Loki doesn’t finish exactly (episode 6)

I’ll start with a minor spoiler, which I’m not hiding because it’s information people like to know before jumping into a series. Episode 6 doesn’t resolve the plot and is a set-up for season 2. I’d assumed Loki was a limited series but apparently not.

This episode sort of gets to an end point but not one that really resolves anything. There are revelations (some a bit info-dumpy) but it isn’t a finale as such. Entertaining but not as sparkly as the previous episodes. More detailed spoilers…

Sylvie and Loki make it through to whoever is running everything and it turns out to be just some guy. I know some people find this revelation disappointing but I kind of like it. The show has never suggested that it is a kind of who-or-what-dunnit mystery in the way that WandaVision was. The “real” story turns out to be pretty much the same as the fake Time Keepers cover story. The details differ (it’s just one guy rather than three aliens) but the premise is more-or-less the same. Various realities in a multiverse became aware of each other, which led to conflict at the end of which He Who Remains is the last surviving instance of a guy central to the multiversal conflict. It is he who has been pruning the timeline so he doesn’t have to end up fighting his other-selves.

We end up with a basic question for Loki as a character. They thrive on chaos and disorder but also crave power and control. How much do they want of each? Also, how much surrounding order do they need to have something to disrupt? The chaotic fascist isn’t an oxymoron — disruption is a way of displaying power and also a means to an end. Personalities with an anarchic (in a non-political sense) personality don’t necessarily skew towards anarchism as an ideology — indeed, possibly the opposite as ideological anarchism looks towards social consensus as a means of doing without government.

Our two not-exactly-heroes take two different stances. Sylvie is direct and aims to kill the guy behind it all despite his claim that doing so will just result in the same multiversal conflict which will once again lead to another version of himself in charge. The chaos of revolution will lead to a new dictator, even if it is one who is more affable than a Napoleon or Stalin. Of course he might be lying.

Hiddleston-Loki is not so keen. Keeping the current status quo at least means he knows what he is kicking against. It is in keeping with the MCU character we’ve met, who enjoys the chaos but sees it as a means to an end. In Thor: Ragnarok, Loki has tricked his way into taking Odin’s place but once in power he does little with it and even though it is Loki he takes the final step by the end of the film to summon Surtur and destroy Asgard, he does so because Thor asks him to. Hiddleston-Loki is not a natural revolutionary even if he is inherently rebellious.

The MCU and Marvel more generally have played with this idea of the conflict between a sympathetic antagonist who wants to righteously burn everything down and a more moderate protagonist who sees why that is a bad idea for reasons that the scriptwriters have had to shoehorn into the story. Notably, Thor: Ragnarok inverted the trope with Thor bringing down both The Grandmaster in a revolution but also literally destroying his own kingdom rather than let a tyrant revive its colonising past.

Disappointingly, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier firmly adopted the cliched reforming-moderate versus the corrupted-revolutionary, to the extent that the script had to throw in pointless atrocities by the Flagsmashers to make them unsympathetic. Loki has a far more interesting take on a similar idea. For starters, Sylvie is far more sympathetic as a character and in terms of the script and the framing of the different choices facing Sylvie and Loki, the scales are less biased against Sylvie. Loki’s objection to killing He Who Remains isn’t a principled one nor is it the “you will become what you hate” cliche. If anything, it is Loki who is asking for time to consider the alternatives one of which is literally the two-Lokis taking on the Time Keeper role.

In so far as the show picks a side, it is with Hiddleston-Loki because he’s the main character. However, even that is counter-balanced by the dynamic between Mobius and Renslayer. Here Mobius, through force of circumstance, is on the side of we-can’t-carry-on-like-this and Renslayer is conceding that there’s something fundamentally wrong but still holds that the status-quo in principle must be right despite the lies, deaths and loss of freedom.

There is far more effort here to create a genuine dilemma. It is still an artifice of the plot and circumstance but it feels much less forced. Renslayer and Hiddleston-Loki positions are contrasting Renslayer’s principle and Loki’s pragmatism but the essence is still that of the moral in Hilaire Belloc’s satirical poem Jim: Who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion:

“And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”

Whereas Sylvie is adopting more of the energy of the poem by a six-year-old that became very popular on Twitter a few years back:

“The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out”

Nael, Age 6 from They’re Singing a Song in their Rocket

Outside of the plot, there’s a broader reason why this episode doesn’t rush to support reform over revolution. We know multiverses are coming to the MCU and the premise of Loki is a show featuring an agency who role is to stop that happening, created (in part) as a back story as to why we haven’t had multiverses dropping into MCU films previously. Sylvie is the plot revolutionary but for the product-strategy she’s acting on order from the Mouse Who Remains 🙂.

So, not the best of the episodes but some meaty ideas. It didn’t stick a landing, as they say, but rather deferred the question to another series. I’m fine with that, particularly if we get an episode that’s just Mobius and Alligator-Loki going on a road-trip together. It doesn’t even have to move the plot along.