‘Loki’ Season 2, Episode 2 Recap: Antihero’s Journey

Loki Laufeyson has come a long way since he made his glorious debut in 2011’s Thor. The Kenneth Branagh–directed film introduced the God of Mischief as a character fit for a Shakespearean drama, the overlooked younger brother of the future king who plots against his royal family to claim the throne for himself. Thor ended with Loki’s apparent death but somehow still set up the Asgardian’s next dastardly endeavor: invading Earth in 2012’s The Avengers. More than a decade (and several deaths) later, Loki has evolved into something much more than the sneering, petulant villain he started as.

In the latest episode of Loki, “Breaking Brad,” the God of Mischief displays just how much he has grown. When Mobius loses his temper during a tense interrogation of Hunter X-5 midway through the episode, Loki is—for once—the one who remains levelheaded, and he attempts to console his friend by telling him an anecdote about a familiar, regrettable incident from another timeline.

“Remember that time I was so angry with my father and my brother, I went down to Earth and held the whole of New York City hostage with an alien army?” Loki says. “Tried to use the Mind Stone on Tony Stark, and it didn’t work, so I threw him off the building! I mean, let me tell you something; it wasn’t tactical. I kind of lost it. Sometimes, our emotions get the better of us.”

The story is, of course, a playful callback to a scene in The Avengers. But the way Loki wistfully tells it to Mobius also reflects his newfound self-awareness and the distance between the villain he once was and the hero he’s trying to become. The second episode of the new season serves as a well-placed reminder of Loki’s progress as he now tries to protect the entire multiverse. At the same time, we also see glimpses of his former self, the shadows of a maleficent deity.

Last week’s premiere picked up right where Loki left off in Season 1, following the climactic introduction to He Who Remains in the season finale, and wasted little time in raising the stakes and tacking on more problems to Loki and the TVA’s growing list of crises. With Loki’s time-slipping dilemma taken care of thanks to an assist from O.B., though, Loki and Mobius can get back to the task at hand in Episode 2: finding Sylvie.

In “Breaking Brad,” that search begins with tracking down Hunter X-5, who’s been hiding from the newly reformed TVA on the Sacred Timeline in 1977. Loki, Mobius, and Hunter B-15 discover that he’s found a new calling as an actor named Brad Wolfe, and their plan is to ambush him at the London premiere of his latest film, Zaniac. (Brad pretentiously describes his project as an “elevated thriller.” It’s also a nod to the character’s comic book origins: In the comics, Wolfe gets possessed by a parasitic demon from the Dark Dimension while filming a slasher movie about a serial killer named Zaniac.) “Breaking Brad” dedicates a sizable chunk of its running time to properly introducing X-5 after Rafael Casal made his brief debut in the role during the previous episode. Once the TVA trio is able to capture and interrogate the rogue hunter, X-5 becomes the key to locating Sylvie in Broxton, Oklahoma.

The long-awaited Sylvie-Loki reunion finds the multiversal counterparts still at odds with each other after their tense meeting at the end of time with He Who Remains. Loki has essentially become a full-blown employee for the TVA, while Sylvie has started a new life working at a McDonald’s. (I know she’s been through a lot, but you do have to question Sylvie’s lifestyle choices and lack of imagination given the multiverse of possibilities that exist a Time Door away.) The divide between them has grown even wider as Loki remains confident that the existence of the TVA is necessary and as Sylvie has embraced a new beginning, feeling vindicated in her decision to free everyone from the corrupt government of misguided time cops.

However, when X-5 reveals General Dox’s plans to prune all the branching timelines, Sylvie begrudgingly teams up with Loki and Mobius again. Together, they’re able to subdue Dox and most of her loyalists, but not in time to stop them from wiping out entire branches, effectively killing billions. The episode ends on this somber note, as the TVA mourns the cost of its cosmic failure and Sylvie returns to Broxton unimpressed by the organization’s inability to change its ways.

It’s hard to blame Sylvie either. The scene endeavors to play up the tragedy of the event; B-15 delivers the heavy-handed remark that “Those are all lives” being lost on the TVA’s blinking monitors, which depict receding branches. But the moment doesn’t quite land on an emotional level, perhaps in part because the TVA has been committing these types of atrocities since the beginning of time. The TVA may be trying to change, but only after its workers discovered that they, too, were originally variants, and therefore the lives they had been erasing from history now had value. This whole ordeal also seemed completely avoidable given that B-15 stood by and watched Dox and her followers waltz out of the TVA at the end of the previous episode, with a deeply suspicious amount of gear in hand, and did little more than ask aloud: “Where are they going?”

“Breaking Brad” is nonetheless another solid episode to build on a strong start to Season 2. Loki continues to thrive through its focus on Loki and Mobius’s relationship in particular: Their quippy buddy-cop routine is one of the show’s consistent highlights. The series is, as always, moving very quickly as it navigates another limited six-episode narrative window. But it’s still carving out enough time to contextualize its protagonist’s shifting motives and state of mind, even if it would benefit from a bit more of the same for some of its supporting characters, like Sylvie and B-15.

While Episode 2 narrows its main objective to locating Sylvie, it also sets up where the season is heading. O.B. continues to uncover new ripples from the TVA’s Temporal Loom crisis, which can’t be solved without the help of Miss Minutes, who’s still missing, or He Who Remains, who’s dead. Unless the TVA can convince Miss Minutes to come back to work or somehow summon the temporal aura of He Who Remains, O.B. screams to his coworkers, they’re “all going to die” because the Loom can’t be fixed. Meanwhile, Casey is able to get a lead on the whereabouts of Ravonna Renslayer, teasing the imminent return of one of the show’s most memorable antagonists.

For this week’s recap, let’s take a closer look at the ongoing development of three of the episode’s most important characters: Loki, Mobius, and Sylvie.

Loki’s Journey From Villain to Hero

One of the advantages of a multi-season TV series (which Marvel wants to make more of) is the freedom to focus on developing individual characters and depicting how they change over time. The God of Mischief has had an especially long, strange journey in the MCU, and Loki has done a great job of allowing him to continue to grow in interesting and new ways while not losing sight of where he came from.

“He’s a character who, as long as I’ve played him, has been searching for meaning,” Tom Hiddleston told Marvel.com. “Even when he wasn’t aware of it, he was full of grievance and anger and emotional destabilization because he didn’t feel he had purpose or meaning. He was looking for meaning in the wrong places, and now I think he’s found a way of giving himself purpose, which is to try to reorganize, to help Mobius and Hunter B-15 and the TVA.”

In “Breaking Brad,” we’re able to see what Loki’s new sense of glorious purpose looks like as he works alongside his onetime captors. His relationship with Mobius has shown his capacity to care for others, particularly as he empathizes with Mobius after X-5 gets under Mobius’s skin during the interrogation. He tries to give his friend the help he needs without any sinister ulterior motives.

But what the episode does so effectively is show the remnants of Loki’s checkered past and the villain he once was. Early on in “Breaking Brad,” when Loki is pursuing the fleeing X-5 in London, he appears to take pleasure in hunting his enemy and humiliating him after he’s caught, like a cat playing with its prey. Loki delights himself as he uses his magic against X-5, casting projections to frighten him. And he exhibits all of this behavior again later in the episode when his solo interrogation of X-5 descends into a mini torture session, in which Loki nearly crushes X-5 with a peculiar TVA machine that could have cubed him into oblivion.

During X-5’s interrogation, the former hunter draws attention to the fact that Loki’s intentions have not always been so noble. “Everyone here knows what you’re doing, you know,” X-5 says. “You’re just trying to make up for all the terrible, awful shit you’ve done in your life, you pathetic little man.

“At the end of the day, you just make everything worse,” he continues. “For Mobius, for B-15, for your mother. Because that’s what you do. You lose. You’re a loser. Stop trying to be a hero, man. You’re a villain, and you’re good at it. Do that.”

Aside from absolutely roasting Loki, X-5 stands in for the viewer who may not be buying into the Asgardian’s rapid transformation from villain to hero in Loki. Early in Season 2, it’s a smart choice by head writer Eric Martin and Co. to use this episode to make the audience question how much Loki has really changed and whether he can redeem himself after all his misdeeds, while also showing how his path to heroism is ultimately a work in progress.

“If Season 1 was about self-awareness and self-acceptance, Season 2 is about taking responsibility and trying to find a new purpose,” Hiddleston told Marvel.com. “Maybe there’s more burden and less glory in the purpose this time.”

Mobius’s Past Life

One of Loki’s greatest mysteries is what Mobius’s past life was like on the Sacred Timeline before he started working for the TVA. Did he have a family? What did he do for work? And did he ever get to ride a Jet Ski?

“Breaking Brad” reminds the audience that we still don’t know the answers to those questions and that Mobius doesn’t either. More than that, Mobius doesn’t want to know about the life he left behind, willingly or not. The ever-insightful X-5 manages to pierce Mobius’s typically even-keeled demeanor and upset him with a reminder that he could have loved ones waiting for him to return, somewhere in the multiverse, and that he needs to “wake up” to the reality of the TVA’s deceit.

As Loki subsequently soothes Mobius with a slice of pie, Loki tries to understand how X-5 was able to get under Mobius’s skin and why the longtime TVA agent has never bothered to look at his past. “I get it, you know. You might think twice if it’s something bad,” Loki says.

“Or something good!” Mobius interjects. “Something bad I can handle. What if it’s something good? You think I want to have that rattling around in here? ’Course not!”

Mobius may still remain something of an enigma, but how he reacts to X-5’s very reasonable observations—and his fear of facing the truth—provides a lot of insight into the kind of person he is. For now, Mobius remains steadfast in his “ignorance is bliss” approach to his past life. As we’ve seen with Loki, though, everyone is capable of change. Whether Mobius opens up his mind and allows himself to peer into what could have been will be something to look out for in the episodes to come; we may yet see the man get his elusive Jet Ski.

Sylvie’s Return

After Sylvie’s screen time was mostly limited to a post-credits scene in the Season 2 premiere, the enchantress returns in “Breaking Brad” for a larger role.

When Loki and Mobius finally catch up with Sylvie, it’s evident that she’s built a life in Broxton. She’s quickly gone from not knowing how to place an order at McDonald’s to showing some proficiency in a job there. She swapped out the wig for a new haircut better fit for the 1980s. She even bought herself a green pickup truck.

While we’re able to parse a series of context clues to discern the rough outlines of Sylvie’s life in Broxton, it’s less clear where she is in her own character journey. Some indefinite amount of time has passed for her in Oklahoma, and yet her emotions—and sense of betrayal—when she sees Loki are still raw, as if some part of her has remained in stasis since their fateful encounter in the first-season finale.

Sylvie is a tragic, layered character, but for now, she’s still too blinded by rage to even consider what Loki has to say about He Who Remains’s variants or the TVA, and not much time has been afforded to explore her psyche further. Given how crucial a part Sylvie played in the first season, it could have been valuable for Loki to spend less time on, say, Brad Wolfe’s smug (yet amusing) antics and more on Sylvie’s new Oklahoman life outside the purview of the Golden Arches.

When it comes to Sylvie, at least, “Breaking Brad” gave us more of a rushed, drive-through experience than a sit-down meal. Of course, as the episode ends, she sits on the hood of her car in the McDonald’s parking lot, holding He Who Remains’s special time-twisting TemPad in her hands. Sylvie has held on to her ability to travel to the TVA, the Citadel at the End of Time, or just about anywhere else she can imagine, not to mention the device’s potential to manipulate her body through space and time. There’s clearly a lot we don’t know about what Sylvie’s life has been like or what she plans to do now that she’s been pulled back into the multiversal chaos of the TVA. But Loki could just be biding its time for greater reveals in the future. With four episodes left in the season, time is still on its side.

Daniel Chin

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