TV Review: ‘Loki’ Season 2, Episode 4 — An End Without Meaning
by Frank Martin
The most important rule of science fiction is that the audience has to buy into the framework of the story. Yes, science is used as a basis for the plot, but depending on the nature of the story, the fiction part can be doing a lot of heavy lifting. In Loki, it’s practically carrying the whole show. The idea of branching timestreams going through a giant mechanical loom that then weaves it into something refined is already a bit of a stretch. This season is focused on that system going haywire. The main objective for the characters is trying to set it right, but the premise itself is so contrived that it’s hard for the audience to buy into the struggle, and so this week’s episode didn’t have the impact that it should have had.
Now that Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors) is at the TVA, he and the rest of the group work towards trying to fix the temporal loom before all of existence is destroyed. Meanwhile, Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) invade the TVA in an attempt to take it over for their own nefarious purposes. Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and the others try to prevent this by rebooting the TVA’s major systems and shutting down Miss Minutes, who locked them out of everything. Victor tries to go out to repair the loom with his device, but it’s too late. The radiation is too high and he is instantly disintegrated. This means they are out of options and the episode ends as the loom is destroyed.
This ending was meant to be grim and dire. But it’s not exactly the ending that it appears to be. Obviously, the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t going anywhere. And since this season still has a couple episodes left, the show will go on. So the fact that the episode ends in a very dramatic matter is meaningless because the next episode will show audiences what will happen next. The episode probably would have ended on a stronger note if it gave fans a tease of what’s to come, but this show has been all over the place since the beginning of the season. It will be interesting to see how it tries to pick itself up.
Loki streams Thursdays on Disney+.
