LOKI - Episode 4 - The Nexus Event (Patreon)

Uhhhhhhhh, was that the first legitimately great episode of a Marvel TV show???

It’s not just the fact that SO MUCH ACTUALLY HAPPENS in it (which we’ll get to), it’s the way so many wonderful things get layered in from the onset. Though I will say, the funny thing about a TV episode being really entertaining on face value is it that it doesn’t leave a whole heck of a lot to analyze. It works because it works on a really good surface-level way. So rather than dive deep into one or two story problems, I’m going to listicle what I liked chronologically while having bigger asides! Huzzuh!

-It all starts with Gugu actually showing emotion and her immense fear when dealing with the Time Keepers. We cut away soon, but I literally wrote in my notes “major Wizard of Oz vibes” which turned out to be the exact intention of the scene!

-I do think that reveal of Sylvie as someone who is “not supposed to exist” should have come as a proper culmination of last episode, but I’ll still take it here, if only for the way it properly bookends her confrontation with Gugu at the end of THIS episode (sometimes you gotta make those kinds of choices of which episode you want to help or hurt). And that line about “growing up in the ends of 1000 worlds” is some proper Dr. Who shit.

-Alas, even the Queer-lit planet got fridged.

-At that early point I was curious how much the “nexus event” gets into some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy stuff - like was there a spike BECAUSE in the future they were going to go get them? I don’t know, so far they’ve avoided that timey wimey stuff. I also wonder how they are going to avoid tHe TrUe SpIkE wAs lOvE.

-Re: VFX - I talked about this with The Mandalorian but sometimes you can reaaaaaaaaallly feel the way they lazily film with the admittedly super-cool "Volume Stage. Because you really need to pick your angles and hide the seams as best you can and I feel like sometime they’re really not doing that and thinking they can clean it up magically. You can’t! 

-“Time loops. How lovely” hahaha, I felt like they really nailed the right balance of “yes this is why time loops are insufferable as hell” and also not making you feel that hell yourself too much. Also, hi Jaimie Alexander! Also also, I just realized that’s two “i”s in Jaimie. Also also also, the scene turns out of be a major thematic set up of “you are alone and you always will be.” Love when you sneak thematic set-up into fun!

-During the Loki / Mobius interrogation scene I wrote “this is the smartest / best thing they’ve ever done” because it completely understands that the point of a scene where characters are unsure about the truth. That’s because it isn’t trying to “constantly wash every statement in vaguery” (LOST fell into this trap so many times). Instead, it has them come at each moment with abject clarity - whether the character is being honest, lying, fishing for info, etc. WE KNOW - and then it just all adds up to a more complex reality once compiled. I mean, the way Mobius pretends Sylvie died, the way Loki reacts, the way Mobius turns it on him, the way you can see the way each character doing the math yet still have emotion on their face? That’s genuinely good stuff, all edited perfectly. Plus it’s a conversation filled with psychological insight (like calling out that he fell for “himself” in egotistical fashion) and great lines like “now i have to have a prince tell me how the real world works.” It’s like the entire show really came alive for a beautiful moment. And continued to!

-Because it’s precisely what allows Owen’s next scene with Gugu to work, too. He’s absolutely fishing for answers with her. But I have to single out Gugu’s work, not just in the moment, but with what comes after. Because she clearly KNOWS that all these people are variants and is helping the timekeepers anyway, but genuinely seems torn about it. And the way she gets out of his questioning is actually with sincerity, but still not revealing the whole deal - which all leads to such a good moment when Owen switches their datapads. Big stakes things are happening with characters I really, really car about and the threats feel real! These are two top tier dramatic scenes! They did it!

-And once Mobius has the datapad, he thus learns the truth and springs into action. It was genuinely enthralling to see Owen fiery and cut through the bullshit conversation with Loki to get to his core characterization - followed by his attempt to rescue him / the jetski speech - and then I literally yelled OH SHIT when he got got. Now, it’s one of those things where there was some doubt in my mind about this being him “dead” because we don’t really know what the zappy sticks do and the MCU has apparently forgotten that killing people permanently is an actual choice you can make (which means we wont believe when it happens anymore, robbing of stakes). But at the moment, I felt like that could be the case that those were actually his final moments, which would be properly heartbreaking. Especially for an MCU that’s always way too afraid to break your heart (we’ll come back to this).

-Did anyone else have to turn on closed captioning to understand The Time Keepers?

-Last week I talked about the show always addressing my concerns right on cue and in that ending fight I was like “none of this is interesting I wish they turned into some tension” and right on cue they wrestled to the ground and started doing that.

-Andddddd yup, the Time Keepers were a Wizard of Oz scenario. Makes sense for the way they’ve been hid / regarded this season. And does it make for a nice mystery that will surely lead to more interesting things in the next couple episodes? I sure hope so! They’ve certainly executed it well so far. But none of my real concern lies with the dramatic plot mechanics of this decision, but more an interesting thematic thing I’ve been thinking about…

Thus far, the only real arena that that the MCU has stayed away from when it comes to cosmic stuff is the “god-like” beings that populate the comics. It seems they did this on one level because The Time Keepers aren’t “believable” in the same way that so many characters are and they don’t want to stretch people’s conceptions. But given that we deal with Demi-gods on the reg, I feel like that’s a cheap excuse; a mere logical explanation for a deeper emotional issues. Because there has been this running thematic staple throughout the entire fucking MCU that there are no gods before the selfhood the heroes - the the most important thing for them is free will of whatever you want to do. Time and time and time again, that’s been the testament of what people learn in these stories. From Wanda, to lil baby Spider-man, to Tony Stark, to so many more. So the problem with the time-keepers is not that they’re “unbelievable” - it’s that they can’t have anyone genuinely more powerful than our heroes. In the end, they can’t truly be in awe of anything but themselves. Because all gods or pesky morality would just stand in the way of their immortality. Which is the flip-side of the coddling way they treat death and refuse to break your heart. Nothing choose your fate and everything is literally forever. And the “gods” who could are false… And when it comes to the myopia of heroism in these stories, this is a worldview I find… difficult.

-So the episode ends with Loki getting evaporated / Sylvie demanding “tell me everything!” and of course we are meant to think “oh shit!” and wonder about what all of this means.

And then comes the after credits scene which shows us.

Y’all, I’m so tired of the post-credits scene industrial complex. At their best, post credits scenes are supposed to so be some easter egg, a delightful little tag, or even a fun tease at some thing far off in the future. But somewhere along the line we started putting GENUINE MOVIE SCENES THAT ARE ACTUALLY PRETTY IMPORTANT in them, too (for example, the reconciliation in Thor: The Dark World remains the most unforgivable). These are full on critical ending scenes sometimes and it drives me bananas. With the shows, I usually look for them sometimes I miss em. I remember with Wandavision I didn’t see the reveal of (uhhhhh, if you didn’t see it, the white one) and had to go back after I saw people talk about it on twitter. And here they pull an even worse version of that shit.

Make no mistake, Loki’s reveal should absolutely be the final scene, but it’s the case of the MCU not being being able to help themselves. And as a result, I can GUARANTEE YOU there are people who missed it (according to steamers, apparently most people hate watching a single credit). The complication of this is two fold. If you don’t see that scene, you are left to wonder if all your faves are dead (as the credits played I was literally writing the note: “I have no idea what the next two eps are going to be! That’s fun!”) But if you stayed you get the full on answer to that, along with the hint that we just get banished to some place with all out other variants (like Richard E Fucking Grant!). Which means I also now have a pretty good idea of what’s coming the next two episodes. It’s a night and day difference when it comes to the scope of the episode and what it resolves. This is such a bad decision. I simply cannot abide the post-scene industrial complex and what it does to this episode.

-And lastly, a bit of MCU conjecture! Prior to Loki, we knew the mutli-verse was coming, we just didn’t exactly know what it would be like. But the idea that this six episode tv show is going to be the foundational text of so many of the movies going forward is… perhaps a bit weird to me? Like what are people who came off Endgame and can’t afford Disney+going to think? Also, I have to see four damn marvel movies this fall?

And most concerning of all, we are suddenly heading right for what was the eventual crisis point of comics with the constant use of different versions. Sure, what makes some of those stories amazing is their capacity for infinite variance, but it’s also a bind, a crutch, and a trap. Because it’s what keeps comics recycling and remixing the same shit again and again and again and often prevents branching out. After Endgame, I was genuinely curious about the new spaces the MCU could branch out. And now, I can’t help but worry about how fast we got inward to here.

It may seem odd that I am suddenly writing about all these concerns of the MCU with an episode I genuinely loved, but that’s part and parcel of how this goes. Even at their most entertaining, the MCU leaves me with pointed thematic caution. With that, I assure you concern is rarely tempers my enjoyment. It’s sort of a constant state of questioning whatever I’m looking at, especially when I’m enjoying it. So who knows what truly comes next for the MCU.

To infinity and beyond, I guess!

<3HULK