Loki - S02E05 - Science/Fiction

[00:00:00] Welcome to the MCUniverse. We're the Lorehounds, your guides to the multiverse and beyond. I'm David. And I'm Alicia. And we're here to guide you through the only successful breakout in Alcatraz history and some multiverse hopping shenanigans. We're going to be recapping and breaking down

[00:00:40] the fifth episode of Loki Season 2, sharing Easter eggs and our current theories about what is exactly going on. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about Loki as we discuss the rest of

[00:00:52] the season. Email your feedback to mcu at the lorehounds.com or head over to our website at the lorehounds.com and use the contact form or record us a voicemail. We've got feedback and a voicemail this episode. This is great. Thanks everybody for writing in. Keep it coming.

[00:01:10] Yeah, come. We've got one more to go. So exciting. If you're interested in getting an ad-free version of this or any of our podcasts, or you just want to throw us some bucks and give us a hand,

[00:01:21] check us out over at patreon.com slash the lorehounds. I'll share more information about the Patreon and notes about our upcoming programming schedule at the end of the podcast. You can also help us out a ton by giving us a five-star rating wherever you happen to be

[00:01:38] listening now. Apple Podcasts is especially helpful. So yeah, we read all the reviews. They mean a lot to us, even if it's just a few quick words before we get started. Spoiler warning. We of course are going to be spoiling all of the Loki episodes,

[00:01:55] including the one we're going to be talking about today and pretty much anything MCU related. It's all on the table. And Marvel comics. And Marvel comics because it's all there and we can't talk about the episode without getting into all of that kind of stuff. So

[00:02:08] with that, you may have noticed that Jean's voice is absent from our intro this week. In fact, he has not been spaghettified. He is still with us in the primary world. He's just got some

[00:02:24] unexpected family stuff to attend to this morning. And so Alicia and I are flying solo today. Flying spaghetti monster. That's right. The flying spaghetti monster FSM. We're going to hear from Jean hopefully next week. He said in the discord that he was pretty happy about this episode.

[00:02:49] So yeah, I included his discord thoughts in the notes. Oh, perfect. Thanks. Thanks for doing that. Cool. All right. Well, you want to set us up really quick on the episode and then we can do our hot takes.

[00:03:00] Yeah. So it's called Science Slash Fiction. And if you've watched the episode, you understand why it was directed by Justin Benton and Aaron Moorhead. So the overall directors for most of the season and written by Eric Martin. The quote unquote showrunners.

[00:03:17] Yeah. Well, I mean, because often the showrunner is the head writer, which would be Eric Martin, but yeah, it's there. But these are the three guys we've been talking about throughout like all of our Loki coverage so far. And yeah, this is this and the next episode

[00:03:32] are their babies. Right. Well, do you want to recap what Jean had to say on the discord? And then we can talk about Aaron and I's hot takes. Yeah. So he's still enjoying the season.

[00:03:42] He said, I can't wait to see how they pull off the season finale in episode six, because up to this point, the show has been hitting on all cylinders and they will land the plane. He says the plane will be landing.

[00:03:54] Yeah. So far, I'm pretty confident that they're going to land the plane. It will just see how bumpy the landing is, but it's definitely not a secret invasion situation. Right now. Well, I mean, yeah, I think the problem is the landing might be too smooth

[00:04:12] for some people like they've been telling us all season. They've been telling us all season that this is a story about the creation of the TVA. And then I feel like some people are

[00:04:22] disappointed that this is turning to be out to be a story about the creation of the TVA, but that's what I signed up for personally. So I think it's I've come to the conclusion that this

[00:04:34] that may be true. I mean, obviously multiple things can be true for me. What one of the primary one of the big cornerstones of this season is taking Loki from this trickster God who is devoid of friendship and camaraderie and community

[00:04:55] and turning him into a heroic character and having him go through the process of changing. So it's a heel turn in the opposite direction. And I don't think a lot of people may have been

[00:05:11] necessarily expecting that as well. So there's a lot of character work that's going on, I think, in this episode. I was a little mixed on this episode personally when I watched it the first time. I will just say the acting, the camera work, post-production, editing, music sets,

[00:05:34] everything is incredible. This is one of the best looking television shows I've ever seen in my life. It is through and through visually gorgeous and expertly shot and put together. So

[00:05:46] loved all of that. I was slightly disappointed in the fate of the characters. I was hoping for a little bit more zazz in them falling back into their what their non-TVA variant lives were.

[00:06:07] You know, but that's a minor quibble. My one bigger quibble though is this point of the magic was in you all along, you know, in this sort of, you know, realization that I can control my fate,

[00:06:22] but that's fine. I am not opposed to that. I'm not, I just felt it was a little bit soft. It just, it just, you know, there was just this sort of, oh, I can control it. And suddenly it's happening.

[00:06:41] And I felt like it was, I just, I don't know. I just wanted some more crunch to it somehow. I just wanted some more mechanics to it somehow. I don't know. I just felt it was too much of a

[00:06:52] little bit of a internal realization, fuzzy navel gazing moment. But again, it's fine. And I think it's fine within the context that, you know what? And I heard Aaron on the Bald Move podcast talking

[00:07:06] about this. Cause I listened to their coverage just before we hopped on. And his point was, and he liked the episode. His point was that this is a comic book and this is a comic book story.

[00:07:17] And one of the things that we want from our comic book stories is for our heroes to be heroic and to prevail and to against all odds, you know, pull it through. And in the last minute. But Lokis lose.

[00:07:26] Lose. Yes, exactly. And I think that's what they're doing is they're turning that because and obviously we'll talk about it when we get there, but that's one of the last things that we hear in this spaghetti scene was Sylvie saying, you know, Lokis lose because we're Lokis.

[00:07:45] And he rejects that. And that gives him, that's when he has the moment. And when he becomes, when he finds the truth within him, which is that he can rewrite his own story.

[00:07:57] So I just wanted to throw in there that I think the opposite of a heel turn is a face turn. So just before the wrestling fans come at us. But yeah, I think for me, when it comes to all of

[00:08:13] the explanation of the mechanics and stuff, I'm not making any judgments on that until after next week, because I fully expect that a lot of things will be explained in the finale. Not everything. I think we're definitely going to end the season with questions. I think that's always

[00:08:27] the case with a lot of shows, but especially with Marvel shows. But yeah, I'm going to see what they give us next week. But I do have a theory that I'm going to bring up at the end

[00:08:38] of our breakdown that I'm curious if that affects, if my theory, which is probably not true, but if it were true, I'm curious how that would affect how you felt about that. So overall, were you positive on this?

[00:08:52] Yeah. I mean, overall, I was very positive. I think that, again, like the last one, it was kind of what I expected. So I didn't have that delight like I had with episode three. That's

[00:09:08] kind of what made me like that one best because it surprised me the most, I guess, even though I didn't know that they were going to obviously go find Victor timely at some point. But I think that

[00:09:17] it pulled this together. Well, there was a lot of emotional moments could have had a bit more from who these people were in their past lives. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm also again, I'm not going to

[00:09:31] judge that until after next week, because we don't know where they're going to show us then. I think it's an interesting question of how many episodes could we have seen this season? Six feels a little tight. 12 would be good.

[00:09:51] Eight would be good. I think, yeah, 12, 10 or 12 might be stretching it a little more. But then the question is there is what's the tolerance for watching Loki do this time trippy stuff? Could we sit through 12 episodes? Yeah. I think eight, I think you're right. I think eight

[00:10:08] might be an awful number. I mean, yeah, I guess. I'm thinking about seasons of Doctor Who, but those do tend to be in small clusters. And that's a different show. It's built differently, right?

[00:10:20] Well, I mean, this season of Loki is very Doctor Who, which is a good thing to me. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. This is like a more polished Doctor Who. Yeah. A much bigger bunch at Doctor Who. Yeah. At least from the old- Tom Baker days.

[00:10:35] Disney has the Doctor Who rights now. We'll see about that budget. Wait, what? Yeah. You'll start finding Doctor Who on Disney Plus because they are, I mean, not that they have bought it, but they have bought like the- They optioned rights for it.

[00:10:51] Yeah. So they're going to be distributing it internationally and they're putting money into it. Yeah. Interesting. Do you think that they're going to do some fresh productions from there? That's another big IP for them to own.

[00:11:00] I mean, we should already start to see the difference in the 60th anniversary specials. Okay. That's really interesting. And then Hulu, I guess, is about to get fully owned. So Disney's buying out that minority stake. I forget who has it. And so- Comcast.

[00:11:18] Yeah. So it's going to be interesting. Is Disney going to be able to step through into a new realm here? Well, but here in where I live in Europe, all of the Hulu contents on Disney anyway. So it's like,

[00:11:33] come on, catch up. But also the one annoying thing is that for some reason they delay all FX shows by a couple of months before they release them on Disney Plus. So I'm hoping that will stop as

[00:11:44] soon as Disney has whole ownership of Hulu. Just please give us the bear at the same time as everybody else. It must be torture to have to wait. Oh man. Yeah. International distribution rights are funky. So who knows? Well, should we talk

[00:12:00] quickly about the Variety article and some of the MCU news that has come out? And I know we're going to talk a little bit more when we do our Marvels preview, which we're recording probably the day

[00:12:12] after this comes out. So we're going to do a prep podcast for the Marvels so that we're caught up, everybody, especially the casual fans, the fans who just drop in and out. We're going to set up

[00:12:28] the primary characters and sort of what we know going into this from all of the other storylines and then talk about what we expect. But I know that you've been doing the Marvel book that Joanna

[00:12:40] Robinson coauthored and you had a bunch of notes on that, but then obviously we have this big Variety article. So I thought we were going to bundle a bunch of that into that conversation

[00:12:49] as well, but you wanted to touch on some stuff here because there was a big article in Variety. Right. Yeah. I think maybe we can put a few minds at rest because... Okay.

[00:13:00] Yeah. So I have finished the Joanna Robinson book and obviously we all read the Variety article and I've read a bunch of... I've seen all of the piggyback articles with the clickbait headlines. The AI generated follow-up articles. Yeah.

[00:13:17] And I have to say the Variety article itself, it is a good read. We were all like, ooh, juicy. It's well-written, but it is definitely slanted in a certain way that is kind of piggybacking on this whole idea going around of Marvel fatigue. Right.

[00:13:34] And when you dissect the Variety article, most of it is not new information. Pretty much none of it's new information. So we'll talk about the Marvel stuff when we talk about, do the Marvel's preview app. We've already talked about things that have happened

[00:13:51] since the Variety article, like changes on the TV side with them implementing showrunners and things like that. And that Feige's overall slowing down the Marvel machine for better quality control. I think Iger was a little bit behind that too. I think he saw...

[00:14:06] Yeah. No, I don't mean to give all the credit to Feige. No, yeah. But hopefully Feige had a voice in that because he sounded like he was getting buried with work. So... Definitely. Yeah. And there was a lot of discussion about the Blade stuff, but the

[00:14:22] Blade worries, this is all past stuff. The production was already rebooted months ago. Ali has not left the production. And I have to say that quote that was included in there about

[00:14:33] about that, apparently a draft of the script that had a bunch of women and life lessons and fourth lead. And I keep hearing that quote getting repeated and repeated on other podcasts and other media and people are picking up on that. I'm like,

[00:14:44] I don't know. Doesn't that sound off? Yeah. Yeah. It sounded off. So backing up my feeling that that sounds like it comes from a particular type of Marvel exec, a screenwriter named Michael Starbury, who he worked on previous early editions of the

[00:15:00] Blade draft. And he said, I worked on a draft before the strike, never saw a version where Blade was a fourth lead or it was quote, a narrative led by women and filled with life

[00:15:11] lessons. But I suppose a lot could have happened since. A lot of could have happened since I had anything to do with it. He was in 99% of the scripts I was part of. So that sounds more like

[00:15:22] what I would expect. Take it for what it's worth. He did delete his Twitter account after this. What? He got a lot of backlash. Well, apparently he moved to thread. So he might've just deleted it in general because of the Twitter exodus. Yeah. Right.

[00:15:38] And I think that they also reported that Blade will be getting a smaller budget, but we're still talking nearly a hundred million. And I think that actually that could be a good thing because one of

[00:15:48] the insights I had from the book was that the smaller, less scrutinized projects or the projects that were assumed wouldn't do well, like Guardians of the Galaxy or Werewolf by Night got to do its

[00:15:58] own thing. These are often the strongest creative projects and the ones doing the most interesting things. So I think it's a good thing for Blade. And I'm very heartened that the writer they've

[00:16:09] brought on is Michael Green, the writer of Logan who, I mean, I think we can all agree that's the best Wolverine movie. Right? Right. You know, I always go back to this one sort of observation that I had where the original Matrix

[00:16:25] movie was done on a budget. They had tight constraints around them and it was one of the most creative groundbreaking cinema altering movies that we have had in this more modern era,

[00:16:42] coming out of the 80s action thriller stuff. And then when they went on to make the second two movies, they were just bloated and over the top in a lot of ways. And they started out at 11,

[00:16:57] rather than starting out at five or six and then slowly turning the knob up. And when the studio just shovels cash at you, what's your tendency? Let's spend the cash. Why not? And I think that one of the things that we know from artists, from any discipline,

[00:17:18] that part of your creativity comes from the constraints that you have around you. Not that we should all be starving artists or anything like that, but that having constraint helps focus and helps create innovation and helps push you into new directions. Everything that has been

[00:17:37] a groundbreaking production, visually, television movie wise, seems to have had that narrowing. At some point there was some sort of choke point that you had to get through to birth the creation. Right. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:17:53] So I was listening to The Midnight Boys as well and I think Van made this point. He's like, why do you need $250 million to have a guy with a sword killing vampires? It's like, come on. Student films have been doing it for decades. Yeah.

[00:18:10] Absolutely. I watched a director by night as well. That was amazing to see this. Yes. Because they showed footage from their childhood. Oh, it was incredible. Yeah. Yeah. So they unearthed all this stuff and I felt so connected

[00:18:24] to it. We didn't go into a huge film, but we did some drama and there was a couple of times where folks were playing around with video cameras and things like that, but it was really a charming

[00:18:33] movie. So check that out if you haven't. Yeah. So I have higher than ever hopes for Blade, to be honest. I would rather it be... I mean, this isn't even like indie drama budget,

[00:18:45] but I'd rather it be more of an indie project than a creative, auteur-led project than one of the... another milquetoast, big budget... Where they're trying to appeal to everybody. ...the same way. Yeah.

[00:19:01] And I think that was one of the successes of Andor. I've been rewatching Andor recently off golf. And they weren't trying to appeal to everybody. They were trying to tell the story that they had

[00:19:11] in mind and then go from there. And if you try to appeal to everybody, you just lower the common denominator and you make a bland creation. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, in terms of the...

[00:19:25] on the big budget side. So the idea that they're going to bring back big names like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and all that stuff. No, I mean, we've known this. We've been assuming this

[00:19:37] is going to happen in Secret Wars. So this is not news and it's definitely not a sign of a lack of confidence. It's just a reward they're giving to fans for the big movies that cap off the

[00:19:47] end of this saga. So the only real major worry is well, majors, is Jonathan Majors. So yeah, they said in the article that for instance, that CAA parted ways with him pre-arrest for his brutal conduct towards staff, which matches things that were being said around

[00:20:06] about the way he treats people professionally and also obviously in romantic relationships. Now, yeah, the trial starts right after the season of Loki ends. And the incident did occur while this season was filming. So there may be some interesting wrinkles, but yeah, we don't know

[00:20:25] what they're going to do. Are they going to ignore it? Are they going to recast or are they going to shift to doom? That's an old rumor as well. I think that they're going to either ignore it

[00:20:35] or recast personally. We were talking offline about this and it feels like this article is a lagging indicator, right? A lot of stuff has already been implemented or we've heard some other

[00:20:51] things. And so it feels a little bit maybe like this is getting the dirty laundry out, dump it. Well, they didn't dump it on a Friday, but let it just clear it out and just deal with these issues

[00:21:06] sort of head on. Give somebody some priority access, give them some juicy tidbits and a couple of quotes and finish cleaning the deck, sweeping the deck so that they can refocus. And it already

[00:21:17] feels like with this season of Loki, that this is a refocused show. This feels like it's a singular vision of Benson and Moorhead. And who's the writer again? Eric Martin. Yeah, it feels singular in that sense that there's a tight creative vision. So yeah,

[00:21:35] maybe this article was just them just trying to get the rest of the laundry out of the basement before they start fresh again. Right. And it is interesting though that in this backlash from this article, they suddenly surprise dropped a new trailer. Dude.

[00:21:52] Oh, I mean, great timing for this trailer. Yeah, they don't. This is, this is, it feels like there's a hand working behind the scenes here, you know, that's, uh, that's working this, but yes. Let's talk about Echo.

[00:22:07] Yeah. So, um, it's coming out January 10th. We have a date now, five episodes, binge drop crossover with Hulu, which is probably because this is now officially the first TVMA MCU project. So this feels definitely like it's been engineered that they made a bunch of decisions

[00:22:28] months ago and these are now just showing up in the, in the public world. Yeah. I mean, and I, if you listen to the industry stuff, they've been, it's been speculated for a while. Like when is Disney just going to full out by Hulu?

[00:22:44] Right. Just get over it. Right. Yeah. Just to make things easier. It takes a while though to work out the details and the legal stuff, but that's what all those lawyers are paid for it. So what did you think of the trailer?

[00:22:54] Okay. I'm going to back off the mic here and I'm going to swear. So, fuck yeah! That trailer blew me out of the water. I was jumping around after I saw you posted it. I was freaking out. Well, they've made it low stakes. So I guess it's,

[00:23:09] hopefully that means that they then have had more room to play. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, I've been excited about Echo since, you know, that was one of the first things when you and I started talking about MCU stuff.

[00:23:20] One of the first things I said I was excited about was this Echo show, which is finally coming out. She just like, she's such a cool badass character already. So yeah, when they found this character, Alaqua Cox,

[00:23:32] she happened to be an amputee and so they just rolled with it. Like, she's the perfect actress. So we're just going to add this feature to her character as well. And it's such a, it's such a cool extra touch just that, you know,

[00:23:46] seeing her fight and the way she uses her prosthetic when she fights. And yeah, I love that this seems like it's going to focus a lot on her complicated relationship with Kingpin. And we saw Kingpin go like full Kingpin the way that we know from the Daredevil show.

[00:24:02] Incredible. Yeah. And seeing where his hands sort of shaking after the assault, it was just such a, an incredible shot, incredible touch. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, the complexity of that relationship is going to kill me, but in a good way. Yes, exactly. Who's the monster, right?

[00:24:19] Yeah. Yeah. And we got the Daredevil sighting. So, you know, we're going fully back into that universe. And yeah, I love that they're bringing back her dad played by Zayn McLaren, who, you know, the Native American actor from Westworld and Dark Winds,

[00:24:33] and they're fleshing out the native cast in general. So there's a bunch new actors being added in most added, most of them Native American, including recognizable faces like Graham, Graham Green from Dances with Wolves. And also I have to say, I looked on the back end,

[00:24:48] head writer looks pretty, you know, Northern European, but, but the writers room, yeah, but the writers room in general, there are a lot of different Native American writers in it and on the crew and things like that. The one thing in this is just like a through line

[00:25:05] with me is that I do get annoyed or discouraged that Native American culture is often treated as a monolith. So I didn't see any Cheyenne. It's diverse as anything, right? Right. We're talking about an entire continent of vastly different languages and cultures. And

[00:25:25] so I didn't see any in the comics, the character is Cheyenne and I didn't see any Cheyenne people on the staff, but I hope that they are paying attention to being specifically Cheyenne and

[00:25:37] yeah, Lopez, the actress is not, she's not a Cheyenne herself, but still, I hope that they make an effort to distinguish that tribe. That would be good. That would be a smart thing to do. So now it looks cool as hell. I'm very excited.

[00:25:57] All right. 30 minutes into the pod, I guess maybe we should get into our episode breakdown, but let's take a break really quick. And then when we get back, we'll get into it. And we're back. Okay. Alicia, thanks again for doing the episode breakdown.

[00:26:30] Do you want to start to walk us through? Okay. So starting at the beginning as the blinding white lights from last week clears Loki, Tom Hiddleston finds himself alone in the TVA, the loudspeaker still blaring TVA code 1299 fail safe mode initiated. He's become untethered from

[00:26:49] time again, stumbling across himself in the Crono Bay while the monitor there shows a graphic of Miss Minutes, mockingly thanking the empty TVA for their service. Total spaghettification begins and Loki time slips away with the TVA manual in his pocket. Loki starts getting time pulled across

[00:27:05] the branch timelines to the points where his friends are. And once to the time theater where Mobius once told him about how sacred timeline Loki's life had ended. First though, he finds Casey, sorry, Frank still played by Eugene Cordero breaking out of Alcatraz in 1962. B-15 Wunmi

[00:27:23] Misaku is apparently a pediatrician in New York city in 2012 where she is known as Dr. Willis. And Mobius Owen Wilson is of course selling jet skis, but in 2020 Cleveland and he's a single dad with two boys. None of Loki's friends recognize him before he time slips away again.

[00:27:40] So a couple of little fun things in the opening there with that, that Marvel studios music, it really connected me to sort of a horror style film. And I guess you had mentioned that Benson

[00:27:56] and Moorhead have done a lot of thriller horror titles. So it really felt like sort of a creeping dread thing. Well, yeah, we have to thank Natalie Holt, the composer for that. And I know last week she posted

[00:28:09] on Twitter that there was a similar chant and she said that it was from the Norse Edda, which is like a North saga poem, Lokasena. So, and that was actually the one last week was created by Sigur

[00:28:21] Rós. I didn't look to see who composed this one. If it was Sigur Rós again, it was a famous Icelandic band that does this kind of droning Norse music if anyone is familiar. Anyway.

[00:28:32] I, they're very famous. They're very famous. A lot of people know that. But yeah, so I don't know if that was the case again this week, but I think we can assume similar.

[00:28:40] Very cool. And then the nice little touch of the disappearing letters and the Loki TikTok going down. And then they left what the last one was. Oh, so I don't know, Ouroboros maybe. I don't know.

[00:28:53] That may be something shadows, but you know, I was curious as to why the, the, oh, was the last one. And then it comes all back full, right? So very much mirrors the, what goes on in this

[00:29:04] episode. I had a theory question in tinfoil hat time, who are the TVA? Like who are the people that make up the TBA? And I thought going after the last episode where we had, you know, Renslayer

[00:29:22] learning that she was the commander of, of the armies. God, it probably just be easy to take the time army, wipe their memories and then have them, you know, cause you have a paramilitary

[00:29:36] force already, you know, a military force and you just kind of create a more, you know, civilian, you know, a paramilitary style organization agency from those people. I don't know. That just would

[00:29:48] seem to me like from a human resource, resources standpoint would be the most efficient thing to do. No, I think that sounds very plausible. I'm assuming. Not that it's going to mean anything for the plot. It just sort of was a head canon thing. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:02] So does the 1229 code mean anything or is that just some number that they just pulled up out of thin air? I mean, I brought that up when I, we heard it in the first episode and I've been wondering ever since, but. Or a different code.

[00:30:16] I mean, we can double check, but yeah. But I think it's the same. Yeah. I thought it was interesting too, how they had Loki see himself in this little scene. And so I thought from a plot, a plot device, my camp plot mechanics,

[00:30:33] it was a good device to teach us about what's going to happen and the fact that this is going to be a time slippy episode and that we're going to see. And then later on we see, specifically

[00:30:46] with Mobius, we see them seeing each other. And then of course, Loki time slipping later. So it just felt very, it was a good little piece of structure to prep us for what's about to come. Right.

[00:31:00] And then he also, this is also where he slips the TVA manual into his coat pocket. So a little bit more bootstrapping, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, especially when he gives it to, um, OB slash Doug later. Exactly. Doug. Yes.

[00:31:16] Because then he's gotten it, but he's, but then it adds, he's gotten the thing that he's going to write. So that's just straight bootstrap paradox, but then the whole Ouroboros element where there was also Victor Timely involved seems to be somewhat wiped.

[00:31:31] But I guess, again, I'm back to the Mobius twisting around dark style time loop solution. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And just this spaghettification and there's so much of it in this episode, it looked amazing. They, some of the ways that they work the camera, especially in the record

[00:31:50] store, I've got a couple of things I want to talk about when we get to that, but it looked really good. It looked a million bucks throughout the whole thing. I don't know what sort of,

[00:31:59] you know, plugin they have rendering software. Okay. Click spaghettification on how many threads? Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's not poo poo. How much work goes into it? But it's not, yeah, I'm sure that they had, um, they had, you know, their artists work with the

[00:32:16] technical side and I've seen this in animation studios, how they were probably slaved over that effect for many months and getting the physics exactly right. And then they're like,

[00:32:28] all right, this was a lot of work. We spent a lot of money on this. Uh, control a apply all. Exactly. I think, uh, when we talked to bear McCreary too, we talked a little bit about his,

[00:32:40] um, process for doing the music for foundation and how they created a software model to do it. And it took a lot of work to be able to get to that point of automation and a bunch of sliders

[00:32:54] that are going to produce good effect. So, you know, yeah, I could imagine them, you know, spending a lot of time on this, but you know, we're already at a pretty advanced state in, in animated stuff like this. It just does take time.

[00:33:07] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the fact that we are capable of doing this, that's, you know, shows our advancement, but it still takes, um, it's, I think a lot of people tend to think that

[00:33:17] animation, uh, can be done more by computers when it's actually, even when you have these presets, you know, these, these physics, uh, tools that you've created yourself and you can apply them. It still takes so much human tweaking to make it not look weird and wrong.

[00:33:33] Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the really, the important thing is getting out of that uncanny valley, right. And making it sort of look natural, even though spaghettification is not at all natural. So when he starts jumping back around, were you surprised by any of the previous life reveals?

[00:33:49] Did you have a favorite amongst those? The backstory? It all seemed reasonable. I, I think I said at the top of the show that I was a little underwhelmed or maybe just whelmed at the, at where they were in their different lives.

[00:34:05] I did like the fact that Cordero had the most range that he could play. So that was nice for him. But then when you have an actor like Saku and you just make her this nice

[00:34:19] doctor where it's all lollipops and, you know, unicorn rainbows, I was, I was really underwhelmed at, at her storyline. And that was disappointing because again, it's just making, it's just giving her too simple of stuff to do, you know? And, and so, uh, and, and just making

[00:34:38] her a doctor, you know, and then writing the cast, it was all very cutesy and simple, you know, at least Mobius had some, you know, like it made me feel uncomfortable for him as a parent trying

[00:34:52] to do, you know, being a single parent with two wild childs, you like that, you know, it's not easy. And then trying to be a jet ski salesman. Yeah. So I felt like that had the most depth to it,

[00:35:05] but none of the storylines really excited me, uh, let's say. And then of course, Sylvie was just Sylvie. Yeah. Um, so about the B15 backstory, uh, so that is actually, she's a real character

[00:35:21] from the comics that she's playing Verity Willis. Yeah. And so in the comics, uh, in more recent comics, like we're talking like 2014 past comics, um, she's a close friend of Loki's and she like

[00:35:35] swallowed this truth ring at, uh, when she was a baby that's dissolved in her stomach or something. So now she can see the truth. She can see through any lie. So this makes her, you know,

[00:35:46] this endeared her to Loki because she calls him out on his bullshit. Maybe that's why she could see when she sees that when she writes a little note on the, on the girl's cast, like you're not

[00:35:54] going to do that. Yeah. That's true. Oh, you're right. That's probably the case. But in, uh, um, in the comics, she has like purplish hair and like tattooed arms and she definitely has a lot

[00:36:06] of personality, which is why it's like, well, why, why in this flashback do we not get more personality? Seriously, seriously, you know, just the gosh and golly doctor, right. You know,

[00:36:17] come on. Yeah. You know, when she was in, you know, uh, uh, what was the one, um, I'm blanking the name now, the horror one with majors. Um, it's, it's Lovecraft's country. Love that's it.

[00:36:32] Lovecraft's country. I, her, the range that she played and the thing that she went through and, you know, I don't, I'm not going to spoil it, go see it was incredible. It was absolutely mind-blowingly incredible. And in this season, it's just so mono-dimensional. It's, it's really

[00:36:49] disappointing. This is my one big criticism of this season. No, they, they need to give her more. Um, it is interesting though. I wonder if they cut stuff out because the fact they put her in 2012

[00:37:00] in New York, which is when the battle of New York happened, which was the invasion caused by Loki himself. So it seems weird to put her in that setting and not, I again, we'll see if there's

[00:37:12] something in the finale, but she wasn't like, Oh you, you were leading an alien army or something. Right. I would assume that they would be careful with those dates that they're choosing,

[00:37:21] you know, that's the kind of stuff that you don't, that would be a bad miss on Marvel's part. So. Yeah, I don't think that's an accident. So I'm wondering if there's, that's going to come up

[00:37:31] later or that was cut out or a reference to that. Um, but where they were careful about the dates is with the backstory of well, Casey, AKA Frank. So, so for anyone who hasn't done the Alcatraz

[00:37:46] tour in San Francisco, which I highly recommend if you make it there, um, the 1962 breakout is a real event. So it happened the night of June 11th and Clarence and John Anglin and Frank Morris,

[00:37:59] they placed paper mache heads in their beds and snuck out through the ventilation shafts and took off on an inflatable self-made raft and no one knows what happened to them after that. So this is a story that they never, they never found them after. So.

[00:38:14] Yeah. And, uh, this, these events were also recounted in the movie escape from Alcatraz, where the Frank Morris character is played by Clint Eastwood. Famous movie. Yeah. But it makes sense that he would be Frank Morris because, you know, he, he got into a lot

[00:38:29] of trouble robbing and stealing and possessing narcotics and escaping from jail. And that's how he ended up in Alcatraz, but he did have a mental qualifying IQ. He was a very intelligent man.

[00:38:39] Right. Anyway, it was nice that, that Eugene Cordero had a little bit of range to play here. You know, he got to play something, you know, very different, push, pushes boundaries a little bit.

[00:38:47] So it was weird to see Casey with a little bit of harder edge, you know? No, I liked that. And it was funny. He does shout. I don't know if you caught it when he's coming

[00:38:57] out. He says, though, the, if we, they catch us, they're going to get us like a fish, which, you know, was what Loki threatened him last season. Oh, I forgot about good call. I forgot about that one. That's right. Yeah. Good.

[00:39:11] And yeah. And I also wanted to point out a fun Easter egg, the Anglin brothers, the two guys who escaped with him, they were played by the directors, Benson and Moorhead. No way. That's fun. It's a, it's fun. I like those little Easter eggs like that. When,

[00:39:24] when production folks get to jump in front of the screen for a hot second, that's, that's very cool. Yeah. So Mobius though, I thought he would be from the nineties. Did you?

[00:39:34] Uh, I had no idea what I was actually surprised that he was done in his fifties at the jet ski shop because we, that there goes the Jack theories, right? That Jack. But he's the right age to be Jack, but wrong name, wrong location.

[00:39:51] Right. Well, I mean, that's a lot of life to live. So, but it would be strange that he changed his name though. That's the only, that's the only difference. And moved from Oklahoma to, um, to where was he Schenectady? Sorry. Yeah. I missed the location actually. So.

[00:40:06] Wait, I wrote it down here in Cleveland. Sorry. Cleveland. Yeah. And, uh, that his wife is long gone. Was that because his. I think because this takes place during the snap during the blip. Oh, that's an interesting theory. Interesting.

[00:40:25] I mean, it does take place during the blip. So it seemed, it feels like that must be. That must be. Yeah. Well, and that's what we want, right. Is we want this, uh, you know,

[00:40:32] IP consistency. We wanted to cross the board there. So, but yeah, I really, I really felt for, for Dawn here. It's tough being a parent, tough being a single parent and tough being a, uh,

[00:40:44] a parent when your kids are, you know, pushing the boundaries like that, you know, without, how do you, how do you create a structured environment for kids to thrive when you're five or six days a week, you know, trying to sell, uh, personal watercraft to, uh,

[00:41:01] to less than enthusiastic shoppers. Yeah. This first time we see him, he looks like maybe he's a bad dad with, you know, his, um, not taking his son's calls. But then when we see him again

[00:41:14] next time, then you see him, he's really trying to parent in, but his boys are running wild. One of them is burning things. There's a sheet hanging out the window. Like somebody snuck out.

[00:41:26] One of the things that when I became a parent that I sort of set up a rule for myself was that I, you know, outside of actual, uh, malfeasance, you know, actual criminal behavior

[00:41:39] or something like that. If it's not that, then I'm not going to judge other parents because you never know what that parent has dealt with in that morning. I remember plenty of times when I

[00:41:50] was, you know, pre-parenthood and looking at parents just going, I'll never be that way. And then being on the other side of that and going, oh, okay. Yeah. It's not fair for me to judge,

[00:42:01] you know, when I'm just trying to cope on a day-to-day basis. So especially when you've got two, it's, it's almost two, two against one, not two against one, but you know, two kids, one parent, that's not at all an easy thing to deal with.

[00:42:16] And they were, yeah, they were like around 12, you know, which is a troublemaking age. I was, I was a troublemaker at 12 too. But I love when Loki arrived at the jet ski dealership

[00:42:31] or is actually, I think Eric Voss on, um, New Rockstars pointed out it's actually a Sea-Doo dealership. Jet ski is the brand name. I'm going to continue to say jet ski, but I'm acknowledging that. But when he shows up at the dealership, Loki, his arrival is mirroring that

[00:42:50] wacky waving, inflatable arm flailing tube man. And it's so good. Um, there were videos that leaked a while ago of them filming and you could see him doing this. Uh, and it was just funny

[00:43:01] then, but now to see the result, they pulled it off. It worked well. I thought it was a little too on the nose when he was sort of in front of it doing the actual arm waving thing. I thought

[00:43:11] the first flash of it that we had was enough. I was like, oh, that's funny. I didn't need the full on, but you know, I get it. That's just a sensibility question, but it was cute. I totally

[00:43:22] agree. So Cleveland, it is on Lake Erie. So there's a great lake there for jet skiing. But why do I get the feeling that Don doesn't really use his much? Maybe not since his, probably

[00:43:33] definitely not since his wife lets us. Yeah. I felt like those were sitting in the garage for quite a while, which is why he's trying to sell one. Right. You can make a sale, use that,

[00:43:42] use that money. I'm still crossing my fingers that we're going to get a post-credit scene at the end of the season of low-key as riding their jets together. That would be nice. That would be fun. Oh, and by the way, in the shop, um, there's a guy who's

[00:43:59] eating the donut and wants to dirt bike. That's Isaac Bauman, who's the cinematographer for everybody sneaking in front of the camera. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. But yeah, I hope we're getting this, the single dad backstory next week.

[00:44:15] Okay. Although I do notice he brings up yet again, having a drink. So I feel like they're trying to tell us that Don was stressed and yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. He enjoys, uh, yeah, I think some people find some solace in, in food and,

[00:44:31] and drink and not necessarily alcoholic beverage, but yeah, you know, he kicked some of those endorphins, uh, get some of those endorphins circulating around your brain. A little yummy snack, a little pie or something. Yeah. There's a lot of, a lot of Mobius seeking comfort,

[00:44:47] like the pies and yeah. Which, you know, sheds a lot of light on his comment about what if it was, what did he say? What is it good? What, what if it was good? What if my life was good?

[00:44:57] And it doesn't feel like maybe pre-snap let's assume that the snap is, is the circumstance that they're dealing with, which would also explain some of the difficulties that, you know, the family is going through because suddenly like one of the parents is just gone. That's a huge

[00:45:15] factor, um, that yeah, you know, maybe they're, they're having a rough time. Okay. Well, uh, so going on with the recap, we have, we get to meet the OG OB while Loki's cute. While Loki is time slipping, uh, he, there's a physicist from Caltech named A.D. Doug,

[00:45:37] who would rather be a science fiction writer. And he's caught trying to sneak his books onto bookshelves in 1994, Pasadena, California. And it is OB K. Who he Kwan he sent away told no one by

[00:45:50] science fiction there. Uh, and I have to wonder if that's like a personal dig from someone's experiences, but anyway, so 80 Doug, he takes Loki back to his workshop in an abandoned building when they meet, which, uh, this workshop looks suspiciously like his workshop at the TVA

[00:46:05] and Loki tells him everything. And he's delighted to hear it because it sounds like his books come to life. Doug tells Loki, he needs to figure out his why to control his time slipping,

[00:46:16] but Loki is still lying to himself. Now, OGOB says that they need to get the band back together to form the group temporal aura that they had the moment before the TVA meltdown, but Loki can't

[00:46:27] control his time slipping. So they're going to need a temp pad to get around. Loki gives OB the TVA manual adding a new wrinkle to that bootstrap or Boris paradox we talked about before he time

[00:46:39] slips away again. So yeah, just first of all, weekly appreciation of how perfect all of K deliveries are. He's been so smooth in this thing. He's yeah, he's playing it really nicely. So, and yeah, we've get the, uh, the Zartan contingent. Yeah. So it seems like the closing

[00:47:02] credit sequences is yeah. Everything is something from somewhere in the show turning up. Yeah. It's all, it's all turning up. We haven't seen, uh, I haven't seen the black hole book, uh, specifically maybe. Yeah, I don't know, but. But it references the overall discussion about

[00:47:19] black holes and spaghettification. Right. So there's, there's gotta be, what did we talk about? I got to remember now about Zartan. Um, we talked more about the Zartan with a Z from the GI Joe

[00:47:31] universe, which was produced by Marvel, but these are probably referencing Zartans with an X, which are from, you know, these Marvel comics and these were beings that were shape-shifting beings created by celestials. Unlike the scroll, they could also copy superpowers.

[00:47:49] Okay. Um, so it could be that, but then also he talks about another book, the sons of urine, and I scoured high and low and I couldn't, I mean, urine's like a character in a few different

[00:48:02] sci-fi and fantasy things, like obviously game of thrones, but, um, yeah, I couldn't find anything that seemed relevant for this. Okay. So I think it's just vaguely sci-fi sounding stuff. Fair enough. Yeah. And it could be just some, yeah, somebody, you know, you're looking for a

[00:48:18] reasonable sounding name. You pull one out of your, yeah. Right. Sci-fi grab bag. Exactly. Cool. Um, this bookstore really made me think of, did you ever see Portlandia? Uh, no, no, not really. Okay. There's a bookstore, there's an ongoing skit about a bookstore,

[00:48:37] like a sort of a more lefty bookstore where, you know, science fiction wouldn't necessarily be sold. So it really, it made me think of that in an offhanded way. So. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of bookstores I've been to.

[00:48:52] Sure. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Especially yeah. In certain places and whatnot. The workshop right straight out of the TVA, you know, inspired. Yeah. I mean the shelves, that whole circular structure of it and even like the pneumatic tube

[00:49:09] in the middle. Yeah. Um, the front door when we spin the camera around later and we see the front door it's yeah. Right out of it. So the question is, does this become the center of the TVA in

[00:49:19] the future or does he somehow base his, uh, workshop on the TVA? It feels like. Or the TVA on his workshop. Yeah. It feels like he would, that's a really good question. It's a

[00:49:33] Mobius loop, right? Um, but it feels definitely like the TVA could be here or, or yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. It's yeah. Certainly OB in his place. Right. So he points out later

[00:49:50] that there's nothing else for miles. So that's interesting. Right. Right. That seems like you pointed out cause it's relevant and they do an outside shot to, to show that it's isolated. The question is though, is where is the TVA? It's nowhere. It's outside of time. So,

[00:50:08] right. And it's not, no, it's not nowhere as in the guardians of the galaxy. It's like literally nowhere in the material plane. Right. Well, some people wonder if it's in the quantum realm, but we still haven't had confirmation about that. Right. Right. It's outside of time and

[00:50:23] the normal rules of time don't apply there. So it's hard to, hard to say. Yeah. There were so many fan blades in there. The other thing that it gave me vibes of was silo with the giant turbine.

[00:50:36] I was like, when they're crawling through the shafts or yeah, I was just thinking, well, you know, and then they have to fix the big turbine. Right. Right. Spoilers. I'm not spoiling too much

[00:50:46] if you haven't seen it. Uh, but it just gave me those vibes. I guess it's a mechanical thing, right? You know, big industrial stuff and maybe they just had a lot of those floating around. So

[00:50:56] yeah. Yeah. And, and lots of, uh, I won't point out all the Easter eggs from the credits, but that post-it board was one of them that people were wondering about. So now we know what that's

[00:51:05] about and where that's from. Right. Yeah. And author's board is that an author's a writer's board there keeping track of all your plot points. Yeah. So yeah. And, uh, I'm just going to call him

[00:51:16] OB, even though he's 80 Doug, I guess. Yeah. Um, but OB says a lot of things during this scene that just make me get suspicious and put on my little thinking brain investigative cap. Uh, one thing he says is yeah, going back before time loom meltdown, uh,

[00:51:36] he says you can't it's impossible, but don't let that stop you. I love that. Um, but it also makes me think like, and he brings up that Loki, he's already done the impossible.

[00:51:45] He's time traveled in a place that has no time. So this is something I need them to resolve in the finale is what, cause they've been playing with what is the nature of time in the TBA tying

[00:51:55] into what we were just talking about, because we do know there do seem to be different time points because Loki can time slip between them. There are points where there's Kang statuary or murals

[00:52:04] and points where that's taken away or covered up. Um, there are points where people have been made to forget. It seems like multiple times. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I guess my other big question

[00:52:19] too is if the loop, you know, we're, we've talked about the purpose of the TVA it's this it's so that he who remains can maintain control over the universe and keep other Kang variants from

[00:52:34] taking over, but we still don't understand how the loom plays a role in that specifically. And they are, they're always talking about saving the TBA and making sure that the loom works, but

[00:52:45] in the, in the episode three, the loom was to harness the energy. And it was kind of a dynamo of some kind of way to generate energy. So I don't necessarily understand the mechanics of

[00:52:59] what's happening. If, if he who remains made the loom and the loom isn't something that exists naturally within the, you know, the physical, you know, in the space of time and space, right. That it's not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Why then is the universe starting to break down?

[00:53:17] Why are we getting spaghettification? What happened in the, what did the loom do to the time streams? I thought the time I would have just assumed from everything that they've told me so

[00:53:28] far that the time streams would just be a giant ball of, of time string out there and, you know, maybe some parallel, some ones next to each other would have some incursions, but what,

[00:53:42] what happened that is causing all timelines now to devolve, to dissolve, to, to, to break apart. Right, exactly. Yeah. So, and I guess that's the science and the fiction of this story. Right. Well, yeah. So, it'll be another thing that he says doesn't sound like science or sorry,

[00:53:59] Loki says to him, doesn't sound like science. And he responds, no, but sounds like fiction. And he says, science is the what and how and fiction is the why, which we get answered later

[00:54:07] with Sylvie. But I was also wondering if, you know, because later on he, he leans into the, so it is fiction part. And I was just thinking of simulation theory. Are you familiar with? Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:54:22] So it's, it's a multiverse theory basically that says that we could be living us in our real world. We could be just as likely or even more likely living in a simulation that's created by some far advanced version of ourselves. And that, yeah,

[00:54:42] we would never be able to distinguish it from reality. So I'm wondering if there's that angle that's going to be worked here, maybe not. I would kind of like it. How would you feel about that?

[00:54:54] It makes me think of, I'll answer your question in a long way as I usually do is that there's a part of a Hindu mythology, as I understand it, is that there's a giant God who's asleep and dreaming.

[00:55:09] And every so often a Lotus flower grows out of its belly button that then opens up a flower with a sort of a God that we can relate to being sitting there. And then as that God opens its

[00:55:25] eyes, it creates the world and experiences and sees the world and it closes its eyes. The flower closes up and then shrinks back down. And that sort of repeats over and over again. So the idea of

[00:55:38] kind of a simulationist theory thing is it's been around for a while. I would, in some variations of firms, I think we're looking at simulation theory now because of gameplay, right? Because

[00:55:50] of computer gameplay. We can have the NPCs and our second lives and all of these kinds of things. I really do think though that this question of being able to write your own story, this is a

[00:56:03] thesis of the show. What does it take for you as a person to write your own story within the realm that we live in? And part of the face turn for Loki is that he's discovering that that's a truth,

[00:56:20] right? That's a truth that he can tap into. And by extension, we all have some authorial, I guess that's an argument. Whether you're doing determinism or whether you're doing simulation theory or free will, there's all those questions there. And what authorial

[00:56:44] authority do we have over our own lives? And I guess I think that's where some of the nutrition of the show, again, as I used that metaphor last episode, that's what makes this season interesting is that it's making a bunch of questions and thesis statements about those

[00:57:02] things. So I want to see character arc, I want to see character growth. And so that, I guess the long answer to your question is I kind of like this. This is what I want, right? This is what

[00:57:16] I want the show to be exploring. I want all my- But you were worried that it was too soft with the- The delivery. Yeah, okay. The way that they played it out, right? This conversation was pretty good and then it was

[00:57:28] just later, it was just sort of like, oh, the secret was always within you. It's like, okay, that's the valid answer. That's great. But it's, I don't know. Where's the line that you have to

[00:57:38] draw as a show creator to serve your audience and not make it too hard? I mean, we're not, we don't want to over, we even get this in this scene here with the cup and the pens,

[00:57:52] like they're trying to do time mechanics by explaining it with basic real world objects. And I thought that's good. That was like a good exposition moment, right? It went on a little long. I got it pretty quick, but I appreciated that.

[00:58:06] Yeah. I also love in this scene, he has like this electric shocky stick. First of all, I don't know why he has it, but it also, it kind of makes you think of the TVA pruning sticks,

[00:58:17] but even more so it makes me think of the shocky sticks from Werewolf by Night, which when we first saw the trailers, we all thought were going to be TVA pruning sticks. Fair enough.

[00:58:29] So we've got the assignment to get the band back together. So Loki slips away accidentally, but he goes back to his bestie who doesn't realize he's his bestie and is about to be

[00:58:39] in the weirdo stalker crazy talker with a tool in his hand on the head until a glitchy time door suddenly opens and OB steps through. He has spent the last 19 months building a janky temp pad,

[00:58:52] losing his job, wife and house in the process. His life is more ruined than that time Sylvie he remains, but he doesn't seem to mind using the temp pad. They collect B15 and Casey and

[00:59:05] fill them in, but Loki informs them they're still missing one person. So how freaked out would you be if Loki showed up, did a hair flip at your house and said, come with me if you want to

[00:59:18] save reality. He really does have the hair flip maneuver down. Doesn't he? So many scenes he does that, you know, sort of, I can see the direction. I can hear the director. Okay, Tom hair flip. He's like, I got this.

[00:59:32] If we assume that I'm not podcasting about the show and Loki shows up and I'm just sort of living a Monday in life, I think I would be pretty freaked out. I don't know how I think the

[00:59:41] reaction of the record store owner, I believe his name was Lyle when he looks out the window and there's just disbelief. Like what? There's just no way that my brain could comprehend the fact that this plexiglass, you know, aged plexiglass thing suddenly appears with somebody

[00:59:59] walking out of it. There would just be no way it would be like, I'm trying to imagine like what it'd be like if you were suddenly seeing somebody roll up in a giant ship, you know, wooden ship with

[01:00:15] wooden sails with sticks that produce thunder kind of stuff. Like there's just no way to, if aliens landed, could I process it in the same way? Just show beyond my capability of understanding that I think I would probably freak out and pass out.

[01:00:33] But that's assuming that, you know, I'm a guy who's got a whole bunch of role-playing game books on the shelf behind me and, you know, all of that stuff. So we're primed for, you know, the fantastical to happen, but I don't know.

[01:00:45] Yeah. I think I would be, I would probably be OB about it, but like, tell me more. No, but that's actually, I joke about that. But to be honest, I can think of incidences where

[01:00:56] people did come up and say things to me that where I just knew they're not connected with the same reality that I'm in right now. And that's, yeah, that's very unnerving.

[01:01:08] You just can't see it. Do you know the podcast, not Science Friday? Oh, I'm blanking the name on it. Anyway, they did a really cool podcast. Was it Science Versus? No, I'll remember it in a minute, of course. But they did a really cool, Robert Coleridge and

[01:01:25] Jad Abinrod are the hosts. Oh, Radiolab. Radiolab. They did a great episode on color and the ability to see and identify color. And until you can identify it, you can't see it kind of thing. This bootstrappy sort of thing, like,

[01:01:42] when can you identify color? And I think if in the Odyssey, they talk, Homer is always writing this line over and over again, the wine dark sea. But there's some evidence that blue was not a color that was identified linguistically for a long time.

[01:02:00] So can you see something? So could I see a UFO fly by if I didn't have words for it? I don't know. It's an interesting question. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Speaking of having words for something, it is funny.

[01:02:15] We've got another possible bootstrap of Boris, where Loki says to Mobius. You're a writer at heart, aren't you? You love words. He says, a beautiful union of form and functions. And then that's obviously how jet skis were described to Loki by Mobius, but which came first?

[01:02:36] Right. And Mobius, I was reading the Wikipedia article about Mobius strips or Mobius loops today. And I like this idea, this three-dimensional object that slides around the surface of the strip isn't mirrored, but instead returns to the same point on the strip

[01:02:55] on what appears locally to be the other side, showing that both positions are really part of a single side. So how is Mobius single-sided? I don't think the show is a Mobius strip. I think it is. I think that the timeline is twisting back around, back on itself.

[01:03:17] And in a way that does, and I'm sorry, this is a dark spoiler I keep bringing up, but there is, yeah, in that you have the two time loops that go through each other. And I think we're

[01:03:33] dealing with a similar situation. Maybe one where Ramona is the triumphant, maybe one where Kang is, maybe one where Loki is. Interesting. The reason I would argue against the show being a Mobius loop is that we have

[01:03:51] growth, but I suppose I can argue myself out of that if I take what you're saying now, which is that as he comes around on the other side, he's now on a different facing of himself

[01:04:04] in a way, Loki does. I'm just thinking, is Loki growing? That's not necessarily... That's progression, not looping. But if he's looping and he's going on both sides of his nature, hero trickster, then maybe the show could work in that regard. Just again, going on the

[01:04:24] theory that the show is about the face turn. Ultimately it's about the face turn more than anything else. Well, I love that Loki gives Mobius the Doctor Who-like promise, like, I can bring you back to any moment, like you never left, which often doesn't work out in

[01:04:39] Doctor Who. But anyway, but it's actually the name Mobius that seems to convince him to go along. He's like, when he meets Casey slash Frank, how are you doing? I'm done. I guess Mobius is my

[01:04:52] space name. And only Owen Wilson could deliver that line and carry it meaningfully. I don't think anybody else could actually, has the right gravity to be able to pull that off. Very funny. Right. Exactly.

[01:05:07] Question too about this real name, when Loki confronts him and says, your real name is Mobius. What is a real name? I mean, Dawn in that timeline is a very, that's a branched timeline, right? So

[01:05:22] what's real? Is Mobius real? It's real to Loki, but it's not real to Dawn. But then is there an objective reality that no, this guy is really Mobius in all permutations? Is that the truth of the matter? I don't know. It's a-

[01:05:38] I think, yeah, Loki wants him to be Mobius. So that's what's, we're seeing Loki's selfishness here that we have talked about later. Yeah. That's a really good point. That's actually very true. And that's the reality to Loki is that you're Mobius, not Dawn.

[01:05:52] So that's real as opposed to not real. Right. Exactly. By the way, so when the crew gathers for this heist looking situation, did you notice, so Casey pockets some device? I wasn't sure what it is and wondering if it

[01:06:07] was going to be relevant or is just to make us suspicious of him later. I saw that the first time I watched it when it first aired. And then when I was doing my

[01:06:16] second watch this morning, doing my notes, I missed that scene, but I was like running on time. So I'm running out of time. So I didn't go back to look for what he pocketed. So

[01:06:28] I don't think that's a, I don't know, is that a shadow or is that something on purpose? Because typically that stuff is on purpose. Yeah. I don't know. I just keeping an eye on it. We'll see if

[01:06:40] it comes back in the finale. But I love that Dawn's always on, even when he's here for their space heist, he's selling jet skis to B-15 and he's like, it's nice to get out on a pond and unplug,

[01:06:57] hit that reset button. But this phrasing, hit that reset button stood out in my head because I feel like that's what they're saying Loki has to do right now. Right. Interesting. Yeah. I thought

[01:07:13] that with Dawn, he's, what is the, what is the Ski-Do Jet Ski personal watercraft represents? It's a type of freedom, right? Feel, are you ready for your Poseidon moment? Feel a little

[01:07:27] bit of water splashing you on the face because he's, what are you doing? You're just living in exuberance, in entertainment. You're being experiencing the world away from all your troubles and cares. That's what it represents. And so is that the nature of Mobius, AKA Dawn,

[01:07:48] is that the, if Lokis are always destined to fail, is this something that's essential to the Mobius character that he's yearning for a sense of freedom, letting go of the cares of life.

[01:08:02] So Loki has told the rest of the gang that they're missing one person and it is now time for tough truths with Sylvie. Loki goes to- Is that their morning talk show? Coffee with Sylvie, tough truths.

[01:08:15] I think that that's what she was telling me. She's like, I'm going to tell you like it is. Loki goes to 1982, Broxton to Oklahoma to collect Sylvie, Sophia DeMartino from her McDonald's job. And he distracts her from, from worrying about what's happened to her takeout bag,

[01:08:32] which has spaghettified away while she was fiddling with her keys. Sylvie actually recognizes Loki, unlike the others, because she remembers everything. She takes him to a bar where she rejects his mission to restore the TVA. And there are accusations of selfishness.

[01:08:48] And Sylvie forces Loki to confront his true motives. Loki admits that he's trying to save the TVA because what he really wants to save is his friendships. So Loki goes back to the crew

[01:08:58] alone and Sylvie goes to chill in her favorite record shop and listen to Velvet Underground. But while she's there, the whole world starts to, uh, spaghetti apart. Yep. Spaghetti pie. The whole world starts to spaghetti apart and using her,

[01:09:15] he who remains Tempad, Sylvie goes to find Loki and the gang. All right. Big scene here. Big stuff. So I think my biggest question was how did Sylvie keep her memories in my head? She's a god. And so somehow she's able to,

[01:09:34] she's not mortal in, in a mundane way. I don't know. Is that what you, what do you? I mean, I have the same question because I was also wondering why later on we see

[01:09:45] that she does finally it like in this scene, she stays whole. She doesn't spaghetti pie, even though everything around her does. And then later we see Loki is the only one who stays whole

[01:09:56] and she does spaghetti pie. So I'm wondering what are the rules when it comes to the Lokis with this whole situation? Right. That's a really good point because she does also disintegrate. Yeah. The mechanics are a little confusing there. So hopefully we'll, we'll land the plane as

[01:10:12] Jean said, the plane will be landed. Yeah. I mean, I can see why Loki would be a little bit different because of his whole, he already had that whole time slipping thing,

[01:10:21] which I'm guessing we're going to get a, we're going to get an answer about what caused that. But I guess the, and the fact he had to pull himself out of time to stop it from happening

[01:10:30] is probably why he was left behind. But I, I still, I want more clarification, please. So cute little ring there with the Zeniac game. Yeah. So, and they even use Brad's voice. Oh, do they? Yeah. I didn't notice. Yeah. So in this it's a different timeline,

[01:10:49] it's a branch timeline. It's not the sacred one where you know, our Brad was, but apparently the Zeniac was a big movie here and it became a video game. Yep. There you go. Yeah. I thought that this conversation was again, the heart of the episode,

[01:11:06] just like the conversation with Sylvie and Loki in the last episode was the heart of the episode. And there's a lot to unpack here. I thought one of my first thoughts was, and I sort of

[01:11:19] questioned this with Mobius is quote unquote real name is, you know, what is a real life? Are variations real or, but I guess they're only variations relative to the sacred timeline. Right? Right. Because relative to where you are, it's like getting a map that's produced in another

[01:11:41] part of the world. You know, the center of the map is from whoever makes the map from their point of view. So a branch timeline relative to what relative to the sacred timeline, but isn't the sacred timeline just a, another variant timeline relative to the others?

[01:11:58] Right. It's just the one that he who remains decided was the one. Cause that's the one he won that he won the war in, you know? So yeah. Vic to Victor's go to spoils, I guess. Victor timely. Not intentional. Yeah. I'm sure that Victor part must be.

[01:12:18] Interesting. But then when she's talking about being selfish, I want a life I want to live and boom, there it is the little onk symbol in her earring. Right. And I think we've got

[01:12:32] some feedback from Maryland about onks and oral Boris's coming up, but we definitely see her onk earring in the bar scene. And then she declares, I want to live. Right. So again, the, you know,

[01:12:49] part of the thesis of the show is what is life? What is it to live a life? Right. And when Loki comes around and is able to finally identify what it is that is important to him, which is he wants

[01:13:06] to have his friends and he doesn't want to be alone. You know, that sort of makes me think of who we are as human beings is that we exist within community. I don't know myself. If I don't know

[01:13:20] you, I know myself through my relationship with you, how you relate to me and that ping ponging back and forth, not only have, you know, you on the other side of the world through the dimension

[01:13:32] that the two dimensions of our, our time door here, but you know, to all the people that are, that I live my life with is it's community within that community is part. That's a fictional element

[01:13:45] because we're writing a story of ourselves. How we understand ourselves is by calm in conversation, right. And, and how we know each other is, is through, um, this, the narrative story that we

[01:14:00] tell each other. What do we do when we get together with old friends? We relive the old times where we retell the stories and that's how we remember ourselves. And so this whole idea of

[01:14:11] Loki coming around to, um, understanding what's really motivating him and what's important to him is to not be alone, to have friends and to have community that is life. And I think that's what

[01:14:25] Sylvie is representing in this conversation with her own hearing is, you know, to live life and to want to live life is to a degree selfish as well. Right. Yeah. And she accuses Loki of being selfish

[01:14:38] for wanting to tell all the others about this other life that they led on the TVA. And I, I have to disagree with her on that because I do always think the best thing is to give people all

[01:14:51] the information, but she makes an interesting point. You know, she says you're ripping people from their lives, showing them something they cannot unsee. So do we have the responsibility to protect people from certain knowledge because it will change the way they see the world? And

[01:15:09] I mean, I think different people would have different ones on that. Like some people don't want to know. They just want to be able to stay plugged into the matrix, so to speak.

[01:15:18] Uh, I would definitely put me back in. I want to remember, uh, speaking of the matrix and it, I'm also, it makes me think of Star Trek and the prime directive that they have through whatever conversations and, and, uh, science and qualitative and quantitative science have,

[01:15:38] have made a line that says pre-warp civilizations don't get contacted. You know, we stay out of it. Uh, until they are warped capable when they can realize that there's a greater world out there,

[01:15:52] then we have protocols by which we do this because when we do do it, when we take somebody out of the matrix too soon, it's not good. The brain is not, you know, capable of, of dealing with

[01:16:05] that reality. So there's a point there that Sylvie has is, is that, you know, what do you do? And so when Loki goes back and says, sorry, gang, you know, I told you that you guys were

[01:16:17] all integral to saving the life universe and everything, but nope, you just got to go back to your normal mundane lives. What the hell? You can't bring me here and walk me through a time door and then just go, Oh, nevermind. I've seen what I've seen. Right.

[01:16:33] Did, uh, did you think that the interrogation where she's like, well, what do you really want? What do you really want? Did you think it was, I thought it was maybe leading to a love confession.

[01:16:42] The love can stop short of that. Like I thought it was going to be, I want you. It's the answer. And then I felt like at the end of the episode, you know, it's her

[01:16:53] who, when she disintegrates, that's when he can reach in and find that inner thing. So, um, can it be non-romantic love? Can it be, does it have to be? Does it have to be romantic? You mean, or I mean, does it have to be non-romantic? Why not romantic?

[01:17:13] Uh, because I want it to be non-romantic. I don't know. I don't need everybody to be shipping all the time. It's not, I mean, but there's no, there's no other romance in this entire show. So

[01:17:26] but I do have a problem that a lot of people now are like, I hear a lot more often like, Oh no, but let's not have any romance. Like, no, I'm. I do want, it's, it's good for there to also be platonic relationships, like what Loki and

[01:17:42] Mobius have, but you know, they have with B15 and OB and all the rest of them are platonic relationships. But I do want romance in my storytelling. That's for me, an important part

[01:17:51] of life. And I wonder if the connection between us, if it's just, if I I'm looking at my reaction and I'm maybe I'm pushing farther away from it just because in most other, in a lot of the

[01:18:06] television that we've had in the past, it always ends up. I mean, if we look at the, the friends example, you know, and sorry about Matthew Perry, but don't a lot of them end up getting paired up with each other? It's like, Oh, is that the inevitable outcome?

[01:18:21] That's friends. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, maybe I'm just, I think I'm over, I'm, I'm, I'm swinging on the pendulum away from the, the romance, but I don't disagree that, you know, that romance is a part. So

[01:18:34] I wasn't personally, I wasn't requiring that their relationship be romantic based. I think you can, the idea of just having a very, very intense friendship with somebody is, is equally important to me and enjoyable to see.

[01:18:51] Sure. Absolutely. But for me, these two based on everything that's been built up on them in two seasons, I shipped them to put it internet speak. Fair enough. Fair enough. But I do still

[01:19:02] wonder if there's some sliver of a chance that a general docs could be a future Sylvie in some way, and that there might be a reason why she felt last episode, why she didn't deserve her own life in the

[01:19:14] timeline. Just, it was, it was, it was an early theory that was just purely based on the fact that the actresses look alike. So, you know, that doc was so, uh, insistent on finding Sylvie and taking

[01:19:27] her out. So yeah, no, no, no. I, I don't know. I just putting it out there. Sure. Sure. Fair enough. I don't know that I need it, but yeah, I don't, I don't, but it could be right. Let's talk about

[01:19:40] the record shop. Yeah. Yeah. So many Easter eggs in there. I was really focused on a couple of things. Obviously this song and the hook of that song is a big part of it. I think I was more

[01:19:58] into that than, than some of the, what are some of the Easter eggs? You had some specific ones. There's some fun Easter eggs in here from the end credits, but we'll talk about that

[01:20:08] later at a future time when we talk about the end credits. Okay, cool. So this song, Oh Sweet Nothing by The Velvet Underground. This is the last song on the second side of the 1970s

[01:20:22] albums called Loaded. And it was interesting because this is the last album that was released by The Velvet Underground before the band sort of spaghettified itself and it sort of unraveled and came apart. And Lou Reed had actually left the band months prior to the album being released

[01:20:44] and the studio really wanted this out and they really pushed the band to make an album that was going to have a lot of radio hits on it. And so the title Loaded is kind of a double meaning joke.

[01:20:59] Obviously they wanted it to be loaded with hits, but then it's also about getting loaded, getting high, consuming drugs or alcohol. So the song itself is about people who've lost everything. And as you put in the notes here, I like the way you put it, unbound from responsibility.

[01:21:18] And I think it's a very bittersweet song because it's about suffering and poverty at the same time as this question of freedom because the guitar solo, it's very not triumphant, but it elevates

[01:21:36] and it elevates your mood and it sort of is a big pickup and then sort of ends on this bittersweet note. So if you don't have anything, you're free. But that kind of freedom can kind of suck too,

[01:21:49] if you're unhoused and living rough. And so I think that kind of freedom too has a bittersweet nature to it because if you're free, are you free from relationships? Are you free from community?

[01:22:03] Are you free from the things that bind you to this world, love and relationship and community? Right. And that's exactly what Sylvie needs to ask herself right now is that does she really want that kind of freedom, that kind of lonely freedom? Yeah.

[01:22:19] Oh, I thought about that actually, because that's the way the life that she has been living, wasn't it? Yeah. She's been a vagabond between different apocalypses even. Right. And just going out and causing a lot of death and destruction. But yeah, living alone and living without community.

[01:22:38] So, but yeah, she doesn't have much time to ponder this because then we see a man walking in and at first I thought he might've done something, but then I realized that he was just a customer who spaghettified himself.

[01:22:51] And then the coffee starts pouring and I realized it must be because the mug spaghettified. Yep. And then everything just falls apart. Right. And it starts the, yeah, it starts the, starting from the McDonald's bag going out,

[01:23:04] we're starting to see the universe starting to spaghettify. So there's two shots that I have to talk about here in this show, otherwise it wouldn't be me. One is in the, in Doug,

[01:23:19] AD Doug's workshop and one is here in the record store. And since we're here at the record store, I'll talk about this first. So the shot starts out directly overhead of her putting the record down

[01:23:33] on the platter and then it pans, it pulls back up and then the camera pulls forward to the top of the screen as Sylvie sits back in the couch. And as she lays back in the couch, her head,

[01:23:50] her whole body movement is in sync with this camera. And then the hook, we hear the hook of the of the song and we, and so that you get that emotional punch. And then her eyes kind of open

[01:24:04] up and she's like, Oh, this song is hitting me in my soul. Right. And then the camera moves back and then comes down and pivot so that we're horizontal to her and her body follows the

[01:24:19] camera as it moves her head. You see her head slowly pick up track with the camera and then come down. It's such good camera work. It's exceptional. It's, it's giving us emotional stakes. It's bringing us into the mind of the character. It's putting ourselves in different

[01:24:36] perspectives and then for the actor to be acting with the camera. Brilliant. It was just, it's just a brilliant scene. And you know, in the whole metaphor of the record spinning itself. And

[01:24:49] then later when the spaghetti is happening, the camera then spins with the record until the record and the camera sink in so that the record label is at the top. So it's oriented to frame. It's,

[01:25:04] it's really incredible. Just really inspired camera work. And I have to say of anything of this season, this has been some of the most confident filmmaking that I've seen in a long time.

[01:25:14] I will point out two minor notes. The needle is in the wrong place for when the song starts because she does have it on the second side. I did freeze frame and it says side too. But maybe in this universe, the song was first.

[01:25:31] Okay. Fair enough. It's the last song. And so obviously, but also in the overhead shot, you can see her bracelet and it's not the same bracelet as the one that she got from he,

[01:25:44] who remains the big round disc. She's wearing a bracelet. It's just not that one. And I don't know if that was like a little slip or something. It's just more of a kind of a bejeweled bracelet

[01:25:55] all around. It doesn't look exactly like the one that we see. Was it on the same wrist? Because we do see her use the, you know, that at the end of the scene. Yeah, it was on the same wrist.

[01:26:05] I'm just guessing that the costuming jewelry was probably uncomfortable to wear that big round. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. So the other shot I want to just talk about, and this one's a lot more simple as is when

[01:26:15] they're in the TVA or not, they're not in the TVA in advancement and repairs when they're at 80 Duggs workshop. There's a shot of just before Sylvie comes in where we start really far back

[01:26:29] and Casey and Kei Hikwan is sitting on a stool reading a book, reading, I think the time manual, Winnie Masaku is sitting in a chair reading, you know, the Zartan or whatever.

[01:26:40] Loki is going, oh, it's all a mess. Casey walks out of the frame and then the camera starts a slow push in and people are walking in and out of the frame. They're talking to each other. And

[01:26:51] then the shot ends when Sylvie pops in. And it's not a one-er in the sense of like, it's a huge long scene because in the scene it gets chopped up, but there's just this slow push in where it's

[01:27:03] all a single take with all of the actors doing something in the scene. And again, just expert level cinematography here where the camera work is doing part of the work of telling the story, not just the characters reading lines or doing action. So, all right. Absolutely.

[01:27:23] Finished my nerd out on camera work. All right. I think this is a show that gives you particular flavor of candy. Yeah. So, I'm going to have some very high sugar levels at the end of this episode. Season.

[01:27:39] Well, speaking of this awesome spaghettification, let's lean into the spaghetti timepocalypse. Yes. And we've got Loki, he comes back to the crew after this talk with Sylvie and he's like, we're calling it all off and he gets all sulky. But then Sylvie shows up because she's fleeing

[01:27:55] universe falling apart. But just as Doug notices that his temp pad is missing, the world begins to go noodles all around Loki. And finally, even his friends start to go one friend at a time. Last is Sylvie. But Loki, he's unaffected physically. He's clawing at

[01:28:13] the noodles in the air trying to stop it from falling apart until in desperation. He finally intentionally time slips, but not in that flailing way. He just kind of mind slips back to a previous moment. Just as Sylvie arrives just shortly before all this happened,

[01:28:30] Loki has officially become a living temp pad. So he is the quiz, that's right. And he manages to slip back to the moment before the TVA blew up. Was this, did this cut close to the snap for you or were you okay with?

[01:28:49] What do you mean? How so? Well, it's like the snap in the sense of everything disappearing and turning, not the visual effect of it, but the story effect of losing everything and everything being

[01:29:03] taken away from you or at least half of everything being taken. It's a big plot device. You mean like at the beginning of the episode when? No, just the idea that- Oh, if the spaghettification had happened. The spaghettification and the snap, the spaghettification not necessarily intentional.

[01:29:22] It's like an accident whereas the snap is intentional, but they're both things that fundamentally alter the world and take people away from you. Yeah. I mean, I can't really compare them because the snap and the blip that followed,

[01:29:36] that was like a whole five-year thing and this just like lasts a moment, and then it's undone immediately. So for me, it doesn't really compare. Okay. They're not at the same level for you in terms of device?

[01:29:51] Well, no, because the thing about the snap is they really just ended an Avengers movie with that. They're just like, snap, half the world disappears, end credits. And you had to wait, what was it,

[01:30:05] like two years until we got that resolved? And in their own world, there was a five-year gap. So this is something that the people who lost their worlds, all the many variants, that obviously is

[01:30:18] devastating to them, but that's been happening this entire time. The TVA just does that all the time. That's how we started this story. And when it comes to our main characters, it was immediately undone. So obviously for a moment I was like, what's going on? But I knew

[01:30:33] obviously they're not killing off every character except Loki on this show. So sort of both fruit, but not apples and apples or oranges and oranges. Not comparable in your book. Got it. Cool. So when Loki is grasping at the noodles, which

[01:30:50] beautiful imagery, right? And just beautiful acting and the CGI work of being able to get the noodles into his hands, because I don't know how you dummy that. Did they have a bunch

[01:31:03] of green screen noodles go behind or something? But it looked really good. But it was interesting to hear the background quotes I turned on for my second viewing. I turned on the closed captioning

[01:31:14] and the quotes that I picked up on it were AD Doug saying, it's a fiction problem. Sylvie at first saying, it's all falling apart. And then later what's wrong with wanting something?

[01:31:27] And then Don Mobius saying he has to go back to see his boys. Dr. Willis B15, I looked happy. Casey, actually I think Loki says something about where are you really from? And then Casey says,

[01:31:42] oh, TVA or it's vice versa. But the implication was is that Casey's home is the TVA in regards, at least that's the way I'm head canning it. And then finally Sylvie says, when we hear this

[01:31:54] pretty clearly, do you think what makes a Loki is that we're destined to lose? And boom, that's when Loki intentionally time slips. So I think this is the moment of the face turn.

[01:32:10] And you ask a good question here in the notes that I also have myself is this time, it seems to be different in that he seems to jump back into his own body. But other times,

[01:32:19] it's like him moving his whole body. So I guess I'm just writing it off as a visual trick unless they tell me otherwise next week. Well, didn't AD Doug say something about it's evolving and that you're not only moving in time, but you're moving in space?

[01:32:36] Right. But he was doing that already because that's well, he's not only, it's not only time and space, but he's moving like across timelines. So that's a whole dimension. Because earlier on in the season was he just in, he was just slipping inside of the TVA

[01:32:52] into like before and after things. So yeah. So now he's able to jump into himself. Which is a pretty fantastic. But he can also, but he can also jump his entire body to a completely different timeline. So

[01:33:07] I'm wondering like there are characters, if this is not a simulation, if this is the real world, well, first of all, first question is, will there be any mention of incursions in this show? I'm wondering. And second question is like, if this is a skill that Loki keeps,

[01:33:25] you know, what does that mean for characters? Like for instance, the character America Chavez, from Multiverse of Madness, she was added because she has the ability to portal between realities. So that's an important skill, but now-

[01:33:39] I think we see evidence of that in one of the trailers of the Marvels movie, right? They're getting punched across dimensions or something. Right. Well, they're entangled because of their powers and these bangles and whatever's going on

[01:33:53] with this Kree wormhole, but that's something else. But this is just a character because that's within the same, with them it's within the same universe, at least. It's time and space they're moving between for different reasons, but this is now somebody who can apparently jump

[01:34:09] universes on his own, which I need to know what are the limiting consequences of this. Agreed. Agreed. I think I said this last episode was how they can bring everybody back and restore

[01:34:25] the universe to as it was, but they got to do it right. It needs to have had consequence and it has to have some sort of logical consistency to it. It got stolen somehow. That's a good question.

[01:34:38] They didn't show us. I don't think I have any evidence. And the only thing that I have evidence for is spaghettification. Yeah, it must be. Because they kept showing us that even though,

[01:34:49] and I'm wondering if they were just pulling their shots because they had a lot of money, they had to spend a lot of money on effects on this. With the coffee cup and stuff.

[01:34:57] Exactly. So do we need to see this big, we saw the McDonald's bag begin to spaghettify, but then we jumped away before it finishes or the coffee cup, they just cut it out entirely.

[01:35:06] Was that budget reasons or not? So my assumption is that it was just, but maybe the purple Grinch is sitting somewhere with a bag of McDonald's and a temp ad playing around. I think because

[01:35:18] they did show us how with limited viewpoints, how unnerving this can be. And they also did that sometimes with layering the dialogue over visual cuts so that you're jumping in your mind before you're seeing what's happening in this other time. Credit sequence, they made a few changes too.

[01:35:39] Did you notice at the very end of the credits, we get like the very last, you have to let it play all the way to the end. We get that Zaniac voice Brad again that says, you died in search

[01:35:50] or a coin loser. Like all the way at the end, past all of the translation services credits? Might be before translation. Okay. My browser was acting really weird. The Disney app is terrible

[01:36:06] for scrubbing and for pausing. It's like one of my least favorites to do scene breakdowns for because it's just so crude. And especially trying to scrub back just a couple of frames, you've got to go

[01:36:18] with the full whatever it is, 10 or 15 seconds. So I saw that in the notes and I was trying to find where it was, but I couldn't find it. And then my browser, Disney kept pushing the minimizing

[01:36:32] the credits into the small window and putting the screen up for like, watch this next. And it kept doing that as I kept scrubbing. So in the timeline was like, it really annoyed me.

[01:36:44] I hate how they immediately do that. Sometimes it's handy, but a lot of the time it's like, I want to see the credits. Stop it. Yes. I want to hear the song that you're playing.

[01:36:54] More often than not. I want to hear the music that, I want to linger in the music. I don't want to wait 15 seconds for you to push your next thing on me. So anyway, complaints, complaints, complaints. But yeah, it's the same thing. There's ringing in my head,

[01:37:11] the whole, you just need to press reset when Moby said that. Was this your theory that you were teasing at the beginning? Well, no, that was a simulation theory, but this is more than a theory. I'm pretty sure they're

[01:37:24] telling us Loki needs to hit reset on the TVA. And is he going to do the TVA? That was the big conversation between him and Sylvie was order versus chaos, right? Is the TVA the best

[01:37:37] bureaucratic, is that the best solution is to create a bureaucracy to do what? To stop. Is it to preserve a single timeline or is it to stop Kang? What's the motivation here? I think that's a valid question to ask. Are we just trying to stop the Kangs?

[01:37:55] And does it matter if you are trying to stop a villain, might you still become a villain yourself in doing so? Right. Yeah. And that's the danger of any authority that it will evolve and devolve over

[01:38:10] time into something that isn't so great for a lot of people ultimately. Speaking of post-credit scenes, one of the things that I noticed in this watch when I was trying to find the zeniac little

[01:38:24] thing, I noticed that the, in the credit scenes, all of the scenes we're seeing are stuff that we see in the show, right? One of the things that we see right at the end of the credit sequence is a

[01:38:36] fireplace in the whatever the palace castle thing is that he who remains has at the end of time, but it's lit the fireplace is going. And when we've been there in this season, it's cold and

[01:38:53] dead. So there's a lit fire that I was wondering if that is going to mean anything like, you know, what, and, and they start, don't they start this episode on the previously on with he who remains

[01:39:10] saying every path that you've, you know, you've the path that you're walking, I've laid it out for you. That's the first scene in the previously on in this episode. Every step you took to get here, I paved the road.

[01:39:23] That's it. That's it. So I feel like we're not done with that. Even though if more, if Marvel studios had wanted to wrap up the Kang timeline, you know, spaghettifying Victor timely was a convenient way to, you know, remove an actor from the property.

[01:39:41] But that's just one. Yeah. I think we're going to see him in the finale. He was credited for three episodes and it makes sense that I'm assuming that we're going to go back to the

[01:39:50] void next week. We're going to see Renslayer probably D92. I believe in you D90. Well, that would make sense then because the end credit sequence is roughly linear. The scenes that we see playing out in that seem to have a linearity to them. So

[01:40:08] if that lit fireplace is there, then that would make sense for episode six to have some sort of a scene in that location. Right. So, yeah, absolutely. And hopefully it come up in spread Brad.

[01:40:23] I want to see what's the actor's name again? I don't have it at my fingertips. Anyway, I want to see. Raphael Cassell. Yeah. Raphael Cassell. I hope we see him in some more stuff, just in general. He's been a real revelation. So yeah, absolutely.

[01:40:37] All right. Well, we've got a bunch of feedback, so we should probably turn our minds to that. But first let's take a quick break. And we're back. All right. Let's get into some feedback. First up, we've got a voicemail from Dork of the Ninjas.

[01:41:11] So I did not get to the most recent episode of Loki until yesterday, but I will say I had probably one of the optimal viewing experiences and I wanted to just get my thoughts on the

[01:41:22] series, how it's going until so this is episode four I'm talking about. So me and my partner watched the series over Discord because we don't live near each other and we usually have video chat going where we're going, just watching the show. And something that very interesting happened

[01:41:38] where the moment where Victor Timely got spaghettified, I saw it half a second or two before my partner did. So I turn, look at the camera and I see it happen on her screen and I

[01:41:54] get to see her reaction. And we and I know when I realized this is probably one of my favorite shows running right now. Nice. And she used favorite running into you. So it was not favorite superhero, but one of my favorite shows because that completely converted my

[01:42:09] expectations in the best way possible. I completely expected, oh, Victor might die, but he'll die after he gets the device in place and has a dramatic moment of the thing being sent off and saving the day. But no, it completely caught me off guard that everything failed and

[01:42:31] we're left at the end of the episode. Where do we go from here? This is, it was, it was the moment where I was one from thinking this is a good show to this is a great show.

[01:42:42] And I'm just hoping that a lot of MCU stuff going forward can hold this quality. But the sad fact is from what I understand about Echo when it does come out next year, it has been kind of a mess

[01:42:56] and I'm hoping you're wrong about that. And I'm hoping you're wrong, but I don't want to have he said this before the trailer MCU show in and realizing, oh, I'm not going to finish this.

[01:43:10] Like I did with secret invasion. I gave up three episodes on my show and I'm perfectly happy that I did looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it. And hopefully I can get episode five in

[01:43:20] before yells pod comes on. Maybe say something on there too. You have a good one guys. Thanks, Dirk. Yes, you probably recorded this as Alicia said before the Echo trailer came out. So we would

[01:43:33] love to hear your Echo thoughts. So definitely send that in next time. What did you think about his estimation in terms of it being one of the best shows out there right now? Yeah, no, I've been saying that. I absolutely agree.

[01:43:48] It's going to be high in my list. I don't know if it's going to break my top five though, because I've got some other stuff that's crowding it up there, but I think it's

[01:43:54] definitely going to be in my top 10 for sure. So I am really glad that we've had a strong show, even though there's mixed reaction out there. I hear, I've heard folks not enjoying this season,

[01:44:09] which I don't understand because the criticisms that they're leveling it. I know that they're watching the show, but it's like, what show are you watching? Because you're missing stuff that it seems obvious to me. I don't know. The scrutiny on the MCU right now is

[01:44:23] ridiculous. I was just seeing some people complaining on Twitter yesterday about a clip from the Marvel's movie that's coming up where, and so in the clip, they referenced, we see Captain Marvel meeting Monica Rambeau, and she calls her by the name that she called her as a

[01:44:40] child, Lieutenant Trouble. And then she goes, I go by Captain Rambeau now. And people were complaining like, oh, nobody's going to get this. I'm like, it's not. First of all, A, it's good to have continuity with the film that this is a sequel to, to just acknowledge that

[01:44:56] relationship. And B, it's just not difficult to understand, but it's like people are just hunting for anything to pick apart about the MCU right now. It's the cool thing to do. My spouse and I were watching- Not saying that you're doing that, Dark the Ninja.

[01:45:11] No, no, no. And he dropped out halfway through Secret Invasion, fully justified as well, because from what we know, that was an absolute dumpster fire. That's like a classic definition of dumpster fire, right? That said, I was watching Beckham, the documentary on Netflix with my

[01:45:29] spouse and I were watching it last night. We watched about an episode and a half. And there's this whole thing where Beckham gets a red card and gets ejected out of the game, one of the World Cup

[01:45:41] games, going in against Argentina. And for just for a long time, months and months and months, he's just being vilified and being assaulted. Just a terrible time for him back home in England,

[01:45:55] just the hate that was piled on him. Dumb mistake, cost the team a lot. Okay, move on, right? You're upset. Fine, let it go. And I think there's a tendency to be piling on MCU right now, isn't there? Absolutely.

[01:46:11] And it's picking at every mistake and picking at everything. So it's hard. Or even things that aren't mistakes, just looking for mistakes anywhere. And I think I mentioned this too. If you're not into the storyline, then you're going to

[01:46:26] find the flaws, right? You're going to pick it. All right. Again, you can leave a voicemail yourself if you go to our website, thelorehounds.com, go to the contact page and there's a little button that says voicemail there. And you just click that and just authorize your

[01:46:39] microphone and you just start talking. And that'll get emailed to us and we can drop that right into the audio. Next up is Billy, who wrote in right after episode four, wrote in an email to MCU

[01:46:52] at thelorehounds.com. Says, Dear Lorehounds, first off, wanted to thank you for your coverage of Loki. I hopped on after listening to the Silo podcast and have been enjoying the dynamic everyone brings

[01:47:02] to the table. I love all the in-depth discussion and theories. A Silo-ver, a Silo-zen? Is that what you call it? Silo-zen. Yeah. And we're going to be talking about your Worship Dust podcast

[01:47:14] up here in a moment because you've got some stuff in the pipeline. Billy continues, I think the beauty of Loki that other Marvel shows hasn't been able to capitalize on is keeping us on our toes

[01:47:27] and really speculating on what might happen next instead of what's already happened in the show. I think that's an important distinction to make because the bigger story as a whole hasn't really been elaborated on very much in this current phase. Thoughts here? I mean, I think that

[01:47:45] this is, like I said, this shows brain candy for me. So it's one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much. Right. Billy continues, one theory from episode four that I didn't hear anyone bring up

[01:47:55] is when Victor gets spaghettified, my first reaction was, whoa, not unlike Dark of the Ninjas. I think a lot of people had that, were shocked by that moment. Oh, that scream. Yeah. My second

[01:48:09] reaction was what if we just saw the creation of every Kang being born and spread out into the multiverse as if each strand of Victor was splitting? This could have been he who remains

[01:48:24] his plan all along. So I wonder what is the, we really haven't talked about spaghettification, so I wonder what spaghettification works, how it works. I mentioned last time that when they're citing it as having to do with black holes, but when Hawken talks about that, when Stephen

[01:48:44] Hawken talks about that or talks about it during his lifetime, and he used the words spaghettification, he was talking about that you just get condensed down to like one giant long noodle because you're

[01:48:57] being squeezed into the black hole. So it doesn't look like this, but so it is interesting. Maybe they went for this falling apart into a plate of spaghetti because of the visuals. It definitely

[01:49:09] looks a lot cooler. I have, I heard this theory about it being the birth of all the different Kangs from all the different particles. I think that was on like New Rock Stars or something.

[01:49:21] And yeah, I like that. I like that theory. I don't know if that's necessarily what they'll go for. If they do, I won't be mad at it. You know, they're playing fast and loose with the science,

[01:49:33] but they are more grounded in science than most even shows that call themselves sci-fi are. So got it. Got it. Okay. So a theory that could still hold some potential. Yeah. We'll see if they bring it up in the finale, but I'm not, yeah, it's not,

[01:49:51] it's not my theory. I'm not like believing in it, but yeah, it would be cool thing. Okay. All right. Billy's got some internet points then we'll see if we win any cereal at the end of

[01:50:02] the season. Another thought is that Loki will have some sort of time slip right before the loom explodes and destroys the TBA. My thought is that we'll see the next episodes play out almost

[01:50:12] as if we were starting with episode one all over again, but this time with a Loki that's fully aware of what's going to happen. Okay. Obviously we've answered that question with this episode.

[01:50:20] Finally, I haven't gotten back to count this yet, but I'd like to know how many times does Loki do the hair flip? It seems like an iconic move of the character and I always clock it every time it

[01:50:34] happens. I think you should totally go back. If you want to turn this into a drinking game. Yeah. If you want to make a drinking game out of Loki, there you go.

[01:50:40] We need some gifts, right? For our, some people call them gifs as Joan might say, we needed, you know, a hair flip. Graphical. Yeah. Perfect. I would love to see a chart on this. Anyway, keep up the great work. Don't have

[01:50:54] many friends that are deep into the MCU. So it's really fun to hear a few friends talk about this stuff each week. Billy, Billy, glad to have you as a friend. Please write us in some more as we

[01:51:06] continue our MCU coverage. We're going to be doing the Marvel's front and back coverage. So we're going to do a preview pod and a follow-up pod. Look, sounds like Spider-verse is on Netflix. Right? So one of these days we're going to get around to

[01:51:20] watching that. I may have to put that on the schedule for December, possibly. Yeah. We've got, yeah, we're coming into our end of year time crunch. So we're running out of time. I know. And then of course we've got Echo. My limbs are going to blow.

[01:51:33] Which is going to be a binge watch drop thing. So we'll have to figure out how we're going to do coverage. So we're going to be rolling on. Billy, definitely let's hope we hear from you again, because there is MCU community here for you. Next up is Al-Shalant.

[01:51:49] How do you, do you have any theories on pronunciation? I just, I was just saying Al, but. Al, Al-Shalant. Let me know Al if you write in and let us know how to,

[01:52:00] if we got that right or wrong or what we can do to fix it. All right. They start off their email. Haven't heard anyone question what I'm about to discuss. So why is it that recording,

[01:52:11] why is that recording of Ravonna and he who remains queued up on a reel to reel in the war room in the past? That's a really good point. Specifically that recording existing implies the TVA had their memories of Kang wiped and the time Lords installed by protocol 42,

[01:52:32] since he who remains and Miss Minutes discuss this immediately after Ravonna is dismissed from the conversation. So recording equals memory wipe has happened. So how come the past TVA where Loki is listening to this recording still have statues of Kang

[01:52:48] ornamenting the walls? I'm getting a, yeah, this is getting some timey wimey stuff. What do you think any theories on the reel to reel? So in terms of the not remembering, I would just say that's because it's been implied that they've gone through multiple time,

[01:53:03] multiple mind wipes, memory wipes. So there seems to be, there's obviously that moment where we hear them talking, having this conversation and there's a memory wipe after that. And obviously we know

[01:53:15] that there's a memory wipe after the time when Loki goes back and sees B15 and Mobius. Yeah, there's clearly been at least a couple of memory wipes that affect everybody except OB. But yeah,

[01:53:28] I have definite questions that I'm assuming and hoping that they're going to answer in the finale about why that recording is there, especially, you know, as I was talking about last week, the fact that it's a little bit different. I don't know if that's just something we're not

[01:53:42] meant to notice or if that actually means something, but I think it could have to do with this multiple loop back on each other. But yeah, need to know who was listening to this recording

[01:53:51] in that room. Right? Okay. So big, quiet, open question that we're going to have to track for episode six. So good. Well, Al continues one possibility I keep coming back to is they can

[01:54:03] explain this by showing he who remains or miss minutes, or even Sylvie leaving the recording in the past to be found as a time loop device, kind of like the TVA handbook with Victor. If

[01:54:13] they don't address this and gloss it over or never mentioned it, a bunch of swearing, angry emojis. Sad emojis. Yeah. So yeah, agreed. All right. And I've noticed differences in the voice inflection deliveries in the original conversation and the recording. This could be just alternate takes,

[01:54:33] but I hope that maybe this could also be evidence of a time loop where this conversation and the mind wipes maybe happened multiple times and maybe after. Okay. Multiple mind wipes. The time Lords were finally installed because of a different event. But then why is the recording

[01:54:49] queued up on a reel to reel in the war room where any high ranking TVA member could stumble on it? All right. So yeah, good, good theories. We've got to, we've got to get to some answers in episode

[01:55:01] six and let us know. Hopefully they just show like some, they listening to it and they're called out of the room for something. And then the low key pops up there, you know, for the record. I believe

[01:55:13] that is an Akai 202 D reel to reel tape. And if you Google for that, you can find them on the internet. They range around 300 to $400. I think vintage. I see one here for a thousand bucks on

[01:55:29] eBay, but that's probably in pristine working order. I want one. I cannot afford one. My spouse would murder me if I bought one for vanity sake, but gosh, I would really like one of those things.

[01:55:43] It's so pretty. It's so pretty. All right. Would you mount it in the wall? I put it right behind me here. You can see, can you see this right here? That's my eight

[01:55:52] millimeter reel to reel. I'm missing some real deals. I got to, but that's working. I found that in a thrift shop. I got to get some reels on it, but yeah, I would love to have some old

[01:56:00] tech like that. I was drooling the whole show of all the cool old computer tech that they had in here, all the switches and the dials and everything like that. I would love to outfit my office with

[01:56:13] all that kind of stuff. Anyway. So you just want to live on the low key set. Yeah. I want physical switches, click, click, and you know, buttons. I want to press a big record

[01:56:23] button, a big tally light comes on and stuff. All right. Enough of that. By the way, big MCU fan here. This is Al's email finishing up. Big MCU fan here. Alex from Detroit. Oh, so is this Agus Alex

[01:56:36] is their name. I'm just a little jaded by recent subpar MCU entries like Thor 4 and Ant-Man 3 and the show that shall not be named. We named the show that shall not be named too many times this

[01:56:47] episode. So I'm really worried that I've identified a possible plot hole in the best of the best MCU shows available. I really hope this is by design and explained and not a timey wimey fumble.

[01:57:01] Thanks, Gary. Thanks. Take care, guys. Love to hear what you think. PS, I wrote this also to Jim and A-Ron immediately after I discovered it and was a little more angry and heeded my message

[01:57:12] to them, but I've cooled down a bit over the weekend. And then a quick email came in post episode five. Very well done, but unfortunately it looks like they're not interested in explaining

[01:57:24] this whole thing about the secret recording being on the reel to reel in the war room. So we still have one more episode, Alex. Yes, exactly. Yeah, exactly. I also think it's cool

[01:57:34] though how we maybe see how the TVA is built with 80s, 90s tech now that we see that OB came from 1994. Yeah, and there was a lot of stuff in OB's workshop that even seemed even retro from there,

[01:57:47] but totally agree with that. Good point. Good point. Thanks, Al. It's great to get some feedback finally from some folks. So hopefully we're out there being a positive note for this show and the community is coalescing around it. All right. Next up, Jessie K wrote in after also

[01:58:06] episode four, Hey, super sleuths. Love your podcast. I love how you each bring a different angle to understanding the story and the context to make a show like Loki. I'm really missing Jean this episode too. Yeah. I know there's some great comic book stuff as well just to

[01:58:22] have his takes on the storyline, but we'll spend some time in episode six making sure that Jean has enough time to give us his thoughts about the episode. I may have missed this, but I'm

[01:58:32] wondering if the reason Kang sent Miss Minutes back to the Victor Timely we met in earlier in the season is because Kang knew that he was the only variant that would not stop time loom problem.

[01:58:46] He seems to have figured it out, but was unable to figure it out in time to stop the explosion. This is a novel theory. I like this. He had been working on a solution, but was unable to work out

[01:58:59] all the problems. Maybe other versions of Victor Timely did not experience this problem. It's a kind of, it's kind of like he picked the version of himself that was the weakest. Is it possible that Kang did his own version of Dr. Strange by examining all of the possible

[01:59:15] timelines and coming to the conclusion that this Kang, Victor Timely is the one that he needed to reset everything. Cheers, Jessie K. Thanks, Jessie. What do you think, Alicia? I mean, I'm still wondering if this Kang was placed on this timeline for, for this reason, because this

[01:59:34] was the fail safe. Right. I'm also thinking that, yeah, we're gonna, you know, I was talking about the seeing the He Who Remains version or something at the void, but actually I think probably what

[01:59:47] we'll see is this Jonathan Majors, we'll see Victor Timely again because Loki has slipped back to before he's spaghettified. So he gets another chance now. I definitely think we're going to see

[01:59:58] He Who Remains remaining in some way. So, but I like this idea of this Victor Timely being placed, but then was this the right Victor Timely to be placed? But then there was a mistake that

[02:00:11] happened and he, you know, there, you know, there was no, I think, I think that this is what He Who Remains wanted. Okay. Yeah. But it was, does Victor Timely, what does he know? I don't know.

[02:00:21] I still am suspicious of him and his wandering ways in the TVA. Right. All right, cool. All right. We're gonna, we're gonna see next episode. Next up is Marilyn who wrote in after episode four.

[02:00:34] We've got a good one here. First, let me clear up some confusion from my previous email to you. No, what I meant was that Miss Minutes, the AI could delete Mrs. Davis in the AI in seconds.

[02:00:49] That Miss M was far more powerful and thus more ruthless than Mrs. Davis ever could be. I was not making a comparison between the two shows as a whole. I've already put Mrs. Davis

[02:01:01] ahead of Loki in my top five shows. We'll have to see if the next two episodes change my mind for that positioning, but I don't think that they will. I enjoy this sort of Loki fun, a lighthearted

[02:01:13] ride with interesting moments of introspection, but Mrs. Davis as a show was simply full of depth and wacky gravitas from beginning to end along with superb actors, beautiful visuals, and an excellent storyline. Please don't at me, MCU loving listeners. But I would say if for anyone who is

[02:01:33] an MCU lover and hasn't watched Mrs. Davis, do yourself a favor and do so. I am ashamed to say that it has not yet made it onto my watching. I sort of have fallen behind on

[02:01:46] a few things and I haven't been able to catch up. Maybe when I mid-December I'm going to catch up, but that's going to be probably after I do my top 10. So it's dicey. All right. Marilyn continues.

[02:01:57] In ancient Egyptian symbolism, the connection of the Ankh with Ouroboros is that they're both associated with life, death, and rebirth. In particular, the Ankh is life and afterlife, while the Ouroboros is the constant flow of life to death to life. Both symbols could also be said

[02:02:17] to be related to fertility. So perhaps Sylvie's Ankh earring is another point in the direction of Sylvie as a Loki variant having something to do with Obi's existence, which I still think is highly possible. I also think Obi will have a key role in restoring reality. Ouroboros eating

[02:02:35] his own tail is a very potent symbol of rebirth. And at some point during the episode, Obi even refers to that very image of a snake swallowing its own tail. I can't for the life of me remember

[02:02:48] where this happens, but perhaps one of you three will. I'm starting to think that maybe the Ankh is just a little flourish that maybe the actors decided, oh, wouldn't it be fun if she wore this? And it's just representing-

[02:03:03] They might have intentionally gone with the Egyptian symbology, but I don't know that they are expecting us to derive any deeper meaning from it. No, and they never push it forward. It's just there, but it never feels like it's a

[02:03:16] functional part of the plot. Speaking of Sylvie, I think one can only become a small g god if they're treated as such by others, especially non-godly folks. See Sir Terry Pratchett's small gods. Sylvie never developed that side of herself because she always was running and hiding in and

[02:03:37] out of disasters she often helped to create. Her abilities are godlike perhaps, but what was the event which made her a Loki variant? And when? My impression is that she never had the chance to establish community which would have regarded her as a deity. And since she had

[02:03:54] felt so highly subjected to the power over of others, thinking of herself as godlike is quite low on her probability scale. That makes sense. No, we know when it happened because we saw that in the first season,

[02:04:09] in the second episode. Yeah, it happened when she was still a child, but when she confronted Ravonna about why, Ravonna's like, I don't remember. So that's a question that still needs to be answered within the show, but they're teasing us that there will be an answer, I think.

[02:04:24] Right. Okay. Marilyn continues, I expect it won't surprise you to learn that I do believe in free will. After all, it's what makes Eru's music possible in the end. Eru, Lord of the Rings reference.

[02:04:37] The Aen Lindele and the Silmarillion from Tolkien. In an interesting moment of Life Imitates Art, I was listening to this episode, I was pruning my Boston ivy vines in the kitchen, and I accidentally cut off one of those which was quote unquote dead at the base,

[02:04:54] but still green at the top. Moral of the story, be very careful what you brew. Pretty funny. I hope it's, well, yes. I mean, you're pruning to make it healthy, right? We

[02:05:07] prune our plants. Some plants we have to prune very carefully and some can and can't be pruned, right? I'm no botanist, but I believe that that is the case. So that's a good point. And finally, in your discussion of Zartan, whatever that is, you mentioned the date,

[02:05:23] 1984. Was that the date the first issue of that comic came out? Question mark, which reminded me of the date that we found Sylvie at the McDonald's connection. As always, my gratitude for a lovely episode, Marilyn. Thoughts on 1984?

[02:05:40] I mean, I wouldn't, it could be any number of ties. Why 1984? Was it because of the timing of age? Now we already got, you know, Mobius is not Jack from Oklahoma, but maybe there's something about

[02:05:55] the time that needs to work out. It's also just interesting, 1984. I'm not saying this is a reference, but of course it makes me think the George Orwell book, which is all about control

[02:06:07] and mind games and mind games too. So the government can keep control. So who knows if there's a reference in that? If we come up with any bigger links, we'll definitely bring them up.

[02:06:18] And maybe Jean will be listening to this episode and he will come in with some interesting connections to us as well next week. All right, last up is Abby, our weekly faithful Loki correspondent. Greetings, Alicia, David, Jean, and Marilyn. Oh, I'm crossing the feedback streams

[02:06:38] here. Abby says, what an episode. First, let me gush about how amazing the show is in terms of visuals and sound performances. So beautiful, so much attention to detail. On to my immediate thoughts on the episode, although I'm sure I will realize some things and express them immediately

[02:06:56] after I hit send. Yes, that's totally the case. And I'm here with you, Abby gushing as well. First, Loki, not sure exactly what happened at the whiteout blackout. Were they all sent to their

[02:07:09] timelines according to the last minute desires and Loki was clinging to the TVA or is that what makes a Loki a Loki is that they may lose, but they survive. Oh, that's a good take. Alicia?

[02:07:23] For me, I was thinking it had to do with this whole idea of fail safe. Like there's just something that says if the TVA is about to spaghettify everyone in it gets sent

[02:07:33] back to where they came from. Interesting. Right. But then they have to know that it's only in the case where it's been spaghettified because the branches are branching. So they don't have anywhere

[02:07:45] to go back to. The only non TVA person there was Loki, right? So if there was some sort of built in protocol escape pods that shot you back to your timeline, well, but then Loki wouldn't have

[02:07:56] been shot back anywhere because he doesn't belong there. He should have been. Well, no, but he would he would be shot back to where they picked him up when he where he was a prisoner and he well,

[02:08:05] that's right. He picked up the Tesseract and then he jetted to somewhere in the desert. So I guess he would shoot back to there. Right. But that would be if he's built into the protocol, like

[02:08:14] is his is he entered into the database? It seems. Yeah, it seems like he's been pretty well integrated into. That's true. Right. He's so well, maybe somebody in HR just never got around

[02:08:25] to. Well, I think I think that it has to do with him having pulled himself out of time without self pruning because of the time. Good point. Very good point. I'm assuming we'll find out

[02:08:37] in the finale. Right. All right. Abby continues. I was annoyed by his insistence on needing to save the TVA to safeguard against what's coming. Such a lame argument. Thankfully, it turns out

[02:08:49] that he just needed to come to terms with what his real motivation is. The very relatable desire for connection. What a growth for a character that he realizes that caring for someone, trusting them, supporting them isn't a weakness. It's a strength. Love isn't a dagger,

[02:09:04] even if it's painful. And yeah, I think the face turn is what's keeping it's certainly what is attracting my attention for this show beyond the visuals and the time you want me stuff.

[02:09:18] Continuing the way he was trying to time slip was such a good call back to the time when he was trying to magic himself out of the TVA courtroom. Both times his purpose was clear,

[02:09:27] even to himself. And the outcomes were equally ineffective and hilarious. He even did the same like motion with his hands in his arms, right? Putting them out and clenching his fist. Perfect. The interrogation room with Moby was as well as the bar talk with Sylvie made him

[02:09:44] realize things about himself yet still hesitant to express feelings. So Abby continues here regarding Moby taking some advice. I might've cheered when he said, I can rewrite the story. Let me tell you why. While no MCU project is a direct adaptation of any comic, it's nice to

[02:10:04] get these small inspirations this time, the advent of the God of stories agent of Asgard run. I'm sure John has deeper knowledge and can elaborate more. Well, hopefully John will be able to elaborate next episode. So that's interesting, but yeah, I think this idea we have to remember

[02:10:21] that this show is a comic book, right? In nature in its core and what it's talking about. So I think it's important when we're critiquing the show to remember that and that built in inherent to the

[02:10:35] story and the character arcs of the story is for these triumphant arcs to occur and for characters to sort of win in the end. Right? Right. All right. On to supporting characters. Abby says,

[02:10:49] I expressed my wish after the last episode to know what OB's real name is, but Doug, seriously, Doug, I will continue to call him OB. Anyhow, K. Hequan is a gem and the character is so

[02:11:01] likable and relatable. He's passionate about fiction and science and it's funny and resigned and I'm passionate about him. Ha ha. The line about losing his job and being left by his wife made me think about everything, everywhere, all, wait, everything, everywhere. Oh, wait. All at once.

[02:11:18] All at once. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Great movie. And it was really, it's really great to see him bouncing out of that and coming into this. So. Well, he plays several different characters in the other one because it's a multiverse situation,

[02:11:36] but it's just interesting. None of them are anything like OB. So I've just, I'm so impressed by his nuance and versatility in acting. And I just can't believe we lost so many decades that

[02:11:49] he could have been on our screens. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Well, let's make up for lost time. Right. The Mobius backstore wasn't surprising. Not sure if the timestamp of 2022 on his branch timeline is correct. The shop environment and his kids calling on a landline

[02:12:03] had more of a nineties vibe. Yeah. A little bit of inconsistencies there, right? Cause why aren't they texting him or calling on his cell phone? So that's why like, I think they put them in 2022 for a reason. And I still wonder if there's something between that 2022 and 1984, that

[02:12:21] still needs to be connected. All right. All right. Let's keep an eye on it. I was so happy that B15 has finally a name and a story and no surprises that she is awesome. Her first name being Verity

[02:12:32] as per the end credits elicits another excited squeak as this is another comic hint from the same AOA. I'm not sure what AOA is a short for. I'd watch a whole episode dedicated to her.

[02:12:44] Wunimisaku is just so good. Agreed. Hopefully. Yeah. And Verity, yeah. You called out Verity earlier as being a friend. Yeah. But I'd like to see more, even more personality, you know, not just nice, but you know. Casey being a criminal was a surprise, but his later compulsion

[02:13:03] of collecting valuable looking objects may be a hint on to why he has all the infinity stones in his drawer in episode one of season one. I think that's a good call, Abby. I didn't think about

[02:13:13] that. Yeah. Yeah. He's attracted to these shiny objects. Sylvie is Sylvie and she's unwilling to actually express feelings as Loki. Her choice of timeline is cozy, but oh, so lonely. She undermines her own professed idea. I don't give a fuck. Oh, right. Sorry. I didn't. I was trying

[02:13:32] to read that. Yes. I don't give an F attitude with always showing up when things get rough. In conclusion, this show presents us with a non-linear story while also showcasing the gradual but real growth of the characters. All the loops, all the characters except for

[02:13:49] Wunmi, Masako. All the loops, the TVA settings are a device to explore the deeper questions about identity, determinism, and especially human connections. No person is an island and it isn't subtle that the one who is, who doesn't do partners is the villain. I'm looking forward

[02:14:09] to the final episode to how Loki will be rewriting the story. And I just really hope that we get a satisfying ending as always your weekly Loki correspondent, Abby. Thanks Abby. Thanks for

[02:14:19] being a great correspondent and we are looking forward to your thoughts for episode six. I agree and I've said this before is that the nutrition of the show for me is these deeper character

[02:14:32] connections and this idea, I think this idea of who are we if we're not part of community, even if we don't have besties and we're rolling whatever, we're still part of a community.

[02:14:44] You still live in a building, you still live somewhere people know of you and you interact when you go to the store or whatever. We're part of something and I think it's important

[02:14:53] to acknowledge that and that is what's interesting in a story. If the human heart in conflict with itself is maybe a primary story, the next level up of stories is us in relationship to each other. That's what all good stories are about. Right? Right.

[02:15:13] All right. Well, so there ends the episode two and a half hours of raw recording time. It'll probably edit down a little bit, but Alicia, I guess it just goes to show you even when we're

[02:15:25] down a podcaster, we are still, we still have a lot to say. We still got a lot to say. We wouldn't be the lore hounds if we didn't. Let's talk really quickly about upcoming schedules. We,

[02:15:38] for the lore hounds, we've got a bunch of stuff going on. We're catching up on our backlog. We've got our Silmarillion stories out and we've got our Star Wars film festival for return, Revenge of the Sith just dropped. We've also got coming up, I'm just checking

[02:15:58] on the schedule here for November, we're going to have all of our normal stuff for Star Wars film fest. We're going to be covering Solo and then we're going to do our Marvels pre and post

[02:16:10] coverage. We've got Tehanu. We're going to be reading chapters seven through 10, and then we'll have one more in December to finish that off. And then I think Alicia, you and I were talking about

[02:16:20] doing a one-shot for Napoleon, the new Ridley Scott film that's coming out soon. We don't have any big shows on until January. So we're going to be doing, I think a bunch of one-shots in

[02:16:34] December because a bunch of movies are coming out. Probably you're going to be covering a boy and his... Is it a boy and his Heron or a boy and the Heron? And the Heron.

[02:16:44] And the Heron, yeah. Definitely going to be covering Rebel Moon, which is going to be an interesting thing to watch. I think we might be able to pull some folks together for Wonka.

[02:16:56] And I really want to check out, what is this? Life... Oh, I don't, I haven't only shortcutted here. What's the new Netflix? All the light that you can see or- No, the life that you leave behind. Oh, okay.

[02:17:12] That's what it is. And that is a Rob Esamil, Sam Esamil show, which Sam Esamil was the showrunner for Mr. Robot. So this is a new film that he's got out on Netflix. I think it hit the... It's

[02:17:27] going to hit the theaters for a minute and then it's going to go straight to Netflix. And I really want to see what that's about. It's got Marsha Ali in it, and he's a character... He's an actor who I will follow almost anywhere. Blade. Yes, Blade.

[02:17:41] Elisha, you have been busy. You finished up your House of Usher multi-coverage. You were on Anthony's podcast. You were on with Sean. You had a book club. You had a Wolveshift Dust

[02:17:56] feed. That was a lot of work, but it sounded like you were having a lot of fun with it. Yeah, definitely. So definitely check those things out. And right now we're getting back into the Dune coverage. So basically the Dune coverage, we're still continuing with it.

[02:18:13] We're just spacing it out between other things to stretch it out between now and spring when the movie is supposed to drop now. And in the meantime, we're going to be covering Beacon 23, the new Hugh Howey adaptation, which is going to be on MGM Plus

[02:18:29] about a guy at a lighthouse, sort of space lighthouse, who witnesses a crash and meets some interesting people. Okay. Fingers crossed that we get a good inspiration adaptation. I don't know where we'll be on the scale.

[02:18:47] Yeah, I think this is definitely looking closer to inspiration, but that's what I thought when it came to the fall of the House of Usher after I saw the trailer. And then once I saw the show,

[02:18:56] I was like, oh wow, no, they really wove pieces of it all together in there. So we'll see. We'll see how this goes. We'll probably be not doing that episode by episode, but doing that in chunks of two or three episodes at a time.

[02:19:09] Okay. Sounds good. And it looks like you, John and I will do a quick primer that will release- Right. Cross-release on the feeds to get everybody excited about it. And then you and Luke, you guys are doing a preview pod as well, right?

[02:19:23] Yeah. We're going to do a preview pod just talking a bit more about what this is, what to expect, and what the whole development of this is. Great. So head over to Wolshift Dust if you haven't already subscribed to Alicia's feed.

[02:19:37] There's a link in the show notes or check it out on our website because it'll auto-post over there as well. Last up is Properly Howard movie review. The guys, Steve and Anthony, have finished their season of covering about a dozen movies, all remakes this time around.

[02:19:55] We will let you know when they get geared up for their next season of movies, but those are all in their feed link in the show notes. In the meantime, Steve and Anthony are weekly, we're dropping podcasts on Fridays for a Severance season one recap. They're doing

[02:20:17] episode by episode. We're assuming, we're fingers and toes crossed that Severance season two is going to be released early 2024. We weren't sure if it was going to be January or later. They've still been very vague about the release date except for sometime early 2024. So we went

[02:20:35] ahead and decided to fire up a brand new feed for that and start releasing the episodes now. And when season two starts, it will be myself, John, Anthony, and Steve, all four of us covering

[02:20:49] episode by episode week to week. So that's in its own separate dedicated feed, makes for logistic reasons and whatnot. We decided that that would be the best way to do it. So go find that feed,

[02:21:01] get subscribed and be ready for when that drops. All right, that is a lot going on over here. And we're coming into our end of the year coverage. We will be releasing our second breakfast, which

[02:21:14] is typically our exclusive Patreon podcast. But we do our Christmas episode, we make that available to everyone. And that's where we talk about our top 10s for the year. And we'll be going around

[02:21:25] with Alicia and John and Marilyn and various folks and getting everybody's input as to what their favorite shows are. And we'll have more on that as we get a little bit closer. Last up, we would

[02:21:37] like to thank our Patreon supporters, everyone who is a subscriber. Thank you all so very much. A couple of quick notes. We do have free trials available. It's a new feature that Patreon has

[02:21:51] included. So you can check us out. We've also been turning on the audio preview feature. So if you want to listen to a podcast to see what it's like without ads, you can check that out as well.

[02:22:01] And we also have annual memberships. So if it works better for your budget, check that out. We give you 10% discount. And for as little as about 30 bucks, you can get a whole

[02:22:11] year of all this great quality content that we try to produce at Lorehounds Central and with all of our friends like Steven Anthony and Alicia. And you've got some more voices coming in with you.

[02:22:23] Of course, you had Luke, who you did silo with and you guys are doing Dune. And then it sounds like you and Abby. And Beacon 23. Yeah. And Beacon 23. And it sounds like you and Abby are going to

[02:22:32] be teaming up for something as well. Yes. Abby is she's going to be my co-host on the book club now. So we've already recorded our first episode, Breaking Down the Book, Beacon 23. So that will

[02:22:44] be released soon. And then she'll be joining me for the rest of the silo books. And then you and Jean are talking about some comic DC big stew. Yeah. So is it going to cover animation stuff

[02:22:59] or is it just more more DC MCU or what's the split? So I don't want to like promise anything before I've talked more with Jean, but it's yeah, we're looking at, you know, it's going to be a

[02:23:10] flexible format, but I think we're going to focus to start on sort of a Marvel versus DC character character sort of thing. Got it. And we probably do some Aquaman coverage, I'm guessing.

[02:23:21] Yes. And well, yeah, we want to launch with some Aquaman coverage for the movie that comes out. We're going to, we know it's like the tail end of the DCEU and neither of us is like,

[02:23:36] has it as the movie of the year we're looking forward to, but we're going to have some fun with it anyway. Awesome. Yeah. You get to talk about Aquaman who's kind of an important character

[02:23:43] as well. Cool. Anyway, that's the long way around saying that if you're interested in supporting all of the, what we do within Patrion is a great way. Alicia has a Patreon for her stuff. We've got ours,

[02:23:54] but we make sure that everybody that is on our shows is taken care of as well. So all of your support goes to keeping us moving and keeping us, yeah, you know, keeping it's not an inexpensive

[02:24:07] proposition to put on this podcast. So to Samartian, Cyrus, Mark H, Michael G, Michelle E, David W, Brian P, Nick W, SC, Peter OH, Patina W, Adam S, Nancy M, Lavinia T, Dove 71, Brian 8063,

[02:24:23] Frederick H, Sarah L, Garrett C, Eric F, Matthew M, Sarah M, DJ Miwa, Andra B, Kuang Yu, Laura G, Deadeye, Jedi Bob, who did some work with you. You guys did, he was on your...

[02:24:36] He helped me with the Halloween special. He did Red the Raven and he's also, we're already talking about the winter holiday special. Oh, fun. All right. Nathan T, Alex V, Aaron T, Sub-Zero and Adrian. These are our Loremaster top tier supporters. Thank you all so very much for

[02:24:55] your support. Thank you to all our Patrons. And Alicia, I think here end this, the episode and excited for episode six. Yes, there's only one thing to go to do is to go back to when it all began and do it better this time.

[02:25:09] Ouroboros or Amobius. Actually it's Amobius in this case. Awesome. All right. We'll see you next week. The Lorehounds Podcast is produced and published by the Lorehounds. You can send questions and feedback and voicemails at thelorehounds.com contact.

[02:25:26] Get early and ad-free access to all Lorehounds Podcast at patreon.com slash the lorehounds. Any opinions stated are ours personally and do not reflect the opinion of or belong to any employers or other entities.