But as Loki himself counters, they may often lose, sometimes painfully, “But we don’t die. This is something of a meta realization, since the Marvel version of Loki was created entirely as a foil for Thor, and all comic-book villains are ultimately there to make the heroes look good. Sylvie fills in details of her backstory that she only alluded to last week, and wonders if the defining trait of any Loki is that they’re destined to lose. It’s definitely a truthful hour for Loki and Sylvie, even when it’s just the two of them sitting on parallel rocks on Lamentis, as they wait for the world to literally crash into them. It’s all a lie, and it takes the combined force of two gods of lying to reveal it as such. And the second is that the Time-Keepers are every bit as ridiculous and fake as Loki suggested when he first came to the TVA: animatronic Hall of Presidents rejects, or a slightly fancier version of the Wizard of Oz’s fake floating green head. The first is that simply telling people like Mobius and B-15 that they are kidnapped, brainwashed variants themselves is enough to seriously disrupt the functions of this place. We don’t find out what Sylvie’s original scheme was to take down the Time-Keepers, but for the moment it doesn’t matter, for two reasons. We travel back in time to see that Sylvie was, indeed, a princess of Asgard, but abducted at such a young age by then-Minuteman Ravonna that she barely remembers it. Where “Lamentis” was almost exclusively about Loki and Sylvie, “The Nexus Event” takes us back into the heart of the TVA offices, bringing Mobius, Ravonna, and Hunter B-15 back onstage. But even if Loki stumbles in its conclusion in a few weeks, we will still have “The Nexus Event,” a thrilling, poignant hour of TV that offered that familiar, reassuring sensation of making everything that came before feel more important as a result of it. Do it wrong and you have, well, the great majority of dramas of the streaming era (including most of the pre-Feige Marvel shows): slowness used to pad the story rather than enhance it, and an endgame that makes the whole feel like less than the sum of the series’ parts, rather than more.Įndings in general are not a Feige specialty, based on most of the MCU movies’ climaxes and the muddled finales to WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Do it right and you have something like The Wire, Breaking Bad, or even the most recent season of For All Mankind : The early chapters seem a bit slow but entertaining enough, and then when the plot really starts to move, everything feels so much more rewarding because of the time the creative team invested putting the pieces in place. That sort of deliberate storytelling is a delicate thing. So Michael Waldron and company arguably devoted half of this brief season to setting up the world, the characters, and the stakes while not a lot was happening overall, trusting that the sheer chemistry between these actors (and, to a lesser extent, the alluring weirdness of the production design) would be enough to keep viewers engaged until they could start paying things off. Last week’s episode, while marvelous, also had to put the season’s main story entirely on hold so we could gain a deeper understanding of Sylvie and the bond she has with our Loki. The first two episodes of Loki at times seemed to be straining mightily under the weight of the exposition Owen Wilson and Tom Hiddleston were asked to deliver about how the TVA works, what happens to variants, how this Loki is different from the one who died in Infinity War, etc., etc., etc. A review of this week’s Lokion Disney+, “The Nexus Event,” coming up - just as soon as a prince tells me how the real world works…Īnd that, folks, is what all that setup was for.
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