Spoilers for Loki season 2 episode 1, which dropped on Friday 6 October 2023! I’m going to write up a rundown of the episode along with the analysis, the Easter eggs and my predictions for what comes next.
This post runs briefly through the things that caught my eye on a first viewing and the Easter eggs, and then gets into the analysis.
Spoilers ahead
For the episode-by-episode reviews of the shows that aired earlier, click the images below!
The Loki series
I’ve started shooting all sorts of things for fun lately. The camera is an α7 IV — shoot in RAW, edit in Lightroom, that kind of thing.
Season 2 is finally here!!!
I figured a reunion with the original Mobius wouldn’t be possible any time soon, and then it happens in episode 1 lol
Such a dense opening episode~
The flow of time inside the TVA alone works differently from everywhere else, so I want to get into that later in this post!
This time round, events in the TVA’s past, present and future were affecting each other in the past-to-future direction!
So change something in the past and it acts on the present. But the flow of time in the MCU up to now was that causing something back in the past only made a branch split off from there, so it had no effect on the present.
Which means the flow of time inside the TVA works the same way as Back to the Future.
Does this become a key element of the show, or have they simply not thought it through this far, or is a branch happening after all and the timeline Loki thinks he came back to is a different one… Curious!
Also, I’d assumed the Mobius and the rest from the end of season 1 were Variants, so it never occurred to me that they were the Mobius of the past! And the way meeting the Ouroboros of the past gradually changes the state of the present was fun lol
The odds of being turned into spaghetti in that room being 7000% got a laugh out of me lol
That mural is He Who Remains fighting the other Kangs! Something like this will happen in Secret Wars too, I think, so I’m seriously looking forward to it!!! Want to see it already!!!!
So the Temporal Loom is the thing that weaves raw time up into physical timelines!
What happens with raw time, then? And what things were like before this machine existed — curious about that. Is this machine the cause of time branching in the first place? Hmm, the mystery only deepens.
There was also a scene where the branched timelines look bundled together in the future, so maybe that means all the timelines get merged in Secret Wars? That would let them reboot a few characters and a few bits of the setup while they’re at it!
But then again, not doing this scene at some point during season 2 would leave its own nagging itch~
A phone rings while Loki is looking for the stick, he runs into Sylvie again, and then he gets pruned from behind! That phone call looks like somebody steering things so that Loki gets pruned right there~ And it looks like that same person is the one who pruned him from behind. Who could it be? Loki himself? Mobius? Kang?
Sylvie, having turned the timeline into a total mess (or rather, into what it was always meant to be), went to McDonald’s lol
She looked somehow satisfied taking in that peaceful, easygoing view. The trailer had a shot of her working at McDonald’s, so this presumably leads into that.
Ravonna went off somewhere at the end of season 1 in search of freedom! I think plenty of people will have forgotten, so I’m writing it down here just in case lol
On July 24, 202…