Loki Season 2, Episode 4: Did Marvel Just Reboot The MCU, And Other Major Questions After That Cliffhanger

Loki Season 2, Episode 4: Did Marvel Just Reboot The MCU, And Other Major Questions After That Cliffhanger https://ift.tt/0SVa7Te

This week on Loki, something really important happened. We're not sure what it was, exactly, but the cliffhanger that we got at the end of Season 2, Episode 4 is the kind of thing that could shake up the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. It could also mean nothing, like most everything else in the post-Endgame MCU. In the meantime, though, we have many questions that need to be addressed.

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Loki Season 2, Episode 4.

There are two core plot threads in this episode, which takes us back to the Time Variance Authority HQ after we spent last week in 19th-century Chicago. The primary thread involves Loki and Mobius bringing Victor Timely to the TVA--a risky move considering that a different version of Victor used to run the place, but the hope is that he will be able to help deal with the Temporal Loom, which is still unstable.

Meanwhile, Miss Minutes and Renslayer end up at the end of time with the corpse of He Who Remains, and Renslayer learns some pretty important lore: that she fought alongside He Who Remains in the multiversal war, and then he erased Renslayer's memory afterward. He refers to the memory erasure as Protocol 42, indicating it's something that happens regularly for everyone who works at the TVA.

This revelation, along with some nudging from Miss Minutes, gives Renslayer a new idea: Forget He Who Remains, Victor, Kang, and all the rest of them, and just take control of things herself. So she tries to recruit General Dox and her hunters to her cause (they're imprisoned for destroying timelines in Episode 2), promising new lives on the timeline if they do what Renslayer says. But General Dox and her troops aren't into it--except for Hunter X-05. Renslayer kills the rest using that shrinking box thing from last week, and X-05 goes full baddie. Or did he? We'll come back to that.

Loki and Mobius return to Ouroboros to see how things are going with the Temporal Loom (still bad), and they introduce him to Victor. And it's here where we learn something surprising: that OB had originally derived all the TVA's tech from Victor's writings. Which is the darndest thing, really, because Victor's writings are based on the TVA field manual that OB wrote.

Unfortunately, there isn't much time to ponder this paradox, because the Temporal Loom is about to break down, and they need somebody to go back out into the time stream and fix it. Victor volunteers to be the one, and he puts on one of those big bomb suits that Mobius wore in the season premiere--but the temporal radiation destroys him as soon as he steps outside.

There's nothing more they can do after that, so Loki, Mobius, and OB just stand there and watch the Temporal Loom explode, after which the episode cuts to black.

That's a pretty big cliffhanger right there, and we've got about a million questions we're dying to ask about it. Fortunately, we should get some answers in just a week, but in the meantime let's ponder the mysteries. Here's our biggest questions after the massive Loki cliffhanger.

1. Did Loki just reboot the MCU?

At the end of Season 1, Loki and Sylvie met He Who Remains at the end of time, and then Sylvie killed him to free the timelines from the control of the TVA and get the multiverse going. Given where we are right now after this one, these first four episodes in Season 2 feel more like an epilogue to the death of He Who Remains than a new story, because it now feels like the destruction of the Loom is the real start of the MCU multiverse. But why? And to what effect?

The MCU has been so disconnected in the past few years that there are no meaningful contextual clues from the movies or other shows. With that in mind, my read right now is that the destruction of the Loom is a part of He Who Remains' plan--his own death was the beginning of the process of freeing the timelines, and the Loom blowing up is the end of it. But there are a lot of wild cards involved in this situation, including Sylvie and General Dox. Expect some big twists in the remaining two episodes of the season.

2. Did they think the TVA was outside of time only because their memories were being erased?

Everybody in the TVA has been saying since the start of this series that the TVA's headquarters exists outside of time, and this season has indicated that that's no longer the case. But that's always been a bit of a sketchy idea because these characters have been casually referring to the passage of time at the TVA over and over again since the beginning as well.

During Season 1, I chalked that up to the limitations of human language and some possibly necessary corner-cutting by the writers. We don't really know how to describe what "outside of time" would be like because no human has ever experienced that. But this season it feels like they're doing a bit on this whole concept, and possibly revealing that the TVA was never really outside of time. If everyone at the TVA was regularly having their memories erased--robbing them of any sense of past or future because for them there's only the present--then that could certainly create the impression of timelessness.

3. What's up with Ouroboros and Victor Timely?

Amusingly enough, it seems that OB and Victor Timely form a time loop. Victor based all this work on the TVA field manual that Renslayer planted at his house when he was a kid, and Ouroboros based his own work, which he documented in the TVA field manual, on the writings of Victor Timely.

OB is an original character on Loki, and not from the Marvel Comics, and that means that the MCU is blazing a new path here without any obvious precedent from the source materials. Really, we know so little about OB that it's tough to even speculate what his deal will end up being. But judging by this odd relationship he has with Victor, it seems that OB might become a key MCU figure.

4. Is Victor actually dead?

While Victor's body was certainly destroyed, we don't know the implications of the method--he was torn apart by temporal radiation. There are really only two options here: Victor Timely is dead for good, or his spirit has been dispersed across the multiverse. The latter could mean that this moment is the birth of Kang the Conqueror, and the true beginning of his influence over the multiverse. But when we consider the real life-legal situation with actor Jonathan Majors, who plays Victor/Kang/He Who Remains, it could be that this is how Majors is replaced as the MCU's next big Thanos-level villain.

5. Could Renslayer be the new Kang?

Renslayer and Miss Minutes are now striking out on their own, ostensibly trying to put the universe on a new path. But they certainly don't seem altruistic about things--they want the power of He Who Remains for themselves. This could certainly be setting us up for a bait-and-switch, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Ravonna Renslayer taking over as the MCU's multiversal big bad. Given the circumstances, that would be a pretty solid pivot, because Mbatha-Raw rules.

6. What's up with Hunter X-05 and General Dox?

Something is up with General Dox, who's been acting cryptically this whole season even while we've learned nothing of interest about her. She's a new character who was never mentioned in Season 1, appearing out of nowhere in the Season 2 premiere, and when she and her hunters set out after Sylvie in that episode, Dox and X-05 shared an unexplained tender moment before they set out, which drew a pointed look from Loki.

Now, we're expected to believe that X-05, another character who didn't exist in Season 1, has betrayed Dox, letting her die while he joins up with Renslayer. You could point to X-05's time as a movie star in the 1970s as proof of his intense desire to live a normal Earth life, but I think it's something else.

I think General Dox and Hunter X-05 have been executing some kind of long-term plan this whole season, and I think everything that X-05 has done so far has been according to that plan. I have no clue what that plan is, especially with Dox apparently dead. But X-05's last act in the episode was to prune Renslayer, sending her to the chaotic world at the end of time. And then he flashes those green Loki eyes. Hmmmmmm.

And with the universe cutting to black the way it did a few moments later, any and all resurrections are possible--I fully expect Dox back before this season ends. Hunter X-05 may even be her.

7. Will any of this actually matter?

As fun as this season of Loki has been, it's valid to worry that it's all ultimately a big meaningless pile of nothingness with no direct, tangible impact on the rest of the MCU franchise. We thought at the end of Loki Season 1 that the death of He Who Remains would introduce the MCU's multiverse, but there have not been any references, even veiled or indirect ones, to those events elsewhere. You can infer that Kang's presence in Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania is the result of He Who Remains' death, but that movie didn't provide any tangible connection to support that idea.

Then, we had General Dox prune all the new timelines a couple episodes back, seemingly deleting the multiverse and resetting things again, albeit temporarily. And now, with the Temporal Loom gone, that could mean the multiverse now has actually been unleashed, without limits.

With so few connections between MCU stories right now, and no understanding of the multiverse as a result, it's not possible to make even an educated guess about the potential greater meaning of the destruction of the Loom. But, based on the past few years of the MCU, the most likely option is that none of this will ever directly come up outside of potential future seasons of Loki--as with Kang's appearance in that Ant-Man movie, other movies will probably include implied connections rather than directly stated ones.