Camestros Felapton

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Review: Loki Episode 4 – The Nexus Event

Episode 4 was largely slower and more thoughtful leading to some sudden and violent events toward the end. Oh and there is a mid-credit bonus scene that answers the immediate question to one of those events and sets off several more. Spoilers follow:

The TVA was introduced as powerful and possibly over bearing but last weeks revelation was that the TVA was actively lying to itself. The many employees are not creations of the august Time Keepers but variants who have been memory wiped. The shift changes the circumstances of our dual Loki’s not just simply being dysfunctional people naturally seeking to spread chaos against an authority they don’t control but rather just the right people to unravel a sinsiter conspiracy to control reality.

The episode spends a little time making Hiddleston-Loki consider his life choices and hammers at least some pretence of self-awareness into him. I hope that doesn’t continue too far, as I’d prefer the sinister side of the character to continue but it fits with the shift in the story from one of moral ambiguity to a clear battle of good versus evil.

After some soul searching by Mobius and by Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) over Sylvie’s claim that the TVA staff are themselves variants, events speed up and we have some shocking deaths and a new deeper mystery about the Time Keepers.

Less witty banter and characters bouncing off each other this week but a bit more depth and even less sense of where this whole story is going. I really liked how there was a judgemental aspect from Mobius towards Loki having feelings for Sylvie (i.e. himself) while the show itself is rejecting the idea that there’s something fundamentally wrong with it. There’s some interesting layers here and I guess the show could still go horribly wrong but so far each episode has built-on and improved upon the previous one.

Mercurial fun.

Also, Richard E Grant completes a trifecta of Doctor Who, Star Wars and MCU.

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15 responses to “Review: Loki Episode 4 – The Nexus Event”

  1. I can see why Tom Hiddleston agreed to do this show. He’s getting to dig into the character of Loki in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the films.

    Also….gah, the CGI for the Time Keepers was horrid. I get that they were trying to spell out that “ERRR, NO, THESE AREN’T REALLY ORGANIC BEINGS” but you’d think Marvel wouldn’t be quite so ham-fisted about it.

    Liked by 3 people

    • One of the things I actively liked is that at one point, a Time-Keeper moved its hand and it literally looked like a puppet hand being moved by a rod. Setting the “they’re just robots” up perfectly.

      Liked by 3 people

  2. Now Richard E. Grant only needs to be cast in Star Trek and he’ll be the king of geek media, displacing Simon Pegg and Deep Roy, who both have done the Star Wars, Star Trek and Doctor Who hattrick.

    Finally, could someone please cast Julian Glover in Star Trek and an MCU film and crown him the undisputed king of Geek media, since he’s also been in Star Wars, Doctor Who (multiple times), Indiana Jones, Game of Thrones, James Bond, Harry Potter and The Avengers (Steed and Peel, not the Marvel bunch).

    Liked by 3 people

  4. The big question in my head now is the one that Mobius asked Loki during the interrogation, and which kind of slid past without much attention – what caused the time line to split on Lamentis? Loki and Sylvie weren’t doing anything to change it (or was he? Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell Sylvie before he got pruned and we’re meant to assume he was trying to say he fancied her).

    I didn’t expect to get to ‘the TVA is all a massive cover’ quite so soon in the series, but I liked that it went right past that and onto ‘something much weirder is happening here’.

    Liked by 4 people

    • I wonder if there’s a causality loop – the timeline split was caused by the fact that the TVA rescued Loki and Sylvie (allowing them to do further stuff), which was caused by the sensors detecting a split

      Liked by 1 person

    • It definitely has the vibes of a JJ Abrams “oh yes, something much weirder is happening here” show (Alias, Fringe and LOST all successfully tore up their formats several times during their runs even if folk may disagree about whether any of them stuck the landing!) Although it’s impressive that they are trying it in a six-episode long story.

      And I’m starting to think that my “they’re all Loki” theory might have some legs after all (I mean, that’s not much of a step on from “they’re all variants” is it, even if the ‘hunters’ do seem to be regular humans on the surface.)

      Liked by 1 person

    • I don’t think that smooching was necessarily about to happen. Loki seemed to be trying to show that just plain physical contact between himself and Sylvie had “done something” on Lamentis, and might “do something” again there.

      Could Loki+Sylvie have had enough power together to stop the destruction of Lamentis? If not, then why would there have been a timeline branch at all?

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Mobius clearly believed Loki, and Ravonna got suspicious that he had when he asked all the questions and only had one drink. So he had to go as well. Hopefully he’s with REG and that motley crew as well.

    It was kinda funny waiting for how each iteration of the Sif confrontation was going to end up with the same inevitable result. But that’s just the sort of thing an organization that’s dependent on maintaining the fiction of “one true timeline” would do.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Mobius clearly believed Loki, and Ravonna got suspicious that he had when he asked all the questions and only had one drink.

      And swap-swiped her temp-pad that just happened to have a video of C-20 giving Ravonna the lie by being clearly lucid and declaring that she had memories now from before being in the TVA, and showing Ravonna in the frame of the video, and showing C-20 as deceased.

      I’m not sure Mobius believed Loki so much as he suspected that something was off with the account of what happened with C-20. After all, B-15 had also been enchanted by Sylvie, but had no further problems after coming back.

      Liked by 2 people

      • And swap-swiped her temp-pad that just happened to have a video of C-20 giving Ravonna the lie by being clearly lucid and declaring that she had memories now from before being in the TVA, and showing Ravonna in the frame of the video, and showing C-20 as deceased.

        It’s amazing how easy those little doohickeys are to steal and operate (I mean, Sylvie was able to snatch and manipulate one even though she’d presumably never seen them before). And honestly, a super-secret, super-advanced agency that traverses all of space and time has never heard of biometric password protection? 🙄

        Liked by 1 person

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