This week’s episode is quite handily the best of the season, even if it serves a recursive function. The show has the bad habit of constantly reverting to the status quo, so it should be no surprise seeing exactly when and where its ensemble ends up this week (spoiler: exactly where they ended up last week). However, “Science/Fiction,” directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, gives a longer leash for the filmmakers, and the appearance of story deconstruction allows the latest entry to be much moodier, with far more room for the characters to breathe. That the show is repeating itself thematically can be annoying, but that it hasn’t yet expressed itself this lucidly makes repetition a forgivable sin.
Last week ended on an explosive cliffhanger, with the Time Loom exploding and everything flashing to white. It turns out the TVA wasn’t destroyed — at least not immediately — leaving Loki to wander its empty halls in silence since everyone around him has mysteriously disappeared. It’s an impactful re-introduction that sells Loki’s isolation with each echoing footstep. Amusingly, when he begins glitching once again (or “time slipping,” just as he did in the season premiere), his exasperated proclamation of “No, no, no, this is NOT happening again!” may as well echo the sentiments of viewers who would rather the show moved in any direction but backward.
Thankfully, that desire is soon satiated when the TVA experiences the effects of temporal radiation and gets “spaghettified” bit by bit, like poor Victor Timely. But rather than falling victim to this fate, Loki is mysteriously bounced back and forth between versions of the show’s supporting characters living regular human lives on branched timelines, with no memory of the TVA. Hunter B-15 is a New York doctor in 2012. Casey is a prison inmate escaping Alcatraz in 1962. Ouroboros is a failing Pasadena sci-fi writer in 1994. And Mobius (or “Don”) has the life he always wanted, or so he thought, in modern-day Cleveland. He has a family, or at least he did. His wife has left him, and his two garbage sons make his life a living hell (especially the dreaded Laramie). He also finally gets to be around Jet Skis all the time — his one true passion — but as an overeager sports-vehicle salesman who can barely close a deal.
One by one, Loki regales them with his impossible-to-believe story and convinces them that all of existence is at stake, though we only really see this play out for Ouroboros and Mobius. In the former’s case — on a set eerily reminiscent of his TVA workshop, disguised just enough to be uncanny — the function of letting us see their exchange in detail is to quickly set up some of the episode’s sci-fi logistics while simultaneously breaking them down to their barest elements (thus forcing Loki to consider the “why” of his constant time-slipping in order to overcome it). However, when Loki begins convincing Mobius to help, the scene takes its time. Its purpose is to establish the emotional stakes: the lives these versions of the characters have been blissfully living and the people they’ve been living them with. Loki urges Mobius to leave by reminding him that he can return to any point in time once the day is saved, and his sons won’t even know he’s gone. “Yeah, but I will,” Mobius responds in one of the more heartbreaking moments in the series.
The episode’s deconstructions mostly center on known motivations and relationships, so it doesn’t offer any novel insight into any of the characters. However, its filmmaking affords Loki (and eventually, Sylvie) the opportunity to vocalize all these known feelings and stew in them for extended periods, which is undoubtedly worthwhile. Right from the episode’s opening scene, the image’s blown-out highlights make Loki feel worn to the bone as he hobbles through the TVA. Scenes last longer than they have all season, and yet they feel more urgent than any of the preceding walk-and-talk discussions about how to prevent all of existence from exploding because “existence” is given tangible form this week. It’s living and experiencing loss and love and annoyance, sometimes all at once, the way Mobius does, so the very idea of pulling him away from his new life (his old life?) feels difficult, even if his departure somehow means ensuring his sons will live.
With the TVA out of the way this week, Benson and Moorhead are essentially (albeit temporarily) liberated from the show’s shared-universe constraints, allowing them to play around to their heart’s desire. There’s something wicked and wonderful about the episode’s use of jump-cuts — courtesy of editor Calum Ross — to denote the passage of time (rather than more traditional means, like cross-fades), as though we were slipping and glitching through time alongside Loki.
Humor abounds in the visual framing too, from the way Benson and Moorhead mirror Loki’s flailing movements with the inflatable tube man outside Mobius’s workplace and the way his spread-eagle posture when learning to control his time-slipping makes him resemble Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, given the circular formation behind him. It plays like a sneaky indication of just how fundamental the building blocks of the episode are going to look once they’re deconstructed, as though the directors were twinning the idea of a prototypical representation of the human form with a prototypical representation of human drama. Ouroboros doesn’t just help Loki with the science aspect of his quest, but with the emotional beats that might be necessary to complete his journey (the “why?” of it all), and his solution — bringing together Loki’s loved ones — lies less in any sci-fi logic and more in the emotional reasoning of what has to happen next for Loki to succeed. For once, the show’s closest cousin isn’t Doctor Who but the latter seasons of Lost, which warped and bent its heady sci-fi plots in the direction of heartfelt mysticism if it meant more emotional impact.
The show has taken meta approaches before — its core premise, after all, began with concerns over maintaining a single continuity — but in its first-season finale, Kang’s talk of destinies being prewritten scripts served the far more logistical function of moving pieces into position for future movies. Granted, everything in “Science/Fiction” works similarly toward bringing the cast back to where they were before the Time Loom explosion, but Loki’s discussion with Ouroboros (and furthermore, his chat with Sylvie before her timeline is horrifically destroyed) helps the episode zero in on Loki’s objectives outside of the plot mechanics and the TVA, forcing him to admit that his motives involve wanting to save his friends because he doesn’t want to be alone.
This also leads to a fair amount of emotional whiplash, between Loki instantly accepting that he needs to stop trying to free his friends from their mundane lives and just let them live (and die, it would seem?) before going back on this equally suddenly, and it’s not the most compelling dilemma either. That Loki cares for these people hasn’t really been in doubt — this season has seen a much more altruistic Loki, and one obsessed with safeguarding his loved ones — but putting words to it seems to motivate him enough to magically harness his weird time-slipping abilities (okay, sure) and essentially turn back time when things go awry.
It’s one hell of a deus ex machina (even for a literal god), and it’s jarring to watch the series give its characters Avengers: Infinity War–style deaths, where they feel themselves fading from existence, only to give them an Avengers: Endgame–style resurrection a minute later (will death ever matter in the MCU?) But it’s also played like enough of a sweeping crescendo, buoyed by an emotionally honest performance from Tom Hiddleston, that you’re willing to accept a logistical leap or two. It turns out the real-time travel was the friends we made along the way.
Low-key Moments
• Casey’s accomplices on Alcatraz are none other than the directors Benson and Moorhead.
• As always, Natalie Holt’s score remains unimpeachable. This time, it adds a tremendous sense of foreboding, making even moments as thuddingly obvious as Loki finding the TVA guidebook in his pocket (duh) feel like earth-shattering twists.
• It seems like Brad is living his best life somewhere on the branched timeline, too, no doubt raking in boatloads of royalties from the Zaniac video game we briefly glimpse in the 1980s.
• As though Ouroboros and Victor Timely inspiring each other to write the TVA guidebook wasn’t enough, Loki seems to set an intersecting paradox in motion by handing Ouroboros a copy of the book he’s yet to write.
• Finally, a Marvel show for Primer fans.
