Plot Summary: With Victor Timely in the fold our heroes brainstorm a fix for the Temporal Loom, but a vengeful Renslayer & Miss Minutes storm the TVA with other ideas.

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: ‘The Heart of the TVA

Debut Date: October 26^th, 2023

Directed: Justin Benson & Aaaron Moorhead (4)

Written: Eric Martin (6) & Katharyn Blair (1)

‘Schadeocracy’ is not a real world, but if you got very literal with it, you could argue it means ruling by harm. Or maybe they just meant being shady. Who knows?

The scale model scene seems a pretty clear nod to Back to the Future.

We saw the spaghettification effect in Multiverse of Madness and Quantumania, albeit less graphic versions, and is actually based on a physics theory, particularly concerning black holes.

Recap

Miss Minutes reveals to Renslayer she was originally the co-leader of the TVA along with He Who Remains, only to have her memory wiped.

Furious, Renslayer storms the TVA and attempts to recruit Dox and her rebels, but everybody but Brad refuses, so Miss Minutes slaughters them all.

Their mutiny ends quickly though, as Miss Minutes is rebooted, Renslayer is pruned, and O.B., Timely and Casey get to work on a fix for the Temporal Loom.

Timely volunteers to brave the outside in a protective suit… only to immediately be turned to spaghetti! The loom bursts and we dramatically cut to black!

Review

Trying to convince me they just destroyed all of time and space in episode FOUR of SIX is a hopeless task. I assume they’re trying to create symmetry with when Loki got pruned at the end of episode 4 of the first season… but without the immediate confirmation of what’s coming next. I’ve even seen some theories that THIS episode reset the entire MCU and will allow a full reboot… when they have The Marvels about to release, Captain America 4 coming out in 6 months and two Avengers movies on the horizon. Plus how many times do I need to say nothing they do on these shows is EVER going to impact the movies. WandaVision is the closest they got, and even that was summarised in 30 seconds in Multiverse of Madness. This will all be neatly tied up in two episodes, and next time Loki sees Thor he’ll speak cryptically about going through some changes, and they’ll play a musical cue from this show and that’ll be it.

This season’s pacing struggles hurt them a lot here, with the deaths of D-90 and Dox and her loyalists falling flat due to how little time we’ve spent with any of them. In a world where they don’t feel beholden to giving Jonathan Majors so much screen time and didn’t pull Sylvie in earlier than was necessary, we could have fleshed out some of these characters. Even X-5/Brad’s betrayal of Dox doesn’t mean anything when we never got further than them sharing an unexplained creepy embrace in episode one. The holding cell massacre scene would work exactly as written IF we felt anything about anybody in the room.

Paying off Loki’s time-skipping mystery from the first episode with Loki pruning himself and meeting back up with Sylive was WILDLY anticlimactic. It was painfully obvious who pruned him, the writing of the Sylvie aspect has been awful, and what was ACTUALLY achieved? That it made Loki bring Sylvie back into the fold? She hasn’t even really contributed anything so far; They failed to stop Dox; She tried to kill Timely, who they needed; She failed to imprison Renslayer & Miss Minutes; She enchanted Brad for like… 8 seconds? Cool, thanks for playing!

Also wasn’t the point of stranding Renslayer and Miss Minutes in the Citadel at the end of time that they would not be able to escape? I kind of assumed only the special TemPad that Sylvie took from He Who Remains could freely open portals there, otherwise what was the point of half of season one and how hard it was to get there? It was very dumb of B-15 to propose letting Dox out, and even dumber to leave them all unattended to be slaughtered.

*Deeeeeeeeep sigh* Right. Positives, I guess:

Timely and Ouroboros fanboying over each other and making good on O.B.’s name by revealing each inspired the other was fun. The ending was visually shocking even if the drama is undercut by things like knowing there are unlimited Majors variants to deploy and not being able to pull off an ‘everybody is dead now’ mid-season. Loki and Sylvie’s philosophical musings about determinism and free will and whatnot was as interesting as either character has been this season. I’m also a sucker for using little scale models to explain plans (yes, I know they do a joke about it NOT being to scale.)

They briefly achieved a pretty cool quasi-horror atmosphere when Miss Minutes was messing with the TVA, with even Loki & Sylvie taking Brad hostage in creepy fashion. The better parts of Moon Knight played in this space, like Konshu stalking Steven down long hallways. A ringing phone at the end of a dimly lit corridor is always fun, but of course it had to be undercut with blah MCU comedy.

The way they played the beat with the hot chocolate for so long and how often they come back to pie makes me believe the food in the TVA is drugged to keep the workers docile… or something. Or they just thought it was a cute moment. Which to be fair, it was.

I know that’s a HUGE amount of negatives and only a few positives, but this isn’t actually my least favourite episode of the season so far. The acting, directing and visuals were strong enough to make it mostly enjoyable to watch in a vacuum, but it was just SO emblematic of everything wrong with the season, and most of what annoyed me is actually the sins of the previous episodes and the long-term writing coming back to haunt them.

Best Performance

I still don’t agree with their decision to deploy Sylvie so soon in the season, and she’s mostly not done anything of true value, but at least Sophia Di Martino is a good actor. I’ve disliked most of her generic group hangout scenes relegating her to One of the Lads, but when you get her alone in a room for a quiet conversation she’s great. Quietly revealing she couldn’t kill Timley because he looked scared (while He Who Remains did not) was well done. Her harsh words to Mobius about not having any skin in the game because he’s too cowardly to seek out his real life are keeping this Mobius sub-plot alive amidst so many chaotic narrative strands. Her exchange about free will and playing god with Loki is elevated by the acting, because the actual words are pretty generic, and kind of an inferior version of their dilemma at the end of season one. Please return to this mostly being a show about great actors having quiet conversations!

Kate Dickie is pretty good in her limited, highly compromised minutes as Dox. Her rage towards Brad, her harsh words for Renslayer, accepting her fate; She’s good! Why wasn’t Dox more of a thing before now, and helping flesh out Brad/X-5?!

Villain Watch

Victor Timely is super dead. Yay! For as fun as the spaghetti effect was (and that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer actor)… they never even decided if he was evil or not. Bit of a conman, sure, but Evil? Ehhh. He seemed to be legitimately trying to help. Whatever. Please no more Majors variants.

Is Miss Minutes just gone now? Probably not. She was pretty solid here, chaotically assuming control of the TVA, and I think they probably could have gotten an entire episode out of that. Having her be the one to gleefully kill all the prisoners was a nice touch, and I really enjoyed her glitching out.

That leaves Renslayer as the main villain of the show… after only arriving in Episode 3. She was screwed over by He Who Remains and is seemingly just trying to claim what was rightfully hers, and everybody she killed in this episode helped kill TRILLIONS of people in Episode 2… so… is she actually the stealth hero of the show?!? Probably not, but I love Gugu Mbathu-Raw and at least she’s back and Doing Things (while Wunmi Mosaku wastes away.)

And like… Brad/X-5 was set up as a surprisingly good villain two episodes ago… and now they’re maybe trying to make him sympathetic but failing. And he prunes Renslayer. So… thanks, Brad?

What are we doing with all these villains?!?!