Timber wood Loki
Marvel
Last night we saw the penultimate episode of Loki, where after the apparent destruction of the TVA, Loki must re-collect his friends in order to try to find away to prevent the imminent unraveling of an infinite number of universes. No pressure.
The episode lets us take a look at the “non-variant” lives of members of the TVA like Mobius (a jet ski salesman) and OB (a scientist and failed sci-writer), with the idea that once reassembled, they can return to the TVA to stop it all from happening.
But as the episode ends, it was hard to not picture it being set up almost identically to the events of Avengers Infinite War/Endgame, albeit on a much smaller scale. Spoilers follow.
The end result is that the plan essentially, once again, fails. Loki cannot stop the unraveling fast enough, and watches all his friends slowly spaghettify one by one. Yes, it’s spaghetti, not Thanos disintegration, but it’s close to identical, even the way the scene was shot is extremely similar to the “silent destruction” scene where half the heroes are snapped out of existence.
But on top of that, even the solution is the same, as it requires Loki to go back in time to before any of this happens in order to prevent/revert that outcome. No, it’s not Avengers piling into a time machine, it’s Loki manually learning how to control newfound “Time Slipping” powers, but the end result is the same, he manages to warp himself back to before the Loom blew up and will somehow be able to “rewrite the story” as it were.
I mean this is…Avengers Endgame. I still like it, because it’s Loki, and this is very well shot and acted, but it’s extremely hard not to see the parallels here just on a smaller scale. While we still don’t know what happens in the finale (something Kang related, no doubt), both the problem and the solution are too close to Endgame for my liking, cool as that final scene was.
As for Loki’s warping powers, if he kept these powers, he might be one of the most powerful beings in the universe, able to warp between time and space and dimensions at will. He could get Infinity Stones, he could save members of his family, he could really do…anything.
But will the show let him keep those powers? I kind of doubt it. Even if they let G’iah run away with 40 different superpowers in Secret Invasion, I don’t think Loki writers will be that sloppy, and I doubt he’ll end the series with them. But given how intimately involved he’s been with all this multiverse stuff, I hope he’s not benched for the larger Avengers movies to come. Loki has really been one of the only truly great productions of this post-Endgame Marvel era, after all.
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