In each of the past two episodes of Loki, Ouroboros warned his colleagues at the Time Variance Authority of the imminent threat that they faced. As a rising number of branching timelines split off from the Sacred Timeline to forge their own histories, the Temporal Loom was being overloaded. “We’re all gonna die!” O.B. screamed, to anyone who would listen. And even with the help of an unlikely ally in Victor Timely, the TVA failed to repair the device before it was too late.
The fourth episode of Season 2, “Heart of the TVA,” concludes with a massive cliff-hanger: After Timely gets spaghettified, the Temporal Loom appears to collapse into itself and begins to expand, flaring out a blinding light that engulfs everything in its path. Loki and Co. can do nothing but wait for the light to consume them. When it does, the show’s dramatic score suddenly cuts to silence, and the screen goes black for several seconds before the credits signal the end. Just as O.B. predicted, the unstable Loom led to the death of them all.
Of course, we know they’re not actually dead. After all, two episodes remain in Season 2, and the show must go on. So the real question is: Where are they now? Before we begin to speculate about what lies ahead in the final third of Season 2, let’s recap the events that led us here.
“Heart of the TVA” picks up where last week’s installment left off, as Miss Minutes reveals a secret to Ravonna at the Citadel at the End of Time—one that had been erased from Ravonna’s memory. Miss Minutes casts a miniature projection in front of them, and Ravonna peers through a window into her past, as if witnessing someone else’s life.
The projection shows the entirety of the conversation between Ravonna and He Who Remains that Loki had heard part of in “Ouroboros,” when he was still time-slipping through the TVA. He Who Remains thanks Ravonna for her service in the Multiversal War and tells her that he will be proud to lead with her. Ravonna, in turn, fully expects to help lead the TVA into a new age of order and stability, but He Who Remains secretly has other plans for both her and the organization that he wants sole control of. The moment Ravonna leaves the Citadel to return to the TVA, He Who Remains commands Miss Minutes to wipe every TVA employee’s memory, including Ravonna’s, effectively creating a blank slate for him to redesign the TVA as he sees fit.
This revelation recontextualizes much of Ravonna’s experience at the TVA. (It doesn’t necessarily indicate why that recording was conveniently primed for Loki to listen to in the first place, but that’s a question for another day.) As Miss Minutes explains to her, Ravonna didn’t just help He Who Remains win the Multiversal War; it was she who “commanded the army.” At one point, she was in line to occupy a seat of power at the Citadel, and yet He Who Remains deceived her. Ravonna already lacked any memory of her previous life as a teacher on the Sacred Timeline, and there’s no telling how much of her time at the TVA thereafter she’s oblivious to. The same goes for Mobius and everyone else who’s been pulled into He Who Remains’s web of lies and deception.
After discovering this past betrayal, Ravonna decides to team up with Miss Minutes to reclaim the TVA for themselves. And due to the continued ineptitude of the newly reformed TVA (along with Sylvie’s mystifying mistake of leaving Ravonna with her TemPad at the end of “1893”), the two waltz right back into the TVA headquarters to create all kinds of anarchy. They step directly into the holding room where General Dox and her loyalists are being kept, which has inexplicably been left unguarded. Ravonna and Miss Minutes try to convince the captives to join their cause, but when they all refuse (except for the traitorous X-5), Ravonna and Miss Minutes use the TVA’s torture box to crush the rest of them into oblivion.
Miss Minutes, for one, seems to revel in their annihilation as she continues to evolve into the most chaotic and unpredictable presence on Loki. Last week, we saw how the cartoon clock is secretly down bad for He Who Remains and his variant Victor Timely; here, we see her ecstatic over Dox and Co.’s demise. Just look at the twisted delight on that mischievous orange face:
Elsewhere at the TVA, O.B., Casey, Timely, Mobius, Loki, and Sylvie are attempting to fix the Temporal Loom; the first three of those characters handle the actual logistics of expanding the Loom’s ability to weave new timeline branches with a modified Throughput Multiplier. But the team manages to somehow lose track of Timely—the one person they actually need for this whole operation to work—as he’s captured by X-5 and brought to Ravonna and Miss Minutes. Loki and Sylvie search for Timely and get separated, setting the stage for “Heart of the TVA” to provide the full context behind the mysterious scenes from the future that Loki caught glimpses of near the end of “Ouroboros.”
In “Ouroboros,” Loki was pruned by an unseen figure at the exact moment he needed to be. In “Heart of the TVA,” that mystery figure is revealed to be none other than himself. It’s something of a classic time-travel scenario in sci-fi, a causal loop in which Loki saves his past self. (Moments after, another one of the premiere’s biggest mysteries is solved: the identity of the person calling the phone that attracted Loki to that spot in the first place. As it turns out, it was just O.B. trying to reach Loki and Sylvie, which is revealed so casually that it lands as a pretty funny resolution to such a theory-generating setup.) After Loki ensures that his body isn’t lost to time forever, he and Sylvie are able to carry on to Timely.
Thanks to a somewhat belated assist from O.B., the team is able to reboot the TVA’s system and shut down Miss Minutes and the TVA’s security measures in the process, which affords the Lokis a window to use their magic again. Sylvie enchants X-5 into pruning Ravonna and allows them to bring Timely back to help repair the Loom in time. Or so it seems initially. However, their collective efforts may have been too little, too late all along, as the temporal radiation grew to be too much for Timely to even attempt to fix the Loom.
“Heart of the TVA” provides answers to many of the questions that had lingered since the season premiere before it moves Loki into uncharted territory with the season’s biggest mystery yet. The sheer volume of technobabble throughout Season 2 has prevented it from reaching greater heights by wasting precious screen time that might have been better spent on character development. But the ticking time bomb that was the Temporal Loom has finally gone off. The TVA’s downfall has been fully realized, and there’s no telling what that will mean for the multiverse.
Victor Timely Vs. He Who Remains
One of the big questions after last week’s episode was what kind of person Timely would turn out to be and how similar he was to He Who Remains. Although “Heart of the TVA” leaves plenty of room for skepticism in that regard, it does create some separation between Timely and the man he is supposedly destined to become.
Timely had no choice but to travel to the TVA to help repair the Loom, but once he’s there, he actually shows some signs of humanity. He’s overjoyed to find an intellectual equal in O.B., whose work is based on Timely’s own research while simultaneously serving as the source of it. He shows a small kindness when he hooks up D-90 (Neil Ellice) with some hot cocoa, giving the stoic hunter the first moment of joy we’ve ever seen him experience just before he gets pruned. Most importantly, Timely drops his ego to work with others, and when the time comes, he risks his life to save the TVA.
While that may all be true, the man has now been served as temporal spaghetti to the cosmos. What that means for He Who Remains and the rest of his variants remains to be seen, but it seems unlikely that He Who Remains would have failed to devise some sort of contingency plan for a scenario like this. After all, he’s been several steps ahead of everyone up to this point, and as the creator of the TVA itself, he could have predicted that the chain of events that started with his death could lead to the eventual destruction of the Loom. Even still, this could spell the end of both He Who Remains and Timely in Loki, creating an opportunity for more of their variants to emerge. Given how quickly Victor has become a central figure in Season 2, though, that alternative may prove to be unlikely.
Loki works to position Timely as a sympathetic figure in this episode, a rather impossible task given the real-life circumstances surrounding the actor playing him. Just as Jonathan Majors’s role in Season 2 grows larger, details continue to surface in the ongoing assault case against him. Earlier this week, Majors’s motion to dismiss the case was denied, and his trial is now set to begin at the end of November.
Scene Breakdown: “We Are Gods”
In Season 2, apparently the best place to release your emotions is the TVA’s pie room. With an endless supply of key lime pie at your disposal (paired with some inspired set design), there are certainly worse spots to work through your feelings. Perhaps it’s no accident, then, that Sylvie stumbles upon Pieland after she lashes out at Mobius for showing a lack of urgency with the fate of the multiverse hanging in the balance.
After Sylvie’s outburst, Loki and Sylvie engage in an overdue conversation that extends their previous disputes from the past two episodes. Sylvie tries to reconcile her inability to kill the defenseless Timely, while Loki tells another anecdote about Thor to try to demonstrate the value of personal growth. As it always does though, the conversation returns to the TVA and Sylvie’s belief that it would be better to “burn this place down and start from scratch.”
“Sure, burn it down, easy,” Loki says. “Annihilating is easy. Razing things to the ground is easy. Trying to fix what’s broken is hard. Hope is hard.”
“OK, so Timely can save the TVA,” Sylvie replies. “Then, we hope the TVA turns into something good. Then, we hope that Timely doesn’t turn into He Who Remains or someone worse. That’s a lot of hoping, Loki. I didn’t have you down for an optimist.”
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Sylvie’s “burn it down” mentality has become an all-too-familiar refrain from her this season, but especially now that we know that Timely does not, in fact, save the TVA, her skepticism about Loki’s faith in the TVA is well-founded. The main issue is that Sylvie doesn’t have any better solutions.
“You can’t give people free will and then just walk away, Sylvie,” Loki continues. “That’s not how it works. Now, for better or for worse, the timelines are free. It’s up to us to protect them. It’s up to us to do better than He Who Remains.”
“Sounds like whatever we do, we’re playing god,” Sylvie responds.
“We are gods,” Loki says.
This whole conversation is probably the show’s best effort this season to lay out both sides of Sylvie and Loki’s argument, which has been a fixture of Loki ever since their clash at the end of the first-season finale. Sylvie, a more dynamic character in Season 1, continues to be limited to this static position opposite Loki to elucidate his own growth. But this scene shows Sylvie’s doubts and emotional processing beyond just her yelling, and it better defines the ideological divide between the two Lokis.
In Season 1, Loki dedicated an entire episode (“Lamentis”) to establishing the relationship between Loki and Sylvie. That episode might not have done all that much to propel the overarching plot of the season, but it afforded ample time to lay down crucial developments for both characters to build on. Season 2, on the other hand, has been moving at such a frenzied pace that it hasn’t had the same space for such narrative luxuries, outside of the buddy-cop dynamic between Loki and Mobius. That all may change after the latest episode’s dramatic conclusion and a reset of the rising stakes that have revolved around the Temporal Loom.
Is This the End of the TVA?
The ending of “Heart of the TVA” puts Loki in a somewhat similar position to where it was at this point in the first season. In the final moments of “The Nexus Event,” Loki gets pruned by Ravonna, which, to that point in the series, seemed like the TVA’s method of killing variants. However, instead of dying, Loki was sent to a place beyond the Sacred Timeline: the Void.
Season 2’s fourth episode takes that thrilling bit of mystery and dials it up another notch. In contrast to “The Nexus Event,” there’s no stinger after “Heart of the TVA” to clue us in on what’s happening in next week’s chapter. (It was probably wishful thinking on my part, but for a moment, I expected a reunion with Alligator Loki.) And the latest cliff-hanger involves not just Loki, but all of the show’s major characters, the TVA, and the existence of the multiverse as it’s been defined by Loki.
Through the first four episodes of the season, Loki has kept its locations fairly grounded in comparison to its first six-episode run. Beyond the TVA and the Citadel at the End of Time, Season 2 has split time between 19th-century Chicago, 1980s Broxton, and 1970s London. There have yet to be any trips to Earth in the future, another planet (such as Lamentis-1), or a unique setting like the Void—and it feels like it’s about time for Loki to get a little weirder again and depart from the familiar.
The blinding light that consumes Loki and the rest of the crew looks not unlike the phenomenon that occurs at the point of pruning, so it’s possible that Episode 5 will find the entire TVA displaced from time and back at the Void. (At the very least, it seems like we’re destined to return there at some point given that Ravonna was pruned in “Heart of the TVA.”) But if that’s the case, where would a trip to the Void leave them all, if there’s no TVA to return to?
One of the main themes of the season so far has been the concept of the Ouroboros. More than just the name of Ke Huy Quan’s character and the title of the premiere, an Ouroboros can represent the circle of life, death, and rebirth—destruction and renewal. Loki continues to play around with these paradoxical cause-and-effect situations, whether it’s Loki’s pruning of the time-slipping version of himself or Timely and O.B.’s correspondence across time to create the TVA guidebook based on each other’s work. (In “Heart of the TVA,” O.B. even pauses to acknowledge the perplexing situation: “It’s like a snake eating its own tail.”) He Who Remains knew his death wouldn’t be the end of his story. If the TVA is truly gone, then Loki now has the chance to show its re-creation—or otherwise explore the concept of a multiverse freed from the restraints of a Sacred Timeline.
One way or another, Sylvie has been granted her wish for the TVA to be burned down. The only problem is that everyone, and potentially everything, has burned down with it. With only two episodes left in the season, Loki is likely about to reveal what will be reborn in its place.
