This was my favorite movie as a kid. I watched it again as an adult. It…does not hold up well 
I’m liking the show so far. The interplay between Loki and Mobius is great. Not too much talking, but enough to give it the detective procedural vibe without dragging things out. I’m not a big fan of Luke Wilson, but he’s perfectly cast for this role. He’s got the Columbo vibe close enough without being derivative about it.
My working theory is that the protagonist Loki is going to end up becoming a Timekeeper. There’s something wrong with Sacred Timeline and all possible timelines are leading to destruction (a la the Dune series). The antagonist Loki is the means by which the end will come. The current Timekeepers are desperate, and eventually come to realize they need some chaos to keep the universe alive–perfect predictability can only lead to destruction.
An analogy: the forest services have been diligently put out wildfires for decades. But all that does is create the conditions for even worse wildfires. Hypothetically, someday there’ll be a wildfire so bad that everything burns down. The Timekeepers have been putting out alternate timelines for too long, but they’ve been getting worse and worse. There’s going to be a timeline conflagration so bad that all timelines are going to be destroyed.
I like your idea that Mobius is a Timekeeper. Telegraphed just enough to seem reasonable, but still a surprise.
And maybe only some of the Timekeepers are dead? Or will die in the course of action?
That meeting with Ravonna gave me sort of a Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense feeling about Mobius. Not that he’s dead, but that there’s something big and obvious going on right in front of his face that he just can’t see due to his, for lack of a better word, programming.
The awards that Mobius earned are in Ravonna’s office → Mobius is Ravonna?
Explained in dialog:
“And why do you get to keep all the trophies from my cases in here?”
“Because I approve the missions.”
They were souvenirs, I think, not awards. Which means they’re all artifacts from pruned timelines - that could be significant.
Those weren’t awards, those were souvenirs. It’s a snowglobe & a black roller skate & a katana & some kind of war helmet & some kind of coffee mug. It’s the “cool” crap he’s picked up on various missions through time.
He’s gonna get real jealous when he sees the jetski in her garage.
That’s a very weak explanation.
And that makes it worse - it makes no sense for the boss to get the souvenirs (unless Mobius gave them to her - but then he wouldn’t ask about it).
Thanks.
I don’t think we’re meant to understand the situation as “fair.” The judge takes the trophies because she thinks they’re cool, and because she has the authority to do so. The point being that the TVA is a shitty organization to work for.
Certainly possible.
TVA=Keystone Kops. I think the series ends with Loki getting the best of the TVA only to find that every D lister in the MCU from Flash Thompson to Night Nurse has already done so.
Yes, they’re really leaning into the dystopian vibe.
Whether that’s leading to a plot twist (like Mobius is a Timekeeper) or not, I can’t tell.
Am I remembering the comics version correctly? The Time Keepers are the last three surviving beings at the end of time and the only threat to their existence is if someone changes the past. Kind of like if Hitler outlawed time travel to make sure baby Adolf isn’t strangled in his crib.
My Mobius prediction is that there’s more than one of him, and he doesn’t know it. The judge was looking uncomfortable when he was talking about how maybe another agent left the ring on the desk.
Or he had his memories wiped and rewritten, one way or another.
His name is Mobius. He’s obviously eternal (or eternal-equivalent).
Hiddleston captures the character perfectly and plays it to perfection. Owen Wilson is awesome & the chemistry between Loki & Mobius is evident. It’s going to be a fun ride. The character development is top-notch. Rooting for Loki to find redemption. As Thor said, there is good in him. Looks really good so far. Can’t wait to see the rest.
There’s a lovely time-travel RPG (TimeWatch) that has a premise pretty similar to the show’s: the PCs work for (or, optionally, against) an agency that’s preserving the timeline, not from “variants,” but from other people/dinosaurs/cockroaches with time-travel abilities who want to fiddle with the timeline. The issue of “everything happens at once” comes up, and I have a metaphor that helps me think about it. Dunno if it’ll help others.
Imagine most people floating on a boat down the river. Everyone moves at the same pace down the river. That’s what life is like if you have no time-travel abilities. Time-travel lets you get off the boat and onto the shore, going to a different point on the river.
But at the same time, the river is on a planet that’s rotating, and everyone’s rotating at the same pace. Even if you get off the boat and onto the shore, you’re still on the rotating planet. Nobody has figured out how to get off the planet and go to a different point in the rotation–or if they have, nobody has come back to share their experience. That’d be metatime-travel.
The TVA or whatever exists in metatime, and they can’t travel in that: Loki, once free, can’t go back to free himself in the TVA in the first episode. The only travel they can do is in normal time: they can get off the boat and go upstream or downstream.
Hence Loki’s puzzlement about whether the TVA counted as “the future”.