Kudos to Loki for answering a few of its most looming questions with its latest episode—most immediately, “Why the hell was a talented actor like Blindspotting’s Rafael Casal being wasted in a bit part as a goon in the show’s second season premiere?”
As it turns out, there’s significantly more to X-5 (a.k.a. Brad Wolfe) than some sneering comments about Mobius’ jet ski obsession. No, Brad’s got ambitions—specifically, ambitions to find himself a cushy spot on the Sacred Timeline, establish a sideline as a 1970s movie star, and, presumably, party the rest of his reality away. Unfortunately for him, Mobius and Loki crash the premiere of his new horror movie, Zaniac, with the God Of Mischief getting the chance to cut loose with some magic (and menace) for once.
After this energetic opening, “Breaking Brad” slows down for the next phase of its checklist of cop-show tropes—and it remains a little weird that that’s the template the show’s TVA material is hewing to, but it does at least play to Owen Wilson and Tom Hiddleston’s banter-heavy dynamic—by focusing in on L & M’s efforts to, well, break Brad. The goal: Finding out a.) what the rest of the Hunters, last seen arming up for some mysterious operation, are up to right now, and b.) where Sylvie, who X-5 was assigned to hunt down before going temporally AWOL, actually is. Brad, in turn, takes the opportunity to Lector Lecture the both of them, rehashing multiple first-season points about their characters in the process—pegging Mobius as too scared and apathetic to find out who he was before getting Variant-snatched by the TVA, while reminding Loki he’s a murderer and the universe’s designated loser.
Casal, Hiddleston, and Wilson are all good enough performers to imbue these scenes with some necessary energy, as Loki ends up torturing X-5 into submission via threat of gas-operated forcefield squish. (Silly, yes, but we’ll never not be charmed by the retro aesthetics of the TVA.) But these scenes also nod to what’s slowly becoming apparent as one of Loki’s primary weaknesses as its second season picks up steam: the looseness of its character motivations, which feel at times like they can vacillate from scene to scene, and even line to line, as the plot demands. That becomes even more apparent later in the episode, when Loki and Sylvie finally have their first (product placement-friendly) meeting since things went so disastrously sour with He Who Remains. What does Loki want at this point? To find Sylvie? To save the TVA? To preserve the branching timelines? There’s no clear “why” to any of it, beyond it being, vaguely, “the right thing to do,” and it’s dispiriting to see one of the most sharply acted characters in the whole MCU seem to flail around in search of a solid identity.
On a similar note, the show tries to sell the plans of Kate Dickie’s General Dox (who’s recruiting as many Hunters as she can to prune every branching timeline they can get to in an effort to re-establish the Sacred Timeline) as some deeply affecting cosmic genocide. But for as good as Wunmi Mosaku is at projecting Hunter B-15's horror at all these vanishing lines, and the trillions of lives they supposedly represent, it all reads as extraordinarily abstract. Loki has, weirdly enough, never been very dedicated to its sci-fi side, for all the words it spends on it. Sometimes that’s fine (as with last week’s pleasantly breezy Ouroborous conversations), but here it dismantles the show’s ability to make any of those vanishing timelines feel real or weighty. Loki continues to work best on the intimate level, whether it’s Loki and Mobius clawing at X-5's indifferent façade, or the pair sharing some pie and existential dread, or the two time-tossed versions of the show’s central character carving chunks off of each other in a McDonald’s parking lot.
The dynamic between Hiddleston and Sophia DiMartino, absent from last week’s premiere, remains as strong here as it did last season, two people naturally disinclined toward trust or listening trying to convince the other one to trust them and listen. We can laugh about the incredibly distracting product placement, but there’s something compelling about Sylvie’s devotion to her little patch of reality, a place she can stand without the literal bureaucracy of reality showing up to try to murder her. It’s why the character works: Loki might be a pinball, bouncing around existence, but Sylvie has genuine stakes driving her actions, as violent and reckless as they can be. The pair of them finding a bit of connection in order to bring down the Hunters in a blast of Generic CGI Magic at the climax of tonight’s episode actually manages to carry a bit of emotional weight, if only for the potential it represents.
Two episodes in, then, Loki’s second season showcases both its strengths—visuals, performance, a near-giddy sense of energy—and its weaknesses. (Mostly, a plot that meanders restlessly, dragging its characters around behind them as it goes.) It’s fun, undeniably. Casal is an absolute pleasure, combining “asshole co-worker” and genuine threat in equal measure. But this show keeps acting like it wants to be more than that simple fun, making gestures at telling some grander story about purpose and identity—despite the fact that it’s not at all clear that it has such a story inside it to tell.
Stray observations
- We’ll confess to a bit of dumbness on this point, but wouldn’t Brad’s presence on the Sacred Timeline create its own branching point—making it no longer the S.T.? Did he replace the “real” Brad, who was always destined to be a movie star? Aren’t the TVA drones from branched timelines anyway? Is Zaniac CANON?!
- Zaniac is totally canon, by the way, at least for the Marvel Comics universe. Created in the pages of Thor comics in 1982, he’s a slasher movie actor who got hit with a radioactive blast, causing him to believe that he really was his own character and giving him evil super-powers. Comics!
- Seventies London looks great, at least in brief glimpses. More time travel in the time-travel show, please.
- Beautiful costuming, too. Casal rocks Brad’s little scarf, but Hiddleston going Bond mode with the tux and ruffled shirt is an obvious winner.
- “Most of all: Brad’s an asshole.”
- Casal gets a couple of big speeches to dig into, and he has a lot of fun with each of them, hitting Brad at both his most glib and his most vicious.
- This show always makes its sets and props look good, but that luminous key-lime pie was gorgeous.
- “You remember that time I was so angry with my father and my brother that I went down to Earth, and held the whole of New York City hostage with an alien army?” A very funny line that also highlights how divorced this version of Loki can feel from the one in the films.
- Dear reader, can you believe that Loki and Mobius are actually only pretending to fight to trick Brad in their second interrogation sequence? What a shocker, with no possible precedent!
- “You know, you could kill me with that!”
“Could I?” - “Breaking Brad” is pretty light on O.B., but Ke Huy Quan remains very charming in his sincerity in the part, whether he’s screaming that everyone’s going to die or not.
- Whoops, the door to the Big CGI Space Wedgie is locked, and only Jonathan Majors can open it. We’ll get to that eventually, presumably.
- The show tosses a lot of exposition and lampshade hanging at Mobius, but Wilson can be so charming when he needs to be. “Tell me about Zaniac. I saw the poster. It looked scary!”
- No Renslayer tonight, but they do have a ping on her place in the timeline.
- No post-credits sequence, either, but the credits do change to reflect bits and pieces of the episode.