Like the god of mischief, Loki’s second season has mastered a devious magic trick: the illusion of change. Marvel head honcho Stan Lee’s version of this involved the illusion of character growth before a return to status quo. In the show’s narrative, it involves the illusion of plot momentum, too; this is the third straight episode where Ke Huy Quan’s Ouroboros reminds us that the Time Loom might malfunction and kill everyone, a problem that still isn’t resolved by the end. “1893” isn’t altogether bad — in fact, it’s entertaining in spurts — but its dramatic construction is so flimsy and self-contradictory that it can’t help but reveal the series’ seams.
The show’s production designer Kasra Farahani takes the director’s chair, in an entry that feels immediately carnivalesque even before its opening frames. The Marvel logo is scored by a honky-tonk version of the company’s musical suite, and throughout the episode, composer Natalie Holt continues to remix the show’s signature theme, this time in the vein of an old roadshow. Granted, some of these tricks feel a tad anachronistic, whether out of time or out of place; Miss Minutes disguises herself as a silent-era cartoon, despite showing up in the 1860s (a joke that, therefore, doesn’t quite land), and the episode’s Chicago setting clashes with the soundtrack’s distinctly Western feel.
It seems as though some of these decisions came pre-cooked based on the version of Victor Timely seen in the comics — a Kang variant who travels back in time to the early 20th century and founds his own township — without necessarily being retooled for the show’s version of Timely, who appears to have lived in Chicago all his life. In 1868, Miss Minutes and Ravonna Renslayer covertly drop a copy of the TVA Guidebook through a young Timely’s window (a plan seemingly concocted by Kang himself) before hopping forward 25 years to 1893, where Loki and Mobius track their movements as well. The major impetus for this change in setting is the backdrop: the 1893 Chicago world’s fair, or the “The World’s Columbian Exposition.” Here, a now-adult Timely presents his rudimentary version of the Time Loom, which purportedly converts temporal energy into electricity (a scene teased at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania). However, he fraudulently hires actors to inflate the bids on his prototype so that a vulturous robber baron — who’s kind of racist, too; he calls Timely “boy” — will pay him a hefty fee.
A scientist with big ideas, shackled by the technological limitations of his era, presenting his inventions at a real world’s fair isn’t a new image for the MCU. It’s a distinct mirror to Howard Stark in Captain America: The First Avenger and Iron Man 2, whose ideas were eventually brought to fruition decades later by his son Tony. Similarly, it seems all of Timely’s blueprints might require, well, time. This twinning of the Kang and Stark lineages speaks to the future importance of Kang, but that’s really all it is at this point: a promise of potential. It’s currently unknown whether Kang will end up factoring into the overarching MCU (despite plans for a film titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty), or whether he’ll still be played by Jonathan Majors, whose trial for assault is due to begin next week. But in the meantime, he remains a vital puzzle piece to Loki, from both a plot and character standpoint, even if the other pieces don’t always add up.
This week, two pairs of characters collide on a time hunt: Loki and Mobius are after Renslayer and Miss Minutes, who are themselves trying to catch up to Timely and convince him of his future trajectory as Kang/He Who Remains, creator of the TVA. Both sets of chases lead to some amusing banter — these are the kinds of scenes in which Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson usually shine each week — and eventually, Sylvie shows up too, with the intent of killing Timely because he’s yet another variant of the man who all but etched her fate in stone.
The episode looks great, with an era-appropriate gaslight aesthetic. Its major problem however, is its dramatic structure. All of its characters seem to want the same thing, one way or another. Their objectives overlap in significant ways, and while the conflict between them leads to some fun action-comedy, it’s incredibly frustrating at times, like an episode of the sitcom Three’s Company, in which every bit of conflict is based on a misunderstanding. Loki and Mobius — with their usually intense-and-chill dynamic inverted for comedic effect — are initially on Miss Minutes and Renslayer’s tail because they want to save the TVA from the malfunctioning Time Loom. It turns out only a Kang variant can fix the Loom, so the fact that Loki and Mobius all but stumble upon Victor is quite convenient. Minutes and Renslayer — who have their own interpersonal conflict that’s also quickly resolved — want to bring Timely back to the TVA because that’s where he belongs, and once they learn of the Time Loom kerfuffle, they want him to help fix things too. The fact that everyone is chasing the same objectives is something the episode even lampshades through Timely’s confusion, before hand-waving it away with a flimsy explanation involving Renslayer’s mistrust of Mobius and Loki — a mistrust that plays out in verbal exchanges separate from the action, rather than through the action itself.
The only objectives that seemingly collide are Loki’s and Sylvie’s, i.e., protecting Timely and killing him. But as Loki explains to her ad nauseam, they too want the same thing in the long run: Sylvie wants to live peacefully on her own branch of the timeline, and Loki’s attempts to fix the Time Loom will prevent that branch from being destroyed. The drama between them ends up less a matter of reconciling clashing objectives and more of explanations and clarifications. It’s dramatically inert, though thankfully, Sylvie’s major decision surrounding whether or not to kill Timely ends up being her own, in the episode’s strongest scene (a focused “Would you kill baby Hitler?” conundrum). She recognizes that Timely, like herself, is free to make his own decisions, and is forced to reckon with a clash that’s more internal than external, as her belief in free will collides with her murderous instincts to maintain that very same freedom. It’s a fleeting but powerful moment that allows Majors to tap into what seems like Timely’s innate goodness and innocence — the rare moment during which his performance isn’t grating, with its jumpy, “Timothée Chalamet as Wonka” musical-theater-kid energy.
In something of an end-episode stinger, Sylvie banishes Renslayer to the end of time, where she killed He Who Remains last season, as Miss Minutes reveals to Renslayer that she knows a big secret about her. This secret is likely one that’s been teased in previous episodes — that Renslayer and Kang were involved in some way, and that her memory had been wiped — so it stands to reason that Renslayer gazing upon He Who Remains’s corpse could eventually have some sort of impact on her, at least in theory. But when she sees him lying dead in this episode, it doesn’t make an emotional dent, because at this point in her character’s development, Kang is just a theoretical presence, someone whose face she sort of knows and whose mission she believes in. But they have no personal connection yet, at least not one she remembers.
The drama here is all backward, causing the episode to end on more of a shrug than on anything resembling emotional impact or emphasis. It’s a fun entry, but a flimsy one, and at the midpoint of the season, this is at least a little bit concerning. With so much resolved here so neatly and easily, no one seems to have any remaining overarching goals that clash with their actions or anyone else’s at this point — save for Renslayer, who isn’t actually aware of the full scope of her own story.
Low-Key Moments
• Is Victor Timely a moniker adopted by Kang, like it was in the comics? Or is it his actual name? Probably not — Loki and Mobius think it’s too much of a coincidence — but it’s fun to imagine this whacky instance of normative determinism, in which a kid named Timely decides to become a time traveler.
• Pretty weird to mention the Chicago fire of 1871, and then set your episode during the world’s fair of 1893, but not have a single mention of the deadly fire that broke out at that very same event. It seems, for a moment, that when Timely cranks up his machine and electricity starts shooting off in all directions, that he might inadvertently be responsible for this, but no dice.
• Timely’s great desire is the same as Casey’s: to get Ke Huy Quan’s autograph. Finally, a relatable villain.
• Surely Mobius’ desire to take the scenic route at the world’s fair is a latent desire to live life to its fullest? If only someone had invented the Jet Ski in the late 19th century.
• We need a closer look at the stilt-trousers Timely built. What ARE those things?
• Does … does Miss Minutes want to bone Kang?
