“Loki” Episode 6 Recap and Review: Nothing a Little Glue Won’t Fix, Right?
By Rob LoAlbo
Photos courtesy of Marvel Studios
So...you’ve broken the sacred timeline.
Don’t panic. (Okay, now might be the perfect time to panic. Just make sure to have your towel handy.)
With only a handful of scenes, a lot of exposition, and the introduction of the next phase of the MCU, Loki was able to do what the other Marvel Disney+ shows couldn’t: close the deal. Sure we didn’t get as many answers as we had hoped for, and that ever-elusive Jet Ski will have to roar its way into our lives a bit later than we thought, but boy oh boy did we get a whopper of an ending for this season.
Strap in and get ready to conquer this week’s episode! (All spoiler edition, of course)
The episode pulled no punches by letting us know that this one is going to engulf the entirety of pretty much everything we know, with an opening reminiscent of Zemeckis’s Contact. Our Marvel logo opens with many of the quotes we all know and love from past movies played over Harry James’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” - the song Peggy and Cap dance to. That then quickly moves to quotes from notable individuals like Nelson Madela, Neil Armstrong, Greta Thunberg, and Maya Angelou, then to silence and ominous sounds as we visit the restaurant (or library?) at the end of the universe. Given the scope of the opening, the hints of universal impact are on full display.
It seems as if all of our Loki’s mischief, trickery, and sense of humor have been used up in the last episode, as he is regulated to straight man for the majority of this episode, reacting to others and being his newly discovered level-headed self. He’s the voice of reason here, which goes to show us how far he’s come. He’s reserved, defensive, and cautious where Sylvie is impulsive and stabby. What could possibly go wrong?
Upon entering, the duo are first faced with the temptations of Miss Minutes (that bitch!) who offers them a sweet deal of a Thanos defeat, thrones, gauntlets, and happiness. No way! They’ve come for answers and aren’t going to give in to her manufactured fictional existence! We want the truth (even if we can’t handle the truth)!
Enter He Who Remans. (Can we just call him Kang? Let’s just call him Kang.) Chomping on an apple for the duration of the conversation (Garden of Eden anyone?), he lays out what exactly has been going on behind the curtain of the Timekeepers.
And Kang’s not the only one slinging secrets around: remember that Franklin D. Roosevelt High School pen? Apparently Renslayer was an administrator back there (because of course she was - could you actually see her in any other job?) and B-15 is showing everyone that they are not who they think they are. (Clever girl!)
MEANWHILE, back in the hall of just-us, Ravonna and Mobius have their little tête-à-tête, where he gets disarmed just a little too easily (more of a paper-pusher than a combat veteran, I guess), and they debate their continuously clashing ideals: stick to the “idealistic” plan despite the number of lies the company throws at you, or think for ourselves and develop a new reality apart from the company’s warped reality. (Hello, Republicans and Democrats, my old friends...) That Renslayer takes off to God knows where and Mobius is stuck cleaning up multiple timelines doesn’t give us any resolution to a seemingly unsolvable issue. It’s a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, and smothered in secret sauce.
And Kang has been a bit of a creepy peeper, watching our dynamic duo go through every little private moment because, duh, he knows everything and designs all of time. So, Loki and Sylvie haven’t actually been choosing their steps, but Kang has been road-paving it for them. It’s the ever problematic God-problem: how can free will exist if we have a being that knows the past, present, and future? If an all-knowing, ever-present being knows all actions and words we will choose, designing the entirety of the universe, how are we any more than just pawns in God’s/Kang’s big game of chess? And if we could choose free will, what does that do to the supreme being? Philosophically it’s a mobius strip, but in the MCU, it spells d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r for our g-l-o-r-i-o-u-s p-u-r-p-o-s-e. Renslayer puts it best: “Only one person gets free will: the one in charge.” Beyond that, it’s a multiverse of madness and chaos. More questions, fewer answers, and 99 problems.
So it’s Jonathan Majors’s Kang who gets center stage for the episode, Matrix 2-ing it for us and explaining the architectural aspects of the universe. (Giving a thoughtfully bravura performance as this version of Kang, it’s a great peek at what the future of Phase 4 will bring us.) He’s from the 31st Century (eons ago? He’s back from the future!), where that variant discovered multiple universes that are stacked on top of one another, so of course they made peaceful contact for all of five minutes until all-out-war began because of a few rotten Kangs. They fought, and when Kang met Alioth, he weaponized it and ended the war - but at the cost of free will, the existence of the TVA, the pruning of time branches, the void, variants, everything. “Stifling order or cataclysmic chaos.” Some choice!
Which brings us to the crux of the entire episode, the decision making moment. Loki and Sylvie are faced with the option of taking over for a retiring Kang and maintaining said order, or assume Kang is lying, kill him, and restore free will. Kang says that infinite variants of himself await should they kill him (hence Kang the Conqueror scheduled to appear in Ant and the Wasp: Quantumania), but should they take over, the world and the TVA are their oyster and they can run it however they want.
And for someone who can’t trust others (Sylvie) and someone who can’t be trusted (Loki), they don’t know how to decide Kang’s fate. Loki thinks there might be truth to all this while Sylvie thinks it’s just another manipulation. Who wins this argument? It’s the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object while Willy Wonka waits for his gobstopper to be returned. Kang seems to have painted them into a corner, with either his reign or his work continuing no matter what they choose. Cut one head off the hydra, and another infinite number of variants spring up.
It’s heartbreaking to watch them fight it out. Loki looks genuinely hurt when Sylvie accuses him of posturing for the throne, and all she can see is revenge. Like watching Steve and Tony fight it out in Civil War, we all thought it was so cool, but really we were begging them to stop and get along. We understand Sylvie’s pain, but the true reward is in seeing Hiddleston’s Loki pass up a throne he’s wanted his whole life. Now THAT’s a character arc! And for the BRIEFEST of moments, when they share that genuine kiss of non-incestuous love, we think that JUST MAYBE it will all work out, until Sylvie zaps him back to the TVA and embraces her destiny by plunging a sword into Kang, who’s last words “See you real soon” might just be the most ominous words ever uttered in the MCU. Time branches will tell.
Sylvie, now lacking in any and all purpose to her life, wonders what she has unleashed, as do we. With Loki back at the TVA, he’s now staring down a giant statue of Jonathan Majors and no one recognizes him. The multiverse is so fractured that he and Mobius have to start all over (goodbye chemistry!). And we are left with all the questions.
That Fiege and company choose a television show to severely alter the MCU for this phase is ballsy to say the least. Anyone without a Disney+ subscription is going to be a might bit confused and pissed (but no more so than Dr. Strange is right now). Fiege has already stated that Kang isn’t going to be the “Big Bad” the way Thanos previously was, so it seems as if our super-people will be fighting with multiple versions of themselves and their worlds. It’s an exciting time to be a Marvel fan!
And could you really see them trying to pull such a heady move in one of their movies? Remember: Kang’s scene where he explains the multiverse, his role in it, and the consequences of multi-dimensional war takes up a whopping 25 MINUTES - we knew this show was talky from the first two episodes, so we should have figured that it would end that way, too. Theater audiences and critics would be throwing their overly buttered popcorn at the screen midway. Turns out television is the perfect medium for these approaches, and Loki proves that major impacts can happen within the medium.
Still, it would have been nice to have had this episode be more than just a platform for the recently Emmy nominated Majors. He’s great, but our investment was always in the titular character. That he’s sidelined is a bit of a shame, but the mid-credits announcement of a season 2 gives us hope for more shenanigans (and Jet Skis). It does a great job of whetting our appetites for more Kang, in whatever conquering form he comes in. And now that the multiversal cat is out of the bag (Schrödinger would be so happy with this episode), maybe we’ll finally get a Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer this week. And up against the other two Marvel television shows, my desire to rewatch here is far greater than the other two. They all had their moments, but Loki is the only one where we didn’t either roll our eyes at the finale or feel betrayed by our investment by the end. It’s a thoroughly satisfying villain-centric series that is right now too far away from its next season.
Next month: The confounding, deeply geeky What If… series begins August 11th! (Marvel is claiming that somehow, this series will impact the MCU - honestly, I just can’t wait to hear Chadwick Boseman’s voice in the Black Panther episode)
Star City Rating for the Series: 4¼ out of 5 for the series' inventiveness, acting, and sheer audacity. And for Gator Loki.