It's the end of the Moon as we know it, and I feel fine.
Last time on Loki, the Game’s afoot
in the hunt for Loki’s variant. After a TVA Hunter is kidnapped and Loki makes
an obvious attempt at squeezing the TVA for incentives that fails miserably, he’s
put on research duty. The Fall of Asgard file time Loki off that his Variant is
hiding in Apocalypses, setting up camp and laying low in places where the absolute
destruction of sentient life makes the reaction of Nexus Events impossible. And
thus, making the Variant invisible. After proving this theory to Mobius at Pompei,
they then use the Gum to track the Variant to Haven Hills, Alabama, circa 2050.
A massive Wal-Mart parody called Roxx-Cart is destroyed there, the supplies
making it the perfect hiding spot. Loki and the team travel there and he meets
his match. Eventually. The other Loki possesses several people, to set up their
attack, before revealing themselves to Loki. And this Loki is a girl version. The
plot thickens. Mobius finds the kidnapped Hunter, who reveals she told Lady
Loki how to get to the Timekeepers while under control. Lady Loki then begins
her plan, dropping the dozens of Reset Charges across the Sacred Timeline,
bombing it and forcing nearly all of the TVA’s agents out to deal with Nexus Events.
She opens a door to the TVA and runs through. Mobius catches up with Loki just
in time to see Loki ditch them to follow his other self. This is going to be a
hell of a work week, me thinks. Enough recap, let’s get to it.
Episode 3: Lamentis
 |
| The most dangerous illusions are the ones we craft for ourselves. ... this has nothing to do with this scene, but sounds cool. |
Don't mind them, Loki is just fighting with themselves.
Lady Loki walks into the TVA and tries
to enchant the first Minuteman she walks into, only to discover her powers don’t
work. She instead starts fighting the Minutemen, using their sticks to prune
them. Loki arrives a moment later. He goes to follow after her, but stops when
he sees he arrived in the locker room. He busts into B-20’s locker and collects
his knives. He follows after Lady Loki, seeing the downed Minutemen she didn’t
prune. Lady Loki makes it to the elevator just before Loki catches her. The two
fight with knifes as Loki tries to convince her to join him. Lady Loki isn’t
interested, and keeps trying to get passed him. They end up evenly matched, until
Renslayer arrives with her personal prune stick and extra guards. Lady Loki gets
Loki into a hold and threatens to kill Loki. Renslayer doesn’t mind and tries
to prune them both. Loki grabs Lady Loki’s TemPad and portals them away.
They land in a shack under purple
light. Lady Loki gets up first and grabs the TemPad. She tries to escape, but
her TemPad’s battery is dead. Loki gets up and the two fight some more, Loki
dodging around using his illusions. He gets his hands on the TemPad and bluffs
that he knows how to recharge it. It’s at this point that we learn that Lady
Loki hates being called a Loki. Loki makes the TemPad vanish when she goes for
it. They are about to fight some more, but then a meteorite crash between them.
After asking if that was one off Lady Loki’s powers, we learn they landed on
Lamentis-1, 2077, a moon that is in the process off crashing into the planet it
orbits. Apparently, it’s the worst apocalypse that Lady Loki had saved. No
survivors. To which I must ask, if it’s so bad, why the hell is it still on
your TemPad? Lady Loki saves Loki from an impact, not for any noble reason, but
because as Loki has the TemPad and if he blows up, it blows up, and therefor Lady
Loki blows up.
I'm actually surprised Loki didn't shout "Heimdall
open the Bifrost!" on impulse.
They make a mad dash across the
field they’re in, dodging meteorite impacts. To make it to a sturdy shelter. Once
inside, Lady Loki tries to Enchant Loki to get the TemPad. It looks like it
works for a moment, but he is apparently immune. They almost start fighting and
after some fighting, they agree to work together to get off the moon. Lady Loki
promises that once they get the TemPad recharged she’s going back to enact her
plan, something she’s been working on for years by the way, and kill the
Timekeepers and probably Loki. She goes to leave the shaft, rationalizing that
there has to be power on the Moon, so she’s going to find enough of it to allow
them to travel through time and space. They make there way across the surface,
making towards the nearby town. Loki wants to chat, but apparently one of the differences
he has with this Variant of himself is that she’s not a chatterbox. We do
learn, after Loki calls her a faded photocopy, that she prefers to be called Sylvie.
She jabs at him to for working for
the time cops, and he mocks her plan of killing the lords of time, creating the
ultimate power vacuum and just walking away. They keep walking. They make it to
the town, it’s already deserted. It won’t help, as the whole population dies.
The conditions will only get worse as they get closer to the planet. They have
about twelve hours to escape. Loki sees a neon sign and wonders if that has
enough charge. Sylvie goes up to the sign and tries to trick Loki into giving
her the TemPad to try charging. He doesn’t fall for it, and they move on.
They reach a house that is still
occupied. Sylvie prepares her sword, but the Loki advices that brute force isn’t
always the answer, and that maybe they should try diplomacy. Sylvie tries
diplomacy, and by that, I mean she kicks down the door instead of slashing it and
gets shot for her troubles. It’s a kinetic blast, so she’s fine. Loki, tries a
bit of talking, but the owner isn’t in a very talkative mood. Loki spies a
picture of her husband in the window, and takes on his form. The illusion works
for a moment, but then he gets shot too. They ask her where everyone is, and she
points them to the Ark, the evacuation vessel. It’ll take the train for them to
reach it, but the owner is pretty confident they won’t get on board.
I blame Rick and Morty for the fact I spent this whole
scene expecting an unusually buff old man to come up
to them and say "Tickets, please."
They make it to the train. The line
is long and it looks like a lot of people are going to be left behind. Sylvie
wants to enchant a guard and have him lead them inside. And if they’re
discovered and a fight breaks out, so be it. Loki, insists on doing it his way.
His ways is playing his usual illusion games, transforms himself to look like a
guard and lead Sylvie to the front. The guard they run into starts asking questions,
but Sylvie enchants him really quick to get them on. Woo, teamwork. The two go
to the train bar. They sit and Sylvie berates him for his simple plan. He
advices her to get some sleep, but Sylvie claims to not be able to sleep around
untrustworthy people. Sylvie tells him to nap, and promises to not search him
for the TemPad, begrudgingly complimenting his magic. Loki credits his mother
for his skill,, and Sylvie asks about her. Loki clearly still loves his mom, which
leads into the two discussing their childhoods. A key difference in their
upbringing being that Sylvie’s Odin and Frigga told her she was adopted. Wow,
honesty, how weird. But on the flipside, Sylvie hasn’t seen her mother in ages
and thus barely remembers her. He offers to do a little trick like his mother
used to do for him, and makes fireworks in his hands. Loki asks about the Enchanments,
and learns Sylvie is self-taught. Sylvie tries to use an offer to demonstrate
to steal the TemPad, but Loki sees through it. He gets some champaign and
cheers the end of the world. Loki wonders why the old woman wanted to stay at
her house, and that leads to a discussion about love of all things. Sylvie
thinks she stayed for love of her late husband, Loki thinks she hated him, maybe
love is hate, blah blah. They talk relationships, revealing that both are
bisexual, using bisexual lighting to demonstrate, and that neither has had a
real relationship. They both agree to relax, as stealing the last hope for
salvation from a people will probably be difficult.
Sylvie sleeps for a bit, and while
she’s asleep, Loki gets real drunk and sings. It’s all in old Norse/Asgardian,
except the chorus “When she sings, she sings come home,” but it’s real pretty.
A passenger seemed to note Loki as odd and walks off. Sylvie pulls him aside
and accuses him of being drunk. Apparently, Loki got drunk and decided that, because
it’s the end of the world, no one will care if he acts out a bit. Which, obviously
they did, see the suspicious passenger leaving above. Loki has thought of an
answer to her question, Love is a dagger. He gives a solid metaphor, but then
the guards show up asking for their tickets. The guard being the same one from
the train entrance. Loki goes to make an illusionary pair of tickets but still
is a bit drunk so makes fireworks instead. This leads to a brawl with the guards.
The other passengers clear out and Sylvie and Loki beat up the guards. Ultimately,
Loki is thrown from the train and Sylvie leaps out after him, as she needs the TemPad.
Sylvie pulls her sword on Loki and
demands the TemPad. Loki summons it, and unfortunately, it’s broken. They get
into a fight, Loki mocking Sylvie’s quite frankly insane plan and Sylvie calling
Loki a clown. After a good, magically enhanced scream, the two sit quietly for
a moment. Loki asks again about the moon killing everyone, and asks about the
Ark, Sylvie revealing it too is destroyed. Loki proposes that they highjack it
and use it to get off the moon. Not having really any other option, Sylvie
agrees to go along.
They walk the rest of the way to town.
Loki asks about Enchantment again, but Sylvie isn’t talking initially. Loki
wants to know as a sign of trust between them. Sylvie finally relents,
explaining that she has to physically touch the person and then grab hold of
their mind. Weak minds are easy, and in order to keep the connection, she pulls
something from their memories to use as a framing device for illusions. She
reveals that C-20’s mind was pretty badly screwed up. She had to pull a memory
from hundreds of years prior, to before she was a TVA agent. This is where we
learn that the TVA is entirely comprised of Variants. Renslayer, Mobius, B-15,
C-20, Casey, they’re all Variants pulled out of the timeline and into service.
Loki is shocked to earn this, but they have to get to the Ark as it’s ten
minutes from lift off.
Just running with themself across a soon to be dead
world. I still think Loki has had weirder Wednesdays.
They run to the Ark, and get there
just in time. They see a riot start to break out five minutes to the deadline.
They try to run around as the city burns around them. Unfortunately, a huge
chunk of rock breaks off from the planet below. It knocks everyone about, further
confusing the situation. Loki and Sylvie battle more guards as they run for the
Ark and the city shatters around them. Loki pulls a pretty sick magic move
where he seems to rewind a pillar that almost crushes them back into place.
They get within yards of the Ark, only to see it destroyed by debris. The episode
ends with Sylvie walking away and Loki looking on in defeat.
Well, that was a downer ending. I’ll
give this episode props for putting Loki and Sylvie into a situation where two
untrusting and untrustworthy people to talk. Loki playing keep away with the
thing is classic Loki. I really liked the scene on the train while Loki sang
his little lament. I had no idea what the non-chorus lyrics are, but it sounds
depressing as hell. Loki is clearly hurting and not handling it well. Maybe it’s
seeing his death, maybe it’s the thought he might die in a few hours, maybe it’s
his not-great Timekeeper plan going up in smoke. Who is to say? Their argument on
how to infiltrate the train was fairly funny. Loki wanting to finesse their way
in, Sylvie wanting to do like 40% finesse, 60% violence seems on brand for both
of them. Despite Sylvie’s complaints, it took both of their half plans to get
onto the train. It was a nice little character moment for them. The discussion about
Love was a bit odd… but I’ll get more into that later. It was also a good idea
to have the sign of trust between them being Sylvie explaining Enchantments to
Loki. It seems a universal constant in Lokis are a love of magic, so learning about
a type of magic like that will obviously earn big points with Loki. Oh, and the
setting of this one was great. Seeing the meteorites fall from the sky and the
planet above Lamentis growing ever closer as the episode progressed were neat
visuals. And, obviously, ending the episode with the Ark being destroyed when
they were feet from it was a nice, depressing touch. So yeah, this was a solid
follow up. Next time, we’ll see how they escape the doomed world, and what
happens when the TVA catches a Loki. See you then.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/54243524
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
No comments:
Post a Comment