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Jordan Stokes joins Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather to overthink the current state of the MCU. Or is it the MCM now? Black Widow is kind of a repositioning cruise, so even though the experience is a little disjointed there are things to enjoy. And Loki was a great half-season of television!
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A few Loki checks that were never cashed:
* Why does Sylvie hate being called Loki? Is it just a way to hide? When she originally tells our Loki never to call her Loki I figured there was an interesting story behind that. (Other things I want to find out in Season 2: where does she learn her unique magic and why does she pick the name Sylvie.)
* Sylvie’s whole time bomb from the end of episode 2 seems like it’s going to be a massive deal, but instead it’s just a momentary distraction.
* The idea that the two Lokis having feelings for each other is massively disruptive to the timeline never gets explained.
* Loki asks the other Lokis in the Void if they’ve ever met a female Loki and they are mystified by that idea, which seems interesting. Now of course there’s only one alligator too so maybe not SO weird, but still intriguing.
As for Black Widow, here’s something that’s been bothering me: where does the anti-mind control serum come from? It feels like it should matter, right? Related: when did Rachel Weisz decide to become good and betray the cause she spent her life serving? Because if I’m not mistaken, SHE’S the reason why all those girls are mind-controlled. What are her motivations here? I like Black Widow less and less the more I think about it. No joy and no ambition.
I feel like the “Sylvie doesn’t like being a Loki” comes from an early draft of the script, when either we weren’t supposed to be sure that she was who she claimed or she was scamming her way to the top of the TVA by posing as Loki. I don’t know anything about the show’s development, mind you, but her name comes from the current version of the Enchantress (Sylvie Lushton), who looks a bit like Di Martino, and (in comics) was given her powers by Loki to fight the often-teased Young Avengers.
Jordan’s point about disposability seems to be something of an MCU problem, since all three Disney+ shows also seem to be struggling to get to a metaphor (or statement, in Falcon/WS) about the nature of work in the twenty-first century, but can’t seem to see it through.
As for Loki, it was fun, but felt like the plot and characters took a back seat to the real driving forces of the series: Teeing up Phase 4, showing that they read the wikis (the Thanos-copter and crocodile-Loki being the most prominent), and–tying back to the nature of work–illustrating that any actor can be replaced.
Even Sylvie’s uniqueness seems to refer to an old Superboy (yes, wrong company) comic discussing the multiverse, where we’re told that on other worlds, Smallville’s police chief could be (something like) an old man, a child, a bank robber, an ape, “or even a woman!” There’s a similar weird escalation, here, where Old Loki, Kid “Young Avengers Is Coming” Loki, Barbarian Loki, and Croci are weird, but REALLY weird is the one with the branding sense not to call herself She-Loki or whatever.
I forgot to follow up on the cast. I’d extend the comment about Majors to that entire “middle tier” of the cast. The “Big Three” meet expectations, but the cast made all the character beats of the recurring characters, who we don’t even really know, surprisingly compelling.
As far as the whole Loki/Sylvie relationship goes, I never really understood why this was considered such a timeline-disrupting transgression, either. I guess if you’re playing by Back to the Future rules, you don’t want to touch your other self and potentially destroy the universe? But then if there’s any one thing the MCU has taught us about Loki, it’s that there’s no one Loki loves more than himself.
Also, whoever wrote the show’s final scene was clearly a fan of Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes”.
Isn’t that Timecop rules, actually?
But you’re right. Here again, I feel like they could have done something more interesting with it. Loki-on-Loki action is supposed to be a *huge* disruption, so big that the TVA detects it even in an apocalypse. What sense does that make? Well, one way for it to work is if you think of the timeline of the film (the thing Pete was talking about — the 1st-person timeline that the characters experience as they jump around between the other timelines) as the timeline that has to be preserved. Suppose that Kang really needs Loki and Sylvie to show up at the end of time — suppose, further, that he needs them to show up *with unresolved sexual tension.* If they resolve it, that throws the whole thing off.
Obviously that’s not the road they chose to go down. But it would have made more sense.