Episode 5 of ‘Loki’ Proves This Season Was Leading Up to Being All About Loki After All | The Mary Sue

A fairly good complaint of Loki season 2 up through episode 4 was that the show wasn’t focused on Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Well, that all changed with episode 5 “Science/Fiction” and for the better.

Spoilers for Loki season 2 episode 5 lie ahead, beware!

For a show called Loki, there were a lot of moving parts that kept him out of the limelight. We had to deal with the branching timelines and the Temporal Loom becoming overpowered. We had new characters to meet. Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) were both dealing with things that were separate from their time with Loki. So when it came down to it, he just wasn’t a focal point. It didn’t mean that Loki wasn’t the main character, it just wasn’t what the show needed to have as a center piece time and time again.

So whenever a complaint would roll in from fans that the show wasn’t about our God of Mischief anymore, we couldn’t really pushback about it. Because it wasn’t. It was about the Time Variance Authority first and foremost. But all of that changed when “Science/Fiction” came into play. Episode 5 really took this idea of the world without the TVA and made Loki the most important figure in it and showed us all that he is who we need to trust.

He is, after all, the God of Stories. Frankly, it was worth the wait to have an absolutely incredible episode of television that gave Loki all the agency in his own story and gave him the ability to bring his team back together completely on his own and in his own time. With the help of O.B. (Ke Huy Quan) of course but it was still Loki and his journey that took us back to the start.

As Coldplay once said, oh take me back to the start

Loki coming into his powers was great. Watching him take us back to the start of everything to try and fix it was incredible but what really just clicked was knowing that he is in control of it all. Loki should be the star of his own show. To see that he’s the one controlling it? That’s epic. It also fixes the complaint that I also was beginning to side with. Not that I didn’t trust what was happening with the series, I did more than most. But I did wonder what was going on with Loki that we kept seeing him side-lined for other storylines.

Knowing now that it was so he could have this moment, when he gained the power to control his time slipping and control the narrative? To see how the lack of Loki in the first half of the season was all leading up to not only one of the best episodes of the season as a whole but so that we could have such an incredible pay off with it? It just really made it all worth it.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

(featured image: Disney+)

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