Loki recap: Welcome to the Jonathan Majors show

We probably need to have a talk about Jonathan Majors, yeah?

That’s a trickier concept than it probably should be, thanks to the domestic abuse allegations still hanging over the Lovecraft Country star—allegations that broke just as Marvel was really hyping itself up to make him the new face of the entire franchise, in the wake of an extremely eye-catching (and episode-consuming) performance as the man behind the curtain in Loki’s first-season finale. Majors has been dropped by his manager and his PR firm over the last several months, as well as a number of advertising clients and acting gigs. But Marvel has hung tight, a stance that very much includes this week’s Loki, which brings the actor back to the forefront as yet another incarnation of classic Marvel baddie Kang The Conqueror.

Whether Majors should be in this episode is going to come down to personal dictates: Whether his presence generates outright rejection, dissatisfied tolerance, or executive producer Kevin Wright’s own stated goal to not do anything “hasty” in regards to the star’s public fate being a matter of individual morality. But given that Majors is a huge part of “1893”—especially by verbal volume, thanks to his adoption of yet another distracting verbal tic to distinguish this latest Kang from the pack—we do find ourselves needing to come to terms with the performance itself. After being melodramatically teased in the after-credits stinger for Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (revealed, somewhat amusingly, to literally just be a scene lifted straight out of this episode), Victor Timely is now here in the flesh. And he’s…kind of an irritating dork?

Loki, and Majors, do deserve some credit for subverting expectations, rendering Timely far more of a comedic character than his initial introduction might have suggested, an Oz-esque humbug if ever there was one. (There’s even a bit of the Coen brothers to some of his more energetic scenes, all fast-talk and scampering escapes.) But he’s also just a lot to take, as he dodges creditors, makes impulsive decisions, and speaks…in waysthatseem…to…suggest…thathe’scomeunstuckfrom…time. Every scene with Timely seems, for better and worse, to stretch on far more than it feels like it should.

But despite the slapstick, the bumbling, and the seemingly endless affectations on display with Timely’s initial appearance, we do need to acknowledge the clever thing that both “1893” and Majors are doing here. The actor and the script are careful to thread in all the ways this obvious con-man might one day evolve into He Who Remains: that mixture of vision, buffoonish0ness, and hucksterism—cut with a deep desire for isolation, independence, and, above all else, control—laying down the foundation for what might some day make him “the thief of all free will.” By the time he begs Sylvie to spare his life in the episode’s climax—protesting, honestly, that he hasn’t done anything yet—we’ve seen enough to know why she’s wary of her own compassion.

But, whoops, we’ve jumped all over the timeline ourselves—fitting for what is somehow the very first episode of Loki to really take advantage of its time-travel conceit and do some actual damn time traveling for once. Situated in the fabled “White City” of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, the episode is an undeniable visual win, recreating the spectacle of one of the planet’s most famous exhibitions of architectural and scientific prowess, and then dumping Loki and Mobius into the middle of it. (Mobius can’t stop sight-seeing and gorging on fair food; we can’t really blame him.) There’s a fun time-travel romp running in the background here, getting chances to shine whenever it doesn’t get superseded by the show’s actual plot, which sees the pair casing the fair for Renslayer, who’s been bouncing around both the era and the area in an effort to…well…

Real quick, episode viewers: Anybody know what Renslayer is actually trying to accomplish here, at any given moment?

The return of Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Loki is, on the one hand, very welcome: Mbatha-Raw is a talented performer, and she plays the scenes, and the character beats she’s handed as well as can be expected. But Ravonna Renslayer, the character, is an absolute mess, leaping from motivation to motivation as soon as a new one comes into view. She claims to be the embodiment of “order,” but she can’t even muster up to “chaos,” instead landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “completely inconsistent.” That might very well be intentional: Loki has always had “glorious purpose” hanging as an idea in its horned head, and this second season has seen the entire TVA floundering in its effort to figure out what it’s for in a universe not entirely under its control. But “floundering” is a very small-doses flavor, especially when it’s being applied to the closest thing your show has to a genuine antagonist, and the actual result is to make Renslayer feel like a puppet—not of malevolent cartoon AIs or cosmic masterminds, but of the Loki writers themselves.

(We can also chalk this episode’s new version of Miss Minutes up as one of those things that looks better than it works in practice, although there’s at least some genuine menace to Tara Strong’s performance as she slowly lets Victor in on how deeply troubled his former/future AI assistant is.)

As for Loki himself, he feels largely superfluous to tonight’s events, dragged along in the wake of other characters making big (if not necessarily good) choices. His apparently reflexive desire to save the TVA from the CGI Space Wedgie (which only a Kang can fix, hence why Timely is required) remains weirdly under-examined—he’s become less “The God Of Mischief” at this point than “A Nice Man Who Tries To Do Nice Things,” or, at his worst, “The God Of Not All Time Cops Are Bad”—leaving any actual character considerations to fall to Sylvie instead. Sophia DiMartino is up for it, as usual, but Loki’s second season remains weirdly uninterested in Loki himself. (Meanwhile, Mobius eats some Cracker Jacks and has multiple scenes of recrimination with Renslayer that could have been entirely silent for all they stuck in our memories.)

As we alluded to above, the climax all comes down to DiMartino and Majors, Sylvie and Timely, tormented and possible future tormentor. It’s here that Majors reminds us why his initial performance took the fanbase by storm, despite being shot through with odd little performative tricks that he occasionally leans on as a crutch. He sheds enough of the costume to show us Timely the man, vulnerable and true, calmly asserting the right to existence that his other version so cruelly denied Sylvie. And it’s here that DiMartino reminds us why Sylvie has been the heart of this series’ most emotionally resonant moments, an open wound desperately looking for both a place, and a way, to heal. And that’s “1893” for you: moments of incredible beauty (both practical, and emotional), genuinely fun bits of time-travel adventure and comedy, and all of it held together by a lot of very haphazard strings and a web of character actions that don’t build to any kind of coherent whole.

Stray observations

• Old timey Marvel theme during the sizzle reel: extremely cute!
• As it turns out, Timely’s technical abilities are at least in part the result of a time paradox—Renslayer having anonymously given him a copy of O.B.’s TVA manual as a child for him to spend his life obsessing over.
• As usual, we remain at least mildly baffled by Loki’s time-travel mechanics. Do all the Kangs derive from Victor/1890s Illinois, or are they just seeded throughout all of time and space, waiting for something to trigger them into megalomania? (Also, 1868 is listed as the Sacred Timeline, but 1893, after the handoff of the book, is a Branched Timeline, which is…interesting.)
• Interesting to note that the Loom is only holding steady because of Dox’s temporal genocide last episode; it’s so hard to pin down this show’s actual moral stances, given that she appears to have genuinely saved the TVA, at least for today.
• Not much Ke Huy Quan tonight, but O.B.’s deeply relieved “Really? Oh that is such a relief!” when Mobius questioningly says “We can hack the system…” is very funny.
• “Thor’s not that tall.”
• “I didn’t give the man this book!” (followed by immediately tossing Timely the book).
• The big Miss Minutes feels like one of those things that’s in the show solely so it can go in the trailer. (Her jealous eyerolls are a treat, though.)
• “Why are the two of you not in cahoots with him and his butler?”
• Very creepy effect as Miss Minutes overlays onto the mannequin’s head.
• Sylvie ends the episode with one of the most unconvincing “I’m not going to kill the bad guy even though I could” speeches of all time. Stranding the bad guy at the End Of Time works a lot better when you don’t leave her with a TemPad and the evil time-controlling AI!