It's Freak O'Clock On This Week's 'Loki'

Whelp, there it is. Whatever precarious balance season two of Loki had struck between the character introspection of season one and the furious plate-spinning of plot necessary to appease the Marvel head office just fell apart into a mess of unclear motivations and unnecessary complications. Is it all because Jonathan Majors finally popped back up? That sure didn't help! And I'll unpack all of it, I swear, but Mike Redmond sent me this tweet, and I literally can't move on until I expunge it from my brain:

I'm deeply disturbed. Miss Minutes really tried to flirt and give Victor Timely some Clockussy like girl you're an A.I in a one sided relationship with a variant of Kang / He Who Remains #Loki #LokiS2 pic.twitter.com/jFC2QWwKRH

— ★ keke ★ coraline's amulet 🐈‍⬛ (@LOKISPACEGEMS) October 20, 2023

CLOCKUSSY. Clockussy. Clock. Ussy. Roll it around on your tongue, really feel it -- because let me tell you, that still doesn't scratch the surface of what just might be the weirdest and most uncomfortable scene in all of the MCU (and that includes Sylvie kissing Loki last season, which was very hot actually and not weird at all, fight me). Miss Minutes, the southern belle-ish artificial intelligence that He Who Remains created as some sort of TVA operating system - slash - chess partner, is in love with him. And upon meeting Victor Timely, He Who Remains's latest variant, she transfers that affection onto him ... before transferring her whole clock-face onto a mannequin and shooting her shot with a squink like so:

There is even -- and I am not making this up! -- an attempt at a love triangle, where Victor tries to hit on Ravonna Renslayer by offering her a cold soda-pop from his fridge-chair and Miss Minutes looks on in cartoony jealousy. And for you nerds out there nodding along, thinking, "Of course he hit on Ravonna, she's Kang's guuuuuurlfriend in the comics!" let me tell you how that all ended: with Ravonna dumped in a dinghy for daring to say she had high hopes for their "partnership." Oof, equality is such a boner-killer!

Love triangles, even ones involving cartoon clocks and murderous middle managers, don't have to be weird in and of themselves. What made this one especially uncomfortable was that it was all over Victor Timely. Now, there's the obvious Jonathan Majors of it all -- making his expected return to the series after the abuse allegations. Nobody was particularly looking forward to this, and my money is still on Marvel recasting Kang in the near future, but damn if the man wasn't electrifying in his turn as He Who Remains last season. With what amounted to a chillingly calm episode-long monologue, Majors did more to establish Kang's villainous bonafides than all of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania managed. So seeing him return as Victor Timely, a huckster inventor in 1893 Chicago, was... odd. Forget menace; The character is simply an absence of charisma! I can't even blame Majors' performance, nor do I think it is anything other than intentional from the writers, but the fact remains that all the anticipation around the return of Majors and a Kang variant amounted to a character with the presence of a generic comic relief bit part. One that Gugu Mbatha-Raw flirts with.

So, the plot: Miss Minutes leads Ravonna to 1868 Chicago (Sacred Timeline), and instructs her to leave a package containing a TVA Guidebook in a certain window, saying its all part of a plan He Who Remains came up with before he died. A boy on the other side of the window picks it up and starts reading... Then it's 1893 Chicago, now on a branched timeline, and Loki and Mobius turn up trying to find Miss Minutes, because they need her to override the controls at the TVA so OB can fix the Temporal Loom. How did they find her? Oh, something about picking up on Ravonna's TemPad signature and just assuming they'll be together because Ravonna was the last one to talk to Miss Minutes. Fine. While wandering around the World's Fair they come across an exhibit called "Victor Timely and his astounding Temporal Marvels" and that's how they run into the new Kang variant, Ravonna, and Miss Minutes. And look, I know this is a Disney property but what ensues from here is pure Looney Tunes, just a bunch of running around through rickety alleys chasing each other. Loki and Mobius don't need Miss Minutes anymore, since Victor has the same Aura as He Who Remains and could override the system himself, and for some reason Ravonna also tells Victor she needs him to save the TVA from the Temporal Loom, even though she only knew it was falling apart because Mobius told her so. It was about this time that I closed my notebook and gave up trying to keep track of why anyone was doing anything.

Then Sylvie turns up, because sure why not, and she's determined to murder Victor before he, like, takes over the TVA or something. So Loki fights Sylvie to defend Victor, and the thing is, we know how good a Loki/Sylvie bash can be. They were some of the highlights of season one! Some witty repartee, some long heated stares, magic and mayhem maybe another kiss (please! for me!). So it is with a heavy heart that I ask what the sh*t was up with those green poofy blasts? Two whole Gods of Mischief and they just... poofed each other, over and over again. Last week we saw Loki step up his magic game with shadows and clones and this week, just, poof? Nothing else? Anyway, that was disappointing.

Ravonna and Miss Minutes get away with Victor to pick something up at his lab, with Loki and Mobius and, separately, Sylvie in pursuit, and then comes all the flirting and dinghies and mannequins. There's a bunch more fighting at this point, with Ravonna having rowed up and grabbed what I think is a prototype Time Stick or something. Then Sylvie turns up and gets the upper hand, but she can't go through with killing Victor. Maybe because he's just too pathetic, but mostly because when he tells her, "I can make my own choices. I'm not the man you think I am," she realizes even this Kang deserves a shot at free will. That's all she's ever fought for. So she let's Loki and Mobius take Victor back to the TVA, and she stays behind with Ravonna for her own bit of revenge after the lifetime of attempted pruning the former judge put her through. Sylvie opens a door to the Citadel at the End of Time and sends Ravonna (with Miss Minutes) through it, abandoning them... for now.

The episode ends with Miss Minutes and Ravonna seemingly making up after all the weird catty jealousy on the part of the AI, with Miss Minutes hinting that she knows all of Kang's secrets, including a big one involving Ravonna. That secret is probably what we already know -- that in the past Ravonna ran the TVA alongside He Who Remains, before he wiped her memory along with everyone else's -- but one theory I saw floating around the internet is that Ravonna is actually a Kang variant herself, the way Sylvie is a Loki. Which means the future villain of the MCU could be Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Zero complaints from me!

So, episodes one and two ran through the whole "find Sylvie" plot, and now episode three resolved the hunt for Miss Minutes and/or Ravonna. What's left for the back half of the season? Well, we still need to find out why the TVA was falling apart in the future that Loki glimpsed... and who am I kidding, we pretty much know why, don't we? They just took a whole-ass Kang variant back to the TVA! Whatever plan He Who Remains left behind, it involved teaching one of his variants all about the TVA. So, uh, that'll end well.

Thought Branches:

-- Victor didn't just become obsessed with the TVA because of the Guidebook he received in the past -- he actually became an OB fanboy. Which made me think how great it would be if OB actually was the real secret Kang variant. I know it doesn't work because if he was a Kang variant, then OB's Aura would have overridden the system, but I like imagining there's some greater payoff for making Ke Huy Quan run around like Chicken Little yelling "We're all gonna die!"

-- Victor referring to Loki and Mobius as that "wizard fellow" and his "butler" delighted me. Actually, so did Miss Minutes pretending to be a "ghost clock" and Michelin Man-ing her way out of the World's Fair. The episode was not without its moments.

-- Mobius ate Cracker Jacks! And while it was, sadly, not pie, it did send me down a rabbit hole of Cracker Jacks history. While there are a few different origins for the stuff, it did apparently make an appearance at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

-- Another exhibit at the fair featured carved statues of Odin, Thor, and Balder... though decidedly not Loki. Mobius is all "Sometimes I forget you're one of them," while Loki gripes about how Thor isn't that tall, but the lingering shot of Balder is maybe a hint that Marvel's gonna introduce another Odinson to the mix soon. Balder the Brave and Loki go wayyyy back in the comics (especially in a run that takes place around Broxton, Oklahoma), and supposedly the character has almost made his way into the movies a few times before.

-- This episode was exhausting.