Loki season 1, episode 2 review: The Variant

Loki returns with a second episode that stops to catch viewers up on the mythology and propels the narrative forward. Does it succeed?

Loki episode 2, titled “The Variant,” continued the trippy, complicated tale of everyone’s favorite Asgardian trickster played by Tom Hiddleston.

Following his Avengers: Endgame escape in 2012 NYC, he was promptly arrested in the Gobi Desert by soldiers (called Hunters) from the Time Variance Authority (TVA), meeting the judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbathma-Raw) and Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), while teasing a hooded figure appearing throughout time and disappearing just as quickly.

Mobius enlists our Loki’s (called Professor Loki to keep track) help in tracking this figure, which he believes is also a version of Loki.

The office/jail setting of the TVA, like Wanda’s version of Westview, and somewhat like Pixar’s Incredibles and the hospital settings of the FX TV series Legion, seems somewhat stuck in the 1950s.

What happened in Loki episode 2, “The Variant”?

Globe-and-time-hopping: hooray!

After visiting France in the Middle Ages in the previous episode and a pre-American Civil War oil field in what becomes the eastern Oklahoma town of Salina, “The Variant” opens in 1985 Oshkosh, Wisconsin, during a Renaissance Faire, where a Hunter designated C-20 is kidnapped by the hooded figure.

Other sites that become important to the plot include Pompeii, Italy, just before Mount Vesuvius explodes in 79 AD, and the fictional southern Alabama town of Haven Hills in 2050.

One bulldozer full of exposition, please

As the second episode of six, Loki episode 2 has a ton of exposition to dump into viewers’ laps; much more so than usual due to the incredibly confusing nature of time travel in general, the previous contradictory MCU sort-of-explanations of it (thanks Agents of SHIELD and Endgame), and the purgatory outside-of-time nature of the TVA in particular.

This is where the “kind of alive, kind of hologram” animated clock Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) comes in handy, as she breezily explains that a Nexus event (something that is a fixed point in timelines) can, if meddled with, cause the timeline to destabilize and, if left unchecked, redline, becoming so volatile that it destroys reality.

But because Nexus events (and people) have to exist, this is why the TVA rules require them to come in ASAP afterward in realtime, cleaning up the damage as quickly as possible through the use of a reset charge, which erases this branching timeline.

The hooded figure, or Loki variant, has been stealing reset charges throughout their appearances, though taking hostages is a new tactic.

Internal strife and bureaucracy

Mobius is a little unconventional, according to Renslayer and the Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku), and this has led to strife at times with both of these frequent co-workers, particularly the wisdom and ethics of using a known liar, whose role in the so-called “sacred timeline” may be that of a “evil scourge,” to capture…itself, essentially.

Professor Loki also questions the role and intentions of the Timekeepers, vaguely lizard-ish godlike beings who maintain the timeline, much like the Fates in Greek mythology, in addition to tweaking Mobius’s curious love of jet skis, even though he has never ridden one.

Together, Loki and Mobius figure out that natural apocalyptic events (volcanoes, hurricanes, etc) provide perfect cover for the variant, since they can do whatever they like before the event happens, since all survivors/witnesses will die anyway.

Kaboom (or should that be Kablooie?)

This knowledge leads to an invasion of a department store in Alabama during a hurricane in an attempt to capture the variant.

After several Hunters are killed, Loki and Mobius are split up on the mission on B-15’s orders, where Mobius discovers C-20, who has revealed the secret location of the Timekeepers. While that rescue attempt is going on, Professor Loki engages in an expository dialogue with the variant, who occupies several different bodies before setting off a bomb and revealing their true form, a woman with jaw-length blonde hair (Sophia Di Martino).

The bomb creates an exponential amount of branched alternate timelines as Lady Loki disappears through a portal, where Professor Loki then follows her after a moment’s hesitation, as Loki episode 2 comes to a close.

While heavy on character maneuvering across the chessboard (as all second episodes tend to do), and despite heavy doses of philosophical pondering, there are enough action sequences to prevent this episode from becoming boring, and the mysteries and general trippy tone continue to bode well for this series.

Loki episode 2, “The Variant,” is well worth watching at the earliest opportunity.

Loki leavings

• A grandiose speech in fluent Latin is hilarious because it’s unexpected.
• Haven Hills is described as a company town for the department store Roxxcart, owned by the Roxxon Oil Corporation, which also has roots in Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter and Cloak and Dagger. This future consolidation of corporate power could be setting the stage for the megacorporations of Miguel O’Hara’s (Spider-Man 2099) version of NYC. Or it could just be that a retail setting stages interesting fight scenes while keeping costs down.
• This Lady Loki could be a female version of Loki, or it could be a character called Enchantress. There are two versions in Marvel Comics, an Oklahoma teenager named Sylvie Lushton who is given her powers by Loki himself, and Amora, an Asgardian sorceress with an equally-seductive sister named Lorelai. Lorelai, it should be pointed out, already exists in the MCU (played by The Gifted’s Elena Satine in SHIELD 1.15, “Yes Men”), which implies Amora does as well.
• While Lady Loki does not appear to be a teenager, other Young Avengers teammates popping up across various MCU Disney Plus shows imply that Sylvie may eventually be introduced.
• “I expect you missed a lot [in the files], as you all here are idiots.” This show has a lot of clever snappy insults.
• According to the Ragnarok file Loki examines in the library, 9,719 people died, which seems an absurdly low population for a major capital city, much less an entire planet. If it was castle staff, possibly it would be reasonable, but that figure is puzzling.
• The Asgardian proverb about staying alert is a nice reference to Fenris the wolf, who appeared as Hela’s lackey in Ragnarok, and the nickname of the Strucker twins in The Gifted. In actual Norse mythology, Fenris is a child of Loki, making it a nice Easter Egg.
• The Kablooie candy evidence was a regional candy made from 2047-51, and the specific variety examined as Blooieberry. Also, Asgardian food culture doesn’t believe in processed snacks, making bites in between meals things like nuts or fruit..
• Much like Thor: The Dark World, this show’s lighting is aggravatingly dark; a sort of twilight/dusk warmth to the backgrounds that leave important people and objects as nearly silhouettes.

Loki episode 3 will debut on Disney Plus on Wednesday, June 23 at 3 a.m. ET.