'Loki' Episode 2: Brad's A Jerk (And That's Comics Canon!)

By Tori Preston | TV | October 14, 2023 |

By Tori Preston | TV | October 14, 2023 |

Episode two keeps the propulsive momentum of the season premiere going, as Loki and Mobius race to find Sylvie and stop General Dox from bombing the crap out of every new branched timeline. It’s frankly all kind of a lot, and that’s why I think they needed to keep the momentum up — so there’s less time for you to sit back and go, “But why are they…? Wait, what?” Take, for instance, the start of the episode: Loki and Mobius step out of a timedoor into the Sacred Timeline’s London of 1977 to talk to an actor at his movie premiere. That actor, Brad Wolfe, is actually Hunter X-5 (Blindspotting’s Rafael Casal), and they believe he knows something about where Sylvie is hiding. Why? Well, because he was one of the many TVA operatives General Dox sent off in pursuit of Sylvie, and he defected to live out his dream as a star, and… Look, the guy’s a series regular, he has to know something!

The fact that we all know exactly where Sylvie is hiding (in a McDonald’s in an alternate ’80s Oklahoma, natch) makes the following pursuit and interrogation a little less interesting. Or at least it should, but it turns out that watching Loki and Mobius in action — the partnership between the laid-back pencil pusher and the may-or-may-not-be-reformed God of Mischief — is exactly what I came to see. It helps that episode two, titled “Breaking Brad,” takes the time to slow down in at least one respect. It returns to the question of who Loki is now, after all his soul-searching last season, and whether he still has enough of an edge to… well, break Brad. There’s one painfully ham-fisted bit of dialogue directly addressing the issue (Brad: “Stop trying to be a hero, man. You’re a villain.” EYEROLL) but the real stuff is in the action. We get a look at Loki busting out his magic, making duplicates and shadow-selves, to apprehend Brad, a welcome reminder of what exactly made Loki so dangerous in the first place. And then there’s the interrogation itself, where Mobius and Loki construct a good cop/ bad cop routine that hinges on just how bad a cop you think Loki is. Using a machine that makes what I’m assuming are Time Boxes (given the show’s tendency of just sticking “Time” in front of everything), Loki pretends to lock Mobius out of the cell and proceeds to trap Brad in a series of shrinking squares under the pretense that he doesn’t understand how the controls work. And also, he doesn’t really care. Villain, remember?

Brad finally takes Loki seriously and coughs up the information they need, and soon the three of them are on their way to Broxton where they find Sylvie working behind the counter of that McDonald’s. While Loki and Sylvie go out to have a heart-to-heart, Mobius eats an apple pie and tries to get Brad to open up about his acting career. Only Brad doesn’t want to talk. He’s actually pretty jittery, and really wants to leave. Like, now. Yup, turns out the secret Brad was really hiding wasn’t about Sylvie’s location at all — it’s what General Dox is up to. She’s taken it upon herself to continue the work of the TVA by manually pruning each branching timeline with, and I’m just spitballing here, time-bombs. And since Sylvie’s Broxton is on one such branch, Brad knows it could go kablooey at any moment.

With her favorite multiversal junk food franchise at risk, Sylvie agrees to join Loki and Mobius in taking down General Dox’s whole operation, which they accomplish a little too easily. In part because it turns out Sylvie and Loki have a whole “Our Powers Combine” thing going, and when they hold hands they’re able to send out a magic blast that knocks everyone over, and in part because they were already too late. By the time Dox is in custody, Hunter B-15 is watching nearly every branch off the Sacred Timeline blink out of existence on her monitor. And Sylvie, who killed He-Who-Remains in order to allow those branches to spring forth freely, is disgusted that the TVA allowed this massacre to happen under their noses. She stomps off back to Broxton, leaving the question of how and why she returns to the TVA in the future Loki visited still unanswered. For now, though, we at least get some answer as to why Loki is sticking around. “It’s harder to stay,” Loki muttered as Sylvie left, and more than heroism or villainy, maybe that’s all he’s trying to prove. His pursuit of the truth led him to Sylvie, to the Citadel, and to He-Who-Remains. He didn’t kill the guy, but he bears some responsibility for breaking the system. The God of Mischief spent his whole life running from the consequences of his actions. This time, with the TVA, he’s sticking around to see it through.

So that means in two episodes Loki resolved the hunt for Sylvie, General Dox’s Big Bad Plan, and whittled away almost all the potential of the spreading multiverse. What’s left? Oh, right: O.B. can’t fix the Temporal Loom without the missing Miss Minutes’s help (and her system override power), and with nearly all the branches gone, the TVA finally gets a hit off Ravonna Renslayer’s TemPad. Like I said, the plot is really just barreling right along!

Thought Branches:

— Brad Wolfe, a.k.a. Zaniac, is an old Thor foe from the comics. He was an actor who became a little too enamored with his character — and then he became his character. And look, I’m just going to quote the Fandom entry for this guy because it’s really peak 1980s Marvel nonsense:

Wolfe, in full Zaniac costume and make-up, was filming a scene at the University of Chicago when a passer-by carelessly tossed a lit cigar into a box of explosives meant for an upcoming scene. The resulting explosion released residual radiation from the Manhattan Project which mutated Wolfe by giving him super strength and the ability to generate energy knives from his hands. He was also simultaneously possessed by a demonic entity and driven mad.

— Still no jet ski in sight, but we got two whole scenes of Owen Wilson being charming while stuffing his face full of comfort carbs so I can’t complain.

— Speaking of jet skis, all the emphasis on why Mobius doesn’t want to know who he is on the timeline can only mean one thing, right? He’s a professional jet skier! Or maybe a jet ski salesman. Or just a beach bum. Either way, it’d make it really hard to keep saving the multiverse if you knew you were supposed to be living your dream life with a tiny watercraft between your thighs and saltwater in your hair, so I get it.

— At the end of the episode, Sylvie is sitting on the hood of her truck in the McDonald’s parking lot and looking at something… glowy?… in her hands. I had no idea what it was, so I turned to Google and it turns out that episode two director Dan Deleeuw already spoke with GamesRadar about it! It’s the powerful bangle that He-Who-Remains had during the season one finale, which combines the powers of a TemPad (which opens temporal doors) and a Time Twister (which allows teleportation). The implication is that, even if Sylvie appears to have removed herself from the game, she hasn’t relinquished all her power yet. She’s still a Loki, after all. And for that matter, there’s still a chance Loki himself is just hanging around the TVA waiting for a chance to take over. Lokis are gonna Loki!