Plot Summary: Loki & Mobius find Sylvie after interrogating renegade Hunter X-5. Together they try to stop more timelines from being pruned.

With Marvel dipping their toes into the world of television, Matt Waters brings recaps and reviews of each new episode (you guessed it) every Monday. Check out the full column.

Notes

Episode Title: ‘Breaking Brad’

Debut Date: October 12^th, 2023

Directed: Dan DeLeeuw (1)

Written: Eric Martin (4)

Zarian, the titular character of the film X-5 stars in under his Brad Wolfe alias, was of course an old Thor comics villain.

A cameo was filmed for the London opening, with an actor playing Queen Elizabeth II, but it was cut due to her death.

There’s a poster for one of Kingo’s movies in the theatre, because obviously.

Some fans believe Jack, Sylvie’s McDonald’s co-worker, will grow up to be Mobius. He’s blonde, blue-eyed, southern, and Mobius never gets a look at him in the McDonald’s scenes. Plus all the pie and whatnot. I don’t know about that personally, but just acknowledging it.

Recap

Loki and Mobius arrive in London in 1977, where Hunter X-5 has gone rogue, living it up as movie star Brad Wolfe. Convinced X-5 knows where Sylvie is, they capture and interrogate him.

Following his intel to the branched timeline where she works at a McDonald’s, she is furious to see them interfering with her quiet life, but agrees to help them save it from Judge Dox.

Sure enough, Dox and a faction of her TVA loyalists are mass-pruning timelines, which Loki, Sylvie and Mobius fail to fully prevent.

The episode ends with them finally getting a location on Renslayer’s Tem-Pad.

Review

Sometimes when watching TV it can feel like there’s a missing episode, and that sensation is rarely pleasant. Jumping from ‘the TVA have found Sylvie’ to ‘Loki and Mobius are in tuxedos looking for X-5, who has gone rogue and is living as a movie star’ was incredibly jarring and that sensation took a really long time to shake. Similar to how I felt last week about how radically different the show looked to season one, but without the sense of enjoyment that filtered through from the change. It just really took me out of the episode and made it difficult to engage with the plot, which has become far more vague than it seemed last week. The whole thing had a floaty ‘Sorry, what’s going on?’ feel, as they just go from place to place with minimal logic. Hey, maybe this is what happens when you shoot an entire season in one go without showrunners and series bibles!

Anyway, even if the transition between episodes had been smoother, this is just a step down overall. The interrogation scenes felt toothless to me. I understand conceptually that X-5 is an experienced hunter (who we only met a week ago!) and would therefore be harder to intimidate when following protocol as he knows what they will and won’t do, but it just made our heroes look weak sauce. X-5’s utter lack of fear of Loki felt like it was going to lead to him tapping into some of his darker magics, but they instead went with the weird time cube device, that was visually entertaining if nothing else.

Speaking of dark magics, I’m torn about Loki showing out in London. On the one hand, he was a prisoner of the TVA for most of season one, banned from using his powers, so it’s natural he should be cutting loose more this time around. And I do enjoy shadow-based magic. Buuuut I don’t know. It just felt like a dramatic escalation in what he’s been shown to be capable of in the past. I’m not saying he’s not allowed to do anything he hasn’t done in a Thor or Avengers movie… but he sure does use telekinesis that probably would have been helpful before now.

I do like what they could do with X-5’s cutting remarks towards Loki, namely that he’s destined to always lose and make everything worse for everyone. While Loki has done some healing, it is far more interesting to see him struggle with his past than simply become yet another quippy MCU hero. He’s also struggling to weigh up his feelings for Sylvie… although his insistence she know about events that haven’t happened yet because he saw her in the future was extremely dumb. Surely he’d know better.

But to end things as we started, both in this review and the show itself, we’ve gone from multiple timelines back to… well, not just one, but not very many. The only difference is the TVA know the true consequences of pruning timelines now, so are super sad about it. Not exactly the big bombshell they were going for, even with the trace on Renslayer. A substandard green-screen-heavy fight scene didn’t help anything. It lacked urgency given timelines were being eradicated all around them. Just a much worse episode than last week, and maybe worse than anything in season one… though the charisma and chemistry of the cast kept it a pleasant watch.

Best Performance

Speaking of which, I expressed some worries about Owen Wilson becoming lost if they got more timey-wimey this season, but he put in an excellent performance here. His chemistry with Tom Hiddlestone is charming and dependable when things are lagging, but I thought he was doing legitimately great acting in the key lime pie scene. He’s just capable of summoning up such quiet melancholy. Deep sadness behind that whimsical smirk. I LOVED his little knock-knock joke at X-5’s expense, especially the tiny giggle afterwards, as well as losing his shit at Brad calling him a Nowhere Man.

Hiddlestone is probably a little better than last week, and a worse actor would have struggled to do anything with offhand joke about when he tried to conquer New York. It was verging on a bad line, and he juuuust about made it work. I also enjoyed watching him just quietly take his absolute dressing down from X-5. Seeing the cogs work is fun, and he takes very well to the procedural G-Man role as a quasi-TVA agent.

Speaking of that dressing down, Rafael Casal was surprisingly good given the radical change to his character. He manages to be both slimy, steely and bordering on sympathetic. He sells his fear of Sylvie and despondence over the situation minutes after holding up staggeringly well to interrogation. This could pan out to be a really solid character if they can keep things more coherent.

Villain Watch

See above for X-5, really. I really wish they’d found a smoother way to jump from ‘X-5 is dispatched by Dox on a secret mission’ to ‘living his best life as movie star Brad Wolfe’. What’s actually on the screen is all surprisingly good given he appeared from nowhere, but we need more interstitial stuff to thread this needle.

Judge Dox and her renegade faction of the TVA were just kinda… nothing, really? Sure. We’re pruning timelines again, and our heroes get some nameless henchmen to fight. Blah blah blah.

Renslayer is out there. Sylvie has her own agenda but isn’t really a villain. Maybe O.B. is secretly evil? Oh! And the producers of this show, for leaving Wunmi Mosaku on the sidelines for most of this episode!!!