Plot Summary: It’s Renslayer & Miss Minutes vs Loki & Mobius in a race to track down a Variant of He Who Remains in 1893 Chicago.

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: ‘1893’

Debut Date: October 19^th, 2023

Directed: Kasra Farahani (1)

Written: Eric Martin (5) (story & teleplay), and Kasra Farahani (1) & Jason O’Leary (1) (teleplay)

Those that stayed until the end of the credits of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania saw a heavily edited version of the Victor Timely reveal scene.

Majors’ look as Timely is loosely based on famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Balder gets his first MCU mention despite being a long-time fixture of Marvel comics. Rumour has it that Daniel Craig filmed a cameo as Balder as part of the Illuminati in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Mobius name-drops H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who had a ‘murder castle’ hotel, which there is a newspaper ad for in the episode.

Recap

Renslayer travels back to Chicago in 1868 and on Miss Minutes’ instruction, drops a TVA Guidebook through the window of a young Victor Timely.

Moving forward to a new branched timeline in 1893, Renslayer is tracked by Loki and Mobius, with the two parties trying to get to the now adult con-man inventor Timely.

After a series of betrayals everybody converges on Timely’s workshop, including a murderous Sylvie, who wants to prevent Timely from becoming a new He Who Remains.

Loki talks Sylvie down and he and Mobius leave with Timely, while Sylvie banishes Renslayer and Miss Minutes to the End of Time with only He Who Remains’ corpse for company.

Review

Did this need to be 40 minutes? Just because you don’t HAVE to adhere to strict episode lengths on a streaming platform, doesn’t mean you should deliberately make an episode 10-15 minutes longer. Secret Invasion did it too, with many episodes feeling too long and then one randomly being really short. The only time I’d support it would be a season finale where there’s simply too much drama to squeeze into normal runtime. But this could have easily been cut down to normal runtime in my opinion, and the length is made more egregrious by it being centred so heavily around Jonathan Majors (more below).

I liked the little harpsicord rendition of the Marvel fanfare, and I’m a sucker for a World’s Fair style event. The costuming suits our main cast down to the ground, and they really squeezed a lot out of the setting, with the Ferris wheel making for a fun little venue for an action scene. Though again, it outstayed it’s welcome a smidge. Not sure we needed to have the journey to Victor’s workshop in the same episode as the World’s Fair stuff.

Depending on how they end up threading the needle, I might be a little annoyed by the idea He Who Remains didn’t in fact want to die or hand over control, and so built in a contingency plan to ensure one of his Variants rose to take his place. I know he couldn’t see past Loki & Sylvie’s decision, but if you have knowledge of everything leading up to that moment and want to stay alive, why even allow a scenario where you could die??? If it’s fated and beyond his control… doesn’t that defeat the point of his gimmick? Is it simply that he couldn’t handle the boredom and wanted to tag in an alternate version of himself to carry on the mission? Siiiiigh. Whatever. Timely is technically innocent, if a traitorous, weasely con-man, so I guess we have ourselves a philosophical musing on determinism. Yay?

The background threat of the Temporal Loom failing while O.B. frets and babbles is kind of running thin in terms of dramatic tension. I don’t object to seeing Ke Huy Quan as he’s very charming, but I wish he had more to do. And despite coming back to it so much, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s going on overall. They need Timely as his Temporal Aura can let them modify the Loom, but they find him by accident after tracking Renslayer’s Tempad… a week after they had a seemingly forgotten adventure with X-5 and Dox. I guess Loki has accepted the mandate to leave Sylive alone? I dunno man, the episode-to-episode stitching isn’t great!

All in all, better than last week, which was a real low point, but still not as good as the first episode. I miss Kate Herron’s coherent guiding hand.

Best Performance

Look. Yes, Jonathan Majors remains a really good actor despite being an (alleged) woman-beating piece of shit. It super sucks that Marvel has opted to not recast him (yet), and even more unfortunate they elected to not re-shoot/edit the season so as to not essentially give him a 40-minute showcase. But I can’t just ignore that he’s turning in the best work in the episode. It’s less compelling than He Who Remains in Season One, but he sure is good at committing to an unorthodox speech cadence. Does it sometimes verge on annoying and overbaked? Sure! But for the most part he’s an upsettingly magnetic performer, and his constant betrayals and escapes are kinda funny.

I’m biased due to BTAS (and everything else), but I’m a huge fan of Tara Strong, and she injects so much mania and sly plotting into a little sentient cartoon clock, all with a thick southern accent.

Villain Watch

Victor Timely is not yet He Who Remains or Kang, but he sure is a little dick in his own right. Conning the local rubes is like… medium levels of bad? Some of them may deserve it, some may be honest people being prayed upon. He’s using audience plants to drive up bidding and fake machines for theatricality. That’s fine. But the speed with which he turns on Renslayer for suggesting a partnership was stone cold. We know from the recording Loki uncovered that at some point He Who Remains and Renslayer were in fact partners, but obviously he ended up on top, with her working for not with him. (This is presumably the big secret Miss Minutes teases.) Fair play to him on being uncomfortable around Miss Minutes, though.

The reveal that Miss Minutes is in love with her creator and wants him to build her a body so she can bone him was… a choice? I think they’ve done a decent job of making her creepy throughout the series, and that she’s withholding yet more secrets is a nice touch. Very Ben from Lost; always one more card to play. Loved her awkwardly trying to project herself over the face of a mannequin and just kinda… glitching out while trying to wink seductively. They probably shouldn’t have put her growing 100 feet tall to terrorise people in the trailers though.

Renslayer is in an interesting position. From the most loyal disciple of He Who Remains, to ostensible tutor and potential romantic partner of Timely, to maybe wanting to murder and replace him. I love her actress, and it’s way past time she showed up, so let’s hope she features heavily in the second half of the season.

By contrast Sylvie’s storyline doesn’t feel as well thought out. It made sense she wanted to experience a normal boring life, that she wanted to be left alone, and that the sight of a He Who Remains Variant would make her murderous. However in practice, her flitting around and getting into arguments with Loki before reluctantly backing down two episodes in a row isn’t tremendously fun. I think I’d rather they held off on showing her in McDonald’s until near the end of the season, but keeping Loki meeting her in the future from episode one as a season-long tease.