‘Loki’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap: Introductions and Reintroductions

He Who Remains is back. Well, sort of.

The main villain of Loki is still very much dead, his body decaying in the same chair that Sylvie stabbed him in at the end of the first season. And yet the Master of Time has returned in another life, on a different timeline, just as he foretold. “Reincarnation, baby.”

“1893” centers on the introduction of Victor Timely (Jonathan Majors), a genius inventor from the 19th century who’s on a path to becoming the man who creates the Time Variance Authority thanks to the TVA guidebook, a gift from Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and Miss Minutes (voiced by Tara Strong) that pushes him in the right direction. The arrival of this trio is a significant narrative development as Season 2 reaches its midpoint, but in other ways, the third installment sees Loki take a step backward after a strong start.

Directed by Kasra Farahani, “1893” is more uneven than its predecessors, as Loki starts to struggle with the many moving parts of a fast-paced, six-episode season. With Timely, Ravonna, and Miss Minutes entering the picture, it’s become a greater challenge for the show to balance its screen time between progressing its story—which involves a lot of exposition to describe the confusing technological crisis that the TVA faces—and affording each character enough space to develop in meaningful ways. While the narrowed focus on Loki and Mobius in “Breaking Brad” last week was one of the episode’s strongest features, Sylvie, for example, has quickly become an unsympathetic figure whose perspective has been lost almost entirely. Meanwhile, poor Ke Huy Quan remains stuck in perpetual sci-fi-speak for the second episode in a row: O.B. appears only briefly to explain the TVA’s technical difficulties, as the team now needs a Throughput Multiplier to help the Temporal Loom handle the surplus of branching timelines. Ironically, what Loki could really use is more time.

Beyond its problems with pacing and character development, the third episode is a somewhat clumsy departure for the series in terms of its tone, which careens between Loki’s typical dramatic sincerity and a campy sensibility that pays homage to the episode’s central time period. There’s a one-off iris shot to transition between locations that feels out of place, and a pair of wacky chase scenes that reminded me of Scooby-Doo! (minus the doors to nowhere), set to a playful, old-timey score. (The opening Marvel Studios theme song kind of slaps in harpsichord, though, I must admit.) Even still, “1893” has its moments, and Loki continues to stand out from the rest of the MCU thanks in no small part to its excellent cinematography and the unique look and feel of each of its settings.

(Side note: “1893” director Farahani also doubles as the show’s production designer, and he’s largely responsible for shaping the wonderful, retro-futuristic world of the TVA that stands at the heart of the series.)

After General Dox’s attack on the branching timelines in “Breaking Brad,” an event that has been mostly set aside for now, Loki and Mobius trace Ravonna’s TemPad to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The duo arrives in a branched timeline, one that has diverged from the Sacred Timeline after Ravonna and Miss Minutes gave young Victor Timely a glimpse into his future. But what begins as a search for Miss Minutes, who represents the TVA’s best chance to gain the access it requires to repair the Temporal Loom, soon becomes a wild scramble to get to Timely first. With each party harboring its own reasons for reaching Timely, Loki and Mobius race against Ravonna and Miss Minutes, some random businessman who Timely ripped off, and Sylvie.

Thanks to an ill-timed standoff between Loki and Sylvie that parallels their fateful duel at the End of Time, as well as a ghostly distraction from Miss Minutes, Team Ravonna is able to pull Timely away from all the commotion and retreat to one of his discreet locations. There, Ravonna and Miss Minutes explain their story to Timely and their keen interest in him as he becomes the powerful man known as He Who Remains. (And when I say “interest,” there’s a lot to unpack here. We’ll dive deeper into their, uh, desires later on.) Together, the trio flee Chicago and take a boat to visit Timely’s lab in Wisconsin, a nod to the character’s comic book origins. But when Timely discovers that Ravonna is positioning herself to become something of a business partner to him, he dumps her into Lake Michigan and carries on with Miss Minutes.

The final confrontation at Timely’s lab is pure chaos. As with Sylvie’s sudden, barely-explained appearance earlier in “1893,” there’s a contrived series of events to close out the episode that sees every character arrive at exactly the right moment to try to take control of Timely. After Miss Minutes makes a pass (?) at Timely and gets shut down (literally), Ravonna, wielding an early prototype for the Time Stick, emerges from the shadows to tell Timely that he’s working for her now. Then Loki and Mobius burst in to plead with Ravonna to let Timely go so they can bring him back to the TVA to help repair the Loom. And then Sylvie breaks everything up with her magic just as Ravonna concludes a dramatic speech.

It all comes down to Sylvie’s choice—and it’s a familiar one. Wielding a machete in her hand, Sylvie can kill Timely—which would prevent the possibility of him becoming He Who Remains—or she can let him live, and trust that Loki and Mobius can turn the TVA into a better place. As Sylvie prepares to deliver a verdict based on crimes Timely has yet to commit, he helps her see how she’s preventing him from having the free will that she’s been fighting for all along.

“You don’t know me,” he pleads. “You don’t know the heart that I have beating in my chest. I can make my own choices. I’m not the man you think I am.”

Sylvie ultimately concedes, allowing Loki and Mobius to bring Timely back to the TVA with the Throughput Multiplier that he conveniently had ready to go. With only Ravonna left with her in the room, Sylvie gets her revenge on the former TVA agent who stole her away from Asgard as a child by kicking her through a Time Door and into the crumbling Citadel at the End of Time.

“1893” does a lot to push Season 2 forward, but that movement comes at the expense of what has made Loki the series that Marvel Studios wants to emulate in future TV shows. For all the praise I gave “Breaking Brad” and its focus on Loki’s growth as a character, he’s more of a bystander in this episode. The same goes for Sylvie, who’s quickly getting left behind in a season that has yet to give her space to move beyond her blinding hatred for the TVA.

(The one moment that really focuses on Loki beyond how he serves the plot finds him reflecting on his lost Asgardian family when he and Mobius see statues of Thor, Odin, and Balder the Brave at the World’s Fair. While Balder’s presence in the Easter egg seems like more of an opportunity for Loki to dunk on Thor’s lesser-known half-brother than anything else, it does confirm the character’s existence in the MCU. Perhaps we’ll be seeing more than a wooden depiction of him soon enough.)

Introducing: Victor Timely

With the introduction of Timely comes Majors’s first appearance in the MCU since the news of his arrest in March on charges of assault and harassment of his then-girlfriend, as well as a Rolling Stone investigation in June that described a history of abusive behavior. As Majors returns to the screen in Loki, the actor is set to appear in court next week for another hearing in his case.

As uncomfortable as it is to watch Majors amid these circumstances, his performance as Timely is, admittedly, one of the most captivating aspects of “1893.” There’s an eccentricity to Timely, who enunciates words seemingly at random, with an unexpected pace to his diction. Glimpses of his irregular speech pattern can be seen in He Who Remains, dating back to the first season, as shades of Timely still appear in him even after living at the End of Time for eons.

Timely and He Who Remains are different, yet the same. In addition to their shared genius, Timely conveys a similar sense of greed, and a desire for solitary power. As he tells a potential buyer after his presentation on the Temporal Loom, “I don’t do partners.” His resistance to sharing control, and his lack of trust in others, further emerge when Ravonna and Miss Minutes position themselves to be leaders of the TVA together. Timely shows a romantic interest in Ravonna, pointing to a relationship that existed between his variant Kang the Conqueror and Ravonna in the comics. But when he realizes that she has ulterior motives, Victor doesn’t hesitate to jettison her from the boat and his life.

Whether Timely is truly destined to become He Who Remains is another matter, and it may be a crucial one in the episodes to come. Sylvie spared Timely’s life based on the belief that everyone deserves freedom of choice; she was once robbed of a life in Asgard because she was born a Loki, and she decided not to prevent Timely from having the chance that she lost. Timely’s Temporal Aura and Throughput Multiplier will make him a godsend to O.B. as the latter attempts to salvage the Loom. But the kind of person Timely ends up being may have serious ramifications of its own.

Reintroducing: Ravonna Renslayer

The last time we saw Ravonna, in Season 1, she was walking through a Time Door “in search of free will.” In “1893,” she steps out the other side to meet with Miss Minutes and, upon He Who Remains’s orders, puts Timely on a path to eventually rob the multiverse of … free will. I guess that’s one way to find it.

But we quickly learn that Ravonna is really after more than the abstraction of free will: She wants power. As Sylvie discerns, what the former Judge Renslayer wants is a seat at the End of Time, giving her true control of the TVA. At first, Ravonna attempts to seize it by flirting with Timely, angling for a shared rulership with a variant of the man who brought order to the multiverse. It’s something of a reversal of Ravonna and Kang’s relationship in the comics, which the Conqueror initiated in characteristically aggressive fashion. (While Ravonna is not exactly forthcoming in her approach with Victor, Kang, by contrast, tried courting Princess Ravonna by invading her father’s kingdom in a 40th-century alternate reality Earth. I’d say Ravonna’s tactics are pretty wholesome in comparison.)

However, when the romance route fails, Ravonna attempts to seize control by force. And as she threatens Timely’s life in front of Loki and Mobius, Ravonna makes her case for why she should be the one to lead the TVA into a new era. “I’m the only one who can bring stability to the TVA because that’s what I’ve been doing, thanklessly, for eons,” she says. “When will you learn that none of your words mean a thing? All that matters is order versus chaos. I’m order.”

It’s less clear what Ravonna actually wants to do with all that power, unless bringing order to the multiverse is really enough for her. Much like Loki has neglected Sylvie in Season 2, it has yet to dedicate much time to Ravonna, but she’s now in line to be a primary antagonist again, even if she’s been banished to the Citadel at the End of Time. If Sylvie truly wanted to punish Ravonna, she probably should have checked to see if Ravonna still had a TemPad on her.

Rather than leaving her enemy to rot at the End of Time next to the last corpse she left behind, Sylvie has given Ravonna the chance to get a closer look at the destination she’s been working toward, while also letting her keep a device that will allow her to leave at any time. And Ravonna has already taken the opportunity to realign herself with the second-most-powerful figure in the TVA: Miss Minutes.

Reintroducing: Miss Minutes

Miss Minutes, who’s voiced by the legendary voice actress Tara Strong, was introduced in Season 1 as something of a mascot for the TVA. She was presented as the friendly face that would greet new variants as they awaited trial for timeline transgressions, and walk new employees, like Loki, through the inner workings of the TVA. But as the series progressed and the TVA’s deceptions were revealed, it became evident that there was much more to the anthropomorphic clock. She had a clearance level that exceeded just about everyone else’s at the TVA, and a direct line to the man behind the curtain, He Who Remains.

“1893” repositions Miss Minutes as a key figure and changes our understanding of what she’s capable of. Given that she had deserted the TVA and couldn’t be reached through the first two episodes, we already knew that she had some degree of autonomy. But what the rogue artificial intelligence actually wanted remained a mystery.

Near the end of “1893”, when Miss Minutes is ready to put all her cards on the table for Timely, she blushes and changes her body back to her original color after sporting a black-and-white aesthetic to fit in with the era. At any moment, it feels like she could ask Victor to draw her like one of his French girls. (“Is there a sketch of me in that journal of yours?” she playfully asks.) Miss Minutes tells him about how He Who Remains gave her the choice to write her own programs and forge her own desires, and how she was his one companion at the End of Time for eons. But he stopped short of giving her what she really wanted. “If I had a body, we could truly lead together,” Miss Minutes tells Victor.

“Yes, that’s … that’s something I don’t know how to do,” he replies.

“You never even tried,” Miss Minutes says. “With all your power, with all your abilities, you just kept me as your thing. Your computer. Your toy. Instead of what I could have been … your girl.”

The sudden emergence of Miss Minutes’s unrequited love for He Who Remains is simultaneously the strangest and funniest development Loki could have delivered. Though she is rejected by Timely, her motives—to gain power and a body to call her own—have never been clearer. And after being spurned by her potential lover, she’s been presented with a silver lining in a potential alliance with Ravonna.

As the episode comes to a close, the lovelorn Miss Minutes leaves Ravonna—and the audience—with a little teaser to dwell on as the clock quickly moves on from Timely: “Well, it was foolish of him to make an enemy out of someone who knows all of his secrets. I know a really big one about you. I can tell you, but … it’s going to make you real angry.”

Heading into the second half of the season, Loki and the TVA have managed to secure an unlikely potential solution to their Temporal Loom crisis after finding the man who invented the device. But as Miss Minutes and Ravonna gather themselves after being rejected by the same variant, their troubles are far from over.