Major Spoilers

Loki pursues the Variant and finds himself on a world facing imminent apocalypse…

We left episode 2 with Loki following Loki through a time door to locations unknown. The immediate assumption was they’d gone to far off places for unknown purposes, but in a moment of brilliance we see them loop right back around so Lady Loki/Sylvie can get to the lifts which, apparently, reach the Time Keepers themselves.

If it seems absurd that one can reach the cosmic entities in charge of all of time via an elevator we don’t get to find out if it’s true because Loki number 1 is not prepared to simply let this other Loki have their way without his own plans being considered.

The fallout from this is they end up on a planet far away, one of Sylvie’s hiding spots at the beginning of an apocalypse and with a properly lazy little twist can’t get home.

In some sense this could be a stalling tactic – to slow the show down instead of revealing its core story and while, structurally, that’s completely true, the show manages to deliver an episode which feels anything but an interlude.

The apocalypse they find themselves in is properly worthy of the name – two planets colliding and destroying one another. The shooting of the show has been a highlight for me – each new setting feels complete and distinct, and the location they choose for the apocalypse Loki is trying to avoid dying in? It’s saturated with purples and blues and drained greens. After the yellows, reds and browns of the TVA and the stark white and grey of the Roxxon supermarket, this feels like a wonderfully realised place. Autumn Durald is noted as the series’ cinematographer and props to her for the structure and composition of the show.

These blues and purples are drenched in red and yellow neon and it comes together to create something quite memorable.

Loki and Sylvie navigate their way through this landscape via a series of discussions, with Hiddleston’s Loki desperately trying to understand Sophia di Martino’s Sylvie (who comes across as allergic to the name Loki – with perhaps hints she is not simply a variant of Hiddleston’s version).

Unlike Loki, Sylvie has no care for sharing what she wants or even explaining how her life has differed from his. We get just enough to leave the lingering suspicion that she is not a Loki variant but someone else entirely – not least because her magic is so different and they appear to have no real shared background. Something to keep an eye on I reckon.

What is clear is that they understand one another and that rubs off as uncomfortable for them both. Loki, as a character, has always been delivered as someone so deeply vulnerable that softness is hidden beneath yards of armour. Even when admitting to Thor he might not be all bad, Loki stood there like a child seen and afraid of what the truth might mean for them.

To meet someone who understands your heart entirely is a tricky proposition and Di Martino and Hiddleston are by turns funny and poignant as they explore this. The script is tight and this helps but really it’s the delivery which makes this work for me.

It will be talked about a lot and I’m really happy to see them making Loki canonically gender fluid and bi. There was a blink and you’d miss it notation on his own file about how he identifies in an earlier episode and then, in a lovely section about what love might be, he is very frank about his romantic attachments. It’s complicated because as a one-time villain this could be seen as a marker for his moral deviance, but I’m choosing to see this as something better than that – even if it remains a tiny step in the right direction.

It’s a strange thing, right? This show is not quite an action thriller. It’s not a character study and it’s not a pastiche of other types of show. It’s got elements of all the above but somehow it’s also its own thing. The triumph here is, I think, in how it subtly chooses its own path rather than trying to do something others have done before and looking for the secret sauce.

Sure, it’s a mystery, it’s a conspiracy and it’s got action and comedy but if it resembles anything it’s a show where someone who’s never before come up against a mystery they couldn’t understand finds just that. Not least the TVA which Sylvie makes no bones is fascist and oppressive – they are team evil from her perspective – but also in terms of being faced with themselves. Loki is forced into introspection because he keeps finding himself splayed out for all to see, especially him.

The show is very talky but it’s also delivering that in a way which works for me with thematic call backs to Le Carré and similar bureaucratic spy tales. Unlike The Falcon and the Winter Soldier which had a kind of kinetic velocity or WandaVision which had a single strange mystery at its heart, this is something which is really about who Loki is vs. who he thinks he is. Everything else is just the mechanism for getting his soul on the screen.

On the point about the TVA being oppressive – Sylvie also drops in a bomb about the organisations staff – something which literally stops Loki in his tracks and had my mind immediately going back to questions I had about Mobius. That single reveal opens up many possible directions for this show and how it resolves the monstrous presence of the TVA which sits at the heart of the show like a sun around which everyone is orbiting.

The episode ends on a proper cliffhanger but given where we are in the timeline there’s always the possibility of asking Heimdall for help. Who knows where we go from here?

Rating? 8 defenestrations out of 10.

Stewart Hotston