now.
Diandra: ...........
Chrissy: What? You think I've been spending all that time JUST becoming the smartest person in this entire franchise? I have NEEDS.
Diandra: You get that out of your system?
Chrissy: I mean, it's been many iterations since I grew bored of both you and Sylvie and had to go find this one sorcerer who presented a much more satisfying challenge...
Diandra: Okay, you can stop anytime now.
Chrissy: Of course once the initial thrill of animosity wore off, we had to get creative. He called me a time lord and I called him Master.
Diandra: And now we're writing a crossover for some reason?
Chrissy: Nah, just a kinky Earth roleplay thing. And while I was looking that up, I found this whole Omegaverse thing, which...did I mention I'm a shapeshifter?
Diandra: Please. I'm begging you. STOP.
Chrissy: [makes "expanding the rings" gesture everybody has been doing]
Diandra: That wouldn't even work unless they were BOTH shapeshifters and OH MY GOD WHY AM I GETTING SUCKED INTO THIS AGAIN?!
Chrissy: HA! I knew I could see the plot bunnies hopping in your head.
Diandra: I am NOT writing this. Stop pushing your luck.

Loki tells Mobius it's fine, to just trust him, he knows what he's doing. Mobius is like 'see, that's the problem right there.' Loki picks up a microphone and reminds Casey to latch Victor's helmet. Casey does and returns to find Loki taping at a keyboard absently while a PA voice says "access denied. Password requi- password accepted."

Chrissy: By the way, the password is now "omegaslut". Don't ask.

From the airlock, Victor voices concern that this is all a bit...rushed.

Emilio: Are we sure it's a good idea to just blow open the ring this fast?
Diandra: Oh, come ON. Don't YOU start.
Chrissy: When did he ever stop?
Diandra: [strained groan]

Loki assures him it's fine and "if you stop, you die." He stands at the view window flanked by everyone while the blast doors open and Victor goes out into the radiated hellscape. He hits a wall of resistance, but stays intact this time, staggering down the walkway while Loki robotically repeats instructions and tells him he's being brave.

Victor makes it to the launcher, kneels and starts setting the heavy multiplier down. Loki yelps at him like 'this is what I was warning you not to do!' To prove the point, Victor doesn't even let go fully before it starts rolling toward the edge of the walkway. He catches it and picks it up again, loading it into the launcher with a lot of grunting and yelling. The launcher spins and he pushes the green button, but it just makes a groaning noise. He looks back at the control room and Loki just calmly repeats that he should hit the button because "it can be a little sticky."

Chrissy: That reminds me...
Diandra: NO!

Victor slams the button and the multiplier launches into the loom. Loki starts getting excited like this is the first time they've gotten this far and orders Victor to hurry back, laughing and babbling that it's actually going to work this time. Victor makes it back inside, the suit smoking and Loki throws down the microphone and applauds. For some reason, Victor decides to punctuate this moment by saying "pumpkins."

Everyone is celebrating the victory as the loom wobbles and enlarges in the distance. Casey declares that the device is integrating and weaving the branches, stabilizing. "DID IT WORK, WIZARD," Victor asks as he comes back up the stairs. Loki says yes and turns him to look at the window, slapping him on the back and maybe starting to cry again. Then the music turns dissonant and OB notes that the readings on the computer are "off". Loki comes over to see why they are STILL managing to fail this time as OB announces that the loom is overloading again. Loki smashes some keys, the computer bleats and he smacks the side of it, yelling that that ISN'T POSSIBLE. OB meekly notes that while the multiplier DID work to increase the capacity, there are still just too many branches for it to handle.

Emilio: Yes, despite all the enlarging, there's only so much it can handle before it gets all tired and overused and unable take any more. I'm sure you can relate.
Diandra: You know, if I didn't love this show I would be so tempted to just leave and let the two of you finish this recap.
Emilio: Sorry. Continue.

Victor says the branches are duplicating at an infinite rate, so "it's a scaling problem." OB says that's exactly what they were trying to account for though. Victor says it's not possible. The loom CAN'T accommodate an infinitely expanding multiverse. "You can't scale for infinite. It's like trying to divide by zero." Loki sags to the floor as he realizes that they can never expand the loom enough. Which should probably have been obvious centuries ago, but I guess he was too focused on the plan. "It's almost as if as soon as the timelines started branching, this was doomed to happen," Sylvie notes. Victor slumps to the floor, says "I'm sorry" and they all watch as the loom explodes again.

This is probably how Loki gets a new angle of approach because before the fireball can completely consume the control room we snap back to the fight at the end of the first season. Loki steps between a charging Sylvie and He Who Remains, throwing down his dagger. We seem to repeat the same conversation, but slower. He says he's been where she is and felt what she felt and then flinches as he timeslips into himself. He takes a second to register the moment and he's suddenly a whole lot less calm and composed. He shoves her halfway across the room. She stares at him and asks what the hell is happening here. What was THAT. He rants that she was right to not trust him because he CAN'T be trusted, but she has to BELIEVE him now that she can't do this or everything is gonna end and he knows because he has SEEN IT HAPPEN.

Chrissy: I CAN SEE THE END BEFORE IT BEGINS.
Diandra: [heavy sigh]
Chrissy: Say you'll remember me, Mobius!
Diandra: If you say anything about red lips and rosy cheeks, so help me...
Chrissy: No, I can wait until you make them that way, Daddy.
Diandra: Stop with the Daddy thing!
Chrissy: Oh, but you're cool with the rest of that? Interesting. Just so we're on the same page, you do understand that when I say "cheeks"-
Diandra: You don't mean the ones on your face. Yes. I am distressingly familiar with how your brain works by now, Chris.
Chrissy: Would it be better if you were doing your other roleplay?
Emilio: Didn't we run that scenario at some point? Stephen's hands aren't exactly in good condition for that sort of thing.
Diandra: No, which is why it is the other way around in that accidental voyeur fic that...fuck.
Chrissy: Excuse me, what's this now?
Diandra: Nothing. I didn't say anything.
Emilio: Is this that fic you were telling me about?
Diandra: [frantic shushing gestures]
Chrissy: [chortling victoriously] Oh, we are definitely talking about this later.
Emilio: She'll probably wait until you're at work and send you a text about it that starts "by the way..."
Diandra: I said I was sorry about that.
Emilio: Meh, I wasn't complaining.
Chrissy: Yeah, we both know the hazard of being friends with you by now. I wouldn't still be prompting your muse if I wasn't prepared to find a random text one day that goes something like "so if I want to write Tony being fisted it would have to be FrostIron and not FrostStrange, right?"
Diandra: And again, I said I was sorry. I didn't know you were visiting your grandmother that weekend.
Chrissy: Oh, my grandmother knows me and my friends. And she agreed with my answer: "why not have both?" [ETA: and that's how this happened.]

Sylvie orders him to get out of the way, but he blocks her progress with a hand on her chest. "You've been seduced by a throne," she snarls.

Chrissy: Wasn't there a picture of sorcerer supreme Loki manspreading on a throne in one of the comics?
Diandra: Can we PLEASE just get through this scene?
Chrissy: This scene is gonna take up the next big chunk of this episode. Don't worry about it.

He yells that a throne is the last thing he wants and orders her to stop. She says the only way he's going to get her to stop is by killing her. They fight a bit more, only now instead of elegant swordsmanship they're just punching each other. Once he's flat on his back halfway across the room, we focus on him as the soundtrack features a squelching noise, followed by HWR's ominous promise to "see you soon."

We flash through a couple repeats of them fighting and Sylvie saying he'll have to kill her if he wants to stop her, always ending the same way. Then we go back to the elevator where they first met HWR. Loki timeslips just before Sylvie lunges at HWR. Then a couple more iterations. She starts fighting dirty and kicks him in the crotch before trying to THROW the dagger at HWR from across the room. Loki magic boomerangs it back, Sylvie repeats he'll have to kill her and he just lets go and watches in resignation as she stabs HWR again. Flash through a couple more iterations as he starts getting tired, finishing her sentence for her like "I'll have to kill you. I know." He turns to HWR and asks why he just SITS there and never does anything to try to stop her.

Emilio: Because I am stuck in this place forever with a sadistic clock that only knows how to play chess and complain about not having a body so I will take any entertainment I can get.

HWR picks up a device from the desk and swipes it. Sylvie freezes mid sword slash at Loki. "So, how many times have you been at this," he asks. Loki asks what's happening. HWR laughs that he hasn't figured out how to pause time yet. He assures "lover boy" that Sylvie is fine before swiping something else that makes her disappear. "This isn't the first time we've had this conversation, is it?"

Chrissy: Is that rhetorical?
Emilio: Humor me.

Loki asks how he knew about the time slipping. HWR reminds him of the whole 'I paved the road that led you here' thing. "Aww, kiddo, did you really think I was just gonna sit back and let her kill me and that'd be it?" He reminds him of the reincarnation thing. Loki quotes a poem: "we die with the dying, we're born with the dead." HWR frowns like 'oooooookay. Sure.'

Emilio: You're talking shit for the hell of it.
Chrissy: Ask me what I learned from all those years. Ask me what I earned from all those tears.
Diandra: Why does this sound familiar?
Chrissy: Karma is a cat purring in my lap 'cause it loves me. Karma is my boyfriend, Karma is a god, Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend. Karma's a relaxing thought.
Diandra: Jesus. How does this have anything to do with what is currently happening?
Chrissy: KARMA IS THE THUNDER RATTLING - okay, sorry. You can go back to the recap now.
Diandra: You know, I'm starting to think this is just a stall tactic because you don't want this to be over.
Chrissy: .....maybe.

"This is a lot for you," HWR says. "I get it. So why don't you just go through this a couple thousand more times, get your bearings and then you just...you just let me know when you're ready to have a conversation." Sylvie reappears, staggering and confused about what just happened. Loki holds up a finger and she freezes again. "And what makes you think this is the first time we've had THIS conversation," he smartasses. HWR chortles and compliments him. "You're my favorite." Loki pulls up a chair while HWR makes Sylvie disappear again. HWR asks how Victor T-t-t-timely is doing and "imitates" him to guess that they are having some some some sort of problem with the Temporal...Loom. Loki grumbles that there's a scaling problem. HWR snorts that no, that's not it. The temporal loom is just a failsafe. If it overloads, it just deletes ALL the branches off the Sacred Timeline. The TVA is just "collateral damage" that is easily rebuilt. Loki laughs somewhat hysterically and mutters about all the wasted time.

HWR says by the way, his variants are all already out there somewhere, obviously. Loki says they will find them. HWR says there's WAY too many, but obviously Loki has proven he is willing to take a shitload of time on this. HWR says it won't matter. "Never stopped me before," Loki snots. HWR smiles and says he knows, but the outcome is always going to be the same. He will always lose. "I know," Loki says.

Chrissy: And I can keep losing over and over on an endless loop until you get tired of this repetitive hell. Why does this sound familiar?
Diandra: DORMAMMU, I'VE COME TO BARGAIN.
Chrissy: Oh, right. And again, we're proving just how similar they are.

Loki stands up and paces. "Shake it off," HWR taunts.

Chrissy: Okay, that can't have been an accident, right?
Emilio: I can't help it. It's like I got this music in my mind sayin' it's gonna be alright...
Diandra: Players gonna play and haters gonna hate.
Chrissy: Aww, look at the Absent Minded Recapper trying over there.
Diandra: Shut up. I actually know this song.

Loki comes to the conclusion that he can still change the equation by breaking the Loom. HWR frowns and notes that that is PREVENTING the multiversal war "where nothing survives. Not even the sacred timeline." So...what does that accomplish? He argues that every moment of peace anyone has ever experienced was only accomplished by him sitting here at the end of time making sure the Sacred Timeline wins, so what does Loki think is going to happen to those friends he's so concerned about if he destroys that? Loki doesn't have an answer. Then HWR breaks out a line that would have made my grandfather's skin crawl: "I make the tough choices. That's why I get the big chair." Because he is very much like the war time generals who made the decisions about who got to live and who got to die like they weren't even dealing with actual human beings but just pieces on a chess board from behind a desk and used the "making tough choices" line to excuse sending men off to certain death. The guys my grandfather said should never be able to rest easy again.

HWR claims that what he's really offering here is "mercy". Loki asks which of them that mercy is for, then insists he WILL find another way. HWR chuckles "okay" and brings Sylvie back from wherever he sent her. "Let's see it. Make the hard choice. Break the loom and you cause a war that kills us all. Game over. Or...kill her. And we protect what we can." Loki goes over to where Sylvie is frozen in place and...

We snap back to the interrogation scene at the beginning of the whole series. Mobius asks what Loki is going to do. Loki says he's gonna finish what he started: "claim my throne." Because he was born to be a King, but has forgotten the part where Odin said only ONE of the brothers would actually have the throne. He jolts, timeslipping into himself as Mobius asks what he would be king of, exactly. He tells Mobius to stop because "I know what this is. You want to know what makes Loki tick? You want to know why I do what I do? Why I have so much range?" Mobius is like '...well, yeah, actually.' But instead of answering anything, Loki just lists all the actions he has planned next. He's gonna write a bunch of stuff down and show him a video of a bunch of relevant moments from his life. "Burdened with glorious purpose. My life was a waste of time." Mobius is like 'uh..........yeah?'

Chrissy: Such a lack of creativity and effort. Don't you want to get your hands dirty? Really work for it? Soften me up? Bring me to tears until I am desperate to answer any questions you want to ask?
Diandra: [sigh] I already regret this. [clears throat] So you want me to torture you?
Chrissy: Yes.
Diandra: ...........................
Chrissy: Oh, come on. You know what I mean.
Diandra: I really wish I didn't.
Chrissy: I will refer you back to the discussion about how much pain I can handle.
Diandra: You would remember that, wouldn't you?
Chrissy: Also, this version of me hasn't met the Grandmaster yet, so I'm a bit more...let's see, "virginal" isn't the right word, but...
Diandra: Oh, for...we're MOVING ON FROM THIS.

Loki says he needs Mobius' help. Mobius is like '...yeah, sure. Okay.' "How do you choose who lives and who dies?" Mobius thinks he's referring to the pruning process, which he says the Time Keepers decide, not them. Loki gives a cliff note version of the whole time keepers and the proper flow of time thing and says he knows the "dogma", but really...they are the ones doing it. Mobius repeats that they prune people to maintain the proper flow of time. "What comfort is that," Loki snaps. Mobius snorts that there IS no "comfort" and offers a story about some hunters on a mission to find a variant. Even though the variant was responsible for thousands of deaths not on the approved Sacred Timeline, it turned out he was just an eight year old boy. One of the hunters hesitated because WHAT THE FUCK and his partner had to prune the kid. But by then it was too late and some hunters died and more variants appeared, all because he lost sight of the "big picture." "Most purpose is more burden than glory. And trust me, you never wanna be the guy who avoids it 'cause you can't live with the burden."

Chrissy: Remember when these things were just dumb action movies?
Diandra: Yeah, but THIS is why some of the Civil War comics were the best. They were this deep.

Loki asks how Mobius lives with it then. "Scar tissue," Mobius half whispers. Fully convinced HE was the hunter, Loki asks what happened to his parter. Mobius says she became a judge and she's the reason Loki hasn't been turned to "dust in a TVA vent." Because she is, of course, Renslayer. Mobius concludes that she knows the things you have to do are sometimes hard. "And by hard, I mean impossible. No, there's no comfort. You just choose your burden." Loki, eyes fully swimming now, thanks Mobius, stands up and reaches to shake his hand. Mobius follows suit in a cloud of confusion and the second he touches Loki's hand, he starts to spaghetti, followed by the entire room while dramatic, emotional music plays.

Back to AD's lab as Don and B-15 spaghetti. We don't see Loki timeslip, but after Sylvie says the line about there not being anywhere left to go, he holds up a finger to stop everything. She looks around and asks what just happened. He says he's taken them outside of time. Also, he has learned how to control the slipping now and he went back to try to fix the loom, but it turns out it was just a failsafe designed to protect the Sacred Timeline. "I'm out of options, Sylvie." He says the only way he's figured out how to insure everything survives is..."if I never kill He Who Remains in the first place," she finishes. She further concludes that that means he has to kill her as she told him during the fight. She laughs that she won't give him her blessing to do it if that's what this is about. He just wants to know what he should do because the choice is take the Sacred Timeline or take the total destruction from Multiversal War and neither of those seems good. She says protecting the Sacred Timeline isn't enough because even THAT is full of death and destruction and injustice and "do you really wanna be the god who takes away everyone's free will so you can protect that?" He asks what good free will is if everyone dies. "And who are you to say we can't die trying? Who are you to decide we can't die fighting?" She reminds him that she spent most of her life living in an apocalypse so she knows that "sometimes it's okay to destroy something." She just leaves it at that, so he has to add that that only works IF there is hope that that thing can be replaced with something better. Having gotten a new idea, he inhales dramatically, timeslips and the entire room spaghettis away again.

Emilio: If you were wondering why this episode is the highest rated of the whole series or even all the MCU shows period...[gestures]
Chrissy: To be fair, it was always kind of like this.
Diandra: Yeah. I previously put it just beneath "WandaVision", but this episode pulled it ahead.

And we're back to Victor sticking his head in the scanner. Loki slips into himself...crap, I just realized how bad that phrasing sounds...

Chrissy: [loud snort] Oh, he would DEFINITELY be familiar with that, yes.

The automated voice welcomes He Who Remains and the blast doors open. Loki backs away and pauses for a minute to look at everyone sadly. He smiles, cries a little and starts going down the stairs himself. Mobius and Sylvie try to follow, but he shuts the airlock. They bang on the door, asking what the HELL he thinks he's doing. He turns and delivers a line that is apparently entirely Tom in a call back to a line from the first "Thor" movie. "I know what I want. I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us." They yell protests as he magics the door open and just walks out totally unprotected, which...we've already established he can and that's why we were questioning how nobody thought about him doing this earlier, but whatever.

This part is obviously slowed, I suspect because it smooths out any jerkiness of human movement and gives the illusion of more resistance than a couple wind machines can provide. After a few steps, the suit he's been wearing the majority of this episode peels away the same way the protective gear has been every time anyone goes into the temporal radiation zone. It is replaced magically by the one outfit we haven't seen from the show's poster, meaning this was a spoiler.

Horns grow from the "crown" in the design of the citadel at the end of time because that's probably what it's actually made of. He powers up whatever magic energy, channels Richard E. Grant's Loki and screams, exploding the loom. Ropes of timeline go everywhere and everything turns black. He looks around for a minute, grabs the nearest bundle of threads and sends a jolt of green energy through it. He lets go and it floats away, the green fizzling out and turning it black again.

Because we need someone to play Greek chorus and explain what's happening here, we go to the dark control room where everyone else is watching breathlessly. OB explains that the branches are "dying".

Back outside, Loki grabs a couple of branches and brings them back to life with bursts of green energy again. The light travels along a web and a light reappears in the distance. He looks back at the group one more time and steps past the broken walkway onto an invisible staircase.

From the perspective of everyone inside, he disappears through a rift of light and all the threads seem to follow before the rift itself disappears. They all look at each other, puzzled. Except Sylvie, who tearfully smiles and says he's giving them all "a chance".

The screen goes black and then we switch to the other side of that rift, where Loki is still climbing the stairs, gathering ropes of timeline and dragging them along. At the top of the "stairs", outside the broken remains of the citadel, a "throne" forms with the same black marble with gold vein pattern. He sits on it, the threads swirling around him and brings the two handfuls together in front of him where they explode into a network of newly lit fibers. We pan out to see it kind of looks like the loom. And then the camera rotates like 'whoops, no, wrong angle' and it's a tree. And yeah, it looks like Yggdrasil, but I'm not about to over analyze that and make this recap even longer than it already is.

Although apparently there is some canon basis for this too.

The screen goes black and this time the chyron just gives us a vague time stamp of "after". B-15 enters that monitor room at the TVA, which has gone back to a calm normal, but the monitor now shows a tree of timelines. She finds OB and Casey working on a new and improved Miss Minutes. Presumably. B-15 looks at the cheerful clock on the desk warily and asks if they're sure she won't...um... "try to kill us all?" OB helpfully finishes. He looks at Miss Minutes and shrugs noncommittally.

Chrissy: Great.
Emilio: Hey, I just do what I'm programmed to do. If something goes wrong, it must be human error.
Diandra: All hail Skynet! I mean...uh...DEATH TO HUMAN SCUM...sorry...still working out the bugs...

B-15 mutters that that's not exactly encouraging, but gets distracted from this as she spots Mobius at his desk just staring into space.

Casey heads for the war room, telling her he'll save her a seat. She goes over to Mobius to see if he's okay. He animates like 'oh, I was just thinking about these reports and NOT moping about how I lost my best friend shut up.'

Chrissy: Awww. Love you too, big guy.

He hands her a file on the "variants of He Who Remains". B-15 asks if any of them know about the TVA yet. Mobius says it doesn't seem like it, but "one of 'em caused a little bit of a ruckus on a 616 adjacent realm." He says "they" handled it.

Chrissy: Oh, here we go again. Everybody brace yourselves.
Diandra: Yeah, I'm going to have to give up on this ever making sense. I thought briefly that they might be retconning a fix by calling the MCU 616 "adjacent" instead of actually the 616. But it looks like that just refers to the quantum realm and we're still determined to label the MCU the 616 even though some of the actors are with the fans on this and the last Spider Verse movie had a line that went something like "those idiots who think they're in the 616."
Emilio: Didn't they say the first SpiderVerse took place in the 616?
Diandra: Somebody did. And then in the second movie they said it was actually 1016 or something with contamination from 42 (a number I remember for obvious reasons). I don't really understand why the writers of the MCU are so determined to overwrite the 616 designation instead of just picking a different number when the Sony movies are demonstrating how easy it is, but here we are.
Chrissy: Maybe they ARE trying to deliberately overwrite everything that happened in the comics 616 like it never happened?
Diandra: Which would probably erase everything that was great about the Civil War and replace it with the (necessarily) anemic version of these movies. Lovely.
Emilio: What was it you just said about not making this recap longer than it needs to be by getting into debates?
Diandra: Damnit. I'm sorry.

B-15 asks if he's going to join them in the war room. He says he'll meet her there, then reaches for a variant file on the edge of his desk after she leaves with a post-it note indicating he requested it specifically. He doesn't open it, so we don't see what's inside.

Mobius finds B-15 staring at the mural of the time war and the time keepers surrounding the sacred timeline and exposits that Casey is working on getting that taken down. Mobius shrugs that it might serve as a reminder. "Those who do not remember the past are, you know..."

Chrissy: Bound to vote Republican?
Diandra: Actually, as far as I can tell that's more generational than it is political these days. But we just got away from a rant. Let's not start a new one.

B-15 starts to talk about what happens when they go into that room and Mobius starts to say something, but gets choked up or something. B-15 explains to the audience that he has decided to leave them. Mobius blathers about how the TVA won't miss a "tired, old, washed up analyst." B-15 says some of them will.

Chrissy: Notice how she doesn't try to contradict any of that.

Mobius says he just wants to see what it is they are protecting down there. B-15 assures him he will always be welcomed back if he changes his mind. She sniffs and starts to walk away, then turns and asks if he's "scared." He says yes, absolutely.

Mournful synth music plays as we montage over B-15 going into the war room full of people who look much happier than they did on previous iterations, OB opening a box full of TVA handbooks, little Victor in the 1800s NOT getting the handbook thrown through his window and just going about his life as he was supposed to, and Renslayer waking up in the void next to the "for all time always" emblem and immediately having to face down Alioth.

We see Don playing football with his kids from a distance, which he stops to go have dinner after the one that is supposedly on his team tries to tackle him. We zoom out to show Mobius watching from across the street. Sylvie finds him and notes that this is weird without Loki isn't it? But hey, gotta go. See you around sometime, maybe.

Chrissy: I see some of you will have no trouble moving on without me.
Chrissy: Oh, pffffttttt. We're immortal and you're not really dead.

Mobius asks where she's going, but she doesn't really know. She asks where he plans to go. "I might just wait here for a little bit," he says sadly. "Let time pass." She pats him on the shoulder and leaves via time door.

The screen goes black briefly, then to a lazy synth version of the main theme, we pan through masses of green ropes to where Loki is sitting, alone at the center of the multiverse and Tom tries not to cry for a minute.

For the same reason there was no post credit scene for "Endgame", there is none here either. The ending of a (very similar) redemption arc allowed to stand on its own without immediately lurching forward to the next thing.

Chrissy: And all the guys who sneered about Loki being "retconned" away from villain status suddenly embraced the fact that he had the same arc as Tony and gushed about how amazing this show is.
Diandra: Were those the same guys? I kind of doubt THOSE guys even watched this show (or any of the "woke" Disney plus offerings).
Emilio: But if it was, they could always point out that it isn't the SAME Loki. That Loki died in "Infinity War".
Diandra: Right, which is the thing you could point to as an argument against this nonsense of not bringing back Robert Downey Jr. for a cameo because it would negate Tony's sacrifice somehow. Like I said when we were recapping "Multiverse of Madness", if they wanted to have a variant of Iron Man, they could have just HAD HIM PLAY A VARIANT OF IRON MAN. I don't know where fans got off on that insane Tom Cruise kick.
Chrissy: Yeah, speaking of that...I'm starting to feel like I'm not going to have a place in these recaps pretty soon the way my role play characters keep getting written out.
Diandra: Considering the way you keep managing to invoke characters who are not in whatever we are actually recapping, I'm sure you'll manage just fine.
Emilio: And Loki isn't dead. He's just like the watcher now: always present, never seen.
Diandra: Which is a very fitting ending for a character who spent much of Norse mythology tied to a rock with poison dripping on his face. [ETA: or the comics where apparently he was stuck in a tree until somebody cried for him, I guess. See: a couple paragraphs ago.]
Chrissy: Oh, you DO remember other stories about Loki.
Diandra: I never implied I didn't. It's just that the Sleipnir story is my favorite.
Chrissy: Shocker. Can't imagine why that would be.
Diandra: Oh, bite me.

Emilio: So should we talk about the elephant in the room?
Chrissy: Rude. I haven't gained THAT much weight. Ha! Just kidding.
Diandra: I assume you mean the fact that Jonathan Majors will not be returning despite continued discussions of Kang. Yeah, I would say this would have been a perfect time to fix that little problem by saying Loki - as the God of Stories, apparently - is going to make sure Kang never even starts the multiversal war. Somehow. But given their determination to be nonsensical on the whole 616 thing, I would expect them to completely bypass that option.
Chrissy: Well, that and the fact that they apparently have the next two Avengers (or whatever we're calling them) movies already written and Kang is all over them.
Diandra: Yeah, because they NEVER do rewrites.
Chrissy: .........okay, you have a point. Maybe it doesn't matter because, as you've pointed out, the "fans" are trying very hard to tank this whole MCU thing because they don't like how it isn't all about white boys anymore. Wasn't there talk of just renaming "The Avengers" "Iron Man 3" if "Thor" and "Captain America" didn't work out? Maybe they could do that with Doctor Strange 3 now.
Diandra: Yeah. At this point, I'm afraid that's what it would take for me to be able to stop doing these recaps.
Emilio: On that note...can we talk about whether you're recapping "Secret Invasion" now?
Diandra: Eh. My understanding is that all the plot development that happens there was supposed to come AFTER "The Marvels", which I haven't seen yet, because we're still dealing with COVID related continuity problems. I was just going to wait and see if I want to lump those and "Ms. Marvel" (which I also haven't done because I knew it leads into that movie) all together.
Chrissy: We also talked about doing "The Night Manager". Can we go back to that idea?
Diandra: ....................let's do season 2 of "What If" and I'll think about it.