I cant square TVA schenanigans and what happened to Steve so I’ll just start with Steve…condensed version:
Red Skull: “No one has ever returned the Soul Stone. To take it one must give up something one loves, returning it, you GET something you love.”
Steve (pondering) “No…it would never work. There would be two Steve Rogers. One leading an idyllic life while another sleeps in the ice.”
Red Skull: “It is of course your choice…but you should know. You didn’t have to crash the ship.” (Does wavey wavey nonsense.)
Steve is now at the controls of that Nazi Deathplane again…he looks at Peggys picture. And at the last second…pulls up doing an amazing landing on the ice.
I know this breaks Endgames time travel rules, but The Soul Stone has Timey-Wimey Metaphor Powers already so there you have it…thats my excuse.
Anyway, regarding the TVA pruning timelines, there’s sort of the question of “when” they do it. The TVA appears to operate on some sort of linear time. So If were to travel to the past “now” and change the timeline, when would they get to pruning it in their timeline? Tomorrow? A year from now? Ten years ago? So it’s possible they haven’t even gotten to the rest of the Avenger’s time travel adventures yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if this season ends with Loki severely disrupting their operations.
I figured out where I recognized Ravonna Ravenslayer from - she was in San Junipero, the best episode of Black Mirror.
This episode was pretty good, though if anything it was a lot to pack into one episode - we have Loki figure out where to look, find Fem-Loki, and have her unleash her evil plan all just like that. Loki ruining Mobius’ salad to explain his metaphor was a highlight, as was his shouting in Latin at the crowd in Pompeii (anyone familiar enough with Latin to say whether Hiddleston’s pronunciation was good?) and this exchange:
Loki: I would never stab someone in the back. It’s such an unoriginal method of betrayal.
Mobius: I’ve studied every detail of your life! You’ve stabbed people in the back like fifty times!
Loki: Well… I wouldn’t do it again.
I don’t often post in these threads, but I’d like to put on record my theory that Mobius is one of the Time Keepers masquerading as a lowly agent, and that none of his colleagues know this. Sort of a king-posing-as-peasant type thing.
My other (largely incompatible with the above) theory is that there are no Time Keepers. Maybe there were once, but they’ve long since gone and the whole TVA operation is a cult blindly following tradition, with the higher-ups desperately trying to keep this fact secret.
When Loki was given the file that described the destruction of Asgard, I noticed that there was a shot of the TVA logo on a folder, upside down. The logo looked like “VAL,” which might be an Easter egg reference to Valhalla. Or, might be nothing at all.
I love the show but Loki is in danger of being the least interesting part of his own show. Theres a measure of sympathy for him but unless he’s being dead honest, he’s easily full of shit and worse everyone knows it.
The explicit spell out about Free Will only in the TVA. Actually claimed just the two of them.
The claim by Judge Ren that Loki doesn’t change and not contradicted by Mobius (just that maybe he wants to) while his death in the MCU was him changing. That’s the Sacred Timeline right? He died doing the right thing as I recall. It seems like a significant miss.
Not a fan of the enchantment spell. Where is the body of Loki who casts it while their consciousness is flitting from possession to possession?
I was confused for much of this ep.
Did like Judge Ren getting her weapon as triple zero was announced. I think she’s going to end up quite bad ass.
polýMATHY on YouTube says that not just the pronunciation but the Latin translation itself was pretty good. Hiddleston is, of course, classically trained and can read both Latin and Greek.
I mentioned it above, but people in the past don’t have free will from your point of view. But they did when it was their present. There is nothing in the TVA that stops people from choosing what they will, they just erase those that chose what they don’t want to happen. If there is an invisible sniper that watches you your whole life, and based on some arcane criteria you don’t know shoots you when you do something wrong, you still have free will.
We saw her body setting up the reset bombs. It’s interesting that the possessed body gets an upgrade of enough strength to be a threat to Loki. The pic below is just as Loki and the Best Buy associate walk out of frame:
My theory about the Sacred Timeline and Captain America:
The universe that the TVA establish as the Sacred Timeline is the one where the Avengers go back in time to stop Thanos.
If that’s the case, and the current Sacred Timeline is the one of the films, they need to allow Rogers to go back and live with Carter. Because in the baseline timeline Rogers returns as an old man and gives the shield to Falcon. In order for him to exist and give that shield, the Carter/Rogers timeline needs to exist at least as long as it takes for Rogers to port over to the Sacred Timeline and give the gift.
I’d think that Rogers probably turned that world into a God-damn utopia.
