Timely Thorsday #21: The Variant

Good morning, Ticketholders!

Apologies for being late with this issue of Timely Thorsday. Work has been experiencing a sudden negative flow of human resources recently, disrupting the natural order of things and creating...let's be optimistic and call them "new opportunities." As a result of these "new opportunities," I and many at my place of work are experiencing increased levels of stress and fatigue, and as such, I lacked the drive to think out and crank out a full review article at 9:00pm after spending half of my day finding places for new freight that my assigned department had no space for, cooking too much food for people who weren't buying it for various reasons that I should have taken less personally than I do, clawing my way out from underneath several piles of unwashed dishes, and hand-writing prices and product descriptions on everything I did sell because the label printer decided to suck at printing halfway through my shift. Fun, right?

As per the title of today's post, I am burdened with (in addition to the above) the glorious purpose of telling you about Variants. The word itself refers to something that belongs to a certain category, while also possessing characteristics that differentiate it from others in its category. In virology, it refers to different strains of a virus (most recently, COVID-19 and COVID-19Delta, for example). I have also used the term in a similar fashion in my unfinished novel, Pestilence, to denote humans who have kept their humanity and gained special abilities, where most who were infected by the Hydra Virus became mindless, zombie-like Vectors.

In the context of Loki's setting, Variants are people who (similar to the ship-jumpers at my place of employment) disrupted the natural flow of time by deviating from their assigned destiny, creating a Nexus Point of compounding uncertainty and multiversal madness.

But just this once, go ahead and disrupt the natural order of the dead zone that is my social media presence by clicking the buttons and commenting down below. Such actions are Timekeeper approved. Temporal anomalies can be avoided by subscribing to Disney+ and watching Loki for yourselves because a SPOILER Warning! is in effect now.

The second episode of Loki, titled "The Variant," begins at a Wisconsin renaissance fair in the mid-1980s, with the titular Evil Loki laying a trap for yet another group of Minutemen, set to the tune of the Footloose soundtrack (the good, original one, not the needless reboot from 2011). This Loki, it seems can possess other people's bodies (and swap bodies) by touch, and so uses one of the Minutemen to take out the rest before dragging her, and more of her team's quantum repair tech, through a time door. Contrary to what many YouTube analysts claim, the build of this Loki appears to be masculine. So is the Lady Loki theory dead on arrival?

Back at the TVA, we get our first feel of the chemistry between Main Loki and Agent 3M. It's decidedly in the Blacklist/Silence Of the Lambs vein, with Owen Wilson's 3M filling the ambitious, bone-gnawing federal agent role and Loki serving as the quirky, charismatic consultant/villain; Marvel's Police Procedural Show, with superheroes. Even Miss Minutes is getting in on the action, given literal dimension as a hard-light hologram (Loki: "Are you real or just a recording?" Miss Minutes: "Maybe a little of both."), and her interactions with the diminished trickster god, while brief, are intriguing and entertaining. Perhaps she is more than just the (clock) face of the TVA's exposi-ganda media?

Several hints are given that Judge Renslayer, whom I talked about last time, might be a puppet figure installed at the TVA by her comic book love interest, Kang the Conqueror (the Timekeepers in Miss Minutes' orientation video last episode are animated with the same color scheme as Kang, and even the middle Timekeeper statue in the Judge's office is sculpted to look like Kang). It's also possible, given Kang's original status as the Avengers' retcon Scooby-Doo villain in the comics, that Kang instigated the first Multiversal War (the MCU version of a Secret War?) to set a trap for the Timekeepers so he could kill them and create the Sacred Timeline to his own liking.

We also get hints that TVA personnel might not have been created by the Timekeepers for specific purposes, but are recycled Variants. Agent 3M, for example, has trouble remembering aspects of previous meetings with Judge Renslayer (he also mentions a second analyst she has on the side, who might be a Variant of Mobius for all we know), and expresses a reverence for the 1990s, especially jetskis.

Following some failed underhandedness by our Loki, and a hilarious extended metaphor sequence that will leave Agent 3M in need of a Snickers later, the pair figure out that Evil Loki is using the inevitability of Apocalyptic Events to hide from the TVA between murders. Our Loki hilariously proves this when they travel to Pompeii in 79 a.d. (which I knew because of that Amazon Alexa commercial where it sounds like the guy is saying "it's 1793, run for your lives!"), and he breaks all Hollywood-established laws of time travel without causing any Nexus events. They then figure out that Evil Loki has been hiding at RoxxMart (a.k.a. Shady Science Wal Mart) during a Category Eight hurricane in 2050 because environmental messages are always subtle. After our Loki goes hand-to-hand with some body-jumped Minutemen and RoxxMart employees, Evil Loki pulls back the hood they had been wearing up to that point, and...yup, Lady Loki is a thing, after all! Except she's credited internationally as Sylvie Lushton, the name of a legacy Enchantress in the comics, and she tells our Loki not to address her by his name. Then she triggers all of the reset devices and time portal generators that she had stolen from her various crime scenes (presumably sending them to detonate on the Timekeepers, after having gotten their location from a body-jumped Minutemen agent offscreen), and back at the TVA, timeline monitors (which look like hospital heart rate and blood pressure monitors) start displaying error messages and multiple timeline branches. The significance of the indicated dates and locations here, and the true nature of the female Loki, are unknown at this point, but these events were clearly targeted for a reason.

With her scheme set in motion, "Lady Loki" escapes through a time portal, and Loki follows her just before the door closes and the TVA arrives. Is our Loki looking for an ally? Is he jealous? Hoping she will lead him to the Timekeepers? Or going solo to help the TVA bring her down in his own way? Only time (and obsessive YouTube researchers) will tell.

I also have a theory that the little French boy from the first episode is Sacred Timeline Loki reincarnated as Kid Loki from the comics (because Loki can do that), and that he may be Judge Renslayer's other consultant, but for now, let's hope Marvel can do better with six episodes here than they did in F&tWS.

I am way late and running out of time and energy to stay on track with my weekly college goals, so stay tuned for more Loki and Isekai "Quartet" coverage in the coming weeks. Time permitting, I may also watch Megan Fox hunt lions (or Milla Jovovich hunt monsters), and write some more of my Broly fanfic. Remember to click those social media buttons and comment below before you go, and I'll catch you next time.

Ticketmaster,

out.