Loki‘s second season has not been easy to watch.

The first four hours of this six episode season spun their wheels, presenting events without real conflict or earned emotion. It set the needs of the series aside in place of extended advertisements for future Marvel products.

This season was disorganized, incoherent. The third episode is one of the worst individual episodes of television of the last few years – dramatically dead, narratively structureless, with sudden character arcs that are flatly resolved within the same episode.

Despite a wonderful cast of regulars and individual excellent scenes, Loki‘s current season has not lived up to the first.

At least, not until this week’s “Science/Fiction.”

Be Warned: Spoilers lurk beyond this point – and if you indulge, even the TVA can’t protect you from getting ahead of your own timeline. If you’re looking for a crash course in time travel theory, check out our reviews of episode one, two, three, and four.

Synopsis

After the seeming destruction of the TVA, Loki is once more unstuck in time. He time travels through the decaying final moments of the TVA headquarters before landing in one of the myriad timeline branches.

As he struggles to get his shifts through time and space under control, Loki meets the TVA cast in their real personas: Mobius sells jet skis and takes care of two sons who behave very much like a certain God of Mischief; Casey is a bank robber escaping from Alcatraz; B-15 is a pediatrician; and OB is a physicist seeking to become a science fiction writer. Sylvie, of course, is still at McDonalds. Loki must gather everyone to have a second chance at saving the TVA, as they can only return together. Through the episode, Loki and OB discuss if this is a “science” problem or a “fiction” problem.

Loki rebuilds the team, but gathers everyone too late. He’s fated to lose. Everyone dies, their final thoughts echoing around Loki. Time and space collapse. Only Loki is left. But what if this really is a “fiction” problem? What if he has one more trick?

Thanks to being unstuck in time, he’s able to rewind time just enough to save his friends. They return to the final moments of the TVA, as the screen cuts to black.

Breakdown

“Science/Fiction” features genuinely excellent writing, direction, and cinematography. This is the first time this season I felt that I was watching something that belongs alongside the first season, in quality and in tone.

This episode is extremely well shot, with lingering, technically complicated cinematography in service of what the characters are experiencing or feeling. Many people will talk about the (genuinely incredible) special effects at the record store, but the camera dollying as Sylvie listens to music is stunning, and perfectly captures her. We understand her in that moment without dialogue, even with a (purposefully) subdued performance, because the camera puts us into her headspace. And yet the scene doesn’t stop there, incorporating the cilia-like decay of time and space into the mood of the scene, expanding on what we had already seen. It’s tragic so little has been established about Sylvie’s life in Broxton, because the death of the record store owner could have had so much more emotional weight.

I appreciate that this episode doesn’t feel the need to laboriously spell things out for us. We are left to reflect on how Sylvie is feeling for ourselves. We are trusted to see that Mobius’ sons act like Loki. We see for ourselves how the selflessness that Sylvie sells Loki is really her signature selfishness under a different name. And, in fact, in this episode their argument about the TVA finally has teeth. For four episodes Sylvie and Loki have argued in circles about what to do, always in terms vague enough that it never really meant anything. Now it does.

Their argument, and the episode as a whole, meaningfully taps into the source material that defined the first season again. We are back on familiar ground with the themes of Walter Simonson’s groundbreaking Thor run. Once again, we’re questioning How much are the gods defined by their narrative? vs How much do the gods define their own narrative? Is Loki always fated to lose? But more interestingly, is Loki’s inherent selfishness always evil? Or can it be redirected toward good?

Their argument is about selfishness and selflessness, neither of them really arguing what they mean. Loki may have selfish motives, but he’s arguing for the selfless plan. Sylvie may position herself as selfless, but she only has her own goals at heart until it’s too late. It’s an interesting, meaningful way to ground their debates and bring it to resolution.

Final Score (4 out of 5 stars)

“Science/Fiction” is genuinely excellent television. Tightly scripted and well structured, the episode not only meaningfully explores the entire central cast, but ties their characterization into the plot.

After four episodes, we finally get the exploration of the cast that the end of season one set-up and demanded.

After four episodes, the cinematography that made the first season excellent returns, and returns with sustained sequences better than before.

After four episodes, everything that made Loki, well, Loki is back.

And that’s the problem with the series as a whole. After four episodes, the series hit the stride that the first season had from the first moment. After four episodes, two-thirds of a season, they recaptured the magic. After four episodes, we’re narratively back where we belong. It’s worse because in a properly paced season, this would probably have been the third episode.

While I was delighted to see the show come back to life, at what point is this too little, too late?

If I wasn’t part of a review team, I would have already given up and quit watching Loki. It’s one thing when a season of, say, the 90s genre show of your choice has a few bad episodes. Four – or even more – bad episodes mean very little across a 20-odd episode season, particularly since the important episodes that advance the overall story would then receive enough time in the oven to be truly excellent. Consider that most bad (or even just noticeably less great) episodes in Babylon 5, most 1990s Star Trek, or early seasons of The X-Files are not the important episodes.

Loki would benefit from either a lengthier true pre-production period or (and I genuinely wish this was the case) an expanded season with monster of the week episodes. Slot the advertisements for Marvel products into non-critical episodes, and let the main plot have the narrative room to breathe and ample production time. This would prevent surprises like Sylvie’s one episode wonder character arc in “1893.”

But at six episodes, four of which so far range between below average or bad, it’s very hard to recommend Loki season 2 as a whole. And that’s a shame, because “Science/Fiction” is truly excellent.

Featured Image: Bleeding Cool

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