Loki - Episode 5 - Review

With how the fourth episode of Loki didn't really make any new ground in pushing the story forward, I had high hopes that the fifth episode and penultimate before the series finale, would actually cover more story ground, but it didn't it, tried to but it fell short once again; however the story beats it did actually put forth were somewhat interesting.

Starting the episode with this weird panning long shot through the TVA and then into the timekeepers room and then eventually into what was revealed later to be the Void made little sense, there wasn't any reason in a story sense, though it did give us a grand scale of the threat that Loki and his various new allies were being exposed to. Loki has found himself in the Void, the place at the end of all time, where all that the TVA prune is thrown, a time garbage dump if you will and it's here that he finds new versions of himself and he has a minor breakdown as he demands answers about who, what, how and why. While Loki is attempting to find out that critical information, you know about the giant purple cloud monster and his new associates, Sylvie is back at the TVA forming alliance with Judge Renslayer, but anyone who's ever seen any movie or TV show would tell you that it was never going to happen, and low and behold mere moments later it didn't.

Why would you spend two episodes at the start showing that Renslayer would adhere to the rules of the TVA, with the utmost passion for them and then the middle two episodes allow us to discover that she's secretly, or really not so secretly, complicit in the fact that the TVA is using variants. So for this episode to even remotely put out there that we should consider that she's had a change of heart, all because she was deceived, makes no sense. She had more information than Mobius when he defected and yet she didn't, she was someone who thought Mobius was a good person, but the moment he became a threat he was eliminated, so her attempt at forming an alliance with Sylvie was always going to fail, even if the entire reason was a stalling tactic. Of course seeing that Sylvie sacrificed her place in the TVA for a chance to find Loki was predictable and yet still managed to be heart-warming and if that was where the predictability ended, this episode would have been all the better for it.

Over the many movies that Loki has been in, we have seen that he will always do what is best for him, in all the episodes of the show so far, we have seen him do what is best for him and even Mobius has gone out of his way to point out that Loki will do what is best for him. So, too fine a hideout where four other Loki’s all live in perfect harmony, was always going to be nothing but an illusion, one not created by Classic Loki, so when we see our Loki choose to leave and encounter yet another Loki, this time President Loki, it made way for the inevitable betrayal, which really proves that they are all Loki’s. This could have been a really fun sequence, it could have been a lot of word play, some banter back and forth, maybe some illusions and conjuration, anything really to prove that one of these Loki’s was going to be the new king of the Loki’s, but instead it devolved into a fight that was hard to follow, all I can tell you is that at one point President Loki had his head shoved into a popcorn stand.

While all this is happening, outside Sylvie has made contact with the giant purple cloud and in her attempts to flee discovers Mobius, who has managed to find himself one very old and weird pizza delivery car to drive around in. During Sylvie’s escaped from Aliath, the name of the purple cloud monster, she inadvertently enchanted it for a brief moment and that allowed her to form a plan that she would fully enchant it, then discover who's controlling it and then find out exactly who is behind everything. The problem is that later on we see an entire warship and crew literally aged out of existence within microseconds, by touching any part of Aliath, so to think that she can hold onto it for any amount of time, because she has powers, does force at you a suspension of disbelief that the show hasn't earnt and given how those powers don't seem to help another Loki later on, just makes it a plot device for the sake of a plot device.

The many incarnations of Loki that we encounter are mostly interesting and while I would have liked to have seen more out of them, other than we survived and so we hide in the dirt, it is interesting to see that they used other versions of Loki from the comics that maybe a lot of viewers realised existed, and yes that includes alligator Loki. Richard E. Grant provided a bit of gravitas to his performance as the old, embittered Classic Loki and even in the moments where he was explaining that he was caught because he was lonely, there was enough anguish and frustration to the performance to make you feel for him, I just wish we got something like that for the other Loki’s we met. Having Tom Hiddleston play two versions of Loki in the one episode was quite entertaining, but I really would have liked to have seen the talk between the two of them at the top of the hatch, as they are more alike than any of the others we've met, so it could have been something fun, instead we got essentially a commercial break.

For the penultimate episode of Loki's debut series, this was a letdown for most of it, the moment of acceptance between Loki and Sylvie was nice, but it could have and should have happened in the previous episode. For all the hype that the additional Loki’s generated over the past week, between their tease at the end of the fourth episode and now, they really didn’t add much to the episode, for the most part their roles could have been condensed into one person and this is not a slight to the actors portraying them. Their addition, while fun just highlighted the fact that the story, for the third episode in a row, didn't need to be this long and as we go into the final episode, it had better gain some serious traction. After three episodes where the wheels felt like they were stuck, I can't handle another one when nothing of consequence occurs and given it is going to be the end that would be a horrible way to end this show.

The Score

6.0

The Pros

+A bunch of Loki’s all interacting with each other was bound to have moments of fun

+Loki and Sylvie accepting that something is happening between them, was finally welcoming

The Cons

-The story again dragged out, for the third episode in a row, making this highlight some issues with the format

-The various Loki’s were not really used, making it hard to justify their existence in the episode