House of R - 'Loki' Season 2, Episode 5 Deep Dive

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Joanna is joined by Dave Gonzales to tackle the penultimate episode of 'Loki' Season 2! They break down their initial thoughts on what happens to Loki when he time slips through dying timelines in an attempt to rescue his friends (07:33). Then they dive deep into the episode itself and examine all of the emotional beats that bring Mobius, OB, and Sylvie together (14:00). Later, they give their thoughts on wig watch and all the theories leading up to the finale. Host: Joanna Robinson Guest: Dave Gonzales Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Social: Jomi Adeniran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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walking away. So selfish. Of course I'm selfish. I want a life. I want to live. What's wrong with wanting something like he. What do you want? I want to stop he who remains. No, wrong. Try again. What is it that you really want? Come on. I want to save this. I want to save everything, all of it. Is it really that hard? Come on, keep trying. I want to save the TVA.

Why? I want the TVA back. And? What do you want? I want my friends back. Two bourbons, please. Excellent choice, Sylvie. I want my friends back.

I don't want to be alone. We're both selfish. I'm Joanna Robinson. This is, we're here to do a deep dive, medium deep, a, you know, a semi-dive on season two, episode five of Loki. And I am joined today by a very special guest. I love that the theme of this episode of Loki is the most important thing is the friends you made along the way.

One of the best friends I've ever made along the way of all of my time in podcasting and writing and writing a dang book that came out last month. It is my co-author, Dave Gonzalez. Hi, Dave, how are you doing? Woo, yeah, definitely didn't get Mal sick so I could do this with you this week. That's, you never accuse me of using my time powers. Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Big fan of the show.

I'm going to try to provide whatever type of flavor this is going to be different from the mal flavor, but hopefully just as good. Just a different type of pie. Our, different time, yeah, it's not just key lime anymore. Our beloved Mallory Rubin is, unfortunately, out sick today, but I do have a message directly from her to all of our listeners, which is, please let the beloved bad babies know. I really enjoyed the app, and I'm sad to miss this one. Flash sideways, fail safe, I zoom lost. Boom. So, and I'll be back on Saturday for the

finale pod that we're doing. So that just takes me right into programming reminders to let you know what's going on elsewhere in the ringerverse, et cetera, right now. We've got a lot going on. Loki finale is looming. That was not an intended part. that just happened. Loki finale is coming up. So the Midnight Boys, Poo-Pew, will be here on Thursday

over on the Ringiverse, I should say. By here, I mean a different feed entirely over on the Ring ofverse to do a Loki finale plus Invincible Season 2 episode 2 instant reaction.

So a little two for you on Thursday from the Midnight Boys. And if that isn't enough mid-My boys for you, I have a treat for you on Friday. We get an instant reaction to the Marvels from the Midnight Boys on this Friday as well.

So it's back-to-back Thursday, Friday. two shows, one movie, all coverage from The Midnight Boys. Mallory and I will be here on Saturday with our Loki finale Deep Dive. And we're going to go deep because Mallory is truly bummed to miss this episode. She really loved this episode of television. So we're probably going to do a little episode five catch up, season wrap up. It's going to be a long one.

I apologize in advance, Steve, because we're doing it on the weekend. Sunday, Jess Clemens will have a splash page for you on the Loki finale. And then Monday, Button Mash, Ben and Jessica, and perhaps someone else will be doing Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3 on Button Mash. And Mallory and I will be here on Monday to do The Marvel. So that's just a lot that's going on. And if you want to stay in touch with everything that's happening, I would recommend you subscribe to the podcast. That might be a good idea. There's two of them, Ring orverse, House of R.

Subscribe to them. Then what more could you possibly need or want in this world? You follow us on social, Twitter. Facebook, Instagram. I don't think we're on blue sky yet, but maybe soon, et cetera, et cetera. We're around at Ringerverse. Jomi, just keeping you in touch with everything that's going on. And last one at least, you'll definitely want to email us.

Email us all your Loki thoughts. We're kind of running out of territory on theories. I think Theory Corner is about to dry up with Loki because we're about to hit the finale. But your Loki season-long thoughts, your thoughts on the marvels, we very much want to hear those before we record on Monday, Hobbits and Dragons at gmail.com is how you can get in touch with us. Dave Gonzalez, have you ever sent an email to this podcast? I have never sent an email to the podcast because let me tell you something I've learned about the bad babies on Book Tour.

Very passionate, smart people. And if I need to get a hold of you, I will text you. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, we met a lot of listeners on Book Tour, and it was wonderful. Everyone was so sweet. And we will be, I mean, Miles is not here, so why not go wild and do a little book tour promo? We have two more stops planned officially. We will be in Austin, Texas this weekend.

Dave and I and our co-author Gavin Edwards will be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas. So, hey, bad babies. Awesome bad babies. Come see us. And then Dave and I will be at Dutch Comic-Con in the Netherlands, the following weekend. So if you're a European bad baby and you want to hop on a train, and come see us, or perhaps you live in Utrecht, then you can just amble down the street and see us.

We will be at Dutch Comic-Con. There's a lot of cool people at Dutch Comic-Con. We're really excited to go. So that is what is coming up for us on the book front. But today, Tuesday, November 7th, we are here to talk about episode 5 Loki science slash fiction. Love some slash fiction. I also love slash fiction, genuinely, unironically.

47 minutes long. This is written by Eric Martin, who is the headwriter of the season, and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who are sort of like de facto head directors of the season. And so it's like the A team is here for the penultimate episode of Loki. Let's begin with our opening snapshot. All right, Dave, quick overall thoughts on episode five. I really like it. I treat my analysis, I think, of this episode, like as it finished before. I started my rewatch, I had to just sit and be like, that's a good episode of television.

So unlike a lot of the nerdy-ass shit that I do on the internet, I don't have as many thoughts about, like, I do have thoughts. I guess I have a normal amount of thoughts about how this fits into the overall MCU to the Loki timeline. But just on what makes TV good TV, which is something that I've been trying to focus on with Loki as Marvel's first season two, what differentiates it for some of the other projects. This is just a really tightly well-done episode of television that through character-based storytelling, I think is telling us a lot about what is important

not only to Loki, but to Loki the series, both the character and the series. So I had a lot of really interesting thoughts about this pivot away from a more timey, why-mey, sort of way of time travel into a more character-based time travel. So the idea that I think at the very end, Loki says he could rewrite the story. So the idea that stories can be worlds really reminded me of first nerd-ass reference. For a period of time, I had a small production company, and we attempted to pitch a Mist movie.

I don't know if you've read any of me. I have played Mist. Okay. So if you played the game, you have a vague idea, but if you also read the novels that lead into Mist, it is about a society that learns how to write worlds into existence into books. And then you could, like, sort of touch those books and travel into those world. Or trap your, who you think are evil in those worlds. That's more mist is about. But that's sort of like storytelling into direct physical worlds. This episode reminded me of that. It also reminded me of a comic book series called The Unwritten, which is sort of... I've read that too. Why are you hitting on all things I've actually played in red? You know that I don't have a deep bench in video games. Amazing. Yes, I've read unread.

Well, maybe we're both interested in this idea that you could create actual realities through storytelling. I don't know why we'd be invested in that as, you know, like journalists and storytellers. It's a mystery. Oh, yeah, but if you are unfamiliar with the unwritten, it's basically a guy whose father wrote a series of fantasy novels that are sort of supposed to be like the Harry Potter novels, but used his real name, Tom Taylor, and that leads to all sorts of complications

as you get deeper and deeper into the series. So if you want to check that out, it's of the flavor of episode five of season two of Loki. I just like it. I like character-based storytelling. I like time slipping. I like an episode that needs to live and die by the logic of its dialogue within the same hour.

And so I really like this episode. How about you, Joanna? Well, thanks. What a pivot, Dave. I appreciate you. So with love and respect to our pals, the min-eye boys, I couldn't have disagreed more with their take. It's all subjective, so they're allowed to feel how they feel. This is not necessarily like a 10 out of 10 episode for me. But I think the highs are so high and the highs are feeding something that I really wanted from the season of Loki so much that like the other things that don't hit perfectly don't matter as much to me.

will be sort of pointing them out a little bit. And one of the things that I want to say, just as an overall, we will be referring to Lost a few times in this analysis. And I just want to say, as tempted, like, Dave and I used to host a podcast about Lost called the Storm. You can go listen to all of it if you ever want to rewatch Lost. Loss is a foundational text for the Loki writers. Michael Waldron, who was the head writer in season one, talked a lot about Lost, talked about how the episode The Constant, is he thinks, the best episode of television ever made. There's a lot of the constant DNA in here.

There's a lot of final season of Lost DNA in here. We'll be talking about Lost. There are a few things that I will try to protect spoiler-wise, in case you've never seen Lost. And we'll definitely premise everything. But just know that if Mallory had been here, we also would have been talking this much about loss. You only need to listen to our Yellow Jackass episode to know that if Mallory and I have an excuse to talk about loss, we will. So this is not Dave's fault.

This would have happened anyway. All this has happened before will happen again as we talk about Time Travel Ship. shows. But something that this episode attempts to do is accomplished a similar plot, similar-ish plot to what stacks up to, I think, about like eight or ten episodes, maybe eight of the final season of Lost. And so I, for one, felt that compression a bit would be my main critique in that if we're talking about all the characters in the show or all the characters we're talking about here are Loki, Sylvie,

Obie, Mobius, B-15, and Casey, right? Like, those are our characters that we're dealing with here. I'd say they nailed it on Loki, nailed it on Sylvie, nailed it on OB, mostly nailed it on Mobius, and I'll talk about where and why,

and then Casey and B-15 just feel like significant afterthoughts, which is like, they're supporting characters, but if we were in the final season of Lost, we would have gotten whole episodes for them. So I just sort of felt that loss of that loss of that a little bit, only because they're so clearly going for a lost homage in this setup without having the luxury that Lost had of like the final season wasn't 22 episodes,

but some of their seasons are 22 episodes. So, you know, it's a six-episode season. There's a lot that they have to accomplish. And I just felt that compression a little bit. But again, the highs are so high when Loki and Sylvia are like stopping to talk in the bar, stuff like that. I'm like, yeah, this is a juice, this is what I want. Did you know about one in three people with plaques psoriasis may also develop

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All right. So we start sort of is precisely where we left off with Loki standing in the, you know, explosion, the bright blast glow of the exploding time loom. But now none of his friends are standing near him. And just as he always feared, he's all alone. And this is something that's going to, this is a thread that is going to unspool throughout the whole episode. but this image of Loki once surrounded by his friends and now all alone is how we start the episode. How did this opening business with Loki running around the TVA, with we see like a quick little time loop where he sees himself reading the guidebook so we sort of understand a bit exactly how he's looping and what's going on? How did that play for you before we get into the spigotification of it all?

Considering we're about to get into the very specific details of how to navigate this world and a whole bunch of gobbledy gook from Obie or AD about how, you know, time slipping in the TVA shouldn't work. One of the interesting things I thought about the first episode of Loki is how they're like, time doesn't exist here on the previously on and then immediately had basically like a ticking clock plot line. So a lot of times when an episode starts out this drastically, I was mostly focused on how it looked and specifically the method that they were using of sort of allowing us to,

this is the most basic film 101, but allow the audience to slip through time through editing. But very specifically in isolating this character and making use of the space on either side of him, I think the first 10 minutes of this are either excellently shot or excellently shot because there's excellent storyboards driving them. You could really feel how when there's a lack of need for something like character chemistry, which we'll get on to later, as Loki's tried to convince these people back to the TVA, that the scenes start fronting the performances. But when it's just Tom Hiddleston who could perform his way out of a wet bag on this show, because a lot of times they're giving him out. absolute nonsense and stuff.

The bag has to be wet? Okay. All right. Well, I mean, it helps if the bag's wet. Okay. I guess he doesn't have the horns anymore, so you got to make that initial tear somehow. But it just makes the beginning of this episode makes such good use of the production design space and how to frame Loki as he's wandering through the TVA and we're all just as confused as he is. What's your theory into why other than the plot needs him to, why Loki starts glitching through time again? Do you feel like it's sort of physical that the loom exploded and by whatever mechanism that he was pulled back into the present because the loom is exploded, it's no longer anchoring him there?

Or is it more like emotional because it was Mobius, who was the one who extracted him? Is it because Mobius isn't there anymore, these glitching-to-time? And if that's the case, then we're already smack-dam in the constant territory. And we'll talk about that in a second for people who have not seen the constant, which, I love you, what are you doing with your life? Dave, what do you think? Emotional, physical? What do you think? I mean, I think it eventually becomes emotional.

But I do think knowing what I know about temporal radiation in this story world, I do think, it's sort of losty slash the constant in that he's just suddenly inundated with so much temporal radiation. And we see later on the episode when everything's spaghettiing that it sort of doesn't affect Loki, at least not immediately. We never sort of see him unspool. So if he's like some sort of sponge, he sort of got reset when they pulled his temporal aura out of all the various timelines at the end of episode one. But he's still spongy. So this explosion of all time

sort of allows him to absorb enough to start time jumping again. And it isn't until, you know, he consciously gets control over it, that he develops it into a superpower. But that's very similar to the constant. So, yeah, I think it's,

you get blasted with enough energy, your light bulb turns on, even if you didn't flick the switch. For those who don't know, I'm going to talk about, like, three main broad concepts of Lost so that y'all can follow along as we, like, make various references. The constant is about a man who is slipping through his own timeline, as Loki does at the very end of this episode, his brain is slipping through sort of different points in his

own timeline. And he, in order, and that's not healthy for him, and so in order to settle back into the present, similar to the opening of this season, settle a person one place. settle his brain and his body in the present, he needs to find someone that he kind of knew throughout time and space to anchor him. That person is called his constant. And so it becomes this very emotional story of finding someone to anchor you. That's the premise of the constant. Again, one of the best episodes of television ever, and you should watch it. Certainly one of the best episodes of genre fiction ever. And then later on in Lost, in two different storylines

in different seasons, someone is going around trying to recruit people to go back to something. and whether or not that recruitment it just takes place in the present and we need to physically go back or in a sort of what they call the sideways, a sort of alternate reality of like wake up, I know you from something else, come back.

Those two recruitment storylines are hanging heavily over this episode of Loki. I would say specifically the alternate timeline version of it. As Loki's glitching around the team, TVA, we hear this announcement, TVA code 1229, fail, safe mode initiated. Thank you for your service. It's not misminutes. It's another woman.

I didn't see whether or not it was Tara Stronging the credits, but it's not miss minutes. We do see her logo at the very end, like when things all spaghettify. The automat is empty a pie. The pie spaghettied early. The key lines were like, we're getting out of here. We're not. We don't want to be here anymore. And I think it's just like really

We have to notice, and this is like a clever thing about the little loop that they do at the opening of the TVA That Loki definitely has a manual on him as he glitches out of there and everything spaghettifies around him. The spaghettification of the TVA and then later the record store, which we can talk about, is so beautiful. You know way more about VFX than I do from your expert VFX, perspective. Like, what was your take on that whole effect and how it was done? Oh, I really like it. I mean, they have a lot of, they made a lot of choices to make it easier to look, uh, beautiful, I think. Because like the closest thing that I could think about is like a progenitor of this visual effect is like old video effects where you could just take like the color of a pixel and then like

extend it. Yeah. And that would sort of like make, that would make this, uh, this version. And that's sort of, it's now been placed with some sort of water, floaty physics sims so that they're kind of bouncing off of each other and maybe pulled in a momentum direction. But it allows for zero to visual cacophony so quickly that I think, yeah, it depends a lot on the composition of the overall shot, but it is great looking. What a week for spaghetti.

Joanna, I know you don't watch Rick and Morty, but what a week for spaghetti we're having in terms of television. What happened with spaghetti and Rick and Morty this week? Dave. It was an episode called That's a Morty where during spaghetti night, Rick is bringing spaghetti to the Smith family and they're all loving it. And he goes to get some more spaghetti and Morty follows him. And it turns out he is getting spaghetti out of a dead body because he's found a planet where people commit suicide. Their insides turn into spaghetti. So the episode is about ethical consumption of food. Gross. But also, I mean, I think that's that.

that's like, this is a perfect moment to talk about Rick and Morty because Eric Martin, who wrote this episode, is Rick and Morty writer, Michael Waldron, head writer from last season, is Rick and Morty writer. When we talk, as I like to talk sometimes, about the Rick and Mortification. Every time I wrote Spaghettiation, I was like, you might as well be writing

Rick and Mortification of the MCU here. But yeah, Eric Martin, Michael Waldron, Jeff Loveness on Quantumania. Like, these are all Rick and Morty writers who sort of got drafted over into the MCU. Our first flash sideways. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I'm calling it. Oh, yeah. What do you want to say? During the title screen, Loki reduces to the O, the time loop, and then builds itself back out, which is actually what we're doing in this episode before we get to Alcatraz. Brilliant. Thank you for that. Thank you. No problem. Flash Sideways number one. That is what I'm calling them because that's what they're called in loss. So that's what we're going to call them here today. Flash Sideways number one or Branch timeline, if you prefer. Alcatraz. Escape from Alcatraz.

1962, San Francisco, California, baby. Hometown, love it. We used to take class trips to Alcatraz. It was very spooky and cool. And I know most tourists have probably been to Alcatraz as well. But like D.B. Cooper and a bunch of the sort of urban legend mysteries that we saw in season one episode five last season before it, Casey's Branch timeline here is dealing with a real world mystery, which is what happened to the three men, Frankmore. and John and Clarence Anglin, who attempted to escape from Alcatraz prison in 1962.

They either vanished forever quite successfully. There have been sightings of them in and around mostly Florida, I believe. Or they drowned. Most people think they drowned, but that doesn't stop unsolved mysteries from having an episode about them. And what this episode presupposes is what if at least one of them, Frank Morris, who is Casey's real name. was snatched out of time by Loki. Dave, you love an urban legend and you loved this shit in season one.

How did you feel about deploying the Alcatraz Escape Here? I still like it. Love a prison break. Love going to Alcatraz for various reasons. But yeah, anytime you could show me a variant that because of the nature of this show, we get to check out variants, but we don't necessarily get to see the nexus

event that made them a variant. Guy who survived his Alcatraz escape is a great nexus event. It's like, we got to pull that guy out of time because he's not supposed to ever be found again. So, like, yeah, he pops up in Florida a year later and the TVA's like, oh, crap, and then recruits Casey out. But, yeah, also the man who is so nonchalant about Infinity Stones coming from such humble beginnings really tickled me, I think, in the correct way.

So, yeah, I like it. I think it would have been a little bit too much if each one of these characters was a dangling urban legend. But as you mentioned, we don't get that much time with B-15 or Casey. So if you're going to comp a whole backstory onto somebody, this is a smart way to do it

from a screenwriting perspective. And it gives him, like, Casey, I think Casey and B-15 are, like, the least well-served by the emotional half of this episode. But at least gives Casey or Frank, if you prefer, like, something he wants,

which is freedom. He's like actively trying to escape and form a new life for himself. And that is sort of an interesting and dynamic place to find someone. Something I love learning about the real Frank Morris, which I didn't know,

was that, so he was arrested for grand larceny in Miami Beach. So yeah, we got this like Florida Association, right? But he reportedly ranked in the top 2% of the general population

in intelligence as measured by IQ testing. And so I love this is like, this is both, it feels like the Florida connection is a nod to Eugene Cordero, character from the Good Place, Pillboy, right? Because we are in, like, Florida penny-antecrime territory.

But also, like, the IQ on Frank Morris, translating to Casey being someone who could, like, hang with OB when it comes to, like, trying to figure shit out in the TVA. I love that, too. This, like, he's brilliant, but he's a petty criminal from Florida. And all of that encompasses, like, the various Cs we know of Casey.

And I love that. Yeah, I mean, it, also provides the, at some point we could, if we need to expand on Casey because he gets to sort of, everybody has a faint echo of who they're going to end up being in the TVA in terms of their character. Casey is the furthest from who he ends up being, but he does get to maintain that intelligence. So I'm wondering if it's just like, it seems like if you erase, you know, a lot of these alternate variance timeline memories that they would sort of come out as a similar character

to the ones we know from the TVA, except for Casey for some reason. Because this guy, even till the very end, is like stealing stuff from the lab. And that is the complete opposite of what he is, I think, in the TVA. Yeah, but I like this idea that it's like circumstantial. Like if Casey,

Casey, without the whatever trappings that Frank Morris had growing up, just gets to use his, his brilliance for, you know, a cool, tiny-whimey ship and not for breaking into banks. Fun fact, there's a movie Escape from Alcatraz about this instance. Clint Eastwood played Frank Morris. Like, young 1972, Clint Eastwood, what a glow-up for good old Frank Morris. If you look up what he actually looked. That's nothing to do with Eugene Cordero, mostly to do with his real mugshot.

Usually we reserve Easter to the Easter egg section, but I'm just going to shout this one out here because I genuinely bothers me. Casey says, as they're running, Frank or Casey, if you prefer, says if they catch us, they're going to gut us like fish, right? And it's the exact kind of callback that I absolutely hate because it makes no sense because this is something that Loki says to Casey in season one when he threatens him in the opening, right? I'm going to gut you like a fish, Casey. What's a fish? And right, right, what's a fish? That's a scream, it's a scream joke, right? Because it's a line from scream, Drew Barrymore's characters, Casey. That's like, it's a, it's a scream. joke. Whether or not Loki knows he's making a scream joke, which I don't think he does.

The writer's dude. Loki doesn't. That's a Loki line, not a Casey line. So why would Casey be saying it here? Like, it just, it makes no sense that Casey. It lets him know that he knows what a fish is. But like, other than that, why isn't here? He's a man who lives in Florida, so he knows about fish gutting. And as we all know from Nicholas Cage movies, if you get caught on Alcatraz, someone tells you they're going to take pleasure and gutting you, boy. So you just, You put those two things together and you just naturally come out with the metaphor they're going to gut us like a fish. I know I'm being like a massive wet blanket and this is just a fun little throwaway line. But I, this just reminds me of like some of the later seasons of Game of Thrones where they would just have characters say lines that other characters said elsewhere for no reason other than to like sort of make it feel like it's all connected.

And I'm like, you can't just repeat the, what are you doing? Anyway, it oddly bothered me. Meanwhile, Loki, before he can snatch Casey up or do anything with him, he slips and he bops from Alcatraz to Sylvie's McDonald's, to Don's Jetsky dealership, Piranha Power Sports, to Time Theater 25, which I think is probably a season two episode five reference. And then we go to Flash Sideways number two, B-15. Still not, I loved this episode, so I'm sorry that I'm hitting you with like a couple negatives right in a row. but B-15, still not a character. We're 2012, New York, New York. B-15 is a doctor.

She's absolutely lovely human. Seems delightful. Seems like she has a great rapport with her patients. But we don't learn anything about, like, unlike at least with Casey, we don't learn anything about, like, what she wants, what we're pulling her out of other than the fact that, like, she's a good doctor. Do you have any, like, did you connect to this? How do you feel about this promising for B-15?

I just feel like she's been underserved all season. How do you feel about her little splash sideways here? She does feel underserved. She also feels like a character that can stick around no matter what happens at the end of this season. So I hope we do get more B15. But yeah, this episode has a couple of moments with B15 where I couldn't tell if we didn't get more because of the edits or if that's how it was originally written, which is, I know, a shitty way to doubt the writers. But there's a lot of abrupt cuts away from Loki steps into B-15's world,

and then we, like, don't see sort of what happens. And then later, she's part of the group. So I would like to see more where it is. It's interesting if they placed her in 2012 New York, given what we know. So do you ascribe to the theory that they cut away from her because originally there was a plot about her being, like, scared of Loki because 2012 New York is the Battle of New York. And that's possible.

I also think that there's way too much talk about what is supposed to happen on a branch timeline. So they might have cut it out not only because it seemed kind of weird and also like refocused not on B-15 the character, but on her reaction to Loki. But also because like we don't know what they are or are not allowed to say about the multiverse. We don't know what time in 2012 this is. We don't know if a branch timeline doesn't have a low. or, you know, like, Dr. Stephen Strange is already the Sorcerer Supreme. There's so many what-ifs baked into it. I think we might have sacrificed some character development so we could have more time

stuff to play around with for future use. I will shout out this email from our listener, Gene, who is straight up writing fan fiction now, but it's fan fiction I enjoyed, so I'm just going to include it. It's not slash fiction. It's just fan fiction. He says, I would have liked the show to have spent more time exploring the lives of each variant, which is what I've been saying. The show could have taken a page from Quantum Leap,

one of my favorite shows all time, and had Loki have to figure out the original Nexus event that originally caused the variant to be pruned and try to get each character recreate the Nexus event in order to wake up the variant or something like that. I love that, like a little mission, a little each time, next time the leap will be the leap home, something for Loki.

I love the idea of it, but it makes it makes it more of a question of what or why rather than who, which this episode's trying to steer us away from. Well, it could be who if it required, if the mission, again, we're writing fan fiction, we're having a great time doing it. If it requires Loki knowing his friends better in order to figure out what the thing is. Do you know what I mean? If it requires him to like better connect with them. Yes, instead of being like, don't worry about your kids. I can bring you right back here and it'll be like you never left that we would have.

have to figure out why he, what the deal with his kids was. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right. But a big, like, comic book, Easter egg, or is it bigger than an Easter egg here? Is that this character that B-15 is playing this doctor is named Verity Willis, according to her name tag and the closing credits. Verity Willis is a character from the comic Agent of Asgard, which we talked about, we talked about that comic last week. We will talk about it again at the end of this episode.

And I think a reason that Agent of Asgard keeps coming up in addition to sort of this idea of Loki as God of Stories is because even though Dr. Doom is an Agent of Asgard, it is also very much a Loki. It's also a Loki v. Loki story or a Loki v. the worst version of himself kind of story. And, you know, similar to Waldron talking last season about Kid Loki and Kid Loki interested him for that really. reason. I think Loki versus himself, Loki versus the worst version of himself, and drilling down on that, like, what makes a Loki a Loki is always going to interest the writers of this TV show, of like the most interesting person to pit Loki up against is his, like, worse devils instead of his better angels sort of thing. So, um, isn't that true for all of us? Yes, yes. Have you read Agent of Asgard? Do you have any thoughts of feelings about that? I have not. I just know how people are

talking about on the internet, I definitely want to pick it up, and I have a long flight to Utrecht coming up, so maybe I'll get to read some. But in the comics, Verity Willis is, she has the ability to see through all lies. And that makes her a perfect companion for Loki, you know, a consummate liar, God of lies, God of Mischiff. There is, in the comics, the future version of Loki shows Verity all the ills that the Loki that she is pals with will one day commit. And something that she says at one point in the comic.

She says, I don't believe there's an absolute future. And that's an interesting thing for us to talk about today. I don't believe there's an absolute future. I don't believe we can't change anything. I don't believe Loki can't change. But I do know he won't change if you stick him in a big box, mark Loki and nail the lid down. So this idea of like, as we'll talk about later, free will versus determinism, et cetera. But how that idea of free will wraps into this idea of can we fundamentally change who we are? Can we rewrite our own story, not just the story that's happening around us, but who we are fundamentally. What do you think of that, Dave, Gonzalez? When I hear that, I hear regret. So if you, if there's an absolute future, it takes away the impact of something like regret, but if there's a possibility of change, I think regret comes back much harder, whether or not you get to deal with it in the moment, like some people do, where they have trouble, like, making an actual decision because they are pre-regretting the consequences of any of those choices.

It's relatable. It's way too relatable, day. Pre-regret, oh, no. Well, I mean, and that's sort of where you're trying, especially for Loki in this episode, ultimately, he has to find the thing that's actually scaring him, and that's going to be his motivation to sort of unlock his new superpower. And so the problem that he seems to have, or at least skipping ahead just a little bit, it's sort of defined when he first starts to start to control his time slipping. He's like, I need to save the TVA. The TVA doesn't exist.

There's going to be millions of Kangs. I got to stop that. And that's how it's been going through the entire season so far as he needs to go. He needs to stop Kang's, maybe save some of them if they get to make their own choices. But if there's an absolute future, then he needs the TVA to come in and put everything into place. But then by the end, that's not ultimately what ends up being important.

The interesting thing about this episode in the series of Loki is it tells us that the TVA doesn't much matter as much as Loki matters. Loki has more control over time and more control over the TVA than we've been thinking at this point, certainly than he,

thinks. He thinks he needs to save this institution. And by the end of the episode, we are realizing that he needs to go back to the time he made a choice that he thought he was going to regret too much, which was not killing he remains. And he's going to get another chance of that choice. So could we all be Billy Pilgrims to help ourselves? It could be. We'll see. We don't know what's going to happen, but I'm just basing myself specifically on this episode. If you're worried about the regret of decisions that you make, Loki, the character, now has the power to re-face those decisions. And we're living through so many weird bootstrap paradox, which we're going to continue getting to in this episode, that sort of building him up as a character that has to take responsibility for what looks

like fate is very interesting and brings him back to his godlike status to me. I like that. All right, Flash Size is number three. Mobius finally gets his jedd Ski, 2022, Cleveland, Ohio. Dave, did this fulfill all your hopes and dreams for what would happen when you finally saw Mobius on a jet ski? I love this version of Owen Wilson, whether or not I like this version of Mobius. Yeah, I like how mundane it is. I like how genuinely passionate about jet skis he is.

He doesn't live in a beach town like I thought. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, there with the Rousseau's. And so he's doing some Lake Erie jet skiing. I love just the simplicity of that. And then also 2022, which was interesting, given what I know about the Marvel timeline. It's interesting that he's in 2022 and B-15 was in 2012, which are times in the Marvel timeline where they also differentiate from real time that you and I experienced during those years. You're talking about the snap in 2022.

I believe it's the blip. I was told that the blip and the snap were two different things. But you weren't told by me. But you weren't told by me. No, no. But I was told that the blip at the snap were two different things. I know. So the snap was an event.

This is during the blip. So we don't know, like, for instance, where his wife went. Yeah. Did his wife get snapped? I guess is the question. And then suddenly you have to deal with two kids and the wife comes back and the kids are five years older. That's a whole other. That's a whole other can of spaghetti.

Wind in the hair, a little miss slapping you in the face. and nothing but open water in front of you. And the Owen Wilson wig is hanging on for dear life in front of that high-speed fan. He also says to the guy that he's trying to sell the jet ski to in the beginning. He says, you're ready for your Poseidon moment, which I think is interesting. Don already has, his character's name is Dawn. Don already has gods on the brain, right? He's talking about gods even before he meets Loki here.

What did did you enjoy the visual of when Loki does his stretchy, stretchy time slip thing in front of the air dancer trademark in front of the Piranha Pro Sports? Did I appreciate it? Yes. Did it snap me out of what was happening? Yes. Because it's just one of those extremely visual things where my mind was like, okay. So is that air dancer visual effect? Did they film the air dancer?

They filmed Tom Hiddleston. They're like, they showed him some video and they're like, do this. And he has to like sort of match it up. A little bit distracting for me. But I always appreciate some good visual humor with my time slipping. All right. Now we're going to go to the part of the episode that I loved with my whole heart. Flash Sideways number four, science fiction double feature 1994, Pasadena, California.

And it's not just because the day. Dave and I just published our first book, so we know it's like to be, you know, aspiring wannabe writers hoping people are selling your books in stores, et cetera. This is just so freaking charming. And what a great payoff for the casting decision to put Kiwi Kwan in this role. Because AD is as delightful as OB. And it's just like getting to spend all this time with him, outside of him just like spouting techno babble, which he does like a little bit later. But to take the other side of it, science slash fiction, is the science, is this fiction, science fiction? Science fiction.

And to, oh my God, I just think, I think it's so charming. So he's trying some, like, sneaky viral marketing right by putting his own books in the bookstore and trying to buy a copy and, like, pump up the writer, say, I buy everything that he ever writes. Foyled again by his author photo inside the book, just as it is in the TVA guidebook. And I love that the book is, the book is the Zartan contingent, which was, there's a shot of it in the closing credits. And it has baffled the Easter egg hunters like all season. They're like, what is the Zartan contingent? There were so many theories about it. Also, later we'll see his like post-it board, his cork board covered in post-its that is also in the closing credits that people were just like pouring over.

Just like genuinely created to like bedazzle, baffle, badevil the Easter egg hunters this season. and I love that they put it in the closing credits. But she says, the owner of the store or the manager, I told you to stop putting your sci-fi books on our shelves, and he says, science fiction is a well-respectant thought-provoking genre. She says, nobody buys it here. What's your memory as, like, you know, you're a little younger than me,

but were you reading, like, sci-fi in 94? How old were you? Oh, I was reading comic books in 94. Okay. Was I reading sci-fi occasionally, but I don't think I ever got deep into, like, you know, reading back issues of Asimov magazine or anything. I appreciated science fiction, but I think I was still trapped in the mid-90s day tunnel of, like, independent movies and plotting of serial killer films and things like that.

It was probably a Thomas Harris period for me. Oh, wow. Yeah. We were, 90s kids were really into airport. books for dads. I was, yeah, I talk about this all the time, like the Michael Crichton and the John Grisham and like all the stuff that we were reading. Thomas Harris is a great other one that we were definitely reading at the time.

And it wasn't, you know, Crichton, of course, is doing a little bit of, definitely doing sci-fi, but like, it wasn't in, like, genre, the way that we treated genre at that time was so different than the way we treated it, like, starting in the aughts, stuff like that. So this idea of him as this, like, I mean, first of all, he's self-published. that's a tough road to ho all on its own. But as a science fiction writer, it was a very like kicked upon, frowned upon, looked down upon genre for,

I would say specifically in the 90s, tough time for that. You know what he should be doing is AD should be writing spec scripts for Star Trek the next generation. I was going to say he should be writing spec scripts for Star Trek the next generation. Sure you were. Sure you were.

I was. I'm sorry. It's not my fault. We're exactly on the same page today. The Zartan Contingent is such a good name for a Star Trek next-gen episode. What's the overrunner on you wanting them to look out for the little guy, the Zardan contingent, and actually publish in-universe Marvel book? I think if they got someone really fun to write it, that would be a great time.

Nice. Even though he's a struggling sci-fi writer, he's also a Caltech professional. which we will talk about a little bit later, somehow he is able to fund this extremely cool lab slash lair in the middle of the woods in Pasadena. I don't know. It did not look anything like Pasadena to me personally. But it is in the middle of nowhere, which he mentions later. He's like, there's no one for miles around, but we get this like external shot of it. And it is truly in the middle of a thick verdant wood. And I've never seen anything that looks like that anywhere near Los Angeles, California. But sure. We'll go with. it. And the production designers really popped off on this one. It is, of course, meant to, like, very much invoke Obie's, you know, level of the TVA. It's the same design, same ceiling, same fan, same, like, curve shelving, like, all the sort of stuff. Like, it's the same set, basically. But they just filled it with all sorts of ephemera and fun stuff to make it look more humanoid. And I just, I love the production design on the show, and I just relished. I mean, I was

already all in with like AD the aspiring sci-fi writer trying to sneak his book into the store. I found it genuinely hilarious and delightful. I found the performance so, so good. And then we get this visually dazzling set piece where we will return several times about the episode. What, like, I don't think I've ever talked to you about production design on this show. Like, how do you feel about it? What are you enjoying in this particular setup here? Oh, I feel like it's, you know, a great The production design on a show like this can be occasionally times to just, like, fit in Easter eggs. But I'm just thrilled with the amount of just simple geometry they're able to work into letting a place do the storytelling for you. You want circles, we got them.

You want cables, we got them. You want bookshelves inside curved places, trying to add right angles to otherwise curved surfaces. We got them. And then I also like the fact that it's so full and it's so designed to be able to move around in, to have multiple characters, move around in, that once we jump into AD Doug's Lab, that's when the show does the thing I was saying before, where it starts prioritizing performances a little more. Everything in there is handheld. We've been seeing like some locked off shots, some stuff to like isolate Loki in the center of the frame.

When we get to the bar, we get some more locked off stuff. But here, even if it's like a low shot of a stack of books for just a second, you could see it's a little handheld wobble because they're finding the shots and they're finding the performances on the set for the day, which together with the editing method of having a line sort of bleed in from the next scene and then we immediately cut to it sort of keeps us in the energy of the performances, which otherwise could have been a very long, non-sac exposition scene, these two actors actually end up killing it because it's interesting to look at no matter what they're saying and the energy. They managed to keep the energy between

the actors, even though there's probably a part that was cut out where Loki just explained Loki season two episodes one through five or one through four. We just get to yada yada over that and stick to the pertinent conversation. There are so many lost references. You've already dropped a Slaughterhouse Five reference, but we're going to talk about that a little bit more later as well. But I love, I felt very much that there was like a Back to the Future reference here because when Martin McFly in the first Back to Future goes back in time and he is trying to sort of like explain that he's from the future to his dad, George McFly, all this sort of stuff. George McFly is a sci-fi reader and eventually a sci-fi author. And so he is ready to, he's susceptible to this to Martin McFly's Darth Vader Gambit or whatever. And so when AD says, of course, I believe you, it's a dream come true.

I was just like, this is so George McFly coded. I love this. Did you get that Back to the Future vibe at all, or was that just me? No, no, I'd get it storytelling-wise from here. And also, sort of Mobius's, or Don, I guess, is dressed as like a muted Marty McFly. Yes. He's got the blue jacket instead of that. And then instead of having, like, plaid,

in jeans, it's just all beige in the middle. Yeah, yeah. So, like, the idea that he, in another world, Don could be Marty McFly in this time journey. And he at least has the optimism of Marty McFly in this one. But, yeah, there are all sorts of little echoes. And I could never tell. I'm glad you also enthusiastically yes to that, because I could never tell how deep I'm getting into the other time travel shows references win various time travel shows.

No, there was something about that 80s button down. that just like looked so Marnie McFly to me. I love that you saw that as well. Okay, so in a very like, isn't this cute, we're writers writing about writing line. Loki says, you're a writer, I'm doomed, you know, the writers that Loki wrote that line. But we find out that ADL says a day job teaching theoretical physics at Caltech.

And he says, I need to go, Loki says, I need to go back before the temporal loom melted down. And AD says you can't, it's impossible, but don't let that stop you, which I loved. And it reminds me a lot of this line that Mallory loves to quote from Harry Potter when Dumbledore tells Harry, like, of course it's happening your hair, but head, but why should that mean it isn't real? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's impossible.

Don't let that stop you. You're traveling through time. What are we doing? Let's hear what happens next. Steve. Key plays this clip, please. It doesn't sound like science. No, but it does sound like fiction.

You need to learn how to control your time slipping. I can't control it. I can't just make it happen. It's random. But it isn't random, because you keep ending up around exactly the people you're looking for. And it's evolving.

Because you're not just slipping in time. You're also moving around in space. It's like you're a better version of one of those tampats. You make it sound like it's a good thing. With science, It's all what and how. But with fiction, it's why. So why do you need to do this?

Why do I need to do this? I'll tell you why. Because if I can't save the TVA from being destroyed, there will be nothing to protect against what's coming. Well, if that's the real why that's guiding you, you should be able to control it. So go ahead. I love this one.

I mean, first of all, this is an incredible exchange. This idea of the why as a center of fiction is such an interesting thing that we're going to talk about a little bit more than a second. But like, I love what he says, well, if that's the real reason why that's guiding you and I'm like, oh, it's not. Like, oh, we're on a journey of why, which is a really fun journey to be on. But this idea of Loki being drawn to the people he needs, the people he cares about. the frenzy made along the way. Should we talk more about the constant here? I feel like it's pretty blatant, right?

What do you think, Dave? Yeah. I mean, also the aspect of controlling his time slipping and this definition that we get from AD where it's like he's not just moving around in time, he's moving around in space. His mastery of that actually goes beyond because at the end, he slips back into himself.

where at the beginning of this episode, we see him occupy the same place as two people at the same time. So there's actually like a further understanding that you get by understanding why you're doing something that actually amps your powers up. So it's a fantastic way to start the decoupling that this episode needs to do

of stop asking like the time questions. I know we just spent a bunch of time with Timely and Obie talking about the loom and why it works. and you got to expand some rings or some shit and then it turns into spaghetti. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about what's actually going to happen because if the Y feels right,

you shouldn't have to be thinking about the actual details of it. I don't want to go too hard on the Midnight Boys who I love and I think are so smart, especially not because Steve's on this call and has control over the soundboard, so he could do whatever he wants to in the edit, I suppose. But one of their main... major complaints was that it felt like the end of this episode started right back at a, at,

I mean, a little bit before where the previous episode ended, but like in a way, what did we even accomplish if we're right back sort of where we started, but we're physically back where we started, but emotionally, like that's, that's the, this is boiling down the key of this episode. Loki has to figure out his why. I know he ends the episode by saying it's about who, but it really is about why. And he has to figure out why he's doing this. And, and he has to figure out why he's doing this. And so he goes on a very emotional journey through this episode, even though this plan is sort of like Ocean's 11, let's get the band back together sort of idea doesn't pan out. His conversations with Mobius and his conversations with Sylvie and his

conversations with AD along the way, not you, Casey, not you B15, you don't get your emotional breakthrough moment. But his conversations with all of them help him, as you say, level up on his powers because it's it is very emotional for him at the end to skip ahead. He's like literally grasping at the spaghetti strands of his friends floating in front of him. And not just his friends, but like Sylvie, who he's in love with, like in front of him, having failed them, a very infinity war like watching your friends get snapped to ash in front of you. And it's only in that moment that he's able to harness the power that he needs to do whatever he's going to do next, right. And yeah, to your point, we've been leveling up all season because he started just snapping

around the TVA through time. And then OB's point or AD's point, now you're snapping around, all around time and going to Pasadena and San Francisco and New York and Cleveland, Ohio, etc. And then, yeah, then the final form appears to be snapping your, you know, sliding your brain through time through different moments in your body. And that brings us to something. I swear to you on my entire soul, Dave Gonzalez, I was going to talk about anyway before I even knew I was doing this episode with you. But Dave Gonzalez is the person that keeps Slaughterhouse Five, like front of mind for me, because you tend to talk about Billy Pilgrim, who's the A main character in Slaughterhouse Five often when we talk about time travel.

So if you've never read Slaughterhouse Five by Kervonaget, but I trust me the writers of the show have. It is, there's a frame narrative about a writer, but once we get down to like the core stories about a man whose consciousness is slipping through his own time stream. And the sort of like famous line from Slaughterhouse Five is, listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. And this idea of unstucked in time is sort of where we're ending with Loki, but I just wanted to throw out a couple other timey-wimey quotes from Slaughterhouse Five to feed our discussion about time and free will. And also this question of why. It's honestly the question of why that really pinged Slaughterhouse Five for me when AD brings up why.

Billy Pilgrim asks these aliens, the Cholmalfa Dorians, I didn't pronounce that correctly, but you're going to hang with me, who basically put him in a zoo. And he says, why me? And they say, that is a very earthling thing to ask, Mr. Pilgrim, why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Yes.

Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why, which AD would disagree with. but that is the Tralphamadorian perspective. They also say there is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of the many marvelous moments seen all at one time. And last one of my favorite ones. I am a Tralphamadorian seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time.

It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. it simply is. And we should say with Slaughterhouse 5, and I'm obviously let Dave talk about this because he talks about this book a lot. But like, this sort of time slipping, bopping around your own timeline idea and being kidnapped by aliens and put in a zoo to be bred and all this sort of stuff goes hand in hand with this like real World War II war narrative and like dealing with a trauma of war and to. Dave's point about Loki and regret and time and taking responsibility. Like, it was something always faded to happen. Was Dresden always faded to be bombed?

And Dresden would always be bombed no matter what. Or are there responsibilities we can take for our role in a war or, you know, other things? Dave, give me your Slaughterhouse five thoughts. Oh, man. I like it because the concept of being unstuck in time just from a consciousness, level on your own time stream is it's a lot different than other types of time travel. It lends itself a lot more to the idea of fate or the idea that maybe you lived through something once, but your mind is now on a loop.

Like your life has all existed and now we can't tell the difference between progressing through it as normal or if we're on another loop where we do the thing that does the thing. I always appreciate a concept that I believe I read Alan Moore give an interview about in some British comics magazine, where he's like, if you think about all of time as multiple timelines and possibilities that each possibility branches off to a different timeline, it's sort of everything has to start at a point where all time starts branching. and then slowly, if we know anything about time and matter, it all has to come to an end. So in between the beginning and the end, we're all stuck at an egg of indeterminate volume. Basically, the illusion of choice is actually our consciousness jumping from one timeline to another in this scenario.

So there isn't actually a actual choice you can make, but you could steer your consciousness is the interesting idea that Slaughterhouse Five proposes along with a bunch of other things that I think Loki is kind of latching onto. If you're a Trial Fiamidorian,

you experience all time at once, but I love that quote about seeing all times as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. They aren't actively in all time. They're capable of perceiving all time, but they have the same same illusion of choice that we do. So is there a level of being, be it extraterrestrial or

God where you could both see all time and still have choices is an interesting question that I think both things are posing? But this one, Loki, I don't think is going to come out quite as nihilist as certain readings of Slaughterhouse Five. Because like you're saying, Slaughterhouse Five, I was trying to couch it, you know, in like current day terms. It's like I'd much rather watch Loki and have opinions about it because I'm a viewer watching creative content that I would read the news and feel helpless that I can't. I have no sphere of influence in those things. Ultimately, what does that say about my position in time and my ultimate degree of changing things by choice? That's fucking scary.

And that's always happening. And that's what Slaughterhouse Five is. I'm hoping Loki comes out a little bit more hopeful because, yeah, but you've got friends, is still so much better than, yeah, but you've been fucked since the beginning. All right. So, speaking of the friends, right? So 80's idea doesn't work because he suspects along with the rest of us that Loki has not figured out his why yet.

So he tries cattle prodding Loki, which a bunch of people pointed out is very similar to the Iron Man trying to, to Tony Stark trying to get Bruce to turn into the Hulk in the Avengers. And then AD says, we get the band back together. Everyone of your friends has a temporal aura. Temporal aura is very hard for me to say, so please clap for me, not flubbing that. Anyway, this is just such a lost moment, so much so that I pulled up this quote from the final season of loss.

Final season. Anyway, Christian Shepard, who is Jack Shepard. father on lost. He says, there's a woman living in Los Angeles. Now, once you get all your friends together, and it must be all of them, everyone who left. And once you persuaded them to join you, this woman will tell you exactly how to come back. So this idea is you have to go and get all of your friends, even if you have to get one of them like arrested, one of them's dead. Who cares? You got to get them all. And that's how you're going to get back to the island if you want to go back.

Did the pens in the cup give you lost vibes? How did you feel? Oh yeah, it definitely does. A pens in the cup is a great way to talk about it because otherwise it doesn't make sense. Everyone who hasn't lived a moment in time has a temporal aura from every moment in time they were all together. First of all these characters have maybe been all together. at the same time in a different time period.

It wasn't when the temporal loom was exploding. Two, why is nobody talking about getting Victor Tively's temporal aura? He seemed very important to that moment in time we're trying to go back to. And maybe the only... I mean, we know that when he jumps back. I'm just saying, if you're trying to go to a moment in time, you have a whole bunch of people who work at the TVA that are probably together all the fucking time. And Victor Timely, who was there for that one moment in time,

Wouldn't he have the coordinates? The variable, if you will. Wouldn't he have the coordinates? But yes, you know how we yada yada of that? Pens in a cup. And I'm like getting the band back together, hell yeah, I've seen this plot line at the beginning of lots of things. So let's do it.

I was thinking maybe the kind folks at Marvel wanted to give us an episode off from Jonathan Majors, and I appreciated it, to be honest with you. I mean, I think a reason, I didn't say this in the overview, but I think it's important. I think a reason that Mal and I had been bumping on some of the decisions this season, and it felt like some of the extra characters felt like not all of them were unsuccessful. Like, again, I'm a big Bradwolf fan. I think Raphael Cassell was like really fun this season. But like with like Dot and, you know, Ravona and Miss Minutes and timely and all this sort of stuff. Like I felt like I was constantly being pulled away from Loki.

and Loki and Sylvie, which is like who I really want to be spending time with. And Loki and Mobius was who I really want to spend spending time with. So like, you know, again, like OB, great addition. There's like great stuff that added. But in general, I feel like the focus was too far away from where I needed to be a couple times this season. And so the fact that in this episode, despite all the antics that are going on, despite jet skis, despite all this other stuff, that we have time to sit in a bar with Sylvie is very, very important to me. and, you know, that was the moment I sort of leaned, actually, like, physically leaned closer to my screen

to, like, be like, this is it, this is the stuff. Talk about what you want. Talk about connection. Talk about all that sort of stuff. So I think having timely here would have just been distracting, honestly, from the rest of it. But, yeah. Pens in the cup.

Don't worry about it. Yeah, don't worry about it. It's just pens in a cup. It's just, you know, it reminds me of the scene in stranger things when he's trying to explain the upside down. And he punches a pen's, through a paper plate.

I love when, you know, in order to explain timing and whimy things, we use office supplies. I'm a big fan of it. All right. Loki's like, guess what? He's like, you know, can you make a tempad, blah, blah, blah, he's like, oh, I need a lifetime. He's like, guess what? This good old TVA handbook, which has been the most important prop all season. We knew it would be as soon as we saw how, like, orange and delightful it was.

he's like, I've got this. You wrote it. It's on the desk of every, it's on every desk at TV. And he says, oh, so I'm going to write a bestseller. Kind of. It's very cute. So we're back on another loop around the old oroboros, right? Because it was already complicated when it was like, did timely inspire OB to write the handbook?

Or did the handbook inspire timely to know the things to say to OB? So that was already one bootstrap paradox, but we've just added another layer in that AD also has Obie's handbook. How do you feel about double bootstrap paradox in all of this day? This is either a great thing that we get to talk about after this season is over

and maybe never have answered, or it's to take something from Stephen King's Dark Tower, horn of eld situation where it's like when the Dark Tower movie came out they're like in this one the gunslinger's going to have the horn of eld which if you read the entire book series meant that this

happened after the loop that was in the books right so we will know when somebody writes to the TVA guide book that we're in the last loop around that sort of can be a story signaller now that they've

established that it kind of has no beginning, if they want to for some future plot point, have, you know, A.D. or O.B. sits down and starts to write or starts to copy out the TVA. That will be a moment that signifies this happens once to me. So it'll be interesting to see if they make that usable. But the screenwriter brain in me was like, what an excellent creation of an Easter egg slash future device. Because now I've I've seen something, I've seen enough time, so no, it doesn't have any origin. So when you show me that origin, it's going to be of narrative importance to whatever is happening. Oh, interesting.

My first thought was, oh, cute. I wonder if they're hitting this so many times to make sure that when we get a real answer, it feels important. I hope that's true. I feel like with one episode left, we don't have time for that. And I don't even know if we're getting a Loki season three or if the Loki story is just going to bleed into the movies. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. But I will keep my eye on that notebook. When we were talking about it, you know, we've been talking about it all season, but certainly, like, to go back to Lost, Daniel Faraday's notebook was something that we talked about a lot because that also has similar, like, timely, wimy, loopy origins, the way that gets into his hands, et cetera.

So it exists because it always existed. Yeah. I do want, they don't have to fill in the pages of anything. thing, but I do want that book, just like as a blank notebook with the orange and the graphic design. Cautionary tale. So I said that, like, a couple weeks ago, and I was really hoping that, like, Disney would put out as merch. Or they would, like, sell it at Disneyland or something like that, and I could, like, get my hands on it.

But someone was like, oh, hey, someone selling, like, a bootleg knockoff on Etsy. So did I go to Etsy and buy, like, two copies, one from me, one from Mallory? I sure did. Did they come? And I was, like, disappointed that I didn't look at the photo. more closely? Yes, because this is like, this is very like, like, the TVA handbook is like a beautiful, like, you know, leather bound thing. It's embossed. It's embossed.

And the edges are rounded. The inside edges are rounded. This is a crimsical orange, you know, sharp rectangular notebook where it's not embossed. It's like, it says what it's, you know, TVA written by, blah, blah, blah, on the cover. But it's not, I was just sort of like, no, I clicked purchase too quickly. So this is a, this is a one-star rating, no, three-star rating for that Etsy. store and I will hold I should have hold up for the real thing. I'm sure they have to make it. It took us 12 years to get a screen accurate ather prop in the Disney parks. So maybe we got

some time before it's happening. All right. Let's go back to Ohio. Oh no. I brought up the ather. All right. Yeah. Back to Loki. She's veering away from Thor of the Dark World. Malory isn't here, which means we don't have to talk about Thor of the Dark World. And yet, instilling yet, you took us there. Okay. Don has two boys. Kevin and Sean. One appears to be a troublemaker. One appears to be a little bit more responsible. Kevin's the troublemaker. And from real life, having a brother named Kevin, I relate to that. Oh, I assumed it was a Faggy reference, but I like that you made it about Kevin Gonzalez. Kevin Fagie just stealing matches and lighting all his toys on fire. Liding all his toys on fire. You know, you could say. A little Loki, Thor parallel here, perhaps, though the Thor, the, the, the, the, the,

older kid asks for a snake, which is interesting. I wish, okay, so 10 of 10 no notes on OB and AD. We're back to Joanna has some notes. I wish we knew a bit more about Don's relationship with his boys. And I'm not sure why I understand why they have so little interaction this episode. Like, wouldn't I want to see more of that? I would prefer that over all the Jetsky stuff on it. I would trade all of the Jetsky stuff to see Don and his kids interact.

more so I understand what kind of dad he is. I understand what he's potentially sacrificing and not getting to be with them, all that sort of stuff. If you take, I was thinking a lot about in that season of loss when we're in sort of these alternate realities, and you take an episode like the episode where Ben Linus is a teacher and has a whole relationship with a student, Alex, and all this sort of stuff. like we spend a whole episode with Benjamin Linus as a teacher. And like, it's wonderful.

It's a wonderful episode of television. We're emotionally invested in this whole other life. And I'm like, I guess, like, to fanfic this season of Loki, I would love a whole episode of Dawn and his coworkers and his kids. But instead, it's crammed in with everything else. And I just, like, on the one hand, it hits, but it doesn't hit as hard as I want it to. and I think that they could potentially be capable of. And I certainly think that Owen Wilson is capable of.

What do you think about the Don and his kid's representation here? I hear what you're saying. It didn't bother me that much because this week I also rewatched a little movie called Wonder that has Owen Wilson and Julia Roberts being parents to a Jacob Tremblay facially disfigured child. So I've seen a lot of Owen Wilson gentle parenting. And I think I kind of got the gist of it with what we had. There's also just, I hear that there's a story there, and you're absolutely right. But the more involved we get in that, the more we start to be like, should this guy go back to the TVA?

And I think they're very much trying to keep that an open question without coming really hard down on either side. So I think by not nailing down that there's a at least absolutely. mother, if not blipped mother. And he's responsible for these kids. That would just be like, why would you ever leave that, like, spaghetti or

not? So I see why it might have been a little too much sauce on Owen Wilson and the kids. On the spaghetti? Yeah, too much sauce on the spaghetti. I feel like Loki having to make that decision because later Sylvie is like you're being

selfish, right? Right. Because what Loki wants is all of his pals together with him at the TVA. Yes. And I guess he's counting Casey in B-15, even though, again, he really does not have that much of a relationship with them. But he could, potentially, eventually. We haven't seen him, like, build tarp tents and play mango poker with them on the beach. And I don't really, like, buy that they're, like, close, close friends. That's a lost reference.

And he's only been with them for, like, a couple weeks. But the Mobius thing, I do buy. He is a connection with Mobius. That is a real friendship. that is very deep that he has built, even if it's only over the course of a couple weeks, has been very impactful to him, to have to confront the decision,

the horns of dilemma of, do I grab Mobius for myself, or do I let him be the dad that he wants to be? And should anyone have the power to make that decision? Should anyone be a god in that way? And that's sort of what Sylvie's are. It's sort of like you're pulling people out of their lives where they're happy. And he's like, well, they don't know.

They don't know enough to make the choice or whatever. But it's like if Dawn knows that like, okay, in one timeline, I'm like this kind of cool, chill, very cool, very chill time agent who eats a lot of pie and like, you know, hangs out with Loki and has adventures. He's not going to choose it over his kids, though. So it's just like, then it has to be Loki understanding that that he can't. hold on to Mobius, because Mobius has this deep route back in his own timeline. Do you know what I mean? And maybe Mobius doesn't like his kids. We didn't have enough really to know about it.

Doesn't seem like he like adores them, honestly. Though, okay, let's go to, AD shows up. He has built a very cumbersome tempad over 18 or 19 months. Uh-huh. It in the process has lost his job and his wife. Mm-hmm. And it was funny the way you said it. But also in an episode about like connection and emotional reckoning and loneliness and all sorts of stuff like that, it did feel odd to me as like a tossed off yada yada, yada that happened.

Oh yeah. But we're on the roller coaster again, Joanna, because what you're like is like, oh, it's weird that they yada yada that part of his story thing. I'm like, how the fuck did he find Loki? Because he's a tempad. His oral temporal aura. When did he scan his temporal aura? He didn't invent a tempad at that point. Maybe it's written into the handbook somehow.

I mean, either way, I'm just saying, we're on a narrative roller coaster at this point in the episode. That's why we don't have kids. That's why this just kind of happens. We don't question why it happens. That's why immediately that he has a tempad, he doesn't go to Sylvie. he collects the other ones first.

Like, I would go to the person with God power as soon as I had control over where I could go. But I think at this point, we're on the narrative roller coaster of the episode. No, the reason he doesn't go to Sylvie is he's scared to go to Sylvie. That's the hardest one to do. That's why he goes last. Yeah, but also, time doesn't matter,

so I don't understand why you don't go to yourself. Time also does matter. Okay, let's hear Loki explaining things to Don, and maybe we can debate again whether how much Don does or does not like his kids. Is this Steve? Reality isn't what you think it is. And this isn't the life of the man I know.

I don't know who you know. I don't understand. I know you. No. From a place called the Time Variance Authority. You saved my life when I first arrived. You saw something in me that I hadn't seen him myself.

Really, my friend. Who's he? Is he, my friend? He will be. Why don't I remember that? It's too complicated to explain it to you now. But I need your help to save this place. The TVA.

You once told me it was the only life you'd ever known. I sell Jets keys, man. Trust me. What about my boys? They'll be fine. I can't leave them. What do you mean? I understand.

Listen. Look, you can come back anytime. Oh, you were at the shop earlier, right? That's why I live around here. I can bring you back to any point in time. It'll be like you never left. Your boys won't even know you're gone. Yeah, but I will.

This is hugely important, right, for two reasons. One, as far as I see it. Loki says, you saved my life when I first arrive. You saw something in me that I hadn't seen myself. So, like, this is a very, so I need you, Mobius, because you're a mirror that I enjoy looking in. When I look in the mirror that is you, I see a version of myself that makes me want to be a better man to quote Jackson's innocent, okay? And then, and I, you know, no cost to you. I'll put you back exactly where I left you.

I get to have you how I want you. And then you're not giving up anything because I can just put you right back. but Mobius or Don is like, but I'll know I was gone, right? If he retains his memories of his boys, he'll know that he was gone. And the tragedy of that in contrast to Mobius, stubbornly insisting for the last season and a bit, I don't want to know what I left behind because what if it mattered? What if it was wonderful? What if I was happy?

What if all this sort of stuff like that? I don't want to know what I left behind. But here he's like, I'll know. and, you know, it's devastating that Mobius didn't know what he left. But this guy, like, Loki's not going to erase his memories, right? He can't, I mean, if he reset something in the timeline and he encounters the Mobius at the end of the season who still doesn't know he had boys, and Loki has to decide whether or not to let him know that or to keep his friend, again, there's only one episode left. It doesn't seem like a lot of time.

That seems like a really interesting choice for Loki to have to have to. to make. And I want to believe that we're with a Loki who will do the right thing and send Thon back to his Houdlam child who burns action figures. What do you think, Dave? Yes. I get what you're saying. The reason why I think I'm a little dubious, this, you know, surprise that he has kids and that he's the one who seems to be solely responsible for, them. But also when you get to the version of him in the TVA that has like some sort of inkling of who they were before, what he's latched on to is jet skis. So if I'm keeping track, jet skis, then kids, is at least the surface consciousness level. You could say maybe he has two jet skis

and he's substituted that for two kids because he just feels like he needs two of something. Maybe you get close to that. But I appreciate where we're being led to. to hear, this doesn't feel like something that's going to be wrapped up neatly. Yeah. Well, certainly not this season it feels like, you know. Yeah. I mean, the fun thing about multiversal storytelling is you boil down who the characters are by showing us different versions of choices that they made.

Yeah. So it would be perfectly fine with me if Mobius goes back to his kids at the end of this season and Owen Wilson is still in the Loki universe somewhere. and we get to deal with that when we show up either as another variant or whatever the plot is of that future thing he needs to be in. He doesn't need to be wrapped up as tightly

at the end of the season for me because this complication is such a big one and because they don't have time to deal with it necessarily. I mean, but that's their own decision. Okay. How much of an episode do you want to have about normal Don parenting in Cleveland, Ohio in 2022. I mean, also like...

But the point is how much... If you pitched to me, do you on an episode of television for Ben Linus as a teacher? And we see the vagaries of his life as a teacher and taking care of his elderly father and having a relationship with one of... And by a relationship, I mean, like, a mentor... Nothing creepy with his student. Like, do you want to see that? And I'd be like, oh, I don't think so.

And then I watched it. I'm like, that's a phenomenal episode. television, like that episode rules. And so you could make a great episode of television where we watch Owen Wilson be a dad to two boys in Cleveland, Ohio. Anything is possible if you write it well enough, you know? Oh, yeah. That's another writer's room conversation that I'm sure went down when they're breaking down

this season, like how much time do we spend on this one idea? And they decided to shoehorn it into here. Shoehorn sounds like they rushed it. They decided to contain in this one episode these various glist. of places that we could go. So for me, it feels like an efficiency in storytelling. I guess what we're learning is by different audiences, your mileage are going to vary on how much we need to see those things

in order to make the decisions, the consequences of them feel like they should. I think, again, the show is inviting the comparison to loss, so I'm going to do it. And again, I do apologize for anyone listening to West and seen loss, but really, you should go watch it. But we talk about this all the time. We talk about Lost. We talk about the time that they just spent with those characters and those relationships.

And, like, I know that I have an, you and I both love Lost. I have a more emotional reaction to it than you do, and that is okay. But we talk a lot about an episode that we love of Lost, which is, you know, the gang gets a VW bus up and running, which on its surface sounds like a stupid premise for an episode of television or a wasteful premise for an episode of especially, you know, like, if people are like, get back to the smoke monster, get back to this, down, the other thing, what's going on? And certainly that did happen with loss where people are like, you're not answering the questions as quickly as I want you to. But like, I think sometimes the writers need to know better than the impatient, you know, viewers where they'll be like,

why are you spending so much time on this when I want, I think I want this out of the show? When it's like, what we're doing is teaching you how to care about these people and teaching you how to care about their relationships. And so Loki has versions of this in a microcosm or in a minor scale where it will say like have Loki and Mobia sit in the automat and have conversations about

life and free will and destiny and choices and human nature and all this sort of stuff like that. And that's why their relationship and then the Loki silver relationship are like the two strongest pillars of the show. But as it is, like when all these people get spaghettified here, I

feel for Loki, but I don't feel the same way I do at the end of loss when I am unconsolably weeping through various things because I am so invested in those relationships. You know? And if you're like, they don't have time for it, sure, they don't have time for it. But

ultimately, Disney and Marvel and the budget decides that it's only six episodes of television versus however many they were going to give Daredevil, you know? Yeah. Which is fine, but they did the most they can when you're writing a TV series, which plants the flags that you and I recognize as people who watch storytelling about what's important. And whether or not they follow through at it is ultimately a problem for another day.

They planted those flags very specifically. I'm actually kind of surprised at the degree of restraint that they had because it's like, if their mom blipped away, of course he's not going to leave. Like, that's just, that makes it so much more tragic. If the kids were like super nice or the kids who were taking care of somebody, of lighting their toys on fire with stolen matches, I want to spend more time with those kids. They planted enough flags,

but then we're also like, we can't spend enough time. We can't spend time here. But all time space is turning into spaghetti. But we could also maybe come back here when we need to make this choice for real. All right. Speaking of choices,

Loki pitches it this way. He says to Don, all of existence is in grave danger. Don says, I don't care. And he says, and your boys are in danger too. I can't keep them safe unless you help me, right? So it's a choice of sorts, right? That he gives Dawn here. Yeah. And sort of pre-Sages our conversation between Sylvie and Loki about selfishness. Like all Sylvie cares about is her branch timeline, her little patch of land. And it's only when that thing turns to spaghetti. When her record shop turns to spaghetti, then she's like, okay, now I'm in. Like he... Right. records are to- Loki's still fighting Kings here.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. He hasn't know he's fighting everything dissolving. So Loki, Mobius seems to have heard the name Mobius, well, definitely has heard the name Mobius

for the first time from Loki. Similar to Obie being like, OB, that's an interesting name. Thanks so much. Loki also seems to have written the line about Jetskees. So how much is Loki already writing Like, how much is he already the god of stories?

How much is he already writing the TV series Loki? Loki himself. If we're doing Slaughterhouse Five, even in a degree, he always did. Yep. So, like, that's super interesting. I love it. I don't need to see anymore. I accept that he just always did.

All right, Loki grabs Verity out of her hospital. He grabs Frank slash Casey off the Alameda Beach, which is just maybe not where I would go personally. if I were escaping from Alcatraz. But listen, you do you, Alcatraz three. And they have most of the band back together. We're just missing our lead singer, Sylvie herself, which takes us back to the McDonald's one last time. Sure, maybe one last time.

Maybe one last time. We don't know. McDonald's is forever. I think because I was spending so much time looking at Vonnegut this week, I was thinking a lot about postmodern literature and how postmodern it is for there to be a McDonald's. I mean, it's product placement, but the same time, it's just very postmodern

for there to be this big story of time and genre and all this or something like that, and a McDonald's. That's where the super important character was to spend her time. Yeah, at the McDonald's. At the McDonald's. It's very, very pomo. So he doesn't notice that her bag,

spaghetti is right in front of her faces on the back of her truck. She noticed it's gone, but she doesn't notice the spaghetti strands. There's this implication. Tell me if you feel this way. He's like, he's going to try to explain to her who she is. She's like, yeah, I know who I am, by the way. I'm Sylvie.

I know. And he's like, oh, okay, well, all of our pals got just snapped in the branch timeline. She's like, I know I was there. So the implication is she saw all this happen. She said nothing to Loki and just got out her He Who Remains Tempad and bopped back to the McDonald's. Is that your understanding of what happened as well? well? Yeah, it seems to be her method is when a timeline gets to a point where she's done dealing with it. She could just take the OG temp pad out and walk back to, you know, whatever McDonald's

and whatever branch universe she wants to. This is also, we get another meta reference where Loki, instead of saying, like, this isn't how I thought this would play out or how you'd be, he says, this isn't how I thought this scene would play out. And I'm like, hey, me neither. look at us. Look at us living the metal lives. I also really think it's important that, yeah, the spaghettification is already starting. Yeah. So we're about to have a very meaningful conversation that's at the crux of the main characters of this episode. And I absolutely believe it, but we're giving, we're given the, the signal here that ultimately they're both in more trouble than they think they are before we do any of that emotional deep driving.

stuff. Got to keep the clock ticking. The clock is always ticking here in Loki's season two. I just think that like, it's interesting to me because Sylvie seems like so out on Sylvie and Loki this season. There is, there's like he's yearning and she's doing zero yearning and I'm a little surprised by that. I would expect like 5% yearning from her. Like 95% pissed, but like 5% yearning. So for her to just like take the tempat out and leave without even just like a second thought to Loki. Loki is surprising to me, but I'm willing to see where this all goes.

But I was just sort of like, okay, she really doesn't care. Okay. Let's hear Loki and Sylvie at the bar. Steve, please. How many? If they had a choice, would have chosen to stay. Mobyus always said the TVA was the only life he'd ever known and he liked it. It gave him purpose.

It was never his choice to begin. with Loki. He who remains did that. But Mobius should have a choice now. No? Shouldn't they all to return to the TVA if they want? No, you would be ripping people from their lives, showing them something that they cannot unsee. What kind of choice is that? But they didn't get a choice in this. And I can't give it to them without you. And you can't hear it, but just the monumental shrug that she gives him that like, so the fuck would. I don't care. And then they continue to talk.

We heard a big chunk of that at the clip at the top of the episode here. But they're talking a lot about free will, as always, free will versus determinism. Like, Loki's desire to mix in so heavily on this idea of choice is a fascinating thing that, like, Mallory and I have both agreed and disagreed about all season of, like, is Loki right to, you know, Sylvie's like, give them free will and then walk away. Yes. And Loki's like, but things are not going well. Like, shouldn't we continue to mix in a bit? Like, free will is all well and good, but doesn't someone have to mind the shop? Where do you stand on all of this, Dave? Like, how do you feel about it? Are you with Sylvie or are you with Loki? How do you feel? Oh, I'm with Sylvie or I'm with Loki. I mean, probably, first of all, same person. Second of all,

I'm probably with Loki slightly more. I've always had trouble being a live-in-the-moment person. I aspire to be better than that. But Sylvie seems to be pretty chill on that front. So much so that she's, you know, she wants to have, she could identify that she's doing things for selfish reasons. That selfish reason is only so selfish isn't she wants to have her own life. She doesn't really care about giving choices back to people.

as much as Loki seems to. But she's also never done the thing that she says Loki's going to do. You'll be ripping people from their lives, showing them something they can't unsee. Loki kicked off a whole segment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by opening a space portal over the top of New York. That changed everything up until Thanos came and like snapped a finger. That was the entire world got a better idea of like what they're. playing at it at a galactic moment.

And then I think this is another instance where they're forgetting that they're gods. In this story world, I'm glad they're having this debate. Debate between gods about free will. Fucking love it. But they are also the ones that ultimately get to have this conversation and decide we've been told through like marvel narratives. So it's interesting that they are having this conversation about if they could harness the, you know, many branching timelines and provide the order that Loki wants through

choice, individual choice. If everybody sees that they're doing this for a greater good, maybe they'll all choose to come do it versus just why interfere at all? Why play God beyond our individual circumstance, our individual timeline? And I think the difference in opinion here ultimately boils down to our version of Loki has seen so much more of what happens when real people and humanity meets a universe-changing decision than Sylvie, who has always just been fighting for her chance to have choice. So maybe if she got to live a couple more lifetimes making the choices she wanted to make, the next one wouldn't be a McDonald's. Maybe the next one would be subjugating another group of Avengers or something, and she would have a

slightly wider scope of who needs free will and who doesn't, because this version of Loki has slightly had this debate with himself. This is the humanity is meant to Neal version of Loki that has... But it's... I mean, it is, but it isn't. He's supposed to have evolved so dramatically beyond that. I know we bop back in time, but like the shorthand of the show, Loki is that he, like, in that time theater in season one, went through all the character development that he did through all the movies. You know, and we're supposed to be confronting an evolved past that idea, Loki, right? Yeah, and it's a way to show him change,

because this time he's on the opposite end of the debate from where he is in Avengers, which I'm still planning to keep in the back of my mind because he talks about it with Mobius in episode two. So they want us to have that version of Loki is somewhat, But the God conqueror, the human shouldn't have free will version of Loki, has evolved into this version of Loki. And I think Sylvie might have a different view on choice if she'd gone through different iterations of the Loki storyline.

When he says Mobius always said that the TVA was the only life he'd ever known and he liked it, it gave him purpose. It's like so naive. Yeah, burden with glorious purpose. But like it's so naive for him to think like... that Mobius would make that choice again knowing that he has kids. Like, you know, like, dad's not going to choose you, Loki. He's going to choose his real kids.

So I don't know how you feel about that. Also, to just make another lost reference, because why not, since we're here, Loki's in the Jack role saying essentially we have to go back. And Sylvie's in the Kate role saying, like, no. Absolutely not. I got out. Why would I ever do that again? Sylvia does have empathy for him, right?

She says, once he's had his breakthrough about, like, actually why he's doing this, he doesn't want to be alone. He wants his friends. She says, I know this is hard, but your friends are back where they belong. And then he says, very heartbreakingly, his voice literally breaks. But without them, where do I belong? And she says, we're all writing our own stories now. Go write yours.

Okay. So, yeah, Tom's delivery of where do I belong? Amazing. And how much all of that interacts with that? season one refrain from SIF when he's locked in the time jail of you are alone and you will always be. This is his greatest fear, being alone. Where do I belong? I don't belong.

I was adopted. I was never really part of my family. Blah, blah, blah. I'm always alone. I'm always rejected. Blah, blah, blah. I had this connection with Sylvie, but I lost her, all this sort of stuff. So he wants to cling to Mobius, but Mobius has his other life.

It's very complicated. And then this idea of Loki is the god of stories, which we talked about last week with an email we got from a listener about Agent of Asgard and Loki becoming the weaver of the loom going forward, becoming not the god of mystia for the god of lies, but the god of stories. And so, yeah, Sylvie's saying we're all writing our own stories and now go write yours is something that he echoes at the very end of the episode. Anything else you want to say about this bar scene? I really like it. Once again, both these actors. both these actors doing I think the most with the amount of time

of the dialogue that they're actually given to even for me to be able to dig into it as hinting towards other possible timelines or all the way back to Battle of New York is structurally very sound I appreciate it and yeah Tom Hiddleston

taking what in some episodes it's just like a nothing character that's moving the plot forward and actually being able to re-anchor it into somebody that feels like a real person, even if that's a real God person. Very good. Good job, guys. Back in these layer, we get just some random business about Frank, wanting to use the

tempad of rob a bank. Donna's giving very to the hard sell in a jet ski. None of this struck me as particularly that interesting or funny until we cut back to Sylvia at the record store. Incredible sequence. She walks in Lyle, her guy Lyle, handpicks, music. music for her will either cure what's ailing you or make it a whole lot worse. Dave, do you have a song that fits this description for you? I'm so glad I read the notes before recording this podcast because now I do. Yes, I have two. Okay. They're both going to read as silly because here's the thing about music. It can be its own version of time travel if you hook a song to an emotional period in your life. So I have two of, One is everywhere by Michelle Branch.

Pause for laughter and applause. Thank you. Thank you. Tell me why. That was a song that I listened to you a lot after a certain breakup, when immediately after the breakup, instead of being able to process it, I had to go on a family vacation to Vail, Colorado. So I just remember walking around Vail, not skiing,

not doing any of the fun Vail stuff, but just sort of listening to everywhere. and it's like, she is everywhere. So that one, despite being like very upbeat, and a bop, if you aren't, if you haven't connected it to your own drama, can flip for me. The other one for similar reasons,

but later on everybody's collective timeline, would be shaken out by Florence and the Machine, which is, I think, ultimately a joyous song if you read into it. But in order to be able to shake it out, with that song, you have to be kind of down to begin with. And so that song flips on me a lot, sometimes in the middle of listening to it. I have a similar relationship with, it's a food fight.

I mean, there's other songs that came more immediately to mine, but I think I've talked about them, like, within the last couple years on Ringer Podcast, and I'm like, maybe you should diversify Joanna. But I really think that Michelle Branch one is really funny because in, when I was in college, there was an episode of Buffy Vampire Slayer that had like a pro, there was a promo for the episode that used a Michelle Branch song or something and I kept re-watching it over and over again.

It wasn't everywhere. It was goodbye to you, the Michelle Branch masterpiece, goodbye to you. And I played it over and over again because I was watching this one clip from Buffy on my computer in my room. And my roommate thought that I had like broken up with my boyfriend because I just kept playing

goodbye to you by Michelle Branch on a loop. I had not. I was just watching Buffy. But the, I think, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to pick Everlong by the Food Fighters, because for personal reasons, the acoustic version, like, reduces me to tears. And then the, like, non-acoustic version is just a complete bop. So that's sort of where it's a cheat, but I vacillate on this. Sylvie is having an emotion reaction reaction to Velvet Underground's, Oh, Sweet Nothing.

we're going to pause a second for pedantry because I love a pedantic email. This one comes from David. Who writes, I regret that I have a pedantic correction for episode five of Loki season two. I was excited to see the record store employee and Sylvie the Velvet Underground's loaded, as it is one of the best albums of the era and one of my personal favorites. However, she clearly starts playing the record from the beginning of the side when, oh, sweet, nothing is famously the final track of Side 2. Dropping the needle where she did would have played, Who Loves a Sun on one side or head held high on the side 2,

are we to believe in this timeline the studio messed with the track listing? Also, if Sylvie is the crate digger she appears, I'd never heard the phrase crate digger, I love it. If Susie is, Sylvie is the crate digger she appears to be at the store's only regular, she surely would have known about loaded since it was the last true Velvet Underground record with Lou Reed and only would have come out 12 years earlier. Is the record store guy mansplaining the Velvet Underground to Sylvie or is it a production oversight that only bothered me. Again, David, I love a pedantic email. Thank you for sending it. as the absolutely gorgeous spaghettification of the record store happens. And again, Sylvie's emotional reaction to the song, Oh, Sweet Nothing, which is, again, about, like, isolation versus community, which indicates to us that, like, she does have some yearning and longing for, because, like, she has this existence of McDonald's where she is, like, connected to her co-worker, the one that everyone thought was Mobius, but is not, apparently. Or she's got her record store guy. Or she knows the bartender. She knows all these people. But does she have, like, family, community, really deep roots of any kind. Or is she being kind of walking through life kind of aimlessly?

And I think that's the emotional reaction she's having to the song. And then the spaghettification. The beautiful, beautiful spaghettification happens of the record of the store of poor Lyle, watching his like horror as the world spaghetifies around him, watching him run to try to meet like catch Sylvie, all this stuff. It's absolutely beautiful. Friend of the show, Ryan Erie made this great comp on his breakdown of the episode to the nothing from the never-earning story, which I absolutely love, because especially also,

because the way you fix the nothing in the never-erting story is you have a character, Bastion in the book, write the world back into existence. So if we were talking about gods of stories and people who can rewrite worlds, that's a good comp to make. how did this play out for you, Dave? And did you have any similar pedantic record objections of the Velvet Underground album? No, I mean, I love that there's, you know, this misplacing of the track because they were trying to do something visual with a record, but now we can never prove if here they had the same track listing

on the vinyl version in the branch timeline. Love me a time travel story. production error that, you know, wouldn't matter, but here we can't say if it matters or not, because branched timelines. So I love that factor of it. Oh, this had me, I mean, I agree that, you know, she has this moment of, like, feeling lonely or alone.

And this has me a little bit more interested in who Sylvie ultimately wants to be surrounded with because she the funny thing about Loki being afraid of being alone this whole time is when he was introduced he was like, I would really like to get rid of my brother, please. I would like to be slightly more alone

with my family than the other one. So the fact that he now, he and Sylvie together are sort of would like to be alone with, wouldn't mind being alone with each other, which is a different type of alone. It's like two versions of you existing in the same way.

Really interests me. But overall, how long she waits and how sad she is that she has to go fucking deal with this shit. Like, she just had a conversation where she did it. She convinced Loki to let everybody have their lives. She went.

She was going to burn off some excess energy by listening to a record at a record store. And then, oh, no, like time. came for me again. It doesn't read as much as her meditating on loominess as it is. The choice that I was just advocating for might not be a choice at all. She meets determinism in this sequence. I mean, that's what happens when she realized the spaghettification is happening.

But she has an emotional reaction while she's just sitting there with the headphones on to this song, where the chorus is like, oh, sweet, nothing. You know, she ain't got nothing at all. You know, it's about people have been, like, thrown out, dispossessed, all this sort of stuff like that. And she was like, you know, tossed out of her life, tossed out of her family, yanked out, rather than tossed out. That all happen. But, like, how much does she have now in her McDonald's timeline? You know, again, she's got Lyle.

She's got Eric the bartender. She's got Jack who she works. Like, she's got these people. But like, does she have them? I mean, actually, I would say she certainly does because Lyle is, like, running hell for leather to try to get to her. So, like, you know, she has some kind of. connection there, but what Loki is offering her is a much deeper connection, and it's one that she seems unwilling to engage with. I think maybe I'm projecting, but like, to me,

it raises, like, not only because of her perceived betrayal that she thinks he betrayed her at the end of last season, but also because, like, that's just not an anchor she wants to, you know, set down for herself. That makes sense. I don't know if it made things a whole lot better a whole lot worse, because if I'm living that moment emotionally with her in that scene, you might have to cry a little bit to get through to the whole lot better. Like, she does pre-spaghettiation have a life that she chose. Yes. Is this more her reflecting on her current time period, or is it reflecting on all the lost time

that was like literally taken from her before she was able to find her little pocket universe? Yeah, it totally might be that too. The way I kind of see it as like two different emotional reactions in that same scene where like my interpretation of her listening to the record is like, okay, I don't have, I have something here, but do I really have anything? And then when it starts to forgettify, she's like, I can't even have this. I can't even have this thing that I'm holding so loosely. I can't even have a bar and a record store and a fucking McDonald's. And a mullet. You can't even let me have that universe.

You got to take that for me. fuck you. So yeah. So Sylvie shows back up at 80s later after Loki has, to your point, Sylvie changed mind. He's like, I'm being selfish. Go home. Go back to your boys.

And she shows up and she's like, nope, now I disagree with you the other way. Everything's falling apart. The branches are dying. And everyone goes full on Buketini. And Loki is grasping at the strands, grasping at the straws of this life. We hear Mobius say Whatever You know

What do you want? It's a line from earlier He says wherever I know where I want to go Wherever it is I'm really from And Sylvie's asking What's wrong with wanting something to him And this is

I regret to inform you Where I have to take you to Sondheim Corner really briefly And you and Mallory can commiserate about me Making everything about musicals But here we are Okay

The repeated of like want something What do you want, Loki? Want something? What do you want? What do you want? That Sylvie, like, badgers him with this episode. Reminds me so much of this song from the show Company, which is about, company is about a single man who all of his friends are married. And he has gone through his life intentionally not sinking down deep roots, you know, because it doesn't want to be hurt or whatever.

And in this song being alive, which is this big, like, epiphany song for him, where, he talks about, okay, actually, maybe I do want somebody to be in my life, bother me, upset me, all this sort of stuff, but it's worth it for the other things that they could do and make me feel alive rather than living this sort of surface level life. His friends say, want something, want something is this sort of like repeated refrain in the song. And it just reminded me a lot of like, what's wrong? Want something. What do you want? Want something. And he's like, people, friends, connection, not being alone. That's what I want. want. And she says similar, she's like, I want to be alive. I want to have a life. I want to be

alive. That's what I want. And then the last thing we hear her say, before Loki gets full possession of his powers, is do you think that what makes a Loki a Loki is the fact that we're destined to lose from season one? Loki screams no, and resets to Sylvia at least, and then further back in time. You've already talked about how this feels like an emotional leveling up. Is there anything else you want to say about like Loki unlocking these powers? Not to Last Jedi yet right here in the middle of this very nice podcast. Are you calling them a Force Diyadh? I would happily call them a Force Diod. I am not even going as deep as Force Diyadh. And that would be Rise of Skywalker and Not Last Jedi. How dare you?

I know, but like they're kind of forced diadding in Last Jedi even before they are officially that. Okay, go ahead. In order to unlock his ultimate power, he's not fighting what he hates. He's saving what he loves. And that's the character-based thing that allows him to do that. Instead of, like, I have to stop all the Kangs, which in theory was also what Sylvie was trying to do earlier

this season. She just wanted to be a little bit more murdery about it. That's not going to help him. That's not going to help him time slip. That's not going to help him of any more control. That's not a want. That's a preventative measure that is vague. What he wants

is to be with these people. So, in order to save them from spaghettiification, he can harness his ultimate power for the moment. So that's the non-company version of want something is like make an active decision that is about you and isn't about, you know, attempting to maybe make a choice in the future. It's also a very, you know, again, writerly thing, right? Like what is your character's motivation? What does your character want? What is your character actively arcing towards or yearning for?

If you have studied, like, again, to bring it back to musicals more mainstream this time, like any Disney musical has like an I-Want song. What does your character want? Is your character want, you know, to leave this poor provincial town? Does your character want to, you know, be up on land, out of the ocean? What does your character want is important? So like if we're setting Loki up as like the ultimate, the god of stories, the ultimate author, to, you know, to misquote Tyrion Lannister, what matters more than story, etc.

It's a very writerly thing to do. Love that you. Thank you for bringing in a rose quote. Love that quote from The Last Jedi. When Loki finally figures it all out, this is what he says. Steve will play this last clip, please. I controlled it. You learn to control your time slipping.

Yes. It's not about where. When or why. It's about who I can rewrite the story. That sound you hear at the end is the Pandorica opening. Yeah, the close in shot on him when he says it's about Who is very, you know, they know they're doing Doctor Who references all over the place. Last week's episode, we talked about this, last week's episode was called the Heart of the TVA when like the Heart of the TARDIS, etc, etc. Please join us on our Doctor Who rewatch pods that we've been doing all year.

It's been a great time. Yeah, listen, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time, and so has Loki of Asgard, unstuck in time. Except Billy Pilgrim has no control, and it seems like Loki is able to sort of blip himself where he wants to be. Speaking of blips. All right, I'm going to, in theory corner, we're going to talk a little bit about about what he might do with that in next week's episode and the finale. before we close out on this main discussion, I do want to hit this last email from Jesse. And Jesse wrote,

I just finished the agent of Asgard run after watching episode five of Loki, and my mind was blown at the similarities, even down to the last line of the show. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this run of comics and any similarities or references you noticed. A random reference I caught was the quote, very small box.

It looks suspiciously similar to the box. Loki is trapped in by Dr. Doom in the comics. I also thought the way that Dr. Doom described Time Machine translated well into the description. of time slipping in this episode. The idea of Loki traversing through, quote, quote, narratives could enable him to fully embrace the God of Story's role from the comic run. I've attached a few picks of panels I found particularly relevant.

I'm only going to quote from one. And again, Loki closes episodes by saying, I can rewrite the story. And Agent of Asgardi says, and we can rewrite our stories, all of us, write our own happy endings, our own redefinitions. We don't have to be what we're told to be even. by ourselves. No fate, but what we make, your future is a blank page.

Doc Brown brings you from the Time locomotive. What reference do we like the most here? I just think that like this idea of tying this idea of Loki as the god of stories or someone who can recreate something with storytelling to this idea of like my path my path is not set or I don't have to be what they say I am or I don't even have to be what I worry I am. I can be something else. I can be a better version of myself.

And I can let my best friend go back and be a dad to his two kids because it's very weird to have him here with me. But I can go visit him. Maybe we can just get around together. But look, you'll have to wear a lot of SBF because he is very pale. All right, anything you want to say about the episode before we go into theory Corner. Not that I haven't already said. Really liked it. Solid episode

of television. Probably the most revisitable episode of Loki Season 2 thus far. I think so. All right. Let's go into Theory Corner. I love that psycho cue that Steve uses there. I'm going to revisit this

Hollywood Reporter interview that Eric Martin gave that we read a bit from last week. I'm just going to reread it so that we're all on the same page. Martin says, of of the time loom exploding. He said, well, this is the pivot point of the season and of Loki's story here. And a lot of times these pivot points can seem like the end of the journey. Obviously, we have two more episodes. This journey is going to be continued. But it's not going to be the straight line that we expect. Are they going to be con – and then the interviewer says, there's going to be consequences of that moment. He said, yes, this is not something that's just a piece of plot. This is part of an overall story tapestry that we built. There's a lot going on the season. But everything is purposeful. There's meaning in all of it. Any final teas is for the rest of the season? I think the best is ahead. blah blah. So in terms of that, it's not a straight line. We already knew from the trailer that dropped last week that we didn't know it would just be contained to the finale, but now we do because we've seen this episode. The finale is going to be some kind of loop where Loki is going to be, you know, Groundhog Dang, if you prefer. Or our listener Ryan wrote, Loki die repeat. Is there a chance to get 40 minutes of live, die, repeat in the finale?

And then, I'm including this because Mallory's six. This is a gift for her. Ryan wrote Honeycrisp and only Honeycrisp. So that's for Mallory and the Apple Wars. Loki die repeat, alluding to the great Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt vehicle that came out several years ago. That I just recently rewatched for no reason, actually. Yeah, that is usually called edge of tomorrow. It is called edge of tomorrow.

Live die, repeat was a much better title. So Loki Die Repeat, or Groundhogs Day, if you prefer. Yes. And to bring in, you know, this feels safer to talk about here in Derry Corner. You weren't, like, spoiling anything necessarily, Dave. But, like, Loki looping to figure out what the moment of choice was that needs to be changed in order for everything to be different. We do know from behind-the-scenes footage that they filmed again in the throne room. of He Who Remains in a way that looks like they're going to revisit that choice that happened at the end of season one.

And we don't even need necessarily that behind the scenes footage. Again, that's been released online. It's not a spoiler. Necessarily, it's out there that they're going back to the throne room. But if you feel touchy about that, hopefully you weren't in theory corner with us. But at the beginning of the season, the first episode, Loki says, I think no fewer than three times. I wish I had more time. When he's talking about the decision that Sylvie makes,

he says to Mobius multiple times in that first episode, I just wish I had more time. And even before that behind the scenes footage was out there, Miley and I were talking about this in episode one, of like, do we think we're going to see that moment again? And this time Loki gets the time that he needs to figure out what he thinks the right decision to make is. And maybe it's the same decision.

Maybe there is only one decision. But Loki is unsettled on that question. And so Loki and Sylvie needs to, if we can rewatch that scene in a way that Loki and Sylvie are on the same page, that would be great. What do you think, Dave? What do you expect to see next week? Oh, I definitely think we're going to end up there. How we end up there, I think we've got to go through a little bit of Darmamu who have come to bargain once again. Dormon.

Tremont. I've tried to realize. Come to bargain. Because if it were possible to just fix the loom and then not have to deal with that earlier choice, I imagine they'd find a way to do it. But I think we're going to have to, you know, yes, go back to the inciting incident, the choice that needs to be undone or reevaluated. And the reason why I don't feel like that's a spoiler is, again, if we have the egg of all time,

the beginning of this season of Loki literally began. begins at the end of time. So either way, we're going to end up there. You go, you end up back at the, at the citadel at the end of time. That's what He Remains told us last season. And we narratively haven't had the show telling us that there's another option. We have to end up there. And I think maybe they kind of had faked us a little bit with Rivona ending up there. But do you think they built that, that rotting, he who remains guy for like one, one shot? Let's go see that again. Let's do some time travel at the end of time. I'm all for it. Apparently, if you could time slip outside of time, that might be the only way that Loki could actually access that

moment again. Yeah, I want to go back to it, but I want to go back to it because I would like for this season to end with the question of free will again. Who has it? Who deserves to have it? and is something like the TVA keeping the sacred timeline completely necessary if everybody has free will. They almost let Victor timely live because he's like, I have choice.

And at that point in the series, they still thought it was possible to have choice. As we get closer to the end of all time, it seems like our choices are diminishing. So it'd be interesting to see over the next 40 minutes how many choices actually matter as we try to cycle through and undo the bad, quote-unquote, bad ones. Excellent.

All right. Easter eggs are a little thin on the ground because I did them and not Mallory and time was a little crunchy today. But I think the Zaniac video game at the bar, the post-credit's audio stinger of Brad Wolf saying, whatever, insert another coin or whatever as he says, it was like pretty true. tremendous. Did you have any other Easter eggs you wanted to shout out, Dave? No, just the other one you have listed here, which are the director of directors of the episode are playing the other Alcatraz escapies. Very cute. Let's go to Whig Watch, TM with Joanna Robinson, TM.

Do you wear wigs? The only wigwatch thing I want to say, I already said the thing about Owen Wilson's wig, like holding on for dear life in the face of that fan on the Jet Ski sequence. But I've had several people email me to let me. When we talked about how shoddy, we thought the wig looked this season, a bunch of people pointed out that season one was also a wig. So it's not like he had his, you know, they like styled his hair in season one. And then they put a wig on him this season. Because I guess there's like behind the scenes conversations with Owen Wilson talking about how much putting the wig on,

put him in character for Mobius in season one. So it's, well, actually, say our listeners, it's always been a wig. And I will just say, well, actually, it was a much better wig in season one. that it is. Fair. I still don't like it. All right. So we're going to close it out on a wig watch this week.

We will leave the Netflix subtitling these Fusiliing and Spaghettiing and Fetuccineing and Bucatini of the world to Mallory Rubin when she returns for the finale. Dave, thank you so much for stepping in and talking to me about this episode of television. I appreciate you. You're welcome.

It's always. fun to talk about television with Joanna Robinson. And if we're being recorded, you know what, that's great, too. It's always fun talking about television with you as well. Honestly, listen to our last week podcast. What a great podcast we made over the pandemic. What a fun thing we did. All the podcasts were on together are great podcasts. That's my opinion. Yeah, listen to trial by content, the podcast that currently exists on The Ringer with our pal Neil Miller. We are talking about body swap episodes, body swap movies this episode and also about the Marvels a bit. So stay tuned for that. This episode was produced by the great Stephen Allman. Steve, thank you so much for everything that you do. I hope you didn't cut out that thing I said about the midnight boys and disagreeing with them because you're an honest editor. And also additional production work from Arjuna Ramkupal, who fielded a frantic email call for me last night. Late night phone call. Thank you so much, Arjuna. And thanks to Jomey a dinner around on the social. And we will see you.

over the weekend for the Loki finale, and then on Monday for the Marvels, and then it's just like Doctor Who and a bunch of other stuff is happening. So we'll see you all back here for more House of Art. Bye. All. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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