[In-Depth Analysis & Review] Loki Episode 3 [Impressions & Easter Eggs]
Hello!
Today it’s Loki episode 3, which dropped on Wednesday 23 June — the points worth flagging, the theories, and predictions for where all of this goes next.
Quick notes on everything that caught my eye on the first watch, the Easter eggs, and the theories after that.
Spoilers ahead
The WandaVision episode reviews from earlier are here!
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Check the image below for the Loki episode reviews!
Contents
What I’ve been into lately
Started photographing Hot Toys figures for fun recently. Camera is a ZV-1, shooting RAW and editing in Lightroom.
This time it was Ueno and a few other places.
Episode 3, “Lamentis”
Sylvie’s illusion casting
How she got the information out of Hunter C-20 turns out to be this: she does it using real memories.
The TVA’s secret surfacing in the middle of that exchange gave me goosebumps.
Lamentis-1
The two of them landing in 2077, an exquisitely judged distance into the future.
I had a quick look for a connection between this planet and the comics and couldn’t find one.
Watching the trailer I’d assumed it was mid-destruction from a reset charge, and yet it’s simply collapsing for real — that made me laugh.
What are the people of Lamentis?
The people on Lamentis look human from what I can tell.
The MCU has no shortage of aliens in it, starting with Guardians of the Galaxy. Hard to believe they cut corners just this once, so does this mean people from Earth start travelling in space a lot from here on?
Loki can’t ride facing backwards
Loki announcing on the train that he can’t sit facing away from the direction of travel was so pathetic it made me laugh.
The bond with Sylvie deepens
Family talk with Sylvie, an attempt to take the ark together — in the space of one episode they’ve got seriously close.
Episode 4 is probably a Mobius episode, and I think he might come to rescue these two at the very end of it.
After watching episode 3
The secret of the TVA and the Time-Keepers
And get this — the TVA’s staff weren’t created by the Time-Keepers at all. Every one of them is a Variant.
What’s more, the hunter Sylvie abducted has apparently been alive for several hundred years, so it seems she isn’t simply a human any more. And her memories of her time at the TVA look like they have a haze over them — brainwashed, in a sense, it seems.
So the souvenirs being confiscated, which I brought up in the episode 2 analysis, probably isn’t because there are several Mobiuses — it looks more like the TVA periodically sealing or resetting memories.
And the liking for jet skis must be a memory from back when Mobius was human. This really does look like a story that asks what each individual’s identity is.
The mastermind of the show
As I’ve been saying for a while now, I think the mastermind of the show isn’t the Time-Keepers but Miss Minutes. How about this: Miss Minutes, built by the Time-Keepers, has gone rogue? Really hoping the TVA’s secrets get dragged out into the open soon~
What Hunter C-20 was afraid of
Hunter C-20 was falling apart in episode 2, saying “it’s real, it’s real” over and over.
And that isn’t down to Sylvie’s illusion casting. It looks like it’s because she remembered that
she is a Variant whose memories were wiped
— or that’s how it looks.
So I get the feeling episode 4 is the one that closes in on the secret of the TVA and the Time-Keepers from Mobius’s side.
What Sylvie actually is
Right after Sylvie infiltrates the TVA she tries to take control of a mind and fails. Which means this is Sylvie’s first time at the TVA. If she’d been before, she’d know magic doesn’t work there.
In the conversation between Loki and Sylvie there’s an exchange about their mothers being different? And about having been told what she really was.
I remember Mobius saying that Variants can look different too, but this much divergence in where she came from is odd. At the very least there ought to be more in common with Loki, the original.
So the possibility comes up that Sylvie and Loki are basically different people to begin with.
My prediction is that she might be a copy Loki made with duplication casting when he was small. Which would make her Loki as well, but with a different origin. Incidentally, it seems illusion casting draws a version of yourself that the outside world can perceive, while duplication casting copies your own body exactly and builds it. It really is a holographic mirror of your molecular structure, so they say.
The Loki in this show is a Variant of the Sacred Timeline Loki too, so he and Sylvie are copies together and look set to get on well from here.
Scenes that will presumably show up later
The official trailer is out now, so I’ll run quickly through the shots in it that haven’t appeared in the show yet.
This one looks like Earth. Which era though? Disasters are the theme this time, so it’s got me curious.
The shots above go to all sorts of places.
Something that looks like a presidential candidate badge on the chest… is somebody running for office?
Looks like the late stage of the story. The purple — a reset charge?
This one looks like Lamentis. The story on that planet seems set to carry on a while yet.
Is this lot a proper full-on raid on the TVA?
Really looking forward to what comes next!
